Michèle Sarde's Website

Conference “The Soviet Gulag: New Research and New Interpretations”
Georgetown University, Washington, D.C. April 25-27, 2013
Opening lecture by Michèle Sarde

Jacques Rossi: An education in the Gulag

In the spirit of the Jacques Rossi Fund, I will address this lecture to the future Gulag researchers, that is, our own students, in order to encourage them to work in this field. Jacques Rossi would have liked the idea of passing the torch to young generations.

But who was Jacques Rossi?

He survived twenty years in transit, high-security, and central prisons, as well as in camps for “re-education through labor.” The term GULAG, which describes the entire soviet penitentiary system, encompasses both the prisons and places of exile in one single administration, roughly the size of a country’s government. Jacques Rossi devoted the rest of his life to a massive effort of research into the Gulag system where he had spent his youth. For you, Georgetown’s twenty-first century students, if you decide to do research on the Gulag, you will not be required to live in one of the camps or prisons. Count yourselves lucky!

I would like to tell you how I met this great man, who witnessed the Gulag at first hand and recorded it for posterity.

One day he simply knocked at the door of my office ICC-419. It was in the fall of 1985. The door opened to reveal an unexpected visitor. He said his name was Jacques Rossi. A man of about seventy-five. He was dreadfully sorry to disturb me, he said. Would it be possible to teach some French classes in our department, he asked. He was coming at the suggestion of Aurélia Roman, my colleague originally from Romania, who still teaches here at Georgetown. I asked what qualifications he had. And he gave me his CV. Under the heading Education, this is what I read:

Fine Arts Graduate, Berlin Akademie, and École des Beaux-Arts, Paris, 1929 to 1934
Oriental Civilizations, Sorbonne and École des Langues Orientales, Paris, 1929 to 1936.

And then, to my great surprise:

Survival Studies, Gulag Archipelago, 1937 to 1957

“Survival Studies”? To my knowledge, the subject had never been included in any university program. However, this man, claiming to be its first graduate, had first-hand knowledge of this very specialized area. He had survived almost twenty years in one of the most horrific concentration camp systems of the twentieth century — a century of darkness that is now behind us.

Even so, he did not see himself as a victim, but rather as someone who was himself responsible. Yes, fully responsible for what happened to him. Why? Because, as a young man, he had been a committed communist, ready to die for a cause that he then believed was just. For him, the Gulag did not represent an unfair punishment, but a place of instruction.

As he put it, he had been punished for his sins. He had believed in a fantasy, a utopia. And it took all those years of captivity for him to understand the myth of utopia, to understand his error, to strip it down, extract the universal truths, and draw the conclusions.

The facts

First, I wanted to know who he was, to hear the story of his life. Over time, he gave me various versions of his account. I am summarizing here the most plausible ones.

Jacques Rossi was born in 1909 in Breslau, a town that was German at the time; it is now Wrocław in Poland. His father was Polish, and his mother French. His rich family came from high society. When he was a little boy, his mother refused to send him to school, as she thought him too frail.

After Poland’s independence in 1920, his father decided to move to Poland with his family. One day, while the boy was walking on the grounds of the family estate with his English governess, an old peasant woman came up to him and kissed his hand. He was utterly revolted by this incident. It was this spectacle of the injustice of the ruling class in Polish society of the time that, he said, led him to follow the path of communism and militancy. At the age of seventeen he joined the underground Polish communist party. He was arrested for distributing pamphlets calling upon young soldiers to revolt. When he was freed after six months, he was sent to Berlin by his party and entered the service of Comintern.

And so he became a secret agent. Undercover and using false names, Jacques Rossi studied languages and fine arts in Paris, Berlin, Cambridge, and Moscow.

However, Jacques was no James Bond. “I was only an instrument, but one that was proud to serve the great cause of social justice.” NOTE , he explained. He stressed that he was only an insignificant messenger with no responsibility in the larger institution. Above all, he emphasized his communist convictions bordering on fanaticism. He stated that, if someone had told him that it served the cause for him to jump off the Eiffel Tower, he would have done so without a second thought.

In 1937 he was sent to Spain, which was at the time in the middle of the civil war. His mission on Franco’s territory was to liaise with the Spanish republicans. A few weeks later he was called to what was known as “the village,” that is Moscow. Despite the fact that all of the western press was by that time reporting Stalin’s great purges, he immediately answered the call. Rossi was becoming a victim of what is known as the Great Terror.

In Moscow, he was asked to report to his headquarters. From there, he was sent directly to Lubyanka prison. Later he was transferred to Butyrka, the Moscow remand center, for sixteen months. During that time he was tortured in order for him to provide the reasons for his own arrest. After all, he had been arrested for nothing. No trial, no sentence. Much later, he was informed of the verdict: a sentence of eight years in a labor camp “for reeducation”, in accordance with Article 58, paragraph 6. In other words he was accused of espionage. In his case, this was supposed to be on behalf of France and Poland, because he was Franco-Polish and spoke both languages.

From there (we are now in 1939), Rossi was taken in a Stolypin rail car to an unknown destination, which turned out to be the Arctic, beyond Siberia, beyond the polar circle. After passing through countless transit prisons, he ended up in the Krasnoyarsk transit camp on the Yenisei river. There, a massive barge transported thousands of zeks —that is prisoners— down the river across the Taiga and then the tundra toward the port of Dudinka, which was part of the Norilsk camp.

