chapter 1 Querying Women’s Power and Influence in French Culture It is a peculiar and quite remarkable fact of French civilization that long before the revolutionary era, educated French writers identified women with culture, not with nature. Indeed, one of the most striking features of French history since the Renaissance is the enormous cultural power and influence that men publicly attributed to women – and, what is more, that women claimed for themselves. The most superficial rendering of this concern is embodied in the popular French cliché cherchez la femme, which could carry both positive and negative charges. “Men make the laws,” it was commonly said before the Revolution, “but women shape the morals.” 1 The implication of this oft-repeated observation was that morals were the more important of the two. In his celebrated story Paul et Virginie (1788), the educational writer Bernardin de Saint-Pierre argued that “women have contributed more than the philosophes to form and reform the nations. ... They lay the first foundations of natural law” through their contributions as mother, comforters, inventors of everything agreeable. He perceived women as the bridge between nature and culture: “You are the flowers of life ... You civilize the human race ... You are the Queens of our beliefs and of our moral order.” 2 But women’s power could also have malevolent consequences, as Pierre Choderlos de Laclos tried to demon- strate in his four-volume 1782 novel, Les Liaisons dangereuses. 3 1 See the exchange between Adélaide and Bayard (“Les hommes font les lois”/ “Les femmes font les moeurs”) in Guibert’s play, Le Connétable de Bourbon (1769), in Jacques-Antoine-Hippolyte Guibert, Oeuvres dramatiques de Guibert ... publié par sa veuve (Paris, 1822), vol. 10, p. 22. 2 Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, introduction to Paul et Virginie (orig. publ. 1787/1788). English transl. from the 1806 ed. in Ludmilla Jordanova, Sexual Visions: Images of Gender in Science and Medicine between the Eighteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), p. 34. 3 Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, Les Liaisons dangeueuses. 4 vols. (Paris: Durand Neveu, 1782). This novel, with its wicked, scheming main character Madame de Morteuil, is, like Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s Paul et Virginie, still in print today. 23 https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316946367.004 Published online by Cambridge University Press