Hubertine Auclert

Hubertine Auclert was a French suffragist who made women’s right to vote a direct object of political organizing. She created the group Women’s Suffrage and its newspaper, La Citoyenne, helping push French feminism beyond the cautious campaign for civil rights. Simone de Beauvoir presents Auclert’s initiative as a consequential but only partially successful challenge to women’s exclusion from political power.

Identity and Background

Auclert appears in the account of nineteenth-century feminism in France, after a period when the movement had concentrated on civil rights and had not yet taken up the vote as its central demand. While Léon Richer founded Le Droit des Femmes in 1869 and organized the International Congress of Women’s Rights in 1878, the French and English movements remained timid for roughly thirty years. Auclert broke with that restraint by beginning a suffragette campaign.

Campaign and Organization

Auclert’s campaign took institutional as well as public form: she established Women’s Suffrage and founded La Citoyenne. The newspaper provided a vehicle for the cause, while the group organized women around the demand for political participation. Other groups formed under her influence, showing that her work extended beyond a single organization or publication.

Limits and Historical Significance

Despite this organizing activity, the groups accomplished little. De Beauvoir connects the weakness of feminism to divisions among women: class interests separated bourgeois and proletarian women, limiting solidarity across the sex. The setback therefore sits alongside Auclert’s achievement. She made suffrage an explicit campaign and inspired further organization, but her example also reveals the distance between articulating a collective demand and acquiring the power to secure it.