Rossi’s sentence was to have ended in 1945, but he was not released until April 15, 1947. His release was conditional; thus he was not allowed to leave Norilsk. During this time, new evidence was fabricated against him and he was arrested again in March 1949. This time, he was sentenced to twenty-five years and incarcerated first in the remand prison of Norilsk and then in Krasnoyarsk, Irkutsk and Aleksandrovsk.

That is where he was in 1954 when Stalin died, when the process of de-stalinization and the release of political prisoners began. In 1956 he returned from there via the various transit prisons toward Moscow and ended up in his final prison, the central prison of Vladimir, close to the capital. But release from the little Gulag did not bring freedom in the great Gulag, that is, the Soviet Union. Rossi was given a compulsory order of residence in Samarkand in central Asia and was only allowed to leave the Soviet Union for communist Poland five years later, in February 1961.

These facts that make up the fabric of Jacques’s life-story, we reconstructed together in the eve of his life. By then he was ninety years old. After making several attempts to write his autobiography in collaboration with various, journalists or historians, he ended up coming to me with the following suggestion: “Let’s do the book together. You are a novelist, so you can make it into a novel.”

A novel? The difference between a novel and a testimony is that in fiction you can invent, imagine, and elude. Only later did I understand the meaning of his desire to turn his life into a novel, by his reluctance to speak directly of certain things, and by his habit of secrecy, his addiction to secrecy. Secrecy may become second nature. In Paris at the beginning of the twenty-first century, Jacques Rossi still wrote his Parisian address book in secret code.

Jacques feared, above all, that any indiscretion could harm friends who were still alive. I, on the other hand, was demanding absolute transparency. His first reflex was, therefore, to refuse, to rebel, to treat me as an interrogating officer, in other words, as a torturer. And then, suddenly, he would reveal things that, in turn, shed light on other things. For me it was like detective work.

Testimony and memory

Testimony, while it is always reconstructed to a greater or lesser degree, has to meet standards of accuracy. Of truth. This is what we discovered together while writing the book. Rossi’s experience was too powerful, too intense, and, above all, too universal to be transformed into the stuff of a novel. He had no right to lie, even by omission. He had a duty to bear witness on behalf of the millions of companions who disappeared in the Gulag.

After all, Rossi’s deep, inner motivation to tell his story, regardless of me or any other person, was precisely that: to bear witness, and to tell the whole truth, at least the whole of his truth, of an experience that was at once exceptional and sadly representative. To tell the truth of his experience was also to speak on behalf of his dead comrades. An enormous responsibility.

A witness, especially when he or she has had to wait a long time before speaking, engages in a work of memory rather than of history. Certainly Rossi’s memory was prodigious. He exercised it like a muscle, not only when he was a secret agent, but also when he was in the Gulag where nothing could be written down and kept. On the way to the camps, he remembered Solzhenitsyn’lesson: “Let your memory be your travel bag. Use your memory! Use your memory! It is those bitter seeds alone which might sprout and grow someday.” NOTE What distinguishes a witness from a historian, first and foremost, is his subjectivity. It is he who determines, when recounting the past, which parts to delete and which to retain.

Above all, the witness has a point of view on his story, while the historian is supposed not to have a stance. Rossi’s subjectivity was based on two features that define him in relation to the universe of the Gulag. On the one hand, he had been a committed communist who religiously believed in the cause of the proletariat and social justice. On the other hand, in this soviet concentration camp system inherited from the tsarist House of the Dead, this cultivated man of Franco-Polish origin was a foreigner.

This ardent communist was not a Soviet by culture, even though he spoke Russian perfectly. In a way, therefore, he looked at the soviet concentration camp system with fresh eyes. He was perhaps more sensitive than the Russians to the absurdity of the system. For example, he recognized that he seldom encountered pure sadism among the individuals implementing the system, such as guards, officers, or even the secret police torturers.

“In communist Russia, he said, it was not necessarily man, but the system that was criminal.” NOTE If he was freezing to death in his cell, it was not because the guards were cruel, but because the rules forbade them to give him his undershirt. Quite simply, these men were obeying orders, orders that would probably turn them as well into victims of the same system in the not-too-distant future.

Being a foreigner also helped Rossi, as his fellow prisoners trusted him more than they would have trusted another Soviet. “Many of my soviet companions felt the need to unburden themselves of their experiences. I don’t know why, but they seemed to believe that, as a Frenchman, I would perhaps have the good fortune to get out one day.” NOTE Their trust saved his life on more than one occasion. And it also helped his fellow prisoners to confide in him, which would later facilitate his work of passing on the story. Several of these confessions appear in fiction in his short collection of stories, unpublished in English, called: Qu’elle était belle, cette utopie! (How beautiful was that utopia).

This position on the margins, which allowed him to be both inside and outside the system, was strengthened by another of Rossi’s personality traits; a sense of humor that was black and biting, which enabled him to rise above the most dramatic situations through laughter, and to allow the untellable to be told. Here is an example:

When Rossi was a Comintern agent, he had to carry secret documents on a cruise ship in the Mediterranean with a fake Swedish passport. On boarding the ship, he learned that there was another Swede on board. He was seized with panic at the idea that he would be unmasked by a real Swede. And so he pretended to be sick and missed out on the whole of this beautiful voyage.

This story he told Rudy, a prisoner who, between two interrogations, has just arrived in his miserable cell. He did so in order to distract his prison mate from the torture he had just undergone. Rudy, a Pole like Rossi, listened to the story and smiled:

— The other Swede... that was me!

Another advantage for this particular zek was that he had been a scholar of fine arts and languages. For this gifted linguist who spoke more than ten languages, studying the language spoken in the Gulag became a springboard to constructing a work that is not just a work of memory, but also a work of history.

