André Léo
André Léo (born August 18, 1824 in Lusignan , Vienne , † May 20, 1900 in Paris ; pseudonym of Victoire Léodile Béra ) was a French writer , journalist and feminist .
Life
Early life
Léo stayed at her birthplace Lusignan until 1830, when her family moved to nearby Champagné-Saint-Hilaire , where her father worked as a notary. In 1851 she fled from there with her future husband, the journalist Pierre-Grégoire Champseix, before the police of Napoleon III. to Lausanne.
Writing and Feminism
From the 1850s Léo began her writing and journalistic activities; In 1853 she gave birth to her twin sons André and Léo. With the amnesty, Grégoire and Léodile Champseix returned to France with their children and moved to Paris. After her first husband died in 1863, she expanded her writing to make money. She wrote women's novels and commentaries on feminist people. In doing so, she combined the women's question with socialist ideas. In her first theoretical work, Observations of a Family Mother on M. Duruy , she criticized the dominance of Catholicism in the French school system and called for a more progressive education based on the idea of the Enlightenment .
With her demand for justice and equality while at the same time promoting the individual and free association, she created a new feminism that stood out from early socialism and sharply from the gender image of Proudhon and others.
In 1866 she founded the Société pour la Revendication des Femmes in her apartment , which soon became a collective movement of the most important feminists of these days; so was Louise Michel member of the group that represented the French feminist discourse in this period.
The society, which was expressly open to men, no longer placed the gender difference in the foreground, but emphasized the equality of the sexes, attributed the differences to socialization and demanded equal educational opportunities for women.
Although Léo did not expressly oppose the family and stated that not only a capitalist, but also a socialist society could be based on it, for them a truly democratic society without the freedom of the individual was inconceivable. This is particularly evident in the individual rights of women. Léo published this new form of feminist argumentation in her work La Femme et les Moeurs in 1869 . Léo fought particularly hard against the exclusion of women in the republican-minded men, who also opposed a lack of health care, pauperization, etc., but kept women away from the republican-civic participation. She further criticized the social role of motherhood, which is only a short phase in a woman's life, excludes mothers from the public and does not apply to women without children, and called for the right to inheritance to be abolished.
In 1868, at the age of 46, she met her second partner, 27-year-old Benoît Malon .
International and Commune
The attitude of Léos and her colleagues to separate the concept of the individual as an autonomous bourgeois subject from that of the man and to apply it to all persons led to strong conflicts with the anti - feminist Paris section of the International . In spite of this, Léo joined the Paris-Batignolles section in the spring of 1869 and soon afterwards wrote together with Mikhail Bakunin for the Geneva section's magazine Égalité .
Because of the socialist commitment, there were soon differences within the Société pour la Revendication des Femmes , since not all women rejected capitalism and understood each other more bourgeois-liberal. This conflict led to the founding of the women's organization Association pour les Droits des Femmes in April 1870, which also published the magazine Droit des Femmes .
The policy of the Third Republic , which was proclaimed on September 4, 1870, disappointed Léo. She not only criticized the lack of social reforms, but also the renewed exclusion of women. On February 3, 1871, she wrote in the République des Travailleurs , the newspaper of the Socialist Alliance: “The Republicans are full of inconsistency: they do not want women to be under the influence of the priests, but they also dislike when they are free thinkers are and how human beings want to act. You have deposed God and King, but only to take their place. "
Léo took part in the uprising of the Paris Commune . The Association pour les Droits des Femmes supported the resistance committee of Montmartre to a large extent, and Léo tried, in addition to working in commissions and clubs, to promote feminist principles through his work in the communal newspaper La Sociale, which she co-founded . One achievement of this work was equal pay for teachers regardless of gender.
After the victory of the government in Versailles over the population of Paris, Léo managed to flee to Switzerland.
Lausanne and London
In Switzerland, Léo was involved in the Peace League and tried to get them to support the social revolution. In her speech at the congress on September 4, 1871, she denounced the distorted representations of the events in Paris and the massacre of the Communards. There she also criticized the arbitrary acts of violence and arrests committed by the Communards, as well as the censorship measures against which she had already attacked during the uprising. At that time, she once again made her point of view clear that there could be no equality without freedom and no freedom without equality, and thus positioned herself between socialism and liberalism. Her speech, which had already started with tumult and allegations of complicity, ended with her being withdrawn. Léo's attempt to win over the bourgeois-liberal camp had failed.
André Léo strengthened her involvement in the International again and founded the French section of the International with some other former members of the Alliance, which was soon renamed the Propaganda and Revolutionary Action Section .
The Jura sections of the International and Léos sections were not invited to the secret conference of Marx and Engels in London in September 1871 . There it was decided, among other things, to withdraw the magazines of the International from the public and to only discuss questions in committees and the General Council, which Léo, as a journalist and opponent of censorship, bitterly criticized.
In response to the London decisions, a conference was called on November 12th in Sonvilier , a village in the Swiss canton of Bern , to which the Sections of the International in Switzerland were invited and where Léo's Section of Propaganda and Revolutionary Action took part Jura Federation was incorporated. Over the next few months the division of the International spread across Europe into Marxist and anti-authoritarians , and Léo was attacked as one of the main culprits in a letter from the General Council of the Marxist International.
In 1878 she separated from Benoît Malon and moved to Florence to live with her son André Champseix , who was professor of agricultural chemistry there.
Late life
In 1880, after the amnesty of the Communards, Léo returned to France. Her son Léo Champseix was a civil engineer there. André Léo lived in Italy from 1882 to 1883 and lived again in Poitiers , Saint-Mandé and Villeneuve-la-Garenne in the 1890s . During this time André Léo wrote novels. In 1885 their son Léo died, in 1893 their second son André. The writer worked until the end of her life in 1900 and was buried at the side of her sons and her first husband in the Auteuil cemetery in Paris.
Works
- La Femme et les Mœurs
- Un Mariage Scandaleux
- Marianne
- Legends Corréziennes
- La Guerre Sociale. Discours Prononcé au Congrès de la Paix.
- Coupons le cable!
literature
- Maurizio Binaghi: Léo, André. In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland .
- André Léo (1824-1900) . In: Antje Schrupp: Neither a Marxist nor an anarchist. Women in the First International. Ulrike Helmer Verlag, Königstein im Taunus 1999, ISBN 3-89741-022-2 . (Dissertation University of Frankfurt a. M. , 1999), pp. 151–193
Web links
- Association André Léo (fr.)
- André Léo (1824-1900) ( Memento from June 11, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) mirrored on the Waybackmachine from Antje Schrupp's website
- André Léo: La Guerre Sociale. Discours Prononcé au Congrès de la Paix. at Project Gutenberg (fr.)
- André Léo: Coupons le câble! at Gallica (fr.)
Individual evidence
- ↑ Quotation from AG Frauen der Libertären Aktion Winterthur: Anarchafeminismus: An approach that still has to be worked out . Winterthur 2008. (Brochure), p. 18
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Léo, André |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Béra, Victoire Léodile |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | French writer, journalist and feminist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | August 18, 1824 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Lusignan , Vienne department |
| DATE OF DEATH | May 20, 1900 |
| Place of death | Paris |