Claire Démar

Claire Démar or Émilie d'Eymard (born presumably 1799 ; died August 3, 1833 ) was a French feminist , journalist, and writer . At the age of 30, she joined the Saint-Simonist movement. Today she is known for the avant-garde modernity of her fonts.

Life

Childhood and origin

Claire Démar, partly also Emilie d'Eymard, is a person who is quite mysterious. Little is known about their origins and childhood. Her date of birth, 1799 or 1800, is uncertain, nor is her identity, with her first letters signed with Émilie d'Eymard and her publications with Claire Démar.

According to one hypothesis about her origins, she is the daughter of the German-born pianist and composer Sébastien Demar and Elisabeth Riesam, who is also of German descent. They had settled in Orléans since 1791, but apparently there is no birth certificate in the Orléans birth register for 1799 or in the corresponding ten-year table that could be considered theirs. The daughter of the Demar couple, named Theresia (Thérèse), who later became a violinist , singer and composer and was her older sister, was born in 1786 in Gernsbach , “in the Duchy of Baden ” (Germany).

Conversion to Saint-Simonism

Claire Démar is one of the most combative women in the Saint-Simonist movement. During the time when the movement became a church and it headed its writings with the Saint-Simonian religion , this church was led by Prosper Enfantin , a typical father figure, and was known for its costume, which consisted of a red beret , a red or white skirt, depending on the season, with a crossed leather belt and a blue jacket. This jacket was washed from the back with the help of a companion, as a sign of the solidarity spirit of Saint-Simonism. In addition, the name of the patron was written in large letters on a white breastplate. Père Enfantin was particularly concerned with relations between the sexes. He derived his ideas from a saying of Saint-Simon: "L'homme et la femme - voilà l'individu social." ( "Man and woman - that is the social individual.") In this context presented Enfantin the new moral law on , which was based on the assumption that all relationships between the sexes should be based solely on love. In his opinion, there was no suitable woman to put this theory into practice, because women had too few rights to know what they wanted from within. They are trapped in a “male hierarchy” and therefore, from his point of view, are not in a position to contribute an adequate female view of the future of people. So he officially looked for this “empancipated” female counterpart with the “call for women” . Claire Démar, on the other hand, saw Christian morality as the instrument of power of patriarchy and in her texts radically distanced herself from the positions of the Saint-Simonist community, above all she rejected (Christian) marriage because it was based on possessiveness and was false.

feminist

Appeal of a woman to the people about the liberation of women (1833)

Claire Démar saw the female socialization process as a structural incapacitation process that leads to stupidity and enslavement. She tried to use the Saint-Simonism movement, in which women gained great influence from 1831 onwards, to go further and to express observations and demands. However, these were rejected by the majority of their contemporaries, although they qualified as feminists in the course of the following years. Shortly before her death, Démar published an appeal to the people about the liberation of women , in which she called for the application of the Declaration of the Rights of Men and Citizens for Women. In it she describes marriage as legalized prostitution based on the existing system of guardianship : daughters from a well-off home are married as a "good match", daughters from poorer backgrounds are due to their financial situation (low wages) on the generosity of their lovers and " male protector ”instructed. She linked the liberation of women with the abolition of property, inheritance, paternity rights and "motherhood", ie with the dominant consanguinity. For example, children should be raised by wet nurses as they are trained to raise and support children for their well-being. This means that women should relieve themselves of all reproductive work and are only given equal rights when they can sustain themselves through their own abilities and achievements. In her appeal , Démar not only calls for the promises of the French Revolution , freedom, equality, solidarity, but also specifically addresses the relationship between the sexes. In this context, she criticizes the civil code of 1804, which stipulated that a woman owed obedience to her husband. In her writings, she does not limit herself to describing the oppression of women, but also names the social mechanisms and shows possible solutions for the liberation of women from this situation: women should be equally involved in the drafting of laws and the organization of government. As a prerequisite for this, she strived for the free encounter between man and woman as independent and independent individuals and described this connection with equal rights, detached from material dependencies, in her work Mein Zukunftsgesetz . It was important to her that "man, woman and child free themselves from the law of the blood and the exploitation of humanity by humanity".

Journalist

In the last few years of her short life, Claire Démar worked on women's magazines. They were created after the July Revolution of 1830 , when the Saint-Simonist movement strived for a social order in which all people were able to enjoy both material well-being and moral happiness. Démar published her appeal by a woman to the people on the emancipation of women in La Femme Libre and, in conjunction with Suzanne Voilquin , took part with suggestions or criticism of the articles published in the various publications for which Voilquin took the lead had: La Femme nouvelle , L'Apostolat des femmes and La Tribune des femmes .

Reception of the work and early death

Claire Démar was preparing for the printing of a second volume when she, booed, abandoned by everyone, reduced to the greatest misery and desperate for the emancipation of women, preferred to commit suicide with her lover Perret Desessarts from Grenoble on August 3, 1833 to commit. When they were found dead, they were found on the same bed with a roll of paper and two letters in which they emphasized that each had decided to die for himself, unaffected by the other. Claire Démar wanted the papers to be read out to the Saint-Simon family in Paris and then deposited for the attention of Father Prosper Enfantin. He in turn gave it to Suzanne Voilquin, who published it in the La Tribune des femmes .

Démar's texts went unnoticed until 1976. Then they were republished.

plant

Published texts

• Claire Démar: Appel d'une femme au peuple sur l'affranchissement de la femme , 1833, Valentin Pelosse, 2001.
• Claire Démar: Ma Loi d'avenir , posthumous, in La Tribune des femmes, Suzanne Voilquin, Paris, 1834.

