The Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. The French were watching.
‘Historique” was the adjective du jour used to describe last week’s vote by French lawmakers to inscribe the right to abortion in their nation’s constitution. For once, this overused word was spot-on. France is the first country to make abortion a constitutional right, one on a par with the other “natural and inalienable” rights that France’s National Constituent Assembly proclaimed in 1789 in the Declaration of the Rights of Man, which now, finally and fully, includes Woman.
But the reasons the vote is historic go beyond the fact that France is the first nation past this vital gate. Now that the bilingual message “Mon Corps Mon Choix” — “My Body My Choice,” which was projected onto the Eiffel Tower, has been turned off and the bright lights of the media shine on other stories, it pays to reflect on how this remarkable event came to be and what it suggests about the true nature of democracy.
First, France made history with this vote because a relatively small number of individuals, nearly all women, were its true architects. They were quite literally exceptional, and each was frequently the only woman in the room. For Gisèle Halimi, that was a courtroom. The FrenchTunisian lawyer earned her notoriety in the early 1960s by defending a militant Algerian nationalist who was raped and tortured in a French prison. A decade later, Halimi doubled down on her infamy by successfully defending a teenage rape victim who was charged with the crime of abortion.
Or the room could be the chamber of the National Assembly, where in 1974 Health Minister Simone Veil — the lone female minister in President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing’s government — stood to make the case for the legalization of abortion. Observing the obvious — that she stood before an “assembly composed almost exclusively of men” — Veil declared that she felt compelled to inform them about what has always been and always will be plainly evident to women: that none of them “has recourse to abortion with a light heart. It is always a drama and always will be a drama. For this, you need only listen to women.”
Yet many men refused to listen. One member of Parliament warned that moneyed interests were planning to build “avortoirs” — a pun on the French words “avorter” — “to abort,” and “abattoir”— “slaughterhouse.” Still others compared the proposed legislation to legalize abortion to the Nazi genocide, fantasizing about embryos “thrown into crematory ovens” and wondering how Nazi doctors who practiced human experiments differed from French doctors who ended pregnancies. (Veil, a Jew, had been deported with her parents to Auschwitz. She survived, but her parents did not.)
Second, we learned in 2022 that men could also make history, if only by resisting it. When an almost entirely male majority of the US Supreme Court ruled that our Constitution does not confer the right to abortion, the shock waves not only galvanized Americans but also reached across the Atlantic. Almost immediately in France, female politicians of nearly every ideological stripe collaborated to make their constitution state, clearly and distinctly, that it does confer such a right. One observer remarked that this moment would probably never have come to pass in France “had it not been for the horrifying reversal in the United States.” As one headline read, “It became urgent to carve this fundamental right in marble.” The impact of the Dobbs v. Jackson ruling on events in France cannot be overemphasized. In a world ever more closely connected, one where some nations have looked to our Constitution as a touchstone for their own legal systems, the rollback of this fundamental right shook our sister republic on the far side of the pond. This offers, of course, a lesson in hubris: the moment of blinding arrogance that, as the ancient Greeks warned, leads to a stunning fall.
Third, the reaction of France’s political parties to Dobbs also offers a lesson in something else dear to the Greeks: the idea of democracy. As in the United States, democracy in France is threatened by the rise of authoritarianism and illiberalism, in this case channeled by Marine Le Pen’s extreme right-wing party, the National Rally. Though Le Pen, long opposed to the abortion law, voted for the law, more than a third of her fellow parliamentary members either abstained or voted against it.
This is telling. Any democracy worthy of the name must defend the right of each citizen to enjoy the same degree of equality and liberty exercised by every other citizen. Yet this claim is rendered nonsensical when half the citizenry is instead assigned a “destiny” deemed to be maternal. Denied the freedom to control their bodies, women are thus condemned to unwanted pregnancies and illegal abortions. This is precisely why, as the philosopher Camille Froidevaux-Metterie rightly argues, “reproductive rights are the very condition to women’s full and entire participation in a democracy.”
Finally, these events remind us of the full meanings not just of liberty and equality but also fraternity. At one of the several massive demonstrations in
France following the Dobbs decision, a sign held by one protestor declared: “Solidarity with our sisters in the United States.”
From now on, France’s famous revolutionary trio becomes a quartet: “Liberty, equality, fraternity, and sorority.”
Robert Zaretsky teaches in the Honors College, University of Houston. His most recent book is “Victories Never Last: Reading and Caregiving in a Time of Plague.”