History is distinguished from memory by its objective, or at least its intersubjective nature. And this is the case here. It is in the name of thousands of witnesses that Rossi speaks. And it is no longer a matter of one individual point of view on the Gulag. It is an academic type of research based on primary sources as well as references to archives, documents, and statistics. This is what allows for as accurate a reconstruction as possible of the reality of the Gulag. Jacques Rossi did not content himself with passing on the memory of a first-hand witness. He wanted to leave behind a legitimate, historical record by constructing his monumental Gulag Handbook.

Memory and History

What I want to make clear is that Rossi’s originality lies not just in his testimony, or that of his fellow prisoners. After all, there have been so many testimonies. His originality is that he became the historian of his own history by giving it a universal dimension. “For seventy years,” he writes, “the Gulag was used as a secret laboratory for the soviet regime. That is why knowledge of the Gulag is fundamental to the study of the communist totalitarian regime. Unfortunately, no sovietologist ever did the apprenticeship there.” NOTE

How did this particular “apprentice,” this simple zek, become a sovietologist? As we have seen, for years and years, Rossi listened to fellow prisoners who confided in him. They were very diverse. They included dekulakized peasants, major thugs, good patriotic communists who did not renounce their convictions, true “enemies of the people,” and former torturers who one evening became victims of the same system. All these Soviets spoke to him, in their individual jargon, the Gulag slang, a specific language born of a specific culture.

Rossi was multilingual and passionate about languages. He had a remarkable memory, which he used during his time as an undercover communist.

That same memory would retain hundreds and thousands of Gulag expressions that were not part of the Russian language proper. It was a composite language, consisting of the accumulation and sedimentation of several linguistic strata, the slang of the ordinary prisoners, the legal language of the penitentiary administration, the specific vocabulary of the political prisoners, and words from pre-revolutionary Russian penal colonies.

This “real” language, with its acronyms and neologisms that included a material and human reality, was in counterpoint to the wooden official language that sought to mask this same reality. He used it to describe and indeed explain the concentration camp universe from which it sprang.

There are words and there are testimonies. He gathered both and began his first approach to the Gulag that he took for what it was, in words of Nicolas Werth: “an extraordinary sociological laboratory, a place of social and political experimentation, where all was laid bare, both the regime and the human material.” NOTE

The first step was, therefore, to assemble the facts. But, when Rossi undertook this Dantean task, he was no quiet researcher in the Library of Congress. He was a zek who had been held in the Gulag, for years on end, who had not been allowed to take any notes, and who was subjected to regular searches, even in the most intimate places. Nevertheless, he managed to write and keep records. He also made sketches of what he saw, which were confiscated... and await some curious young researcher in the archives of the secret police. How did he manage this? He refused to reveal it to me, to avoid betraying a secret that could be of use against other detainees.

The second step was to take place in communist Poland, after Rossi had left the Gulag, and had started, thanks to his still fresh memories and his secret records full of recollections, to set up a gigantic file. But here, too, he was not living in a country with freedom of expression. And so, to transfer his work to the west, he had to use the diplomatic bag of the French embassy, where he had some contacts.

The third step is of particular interest to you and to me. It took place right here at Georgetown University, the University of Jan Karsky, our university. Upon leaving Poland, Rossi set off for the United States at the invitation of a former Polish student and, in Washington, met Father Bradley, Dean of the College, who invited him to take advantage of the freedom of expression and make use of the library at Georgetown. So it is here that he completed his work on primary sources, which he gathered through patient, detailed, encyclopedic research, and wrote a book on all aspects of the soviet concentration camp system.

The result is, first of all, a fascinating linguistic investigation of an unknown idiom, the language of the Gulag: several thousand entries in the original Russian edition, published in London in 1987.

The exemplary erudition of the Handbook covers all the dimensions of the Gulag “culture”, if I can use that word: geographical, material, sociological, economic, and legal dimensions all at once.

In this manner, the subjective witness gave way to the intersubjective historian and drew closer to the challenging goal of objectivity. Usually, witnesses do not much like historians who have not, themselves, suffered the situations they describe and analyze. Historians, for their part, mistrust witnesses, suspicious of their good faith, accuracy and veracity. Rossi managed to reconcile the two. He spent twenty-four years of his life listening, recording, and conceiving his project. Then he applied himself to editing the records, drawing up the files, checking and confirming his work by searching through archives, documents, studies, and works by other people.

If Memory and History are to complement and benefit each other, the past must not be cultivated for itself but must, above all, be used to serve. This is how Jacques Rossi saw it. He wanted to place his experience at the service of education with a view to warning the world. His individual testimony as a zek crushed by an oppressive system was to be placed at the service of a universal cause.

The universal cause

In this mass slaughterhouse, what became of the individual? What happened to the human being? What about forgiveness and the spirit of vengeance? How can a human being protect his soul in this gigantic crushing machine of degradation and destruction? How can he or she survive twenty-four years of captivity? This is where individual testimony is of greatest value. And it is a mark of the greatness of the existential choice of Jacques Rossi, the former zek, that in the final analysis he concluded that he had no personal resentment against these men, even the criminals who abused him in the Norilsk camp, even the policemen who tortured him in Butyrka prison, even the false companions who betrayed him and who helped to have him sentenced for a second time. Jacques told me: “The scale of the evil obliterates any thought of vengeance. The more the desire for revenge, which only impedes the search for truth, is reduced to a pitiful settling of personal scores, the more noble is the task of struggling to avoid repeating the nightmare.” NOTE

Rossi wanted this awful experience endured by millions of men and women to serve as a lesson. Will it prevent new blindness?, new forms of fanaticism? The question remains open.

