The exiled French Communard Gustave Lefrançais, writing in 1871 on the anniversary of the First International in Geneva, located the wellspring of internationalism in the founding of the Union des associations ouvrières by the socialist feminist Jeanne Deroin in 1849:
Let me remind you, not to satisfy any national vainglory—there can be no question among us of such things regarding an organization of which it is the very negation—let me remind you that it was also in France that the first manifestation took place from which the International later sprang. Yes, and it was—to women’s honor—a woman whose name is now forgotten, citizen Jeanne Derouin [sic] who, in 1849, was the first to have the idea of uniting all workers’ associations into a vast federation rooted in solidarity.Footnote 1
This speech—transcribed in L’Égalité, the organ of the IWMA’s Romandy Federation—almost certainly shaped the history of the First International written by the Swiss libertarian historian James Guillaume. In Guillaume’s account, Deroin’s Union des associations ouvrières stands alongside the Communist League (1847) as a forerunner of the International.Footnote 2 Arguing that a woman inspired the IMWA may seem provocative, given how marginalized women and feminists were in the congresses and governing bodies of the First International. Placing such emphasis on an initiative uniting 104 producers’ cooperatives in Paris may seem equally surprising: the Union des associations had no explicit international purpose, and more importantly, from its very founding in 1864 the IWMA maintained an ambivalent relationship with the workers’ cooperative movement.
This movement first emerged in the 1830s, set in motion by Owenites in Great Britain.Footnote 3 In France, socialist cooperatives flourished as never before during the 1848 Revolution, emerging from the intersection of workers’ practices and so-called “utopian” reformist thought (Fourier, Saint-Simon, and Cabet).Footnote 4 Through producers’ cooperatives, workers came together to collectively own the means of production, organize themselves democratically, and share profits equally. This enabled them to escape wage labor and the process of proletarianization that accompanied the development of industrial capitalism. In consumer cooperatives, workers joined forces for a different end: to buy everyday consumer goods in bulk, directly from producers. By cutting out the middlemen, these cooperatives aimed to sell these goods at cost and to restore ethical and solidarity-based consumption practices. After a sharp decline following Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte’s coup of December 1851, the cooperative movement revived in the mid-1860s, in step with the founding of the First International (1864). The movement now acquired its own international dimension, driven by increasingly close connections between cooperators across Europe.Footnote 5 Socialist workers—women and men alike—together with pioneers of the struggle for gender equality, then sought to bridge the cooperative project and the IWMA—despite the criticisms the latter attracted in internationalist circles.
To shed light on the links between the cooperative movement, feminism, and internationalism—which are still underexplored in the historiography—this article analyses the engagement with cooperativism during the 1860s of two French activists, André Léo (1824–1900),Footnote 6 and Marguerite Victoire Tinayre (1831–1895).Footnote 7 Beyond their respective affiliations with the First International, they present several points in common that invite joint study. Both were feminists who devoted significant attention to the issue of education, which they viewed as the precondition for achieving gender equality. Born into a family of artisans in Issoire (Puy-de-Dôme), Marguerite Victoire Tinayre (née Guerrier) obtained her teaching certificate in 1856. After moving to Paris, where she worked for a time as a linen maid, she opened several schools, particularly for girls, in which she experimented with alternative, Fourierist-inspired teaching methods. André Léo was the pen name of Victoire Léodile Bera, who was born into a middle-class family in Lusignan (Vienne). In 1849, she married Grégoire Champseix, a close associate of the socialist Pierre Leroux, and went on to become both a journalist and a writer. From the outset, her writings called for reform of women’s education, a cause that led her in 1866 to found the Association pour l’amélioration de l’enseignement des femmes. In 1868, Léo also helped found the Ligue en faveur des droits des femmes, which campaigned both for women’s civil rights and for secular education. Both feminists wrote socialist novels—published, in Tinayre’s case, under the pen name Jules Paty. During the Second Empire, when women remained excluded from the main political arenas, female activists turned to literature as a means of defending their progressive ideas.Footnote 8 Just as Marie-Louise Gagneur won success with feminist, anticlerical novels that championed the cooperative movement,Footnote 9 Léo and Tinayre used didactic novels to convey their political and cooperative ideals. These ideals also shaped their practice: from the second half of the 1860s, both women actively promoted workers’ consumer cooperatives. More readily than producers’ cooperatives, these were open to women’s participation, since women played an essential role in managing daily household expenses. Tinayre’s and Léo’s commitment to the cooperative movement, combined with their involvement in the International, drew them into the same activist circles. They probably met there, and the two women forged strong ties with leading figures in internationalist cooperativism such as Eugène Varlin, Nathalie Le Mel, and Benoît Malon.Footnote 10 Lastly, Tinayre and Léo played a major role during the Paris Commune in 1871, in which they fought for the emancipation of women and the proletariat.
This article focuses on the second half of the 1860s, when the two activists were at their most engaged with the cooperative movement—though in different ways: Léo wrote articles theorizing cooperation, while Tinayre was more deeply rooted in cooperative practice. I argue that their championing of worker cooperation—at once bound up with and in tension with their feminist and internationalist struggles—was rooted in a shared project of popular education, which both regarded as essential to the future of socialism. To demonstrate this, I draw mainly on the cooperative and socialist press, as well as the novels of Tinayre and Léo and archival material that sheds light on the functioning of cooperatives. First, I examine how the two feminists viewed consumer cooperatives as educational—a position that aligned with arguments made at IWA congresses. I then show that their campaign to bring the consumer cooperative model to women—both educational in intent and feminist in its political objectives—aimed to restore female workers’ sense of agency. Finally, I examine what appears to be an enigmatic decision: why Tinayre and Léo declined to encourage women’s participation in producers’ cooperatives—despite the renewed interest these were attracting in the pre-Commune period, particularly within the Geneva and Paris sections of the IWA.
