Gouges, condemned with hundreds of others to the guillotine by Robespierre, but whose name still lives as that of the authoress of a pamphlet dedicated to Marie Antoinette, in which she pleaded in favor of the "natural, inalienable, and sacred" rights of her sex. With a Madame Roland and a Charlotte Corday before their very eyes it would have showed really phenomenal submissiveness, and even stupidity, had the women of the time not aspired to some share in the "liberty, equality, and fraternity," for which their husbands and sons clamored so lustily. How far, indeed, they exercised a determining and restraining influence during those troubled years is to be the subject of a searching investigation by Leopold Lacour in his forthcoming volume, "La Femme dans la Révolution Française," in which the author may be trusted to throw a new and more pleasing light on Carlyle's "draggled Menads." But whatever hopes of political freedom were entertained by the morally emancipated French women - with whom our own Mary Wolstonecraft was in close sympathy-in the early years of the Revolution, were destined to be frustrated before the close of the century; and with the advent to power of Napoleon a fresh era of legal subjection was ushered in. The Code Napoleon, stamped throughout with the master mind of its creator, displays in all those portions which bear upon the relations between men and women the most ruthless disregard of the weaker sex. Man the master is made the despot of the home, and woman is sternly relegated to her maternal functions, the section on marriage culminating in a clause of which Dumas's celebrated "Tue-la!" is but a dramatic echo. Feminism, as a social tendency was for all practical purposes dead, nor does it re-appear except in a modified form in connection with Saint Simonianism until the Revolution of 1848, to be once again, after a short but effective outburst, crushed by administrative severity as a result of the Coup d'Etat of 1852. But throughout the Third Empire there are dawnings of better things, and a whole literature on the woman question was slowly taking shape. It was in 1858 that Proudhon published his great work on abstract justice, as the fundamental principle of society, in which, after denouncing both love and religion, he bluntly described woman as physically, intellectually, and morally the inferior of man, and as occupying in the scale of creation a position midway between man and the monkey. Stirred to action by so gross an attack, Juliette Lamber, a young girl of two-and-twenty, conceived the audacious project of replying to so formidable an antagonist. Such controversy possesses necessarily but a limited interest for a later generation, but the "Idées anti-proudhoniennes," though not without certain juvenile crudities of style, will be always worth reading for its vigorous logic and conciseness of thought. The little volume enjoyed an immediate success and thus, certainly against the will, Proudhon was the means of definitely launching on a literary career one whom the world has long respected as Madame Adam. By a further irony of fate, only a year or two later, he was called upon to share with yet another "inferior" woman the prize for an essay on the theory of taxation offered for competition by the Vaudois government. This was Madam Clémence Royer, an ardent worker in the feminist cause, and one who has abundantly proved in her own person the capacity of French women for the most profound studies. Her admirable translation into French of Darwin's "Origin of Species," with an introduction of her own, is not the least of her achievements in the cause of science. At about the same period the benevolent Michelet in "La Femme" celebrated woman as the "éternelle blessée," treating her as a fragile angel too ethereal to be allowed to come in contact with the coarse realities of life, as one to be tenderly relieved from all needless responsibilities. In accordance with Michelet's ideal, which had an enormous vogue through the France of the Third Empire, whole generations of French girls were brought up, meta phorically speaking, wrapt in cotton wool, kept night and day under the strictest supervision, allowed no active exercise, and scarcely even any fresh air lest it should prove too exhausting for their delicate constitutions. Indeed it is only the advent of the bicycle that seems finally to have disposed of a theory which, however well intentioned, was almost as disastrous in its moral consequences to the sex, as the more widely spread theory of the superiority of brute force. Perhaps the first woman who effectively disposed in her own person of the assertions of both Michelet and Proudhon was Maria Deraismes, who entered on her active career of writer and propagandist in the closing years of the Empire. Her strong sceptical intellect and her wonderful physical powers were alike of the masculine order. To her many other qualities she added one that is exceedingly rare in a reformer, i.e., a keen sense of humor. No one who heard her speech at the International Women's Congress of 1889, due mainly to her initiative, on that most