Survival is at the heart of the problems surrounding the concentration camp system. “Anyone who has survived in these circumstances will always have at the bottom of his heart the lingering sensation that this life is somehow shameful and shaming, says Andrei Sinyavsky. Why am I not dead? That is the ultimate question... and in reality, why am I still alive, while all the others have died?” NOTE

Why didn’t you die? When I asked this question over and over again, Jacques replied wearily as if he were always being asked to explain the unexplainable. “I had a strong constitution, I didn't get beaten up too much, I had no family and so no weak point, I was inured to the harsh ways of underground existence, I was infinitely curious about other people, and I wanted to make sense of what was happening to us. And I had read. I had studied. In short I was lucky. I wasn't forced to commit dirty tricks. I met a few human beings. In the end, it was a matter of resilience... and I had France.” NOTE

Each of these good reasons is worthy of close inspection and affects us all, as they touch upon the limits of human capacity to endure. I would add another good reason, another trait that characterized Rossi: namely his spirit of resistance. It was immense. For example, he underwent three hunger strikes while he was in the Gulag. How can you go on hunger strike in a world where you are constantly deprived of food?

Indeed, as with many other questions, Jacques could never really provide a final answer. And that is why, however significant his work of memory and history, however important his testimony and his attempts to prevent such horrors being repeated, it calls for further research so that the why and how of totalitarian systems, and their attendant crimes against humanity can be better understood and explained.

There is always a certain amount of subjectivity in research, however academic and objective it may be. The reason why the impact of my first meeting with Jacques Rossi was so strong is that I, myself, am the granddaughter of people deported to the Nazi camps. Jacques Rossi may have come back from the Gulag, but my grandfather never returned from Auschwitz.

Indeed Rossi had some blind spots. For him nothing was worse than the Gulag and he believed that the Holocaust had been given too much media coverage in comparison with the silence that surrounded and still surrounds the memory of the Gulag. He did not deny that in the Nazi camps, death was an end in itself, while in the Soviet concentration camp system; it was life that had no value. However he showed that the Nazi concentration camp system had been inspired by the soviet one, which had preceded it both in time and organization. He highlighted the fact that communism turned on its own people, while the Nazis didn’t exterminate other Nazis. “As for me, he said, if I had not been a communist, I would never have been in the Gulag. In fact, I went there of my own free will.” NOTE But he didn’t take into account the issue of the children, or the gas chambers, or the Final Solution, and could only offer a unique, subjective, personal point of view on these terrible matters.

However immense a testimony, a work of memory, or a work of history, it also has its limits. These inevitable boundaries can be crossed by other individuals, the new experts, like the participants in this conference. They can be enriched with the help of new archives and previously unpublished discoveries. And so it is up to to you—students—to continue the work, to ensure through description, analysis and further interpretation of these horrendous systems, that they are not reproduced.

Contrary to Shalamov, for whom the camp is definitely a school against life NOTE , for Jacques Rossi, the Gulag was a place of study, research, and reflection: in sum a school of truth and at the same time a laboratory and a university. And he invited us to follow in his footsteps, to fill in the gaps in his information, to research even further: now, new technologies have been developed, certain archives have been opened, time and distance make it possible to discover and disseminate truths that, until just a short time ago, were too uncomfortable to be discussed openly.

Jacques Rossi may have disappeared physically ten years ago, but his spirit remains in this very place where I met him, where he wrote The Gulag Handbook. Through me, he is asking other researchers to continue the work that he sought to achieve until his dying breath. He would encourage us, above all, to denounce, to elucidate those systems that massacred so many people in the darkest days of the past century and still exist today.

This task is important for democracy. It’s important for human rights. It’s important for the future of humanity. It is a just cause.

Michèle Sarde
Professor Emerita, Georgetown University

Intervención en el coloquio Diálogos con el conocimiento

Ser mujer en Chile: El largo camino entre poder ser y el poder de ser
Sesión: Mujeres en el poder del Estado
“Enfoque comparativo de las mujeres en Francia y Chile”
Facultad de Economía y Negocios, Universidad de Chile, Santiago, 8 de noviembre
Versión integral revisada para este sitio

“¡Quién lo hubiera pensado! Hoy le habla a este Congreso pleno una mujer Presidenta. Aquí están mis diez ministras y mis quince subsecretarias. Aquí está, como lo prometí durante la campaña, el primer gobierno paritario de toda nuestra historia”.

Todos reconocen las palabras de Michelle Bachelet ante el Congreso en mayo de 2006. Nos habría gustado que estuviera con nosotros esta noche. De hecho, con Sonia Montecino y Maïté Albagly, quisimos invitarla. También pensamos en invitar a Sególène Royal, que podría haber ganado las elecciones francesas de 2007 pero no lo logró.

Ustedes me dirán: ¡Da lo mismo! Una mujer presidenta no cambia el destino de las mujeres en general. ¿Seria puro simbolismo? Pero vale la pena analizar este simbolismo.

En las recientes elecciones primarias del partido socialista francés, las dos candidatas fueron eliminadas y el candidato será un hombre. En la vida política, ser mujer no es una ventaja en la Francia de hoy, no más que en la Francia de ayer. Ser mujer aún no da el poder de ser. Al mismo tiempo, como saben, las mujeres chilenas, que han logrado este reconocimiento simbólico de poder ser, no tienen, por ejemplo, el derecho legal de disponer totalmente de su cuerpo.

