She describes the reaction as “The men said ‘no,’ and the women of my generation said ‘yes.’ ” Today, another generation is reading her latest book, “Le Conflit: La Femme et la Mère,” a scathing dissection of what she regards as a spreading cult of “motherhood fundamentalism” in the West. It dismissed the myth of maternal instinct as a sometime cultural construct. Her first, “L’Amour en Plus”-a history of the changing notions of mother love-was published in 1980, when she was thirty-five. She calls them “my contrarian feminist polemics.” She has written five blunt, admonitory best-sellers on the subject of those women and their men.
She believes that, in the name of “difference,” young women are falling victim to sociobiological fictions that reduce them to the status of female mammals, programmed to the “higher claims” of womb and breast. Legally, Frenchwomen have those rights now, and Badinter thinks they are starting to renounce them. Never mind that the citoyennes of 1789 lost those rights before they ever had them, or that they got to vote only after the Second World War, or, for that matter, that until they took to the streets two months ago, in protest, they were expected to accept the extraordinary sexual prerogatives of their republic’s male leaders.
She is convinced that young Frenchwomen have been undermining their hard-won claims to equality-a universalist principle enshrined in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, written by the revolutionary élite of 1789 as the founding document of a new republic. “But I think the privileged classes are often the ones least tolerant of inequality.” Photograph by Lise Sarfatiīadinter once told me that she lived in two centuries and commuted between them, a reluctant tenant in her own. “I know that I grew up in a very privileged world socially,” Badinter says. The arrest of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, in New York, on charges of attempted rape? For weeks, she kept a pointedly protective silence Strauss-Kahn’s wife is one of her closest friends. The so-called burqa ban? She lobbied for months to see it passed. Enforced male-female parity on electoral lists? Badinter fought against it. The Elisabeth Badinter that most of those readers knew was the public Badinter, a woman of fierce propriety and convictions who would emerge from the archives at the first stirrings of dissension within the French feminist ranks and, armed with the precepts of a candlelit past, pronounce on what the proper republican response should be.
It’s what the French call a journal populaire of the republican left-Marianne being the female face of the Republic that you see on postage stamps and town-hall statues-which suggests that not all its readers had actually got through Badinter’s three-volume social history of the French Enlightenment, “Les Passions Intellectuelles,” or even knew that she spent the better part of her time in archives, consorting with the men and women who gathered in the great salons of eighteenth-century Paris for evenings of ardent, exquisite conversation about the rights of man. Marianne is not The New York Review of Books. Last summer, the French weekly Marianne took a telephone poll and, in the fall, informed its readers that the extravagantly entitled feminist philosophe Elisabeth Badinter was now, officially, the country’s “most influential intellectual.” In France, intellectuals have rock-star status.