difficult of French social problems, the "Recherche de la Paternité," will ever forget the caustic audacity of her utterances, backed up as they were by most inexorable logic. So too her numerous pamphlets and essays, while founded on a basis of very solid learning, were enlivened throughout by an irresistible mother-wit. Herein, I think, lay the secret of half her strength, and of her wonderful proselytizing powers. In her various volumes of collected writings "Eve dans l'Humanité, Nos Principles et nos Mœurs," she denounces in scathing terms the rottenness of Parisian society and treats such questions as prostitution and the police des mœurs with a bold common sense which extorts our admiration, even when, as sometimes happens, it offends our more refined susceptibilities. Mlle. raismes she was never married-unfortunately circumscribed her own powers for good by the antagonistic attitude that she adopted towards Christianity, an attitude to which she doubt less owed her admission to a regularly no constituted lodge of Freemasons. She claimed to be the first woman to have attained to that distinction, which is frequently assumed never to have been bestowed on a woman at all. But it is as the valiant champion of her sex that her name will live, and a certain pathos is added to her memory by the fact that all through the long months of agony entailed by the most painful of all mortal maladies she maintained unruffled her cheery courage, working with voice and with pen up to the last days of life. Perhaps I may be allowed to add that after Mrs. Besant and Frances Willard woman speaker save Maria Deraismes has ever seemed to me to possess real oratorical power, judged, that is to say, by the same criterion by which we judge men. She could boast a spark at least of that electrical gift essential to a leader, and in this respect her mantle has not fallen on any other shoulders. Hence, in spite of the adhesion of a number of clever and earnest women, Madame Schmahl, Madame Clémence Royer, Madame Potonié Pierre, Madame Martin, and many more, all ardent propagandists, the feminist movement to-day is without any recognized leader, and is split up into innumerable groups and factions, without cohesion, without unity of action, and often even without friendly feeling one towards another. An influence that must not be lost sight of in estimating the progress of the feminist cause is that of the Slav woman, to whom Jules Bois devotes some charming pages in his "Eve Nouvelle." For the last half century Paris has been the Mecca of many Russian and Polish women, some Nihilists, some political refugees, but many others young girls inspired solely by an eager pathetic longing for an independent life and untrammelled opportunities of self-culture. These unattached girlDe- students form quite a numerous colony round the Latin Quarter, living for the most part in humble poverty, studying medicine, music, law, literature, and eking out their slender resources from home, if haply such are forthcoming, by teaching and writing and by practising a generous charity towards one another. The woman of the Slav races, poetic and yet practical, emotional yet self-re strained, devoured by a veritable passion for learning and yet strangely gifted with feminine charm, is, in many respects, in advance of her Latin sister, upon whom the example of her industry and her enthusiasm has not been without effect. One of the foremost leaders of the feminist cause to-day is a Polish lady endowed with many of the proverbial gifts of her race. Madame Marya Chéliga has lived so many years in the French capital, that she might well pass for a Parisian, were it not that her idealistic temperament points to a Slav origin. As a journalist and novelist, both in her own and her adopted language, her pen has not ceased to plead in favor of her sex, but it was not until last year, when her play, "L'Ornière," was acted at the Théatre Libre, that she attained a notable success. "L'Ornière," painful and outspoken as it is, is simply a plea for greater morality in marriage. A young wife, Eliane, stung to the quick by the repeated infidelities of the husband upon whom her parents have bestowed her and her dot, falls in love with another man. She revolts against a life of deception, and she revolts equally against her husband's vagrant affections at such times as he is pleased to return to the conjugal roof, and undeterred by worldly friends who laugh at her scruples, she confesses the truth. Her husband, strong in the sanction given him by the French Code, shoots her dead. Standing by his wife's corpse he is seized with sudden qualms, and asks his friend if he is certain of an acquittal. "Oh, yes," is the reassuring reply, "it happens every day-crime passionel!" Similar sordid dramas figure, in truth, almost week by week in the French law courts, and the sympathies of a French jury are always with the husband, whatever provocation he may have given. It is, as I have said, a moral rather than a political reform that French women are trying to bring about, and Madame Chéliga's drama has had the effect of focussing attention