On April 21, 1944, 80 years ago, women gained the right to vote in France. The country was one of the last in Europe to grant them this right. Why did it take so long? This is the question answered by the documentary Citoyennes !, broadcast on LCP in April. Jean-Frédéric Thibault, co-writer and co-director of the documentary, and Arnaud Xainte, producer at Illégitime Défense (which also distributes the program internationally) talk about the genesis and development of this project, and the resonance it may have internationally.
Unifrance: The release of Citoyennes ! takes place against the backdrop of the 80th anniversary of women's right to vote. How did the documentary project come about?
Jean-Frédéric Thibault: When you're making documentaries, you spend your time digging around, looking at anniversaries and dates. I stumbled across this piece of information: in 2024, we celebrated the 80th anniversary of women's right to vote! It didn't seem like much to me. Digging deeper, I realized that practically the whole of Europe had passed the law after the First World War. We're in 59th place in Europe, so what's happened? And yet we're the homeland of Human Rights, with an important representation of women in the République, notably with Marianne. That was the initial question: everyone around us is passing this law, and we're waiting another thirty years to do so. Why is that?
There are many possible explanations, the most likely of which – and this is what our historian tells us – is that everything imploded during the First World War, countries were created, there were meetings, changes of government practically throughout Europe, except in France, where we were still in the old République. With people on the right convinced that if women were given the right to vote, they would vote left, and people on the left convinced that they would vote like their husbands, Catholic and conservative.
The law was passed in France in 1919, but never registered. So we unraveled the entire history of these women since the French Revolution. After all, it all started here, in 1789. The idea of giving women the right to vote was born with Olympe de Gouges and Condorcet. From being the first, we ended up being the last in Europe.
Arnaud Xainte: This question is also part of a much broader reflection that we've been carrying out on an episodic basis for the last ten years or so. In 2015, we made the film Le fabuleux destin d'Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun, an incredible woman's destiny. She said that before the French Revolution, women had freedom, and that the event took it away from them. We dug into this point and saw that in the nineteenth century, there had been a phenomenal step backwards! Women, bourgeois women, and aristocrats in any case – who potentially had emancipation ahead of them – were put back in the home, in the kitchen, looking after the children!
With #MeToo, we also asked ourselves questions about masculinity and virility. We were already interested in these issues of gender rights and rights within couples, but we hadn't really dealt with them. In the end, these themes came up in a rather unexpected way, through the history of women's right to vote.
Did you want to tackle a feminist subject?
AX: Not in a political or advocacy way, but from an anthropological, socialogical, and historical point of view. Our natural curiosity led us in this direction, and it made sense given the production's connection with La Chaîne Parlementaire channel.
JFT: We wanted to talk about all those forgotten women who fought for their rights, sometimes in extremely violent ways, especially in England, where violence was a two-way street. We learned things that were absolutely unbelievable, terrible, like forced feeding, for example. We also wanted to talk about those women who were against women's suffrage. George Sand, for example, wasn't really against it, but said there was no point in giving women the vote if they weren't educated first. She speaks of men in the same way, by the way. At the same time, Victor Hugo defended women's right to vote. We learned a lot of extremely interesting things.
AX: We must remember not to look at history through the eyes of our contemporaries. We must always put it in context. Putting history into perspective was important in producing and directing a nuanced film that clearly showed the stages of a form of emancipation. And this emancipation goes far beyond the vote, when we discover that after the right to vote in 1944, women weren't allowed to have a bank account or manage their own finances until 1965! I have memories of one of my mother's colleagues, a schoolteacher in the 1980s, who didn't know how much she earned – her husband managed everything – long after she was allowed to have a bank account. It was a whole rebalancing of gender relations that had to take place, which was absolutely necessary because this state of affairs was no longer legitimate in terms of social organization.
How did you go about researching documents and archives, and bringing historians together on this subject? There are several unpublished archives, including the short film by Alice Guy...
JFT: An editor with whom I often work introduced me to this short film a few years ago, and I absolutely had to use it. It's extremely funny, and it's also a little ambiguous, because with this "Great Replacement," we don't really know whether it's a critique of feminism gone too far or a critique of men.
