After two centuries of shackling feminine political ambition, France is at last giving way to a militant sexual revolution that could see a woman president within 10 years, according to a new book which reveals a growing female urge for power.
The Christmas non-fiction bestseller, Leurs femmes (Their wives), written by a leading political journalist, shows that French women are exploiting the government and party offices of their husbands to influence decisions behind the scenes and prepare their own political careers.
The author, Paris-Match journalist Elisabeth Chavelet, says that the new confidence among career women has been inspired largely by the status of Hillary Clinton, who owes much of her political rise to the celebrity she achieved in her role as a White House wife.
And Chavelet quotes from an interview in which Bernadette Chirac, the French president's wife, who has become a policymaker in her own right, said she hoped that Clinton would be win election this year because it would serve the women's cause worldwide.
Already several names are being discussed for the 2005 and 2012 French presidential elections, although they are still often presented as wives of politicians rather than potential candidates in their own right. Among them are Segolene Royal, four times a minister, whose partner is the Socialist Party leader Francois Hollande, and Cecilia Sarkozy, wife of the dynamic Interior Minister, Nicolas Sarkozy.
Talking about the new wave of influential and ambitious women, Chavelet said they were obliged to take a circuitous route to power because France had always refused to give them their due place in politics -- a tradition dating from the Revolution when the pioneer feminist Olympe de Gouges was guillotined for campaigning in favor of women MPs.
"France has even voted a parity law to guarantee women half the places on electoral lists in an attempt to overcome prejudices," Chavelet added. "But this hasn't worked so far. French machismo carries on and women are being forced to stay in their place in this supposedly equal country -- dominated and second-class."
Although the 2002 general election brought a record number of women into the National Assembly, there are only 71 female members out of 577 MPs.
Postwar politics have produced few heroines, with a short list headed by Simone Veil who introduced the abortion laws in 1975, and Arlette Laguiller, a popular Trotskyist, who has fought five presidential elections.
Only one woman, Edith Cresson, has been prime minister but she lasted barely 10 months between 1991 and 1992 after complaining that her policies were wrecked by jealous male Cabinet colleagues.
But, despite slow progress, the scene has changed considerably since the days when the wives of Charles de Gaulle, Valery Giscard d'Estaing and Georges Pompidou -- Yvonne, Anne-Aymone and Claude -- were restricted to charity work. Jacques Chirac was given no chance of re-election in 2002 until his wife, Bernadette, a rural councillor, launched her own media offensive to correct her husband's image as a lazy and diffident president. Her public appearances have continued at an intense level after Chirac's success, and recently Le Monde named her "the vice-president," hinting that in a runoff with her husband she would probably win.
Similarly Cecilia Sarkozy has an office next to her husband's and attends all his ministerial meetings. Sarkozy's enemies have hinted at a sinister influence exercised by the former model who was once married to a top TV entertainer, Jacques Martin.
Her exotic background as the daughter of Russian and Spanish immigrants who raised her to be a concert pianist will be put to an electoral test for the first time in local elections next year, a move seen as a step-by-step attempt to establish a separate high-flying political career.
But a more immediate potential presidential candidate is Segolene Royal, 50, daughter of an army colonel.
She met Francois Hollande at ENA, France's top administrative school, and is considered more single-mindedly ambitious for the top job.
She has continued to underline her feminist credentials by stressing her refusal to marry although brought up in a strict Catholic environment.
If Royal does stand for the Elysee in three years' time, she will owe an enormous amount to pioneers who refused to play subordinate roles.
Recent high-profile figures include Martine Aubry, the most innovative minister in the last Socialist government, who is now mayor of Lille, and Sylviane Agacinski, the feminist philosopher, who often appeared to be the stronger partner in her marriage with the Socialist former prime minister, Lionel Jospin.
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