on the necessity of amending certain articles of the Code if the conventional French "mariage de convenance" is to be placed on a more moral basis. However valiantly women may have fought for their rights-and ever since the establishment of the Republic the party may be said to have been in active existence-it is quite certain that they would have made but little progress without the help of their male confrères. Their greatest victory has been the winning over of so many allies from the ranks of the writers and journalists of Paris. Some years ago they enjoyed the signal triumph of converting no less an antagonist than Alexandre Dumas fils himself. Nothing is more obvious than that all Dumas's earlier plays, from the "Dame aux Camelias" to the "Femme de Claude," are, on the moral side, absolutely "anti-féministes" in aim and tone; and "L'Homme-Femme," the cynical brochure on the "eternal feminine," in which Dumas develops the "Tue-la!" theory with which his name will always remain identified, is simply a defence of the attitude that he had maintained as a playwright for over twenty years. The "Homme-Femme" brought him into direct conflict with Maria Deraismes, and drew forth one of the ablest of her pamphlets which we may assume to have been not without effect. Certainly Dumas had very considerably altered his views when (in 1880) he wrote "Les Femmes qui tuent et les Femmes qui votent." To the surprise of all he declared himself a convinced believer in woman's right to political recognition; and in reference to a vitriol-throwing case, which was just then agitating all Paris, he suggested that if woman had a share in making the laws of her country, there would be less danger of her taking justice violently into her own hands. He declared, too, his profound conviction-and on such a point Dumas surely may be taken as an authority-that the condition of social morality in modern France was all to the advantage of man and to the detriment of woman, and he urged on the latter to band themselves together to fight, not against the written Humanism" to a study of woman's law, but against the unwritten nature, both in its physiological and its "mœurs." Curiously enough, the very psychological aspects, in relation to that last letter on matters of public interest of man. Of her independent position as penned by Dumas before his death, was a thinker and a worker, without referone addressed to Madame Chéliga, in ence to the male sex, we hear not a which he reiterated once again his be word. It is comforting at least to find lief in the social equality of the sexes, a one elementary truth underlying the letter which rendered no little service many pages of that somewhat futile to the feminist cause. argument with which his book is loaded: the new-born conviction that by the political and intellectual subjection of one-half of the human race to the other, the whole of humanity has been impoverished. And, as its complement, the realization that to place unnatural barriers in the way of the normal development of any individual endowed with rational thinking powers, is to inflict an irreparable loss on the whole body politic. The argument is familiar enough on this side of the Channel, but to French ears it still possesses all the charm of novelty, and requires constant reiteration. It is this truth which M. Lacour has tried to frame in the expression "integral humanism," a which, at first sight, is somewhat mystifying. Quite recently there has been a remarkable outburst of activity in the feminist camp, and feminism in Paris to-day is almost in danger of developing into a fashionable craze. Has not a duchess given her august patronage to the cause? And is not Ibsen, with doctrines subversive of all conventionality, studied in every boudoir? The crowds that assisted at the Women's International Congress in April of last year, the successful conferences at the Bodinière, the course of serious lectures on the movement given at the Collège de France last winter by M. Flach, are all outward signs of an expanding vitality. Week by week new recruits are added to the little group of literary and political workers, known by the somewhat quaint designation of "hommes féministes," a group which is gradually attaining to most respectable proportions. Armand Sylvestre, Rodenbach and Jean Aicard among poets, Paul Hervieu and Rosnoy among novelists, Dr. Manouvrier, the well-known professor of anthropology, the Abbé Charbonnel, an ecclesiastic of somewhat advanced views, Jacques Lourbet, author of a learned work on "La Femme devant la Science," Georges Montorgueil and Leopold Lacour, journalists, have all made public profession of their faith in the "new woman." It is true certain writers seem to regard feminism only as an excuse for discussing once again from a new point of view, and with a painful lack of reticence, the eternal question of sex, and the relations between man and woman. Eve and Cleopatra, Messalina and Circe, re-appear time after time, in order to point out a moral unfavorable, not to themselves, but to their male victims. Thus Monsieur Lacour devotes almost the whole of