Las francesas, no más que las norteamericanas nunca tuvieron la suerte de una presidenta. Pero en muchos campos —política familiar, fecundidad, moral sexual y contracepción, actividad profesional— han conquistado algo desde los años setenta.

Dos observaciones sobre la mentalidad de las feministas francesas:

Primero, la importancia de la teoría y de las polémicas, incluido el gran debate universalismo versus diferencialismo, y segundo, el deseo de mixité, palabra difícil de traducir al español o al inglés, la idea de no separarse de los hombres e incorporarlos en las luchas feministas, idea inspirada en una antigua tradición de feministas hombres.

En las últimas décadas, se ha agregado al debate el concepto de diversidad, vinculado a la presencia de muchas mujeres de origen extranjero, con antecedentes culturales, religiosos y étnicos muy diversos, sobre todo en cuanto al tratamiento de las mujeres.

Con respecto a las mujeres chilenas, por las que siento gran cariño, sin haberlas estudiado en mis libros, me impresiona el tema que Sonia analiza en su libro clásico Madres y huachos, la fuerza de las mujeres que tuvieron que conducir su vida solas, ejemplificado justamente por Michelle Bachelet, una mujer soltera con tres hijos y una vida marcada por la resistencia a la dictadura.

Yo no solo creo en las ideas sino también en las personas que las encarnan y que contribuyen a transformar los sueños en realidad. Quisiera rendir homenaje a mis compañeras, las mujeres chilenas y francesas que han hecho realidad este hermoso encuentro: Sonia Montecino, la gran directora de orquesta; Maíté Albagly, una de las primeras en imaginar esta aventura franco-chilena; Adriana Valdés, Pilar Armanet y Marisol Barría, que han hecho tanto por las mujeres chilenas, y todas las invitadas francesas que aceptaron venir por amor a Chile y por la causa de las mujeres: Yvette Roudy, nuestra única ministra de los Derechos de las mujeres, con poder de ministra; Nicole Renaut, la combatiente de siempre; Caroline de Haas, la combatiente del futuro, y Julia Kristeva, nuestra gran intelectual humanista y feminista.

La telenovela histórica

Prever consiste en proyectar en el futuro lo que uno ha percibido en el pasado, decía un filósofo. La historia de las mujeres es su memoria colectiva. Si queremos construir el futuro de las mujeres, hay que aprender de las victorias y de los fracasos del pasado, que representan esta memoria Mi campo en esta presentación es más bien histórico, y mi documentación solo llega a 2007.

Quisiera mencionar los momentos de la historia de las francesas —esta telenovela— que tuvieron repercusiones en la historia colectiva. Luego quisiera analizar brevemente la victoria de Michelle Bachelet y la derrota de Ségolène Royal. Finalmente mencionaré los factores que, en mi opinión, han facilitado cierta evolución de las mujeres en Francia.

La revolución francesa

Al estallar la revolución francesa, las mujeres tenían mucho camino que recorrer. Podemos evocar dos grandes obras de la literatura francesa: Madame Bovary, de Flaubert y Nana, de Émile Zola. Una mujer adúltera y una cortesana, que ejercen cierta influencia sobre los hombres en su sociedad. Una influencia que la revolucionaria Olympe de Gouges, en su Declaración de los Derechos de la Mujer y de la Ciudadana, describe como “la administración nocturna”.Olympe de Gougesescribía en la misma declaración: “si la mujer tiene derecho a subir al cadalso, también debe tener derecho a subir a la tribuna”. Ella misma vivió esta experiencia, y sus camaradas revolucionarios, los Jacobinos, se encargaron de decapitarla. En 1848, se proclamó el sufragio “universal”, que se aplicaba, claro, a un sólo género. Las mujeres no podían votar.

Lo inverosímil es que hubo que esperar dos siglos, el bicentenario de la revolución, y el trabajo de algunas historiadoras, impulsadas por la norteamericana Joan Scott, para que se tomara conciencia de que la Constitución no incluía a las mujeres en los derechos humanos, no más que en el sufragio,. Aún ahora se sigue hablando en Francia de “droits de l’homme”, derechos “del hombre” y no de derechos humanos.

Esta humanidad de hombres y mujeres estaba encarnada únicamente por los representantes del género masculino. El derecho fundamental de la democracia, el derecho a voto —el llamado sufragio universal— solo era ejercido por los hombres. Las mujeres obtuvieron el derecho a voto en Francia casi un siglo después, en 1945, gracias a de Gaulle. Una recompensa por la participación de las mujeres en la Resistencia. El general De Gaulle, que en algún momento había declarado: “¿Mujeres ministras? ¿Y por qué no un ministerio del tejido?” Las mujeres chilenas obtuvieron el mismo derecho poco tiempo después, en 1949.

Este “fraude histórico” explica la importancia del debate feminista aún hoy entre universalistas y diferencialistas o comunitaristas, debate que las filósofas han denominado “existencialistas contra esencialistas”, o igualdad contra singularidad.

¿Son las mujeres seres universales? ¿Ni más ni menos que los hombres? ¿O son las mujeres la otra parte del género humano, la otra parte del ser universal? En los dos casos, el objetivo es la igualdad de derechos entre mujeres y hombres. Pero ¿una igualdad sin diferencia o una igualdad con diferencia?

Simone de Beauvoir y el debate entre existencialismo y esencialismo

El momento Simone de Beauvoir en 1949 vino a corregir el momento De Gaulle: “No se nace mujer, se llega a serlo”, traducido también con la frase “la mujer no nace, se hace”. El sexo biológico no define a la mujer ni al hombre. Es unaconstrucción basada en la educación y en prejuicios sociales. Esta idea fue una ruptura necesaria.