For the archives, we didn't have a documentalist, so we tried to find something out of the ordinary, and above all to treat the subject in a slightly light-hearted way. Stéphanie Thomas, the co-director, who is also a journalist, found the speakers. Archival footage was used to illustrate what the speakers had to say. We also used a little animation, in homeopathic doses, to lighten the subject a little.
AX: Coming back to Stéphanie, we felt it was absolutely essential to co-direct with a woman.
JFT: Above all, she brought me all her know-how as a journalist.
AX: She does a lot of radio documentaries for "Les Pieds sur Terre," on France Culture, and has an excellent ability to find the right participants – it was she who found the centenarian women who voted for the first time in 1945, for example. Working as a duo also enabled us to have different points of view and angles of attack. What's more, Stéphanie's mother is Dutch, and lived in Belgium for a long time, so she was able to bring together very different cultural and social backgrounds to enrich the story.
Was showing the diversity of views on this issue on the international stage, particularly in Europe, one of the things you wanted to tackle?
JFT: Absolutely, that was the basic idea to explain why France had been so slow. Compare different systems, different policies. In Europe, the Finns were the first, they had a totally different vision of the division of society between men and women. The world was divided in two, but not in the same way as here. The men brought in the money, while the women ran the country. That's why it was so surprisingly simple over there. Of course, we needed an English historian to tell us the story of the Suffragettes, who were fundamental to the history of women's suffrage.
AX: We're also delighted to be working with La Chaîne Parlementaire. It's very interesting from an editorial point of view, but also in terms of international sales. When you want to shoot with foreign contributors, and you have a lot of archives to find, you have to find other sources of income, and so you have to look abroad.
At this stage, many foreigners still find the film too French. In Canada, for example, Quebec women in particular have had a totally different experience, and the couple is not at all seen in the same way. For them, what we're talking about is very distant, even if we've put in a bit of America, which is closer to their experience. Belgium was already preparing something about women and Belgian destiny. We came up against these limits. But we've still made a few sales (RTP in Portugal and Ceska TV in Czech Republic) , and I think that in the long term, things will come together.
What can this documentary teach us today, in a context that is certainly much more egalitarian, but where many battles remain to be fought?
JFT: The vision we have is a European one. But for women in Africa, or anywhere else in the world, there's a lot of work to be done. I really wanted to end the film with what Anne-Sarah Moalic had to say. We didn't entirely agree with Stéphanie at the outset. But that's the logic of the story. For a hundred years, women have been fighting for laws. Of course, there are still pay inequalities and things to be sorted out, but things are on the right track and people are listening now.
As far as men are concerned, we've had the same images of virility and strength for 3,000 years, and it just doesn't fit anymore. What interested me was to end on this somewhat unexpected note: to say that the next battle would be a humanist one, to restore men's place in society. Many women raise the issue of this masculinity. I think we're going to try to work together to regain a social balance and strip away all the clichéd images of triumphant virility, which in any case have collapsed since the First World War to create strong new images.
AX: It's not a battle of one sex against the other, but the idea of rediscovering a new social model. Together asking ourselves, how can we reinvent things?
JFT: I thought it was interesting to end on that note and reopen the debate on something else. The fact that it was a woman saying it made it all the more relevant.
What are the program's attributes that lend it international appeal? ?
AX: I've made several social documentaries based on French cases, such as L'Enfant du double espoir. It's always interesting to use a foreign case as a starting point for analyzing your own society. 16 or17 years ago, I did an amazing job of selling a film about Grigny la Grande Borne, a suburb in the south of Paris. It was an immersion in that town, which I sold all the way to NHK! It was surprising, and said a lot about the daily lives of poor people. The fact that it's centered on France isn't a problem, because it makes you think without resorting to effects.
There's another interesting aspect, and it's aimed more at the younger generation. This is what our first centenarian voters are saying: "But I've never missed an election! We fought so hard to have this right, how could we dare not go and vote?"
It's a right that today we have the impression is immutable and that we've always had it. But no, it's recent! We can see how the right to abortion is being undermined in the United States. Let's be careful, let's protect these rights, because they're precious, and let's use them! Not voting is also voting in a direction. Let's make a decision and get involved.
JFT: None of this insignificant: if women died for this cause, there was a reason.
AX: Being a society means choosing a common destiny. And if the members of a society don't have an equal right to give their voice to that common destiny, what becomes of that society? If this film makes people think about all this, we'll be very happy, because this kind of subject also serves this purpose.