his stout volume on "Integral term Of all recent converts, however, to the cause of woman's emancipation, none has succeeded in treating the subject with so much insight into a feminine character, or such genuine faith in her latent capacities for good, as Jules Bois, hitherto best known as a writer of mystical verse and as a much-appreciated conférencier at the Bodinière. To-day, thanks to his recent volume "L'Eve Nouvelle," he stands accepted as the preux chevalier of the feminist cause. In a transitional stage, smarting apparently under the disillusionment of youthful ideals, the poet a few years ago wrote many unkind things of "L'éternelle Poupée." His "Eve Nouvelle," published last autumn, is a passionate plea in favor of "la femme consciente," and may be taken as representing his more mature judgment on the problems of life; and if I write of the volume at some length, it is because his conception of the whole feminist movement, and of the ideals which have inspired it, seems to me at once the most true and the most characteristically French that has yet appeared. The English reader may find in it much that he will disagree with, much even that he may resent, but the book remains, nevertheless, a faithful and sympathetic presentment of the woman problem, as it appeals to an ever-increasing number of men and women across the Channel. M. Bois has succeeded in treating his subject with considerable originality; his pages display not a little research, and the time-honored arguments are produced from a point of view unfamiliar, at least on this side of the Channel. We wonder, as we read, what John Stuart Mill would have thought of this latest contribution to a controversy which he, more than any man, initiated. M. Bois does not profess to deal in stern logic, and he touches very briefly on practical economic considerations; he appeals rather to the mystical idealistic view of the subject, and in a series of short and somewhat disjointed essays, he traces the influence of women on life and civilization from the most remote prehistoric days. In the ancient legends of the world's mythologies he discerns the early ascendancy and the civilizing powers of woman. For him Vesta discovers the fire, Diana invents the bow, and the whole cycle of Cybele-DemeterIsis legends testifies to man's early recognition of the superior nature of those whom he acclaimed as the mothers of the gods. He points out that in none of the ancient faiths of the world has ordinary man ever been deemed worthy to have any share in the bringing forth of gods and redeemers. Coming to the more practical problems of our own day, M. Bois denounces, not without cause, the "mariage de convenance," and at the same time combats vigorously every form of "free love," and any general loosening of moral restrictions between the sexes. He pleads for true unions of heart and soul and intellect, but we cannot agree with him when he seems to imagine that, in a society regenerated by the feminist spirit, the necessity for legal sanctions will disappear. He pours forth all the vials of his wrath upon the frivolous dolls of Paris society, regarding them as the worst enemies of their sex; he denounces the two accepted types of the French jeune fille, the ingénue and the ange, and urges the adoption of English and American methods of education in exchange for those still universally in force among the Latin races. Taken as a whole, Jules Bois's demands are singularly moderate, and, for a would-be social reformer, he has an unusual capacity for seeing all round his subject. Making allowances for picturesqueness of presentation and for a certain effusiveness of style, M. Bois really pleads for nothing further than the evolution of a woman with a conscience, who shall marry the man of her choice of her own free will, and who shall be sufficiently educated to be an intellectual companion to her husband when married, or to earn her own livelihood in a dignified independence, should she elect to remain single. It is an ideal which, in England and America, we have gone a considerable way towards realizing, but which, for the vast majority of the women of the Latin races, is still beyond the possibility of attainment. M. Bois realizes completely that neither Atheism nor Positivism can ever be the religion of enfranchised womanhood, and with most people he deplores the wave of free-thought which is at present sweeping over the ranks of the advanced women France, and which has undoubtedly done much to retard their progress. He describes them happily as still passing through their Encyclopedic stage, their eighteenth century. It is evident that he is familiar with English thought in many branches, but he writes under a total misapprehension concerning the due proportion of events when he attributes any share in the independent position of English women at the present day to the curious literary development which produced the "Heavenly Twins," the "Yellow Aster" and their little group of imitators, and he has failed to realize that the morbid sensationalism which lay at the root of the agitation is already a thing of the of |