La vida de la filósofa existencialista, compañera de Jean-Paul Sartre, ilustra su postura. Simone se negó a tener hijos, vivía casi siempre en un hotel, escribía en el café de Flore. No tuvo que compartir las tareas domésticas con su compañero ni llevar niños a colegios ni a consultas médicas.

Los tiempos han cambiado. Hoy las jóvenes feministas quieren amamantar a sus hijos y cuidarlos ellas mismas. La reflexión de Julia Kristeva sobre la maternidad ilustra la importancia de esta temática femenina y feminista contemporánea, que renueva el debate sobre la diferencia. Solo las mujeres viven la experiencia de la maternidad. Esta diferencia esencial y existencial no se puede negar.

Mayo del 68

Otro momento histórico. Les événements de mai 68. La revolución cultural de mayo del sesenta y ocho, que recuerda los recientes movimientos de indignación o de revuelta, prepara un despertar de la opinión y de la conciencia contra todas las relaciones de autoridad y de jerarquía. Más de algún eslogan de la calle se ha hecho famoso: “se prohíbe prohibir”, “toma tus deseos por realidad” o —cantado por voces femeninas— “mi cuerpo me pertenece”.

La ley de interrupción voluntaria del embarazo

Es interesante seguir el itinerario de la ley sobre el aborto, término remplazado por “interrupción voluntaria del embarazo”. Fue precedida por luchas de mujeres y un manifiesto.

El 5 de abril de 1971, Le Nouvel Observateur publica una lista de 343 mujeres que declaran: “Soy una de ellas; declaro haber abortado”. En la lista figuran algunos nombres muy conocidos, como Simone de Beauvoir, Catherine Deneuve, Jeanne Moreau.

El 26 de noviembre de 1974, Simone Veil, Ministra de Salud del Gobierno de Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, presenta al parlamento su proyecto de ley sobre la “interrupción médica del embarazo”. Cada año, explica Simone Veil, treinta mil mujeres desesperadas recurren al aborto clandestino, realizado en condiciones de barbarie. Finalmente, en 1975 se promulga la ley que autoriza la interrupción médica del embarazo en determinadas circunstancias. La ley no despenaliza el aborto pero autoriza a la mujer encinta, angustiada por una situación personal, fuera de su control a interrumpir su embarazo en las primeras diez semanas.

En 1977 el parlamento vota la ley, que legaliza la “interrupción voluntaria del embarazo”. En 1982 la ley Roudy establece el rembolso del procedimiento por parte del sistema de seguridad social del Estado. Maïté y Caroline les hablarán mañana de la situación actual.

A pesar —o a causa— de esta legislación, la tasa de fecundidad de las francesas es hoy la más alta de Europa, con un promedio de dos hijos por mujer.

El ministerio de los Derechos de la Mujer y la ley sobre la paridad

La acción del ministerio dirigido por Yvette Roudy preparó el terreno a la ley sobre la paridad de 1999-2000. Es interesante seguir su itinerario.

El 6 de junio de 1996 se publica en la revista L’Express el “Manifiesto de las Diez” por la paridad política, firmado por diez mujeres de izquierda y de derecha, todas ex ministras, incluyendo a Yvette Roudy de izquierda y Simone Veil de derecha.

El concepto de universalidad se basa en la declaración de derechos humanos, que establece: “Toda persona tiene todos los derechos y libertades proclamados en esta Declaración, sin distinción alguna de raza, color, sexo, idioma, religión, opinión política o de cualquier otra índole”.

Para los universalistas, que niegan la diferencia, el ser humano es neutro, sin distinción de sexo, de raza o de religión. De ahí su rechazo de las cuotas, consideradas como antirrepublicanas. En cambio, para los diferencialistas, un ser humano es hombre o mujer, y tiene un origen étnico particular, una orientación sexual y puede tener o no una religión.

Las mujeres, ¿son una categoría de la humanidad, una minoría, o comparten la humanidad con los hombres de igual a igual? ¿Son compatibles las cuotas con la universalidad del individuo? De la respuesta a esta pregunta dependía la ley de paridad.

Finalmente las feministas lograron demostrar que la humanidad es sexuada, que nacemos hombre o mujer y que la diferencia de los sexos forma parte de la definición universal de la humanidad. En consecuencia, debía incluirse en la constitución la igualdad hombre-mujer como un valor universal. La consiguiente ley sobre la paridad no ha dado lugar a cuotas pero ha restablecido el carácter sexuado del pueblo soberano: mitad hombres, mitad mujeres. Tras encuesta, la opinión pública aprobó las reformas propuestas.

Para llegar a la ley, fue necesario modificar la constitución e inscribir en ella el objetivo de igualdad política entre hombres y mujeres. Se agregó en el artículo 1 de la Constitución que “la ley favorece el igual acceso de las mujeres y los hombres a los mandatos electorales y las funciones electivas, así como a las responsabilidades profesionales y sociales”. Observen que la palabra “paridad” no figura en esta enmienda.

La ley impuso a los partidos políticos la obligación de presentar un 50% de mujeres en las candidaturas de listas y penaliza financieramente a los partidos que no cumplen la norma, sobre todo en las candidaturas uninominales.

¿Resultados de esta ley? No muy buenos. Ha sido eficaz solo en los escrutinios plurinominales de las elecciones europeas y municipales. En las elecciones legislativas con escrutinios uninominales, en cambio, los partidos han preferido pagar multas.

