In the Shadow of Rousseau: Gender and the 2007 French Presidential Elections.
By International Social Science Review
- Release Date: 2009-03-22
- Genre: Social Science
Description
In the 2007 French presidential elections, the center-right candidate Nicolas Sarkozy, leader of the Union pour un Mouvement Populaire (Union for a Popular Movement), defeated Segolene Royal, the Socialist Party candidate. The gender dimensions of the campaign revealed much about changing (or lack of changing) French society. As Le Monde (The World) observed, this dimension of the campaign dominated all other aspects of it. (1) Royal ran as a woman, and highlighted this fact more so than any of those women who ran successfully for high office in other democratic countries. (2) While one cannot understand Royal's campaign in its entirety by focusing exclusively on the gender dimensions of her candidacy, such an examination provides a useful paradigm to explore a significant aspect of her attempt to appeal to voters and the reaction of French society to those appeals. This study analyzes Royal's use of gendered discourse during the 2007 French presidential elections to appeal to voters within the context of French political culture derived from the republican tradition of the French Revolution. It does so by focusing on: (1) her emphasis on her status as a woman; (2) her political program; and, (3) her role as a symbol of leadership. It also explores how three French newspapers of diverse political leanings, Le Figaro (The Figaro), Le Monde, and Libeation (Liberation), responded to Royal's campaign strategy. The French historian and philosopher Michel Foucault argues that sexuality is produced in historical contexts; yet, so is gender. (3) Joan Scott, an American historian of France, defines gender as "a socially agreed upon system of distinctions." Gender, she maintains, is culturally determined, formed in society, in part, by its relationship within a cultural system, which can be described as "the patterns and relationships that constitute understanding." (4) Gender thus becomes a way of denoting the social creation of ideas about appropriate roles for women and men.
