The creation of an icon in defence of Hélène Brion

pacifists and feminists in the French minority media

Joanna Shearer

pp. 88-104

in: Alison S. Fell, Ingrid Sharp (eds), The women's movement in wartime, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007

Abstract

The women's press in Great War France consistently challenged traditional media views and became an effective space for minority opinions to be aired. Throughout this period, newspapers and pamphlets destined for women of various social classes became arenas of political agency, and within this "imagined sisterhood" women could exchange ideas about their roles and duties. Arguably, at no time throughout the war was this discursive space more important for pacifist feminists (who, as Alison Fell notes in Chapter 4, constituted a minority amongst French feminists) than during the trial of a schoolteacher arrested for distributing so-called "defeatist" propaganda. During the First World War, notions of pacifism, defeatism and feminism were conflated and demonized in French nationalist discourse. The trial of Hélène Brion was thus a defining moment in the battle between the pacifist movement and the government-regulated propagandistic national press.