Por supuesto, las leyes no son una varita mágica para cambiar las mentalidades, pero contribuyen poco a poco al cambio. Al menos impiden los retrocesos que a menudo han frenado los avances de las mujeres.

El hecho más reciente en esta telenovela, la repercusión del caso DSK.

En mayo pasado, el Director Gerente del Fondo Monetario Internacional y probable candidato presidencial en Francia, es detenido en Nueva York, acusado de tentativa de violación a una empleada de hotel. No es el hecho en sí, que no se investigó totalmente, sino las reacciones que provoca lo que pone de relieve una situación propia de Francia. Esta situación fue denunciada primero por las feministas en Estados Unidos. Yo la llamaré “el machismo a la francesa”.

Las organizaciones feministas en Francia expresaron indignación ante los comentarios sexistas y laxistas de varios políticos. Caroline de Haas comentará mañana estos hechos, así como la liberalización de la palabra femenina que hemos observado después.

En los años noventa, hubo una primera ministra de Mitterrand y algunas ministras en el gobierno Jospin. Los insultos sexistas contra ellas en la arena política fueron tales que llegó a constituirse un grupo feminista con el nombre intencionalmente provocador Chiennes de garde, “Perras guardianas”. Su objetivo era protestar contra este tipo de insultos o bromas sexistas —de hecho sexuales— dirigidos no solo contra las mujeres que ocupaban puestos políticos sino contra muchas mujeres en posiciones de autoridad o de poder.

Las mujeres temen sobre todo el ridículo y la intimidación.

En comparación con las anglosajonas, las francesas han tenido la pretensión de mantener buenas relaciones con los hombres, que las han adulado en la medida en que no participaran en los asuntos “masculinos” y que no trataran de competir con los hombres, y en la medida en que se mantuvieran en su papel de “mujeres” y, por supuesto, sin unirse para reclamar derechos. En muchos hogares franceses, las mujeres que no tienen ayuda tienen de hecho una doble jornada laboral. La repartición de las tareas domésticas es una de los peores de Europa. Las francesas han preferido insistir en las buenas relaciones con el otro género, más que en las buenas relaciones con sus congéneres. Los movimientos feministas franceses se han centrado en un doble ideal: la igualdad entre las mujeres y los hombres, como en otros países, y “la paz” entre las mujeres y los hombres.

Y han tratado de atraer a los hombres en sus luchas. De hecho, en los movimientos feministas de ayer y de hoy, participan muchos hombres. En definitiva, muchos hombres son feministas y muchas mujeres no lo son, lo que explica, entre otras cosas, la debilidad del movimiento feminista francés en relación con los movimientos anglosajones.

Habría que mencionar también, que se creó, fuera del medio franco-francés, animado por mujeres hijas de inmigrantes, un grupo con el nombre también provocador Ni Putes ni soumises, “Ni Putas ni Sometidas”. Este grupo insistía en la noción del respeto hacia las mujeres exigido por las propias mujeres.

Podemos decir entonces que las jóvenes feministas francesas heredaron de las viejas generaciones este contexto constituido por la voluntad femenina de mantener la paz con los hombres, cierta permisividad sexual, la aparente adulación de de las mujeres por parte de los hombres, el carácter sagrado de la pulsión amorosa y sexual, el rechazo de toda forma de censura, y la protección incondicional de la vida privada, en particular de los hombres políticos.

Sin embargo, el machismo a la francesa también ha causado grandes daños dentro de los partidos políticos y bien puede haber sido un factor en la derrota de Sególène Royal en 2007.

La candidata Royal y la Presidenta Bachelet

Una ganó. La otra no. ¿Por qué?

En 2005 Michelle Bachelet fue designada candidata de la Concertación tras el retiro de la otra pre-candidata Soledad Alvear. Ségolène Royal fue designada como la candidata socialista tras su triunfo en las primarias de 2007. En ambos casos había un deseo de cambio de parte de los electores y, al menos en el caso chileno, una propuesta de cambio de género de parte de los partidos. Bachelet ganó las elecciones en la segunda vuelta en 2006, Royal perdió en la segunda vuelta en 2007.

¿Por qué no ganó Segolène Royal?

El sexismo del partido socialista

Su partido, como dijo un filosofó francés, “sostuvo a la candidata como la cuerda sostiene al ahorcado”. Desvalorizar y ridiculizar fueron las estrategias preferidas de su propio partido. Hay una resistencia histórica del PS francés a integrar las demandas políticas de las mujeres, que viene de lejos. ¿Por qué? El socialista Proudhon, uno de los más ilustres machistas en el pensamiento francés, escribió que “una mujer que ejerce su inteligencia se vuelve una mona fea y loca”. Para los socialistas franceses, contrariamente a los alemanes, por ejemplo, el feminismo era una idea burguesa, y ridiculizaron a las feministas y el movimiento sufragista.

Francia es uno de los países de Europa donde la representatividad de las mujeres, sobre todo en el parlamento, es de las más bajas (menos de 20%: 18, 5% en la Asamblea Nacional y 16,9% en el Senado).

Otros factores incluyen la resistencia de las propias mujeres, una cultura femenina históricamente excluida de las altas funciones del gobierno por la ley sálica y la dificultad que encontró Segolène para representar lo universal en una democracia fundadora como la francesa.

El hecho es que no habrá ahora una candidata mujer y no habrá una mujer presidenta en Francia, como no hubo una presidenta en Estados Unidos. Pero hubo una presidenta en Chile. Y como hay que analizar lo positivo tanto como lo negativo, debemos reconocer que para las mujeres del mundo entero fue fantástico.

