8 - ‘La femme du soldat inconnu’: Feminism and French lieux de mémoire

Summary

The attempt by a group of feminist activists on 26 August 1970 to lay wreaths on the tomb of the Unknown Soldier at the Arc de Triomphe with the slogan ‘Il y a plus inconnu que le soldat inconnu. Sa femme’ (‘There is something more unknown than the unknown soldier: his wife’) is often cited as a foundational act for French second wave feminism (Zancarini-Fournel, 2005, 82). Widely reported in the press (journalists were informed in advance), this theatrical action was designed, according to one of the participants, ‘to denounce [women’s] oppression in a spectacular and humorous fashion’ (Tristan and de Pisan, 1977, 55). As Claudine Monteil, another participant, records, the public response was predictable: ‘Ex-servicemen were deeply offended, getting angrier by the minute. The police approached the women, grabbed hold of them, pushed them into a police van and held them for several hours. The next day, some newspapers published a photo showing these “hysterical women” who had dared to “desecrate” the most venerated tomb in France’ (Monteil, 1995, 45). Reporters used the term Mouvement de libération des femmes (MLF) to describe the group of women, thereby aligning them with the American ‘Women's Liberation Movement’. This was in part because the French action coincided with the ‘Women's Strike for Equality’ that took place in the United States on the same day, commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the passing of the Nineteenth Amendment, which effectively gave white American women the right to vote (Cullen- Dupont, 2000, 281). Thus, rather than remembering the national fiftieth anniversary of the 1920 French ceremony that had aimed to bring the nation together in a collective act of mass mourning for the dead – and particularly for the missing – of the First World War, the women on 26 August 1970 marked a transnational feminist day of remembrance, aping the commemorative gestures of the powerful French veteran community in order to draw attention to the continuing lack of equality for women.

This radical feminist act at the beginning of what was to be a pivotal decade in the development of the French women's movement illustrates the extent to which national lieux de memoire such as the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, as theorised in the 1980s by Pierre Nora and Antoine Prost, are always contested spaces (Prost, 1984). Memorials become palimpsests as their meanings and uses evolve over time.