Letters

• Claire Démar: lettres de ... , Fund Enfantin ou Saint-Simonie
• Claire Démar (et Perret Desessarts): lettres à Charles Lambert (3 août 1833), autographes conservés à l'Arsenal, Mss 7714, lettres d'adieu écrites quelques heures avant le suicide des deux amants.

bibliography

List in chronological order

• Revue de Paris, Bureau de la Revue de Paris, 1834, pp. 6 and 7 ( Google livres )
• Suzanne Voilquin: Souvenirs d'une fille du peuple, ou La Saint-simonienne en égypte , 1866, Maspero, Paris, 1978. ( Google livre )
• Ghenia Adrienne Avril de Sainte-Croix: Le Féminisme , Paris, Giard & Brière, 1907.
• Laure Adler : À l'aube du féminisme, les premières journalistes: 1830–1850 , Paris, Payot, 1979.
• Carole Bitoun: La Révolte au féminin. De 1789 à nos jours , Hugo & Cie, 2007.
• Saint-Amand Bazard
• Prosper Enfantin
• Saint-Simonisme
• Claude-Henri de Rouvroy de Saint-Simon
• Claire Bazard
• Palmyre Bazard
• Désirée Gay
• Marie-Reine Guindorf
• Suzanne Voilquin

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Christine Planté: La Parole souverainement révoltante de Claire Démar. In: Femmes dans la Cité, 1815–1871. A. Corbin, J. Lalouette, M. Riot-Sarcey dir., Créaphis, 1997, pp. 481-494, “Oser (parler) est le maître mot de Ma loi d'avenir et il est bien vrai que ce texte frappe par un sentiment acuity et de modernité »
2. ↑ Alain Corbin, Jacqueline Lalouette, Michèle Riot-Sarcey , Société d'histoire de la Révolution de 1848 et des révolutions du (France): Femmes dans la Cité: 1815–1871. Créaphis, 1997, p. 493: On ignore sa date de naissance, de même que la graphie de son nom. Elle-même signe certaines lettres Émilie d'Eymard ( Google livre )
3. ^ Thérèse and Claire Demar on the Sophie Drinker Institute site
4. ↑ État-civil d'Orléans. January 19, 1858. N ° 92. Décès de Thérésia-Elisabeth-Françoise Demar, "professeur de musique", morte le 18, à 71 ans, de feu Jacob-Ignace-Sébastien Demar, "professeur de musique", et Dame Elisabeth Riesam .
5. ↑ Carole Bitoun: La Révolte au féminin. De 1789 à nos jours. Hugo & Cie, 2007: “  La Révolte au féminin réunit vingt portraits de femmes exemplaires. Figures emblématiques de la révolte, elles se sont élevées, à travers leurs actes contre l'ordre établi, parfois au péril de leur vie. Toutes ces femmes ont en commun une révolte individual jaillie de la colère et de l'indignation contre l'injustice, qui a transformé leur vie en combat. Olympe de Gouges, Charlotte Corday sous la Révolution, Claire Demar, Flora Tristant dans la première moitié du XIXe siècle »
6. ↑ Illustrations présentes dans le fonds Enfantin à la Bibliothèque nationale de France .
7. ↑ notamment par: Ghenia Avril de Sainte-Croix de 1907, Laure Adler s 1979th
8. ^ Marit Rullmann: Philosophinnen. From ancient times to the Enlightenment. edition ebersbach, Zurich-Dortmund 1994, p. 277, ISBN 3-905493-44-6
9. ↑ Valentin Pelosse: «« Peuple, tu ne seras véritablement libre, véritablement grand, que le jour où la moitié de ta vie, ta mère, ton épouse et ta fille, seront elles aussi affranchies de l'exploitation qui pèse sur leur sexe. »In the Paris agité de 1830, des groupes s'organisent, partagés entre l'aspiration au bonheur commun et le combat pour la survie. Des femmes participent à ce formidable mouvement et gagnent une certaine autonomie. Parmi elles, la jeune saint-simoniene Claire Démar, qui signe en son Appel d'une femme au peuple sur l'affranchissement de la femme, dans lequel elle qualifie le mariage "de prostitution de par la loi" and let au défi les opposants républicains d'étendre aux femmes la Declaration of droits de l'homme. Un an, après son suicide à Paris, un autre de ses écrits, Ma loi d'avenir, fera l'objet d'une posthumous. Valentin Pelosse, sociologue, éclaire le parcours et la pensée de cette figure herroïque et la modernité qui s'inscrit d'évidence dans la généalogie des «mouvements de femmes». »( Google livres )
10. ↑ Revue de Paris, Bureau de la Revue de Paris, 1834, p. 7: “Ce qui l'y révoltait surtout, c'est que nous eussions écrit dans le Code civil que la femme doit obéissance et fidélité à son mari. "Nous marie-t-on, s'écrie-t-elle, on nous applique l'article du Code civil. Mais est-ce que nous avons assisté à sa rédaction? Le Code est-il bien dans nos goûts et dans notre nature ”, Ce fut cette sainte indignation contre le Code civil qui poussa Claire Démar à demander au peuple une révision générale de toutes nos institutions. Claire Démar a fait plus à elle seule que n'avait osé l'assemblée constituante, qui s'était bornée à déclarer les droits de l'homme. Elle a proclamé la declaration of droits de la femme. »( Google livres )
11. ^ Revue de Paris, Bureau de la Revue de Paris, 1834, p. 6: “Elle (Suzanne) assume heroïquement sur sa tête toute la responsabilité de la parole neuve et hardie de Claire Demar. Ce n'est pas là faire preuve d'un mediocre courage, je vous assure »( Google livre )
12. ^ Marit Rullmann: Philosophinnen. From ancient times to the Enlightenment. edition ebersbach, Zurich-Dortmund 1994, ISBN 3-905493-44-6