La presidenta Michelle Bachelet

Es desde una perspectiva no chilena que me permito observar el milagro de una presidenta chilena. En su ausencia hoy, tenemos aquí otras protagonistas de ese período, las ex ministras Pilar Armanet, María Soledad Barría, Carolina Tohá y Ana Lya Uriarte.

El milagro chileno fue que una mujer socialista, agnóstica, “madre soltera” y feminista haya podido representar lo universal en una sociedad mayoritariamente católica y más bien conservadora, o a lo menos tradicional.

En 2008, al hablar de la experiencia de Michelle Bachelet a un grupo de francesas, traté de responder a algunas preguntas:

¿Gobernó como mujer? Michelle Bachelet intentó proyectar los valores del liderazgo femenino y destruir los prejuicios sobre la “incapacidad” de las mujeres para gobernar. Al dejar la presidencia, su tasa de popularidad era muy alta. Por supuesto, muchos balances y muchas críticas se han sucedido desde entonces, pero su tasa de aprobación se mantiene alta.

Pregunta: ¿Gobernó para las mujeres? Respuesta: En su programa de gobierno anunciaba: “Las mujeres no solo debemos tener los mismos derechos que los hombres sino también ejercerlos mediante una verdadera política de apoyo a las mujeres. Que una mujer sea presidenta no debe considerarse como una rareza sino como un augurio”. En mi opinión, intentó cumplir esta promesa.

¿Cambió su gobernanza la vida de las mujeres y los elementos de cultura machista en su país? No se pueden cambiar siglos de cultura machista en cuatro años. Por otra parte, las cifras muestran que la falta de candidatas en los partidos, tanto en Chile como en Francia, lleva a su escasez en el Parlamento y en los consejos municipales. El impacto simbólico de una elección femenina no provoca la elección masiva de otras, ni mucho menos.

¿Qué falta entonces? Falta mucho: entre otras cosas, una presencia significativa de mujeres en el Parlamento permitiría apoyar proyectos de ley contra las discriminaciones. Ejemplo: el 29 de octubre 2007, la Presidenta envío al Congreso un proyecto de ley que establece una representación equilibrada de hombres y mujeres con niveles mínimos de participación femenina y estímulos financieros para los partidos y para las candidatas elegidas, una suerte de ley de la paridad, denominada “ley de cuotas”. El proyecto tuvo la oposición mayoritaria de los diputados. La ley no será tramitada.

Por otro lado, el sistema binominal acentúa las dificultades para las mujeres en Chile, como sucede con la acumulación de mandatos en Francia.

De las respuestas a mis preguntas, podemos retirar algunas lecciones. Sin duda el aspecto simbólico es importante. Después de siglos de ausencia, que una mujer sea elegida a la magistratura suprema mediante sufragio universal y que represente a todo el género humano reviste importancia histórica. No basta que gobierne, como Angela Merkel, debe tener un proyecto feminista, como Michelle Bachelet. Y no basta que tenga un proyecto feminista; tiene que disponer de un respaldo de los partidos y de los parlamentarios, como en España, Y para eso se necesita un apoyo activo de las ciudadanas, y de los ciudadanos. Una masa crítica de mujeres determinadas a cambiar la repartición de los géneros, tanto en el aparato legislativo como en el aparato ejecutivo. Mujeres que se empoderen, que asuman el control de su destino sin esperar que la sociedad masculina se los proponga.

Los factores de evolución de las mujeres en Francia en las últimas décadas

Por último, ¿cuáles han sido los factores de evolución de las mujeres en Francia en las últimas décadas?

En Francia también falta la masa crítica que mencionaba. Pero algunos factores han favorecido la evolución de la vida femenina en Francia. Voy a mencionar solamente la importancia del debate público, con todas las polémicas; el papel del Estado; la educación pública gratuita, aunque tenga defectos; la influencia de las directivas europeas, (en particular sobre los delitos sexuales: acoso sexual, pedofilia, violación) y la tradición laica.

Como saben, la tradición laica incluye las nociones de libertad de conciencia, el bien común de creyentes y no creyentes, la neutralidad del Estado en el terreno confesional y la distinción muy estricta de las esferas pública y privada. El modelo laico incluye la igualdad en el trato a los hombres y las mujeres. En el pasado esta dimensión laica, originada en el siglo de las Luces, el siglo XVIII [dieciocho], ha permitido desvincular la moral ciudadana de la moral religiosa y ha permitido una política sexual y familiar más abierta.

Hoy día se reconoce la voz de los no creyentes humanistas, que Julia Kristeva representó el jueves 27 de octubre en la reunión interreligiosa convocada por el Papa. Entre las diez invitaciones a crear pasarelas entre humanismo religioso y humanismo secular figura este principio “el humanismo es un feminismo”. Dice Julia Kristeva “Las luchas a favor de una paridad política requieren una nueva reflexión sobre la elección y la responsabilidad de la maternidad. La secularización sigue siendo la única civilización que carece de discurso sobre lo materno. Diferente de la religiosidad como de la función paterna, esta vinculación materna (reliance) completa la ética humanista y participa íntegramente en ella”. El principio de que hay también un humanismo singular de los no creyentes y que este humanismo no religioso es un feminismo, se inscribe, en mi opinión, en la gran tradición laica, originada en el siglo de las luces, en su dimensión más tolerante y más feminista, más de cara al futuro.

Solo quisiera agregar que, a mi modo de ver, esta tradición laica a la francesa, este humanismo feminista que desarrolla Julia Kristeva, no excluye en absoluto el diálogo con la diversidad de tradiciones étnicas.

Michèle Sarde