Workers’ consumer cooperatives: A school for the people
In his Inaugural Address of the International Working Men’s Association in 1864, Marx set out an ambivalent view of the cooperative movement.Footnote 11 Paying tribute to the socialist movement of 1848, he started by acknowledging the contribution of these “great social experiments”: they had the merit of showing “by deed instead of by argument” that “hired labor is but a transitory and inferior form, destined to disappear before associated labor plying its toil with a willing hand, a ready mind, and a joyous heart.” But this concession only bolsters the counterpoint: “however excellent in principle and however useful in practice, cooperative labor, if kept within the narrow circle of the casual efforts of private workmen, will never be able to arrest the growth in geometrical progression of monopoly, to free the masses, nor even to perceptibly lighten the burden of their miseries.” Therefore workers’ “conquest of political power” was to be the primary objective. The cooperative model retained its support at the Geneva Congress (1866), especially among the French sections where Proudhonist influence prevailed.Footnote 12 But at the Lausanne Congress of 1867, opposition to cooperation was growing, focused above all on its incapacity to subvert the subordination of labor to capital. Producers’ cooperatives’ widespread use of auxiliary workers—those without associate status—drew particular criticism.Footnote 13 The criticism was well founded: liberals were moving into the European cooperative movement—among them the French diplomat and politician Auguste Casimir-Périer, and Schulze-Delitzsch, who had pioneered credit unions in Germany—with the aim of redirecting it away from its socialist objectives.Footnote 14 But despite cooperativism’s gradual retreat, the consumer cooperative retained its strategic value for the internationalist cause—as a means of financing campaigns, strikes, and political propaganda.Footnote 15 More broadly, the consumer cooperative was understood as an instrument of popular education: “the great school where the worker is introduced to economic issues.”Footnote 16
The First International’s vision of the consumer cooperative as an instrument of popular education aligned with Tinayre’s and Léo’s own conviction that popular education was the most effective path to a democratic socialist society. This idea runs through Tinayre’s novel Un rêve de femme (1865).Footnote 17 This recounts how a young woman named Valentine convinces her wealthy husband to found a rural factory and workers’ village. Their operation echoes the workers’ villages created by the socialist reformer Robert Owen, whose ideas had been introduced to France as early as the late 1830s, notably thanks to the feminist Désirée Gay and her husband Jules Gay.Footnote 18 When Valentine’s philanthropic endeavor fails, following the couple’s tragic reversal of fortune, it prompts reflection on the need to transform workers’ mores—replacing individualist reflexes with a spirit of solidarity.Footnote 19 Sharing a view widely held in cooperativist circles,Footnote 20 and championed in particular by La Coopération to which she subscribed, Tinayre suggested that participation in consumer associations had the power to educate people, transform workers’ mores, and so subordinate self-interest to the collective good.Footnote 21 Accordingly, in 1866—alongside her work as an educator—she took part in founding the Équitables de Paris, a consumer cooperative in which Louise Michel notably participated.Footnote 22 This establishment, initially chaired by the Fourierist shoemaker Fortuné Henry, was located at 211 boulevard de la Gare, Paris. Its founding was reported in the Fourierist newspaper La Science sociale: “a consumer society has been formed in the Faubourg Saint-Marceau, the poorest and most destitute neighborhood.”Footnote 23 Primarily targeting the proletariat, this cooperative set its membership fees low—though at a minimum of twenty-five centimes.Footnote 24
The cooperative’s name is a direct reference to the Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers founded in 1844 at Rochdale, Lancashire, by a group of weavers, skilled laborers, and cotton workers who banded together to open a cooperative store supplying good-quality provisions. It quickly attracted working-class customers by returning a portion of its profits as dividends proportional to each member’s purchases. Its remarkable growth made it famous, and the cooperative movement came to regard it as a founding myth:Footnote 25 La Science sociale reported that the Rochdale Equitables “seem no longer to belong to history but to legend.”Footnote 26 French cooperativists came to know this English experiment through Alfred Talandier’s translation of George Holyoake’s The History of the Equitable Pioneers of Rochdale—published serially in the Lyon newspaper Le Progrès between October 1862 and April 1863—Talandier being one of the foremost conduits for English cooperativist ideas in France.Footnote 27 The law of July 24, 1867, which subjected cooperatives to stricter regulations by classifying them as joint-stock companies with variable capital,Footnote 28 prompted the Équitables de Paris to adopt the legal form of a limited partnership. Like their Rochdale predecessors,Footnote 29 they accepted women as members. Tinayre even played a leading role: she sat on the oversight committee, acted as the association’s secretary for a time, and took the initiative of affiliating the cooperative with the International.Footnote 30 Like the Équitables de Paris, consumer cooperatives founded by internationalists enabled women to play an organizational role. Aglaé Jarry, for example, managed one of the stores of the Revendication de Puteaux, Suresnes et pays environnant, a consumer cooperative founded by Benoît Malon that likewise claimed descent from the Rochdale Pioneers.Footnote 31 Similarly, Nathalie Le Mel served as secretary to La Marmite, a cooperative restaurant she co-founded with Eugène Varlin, which was one of the hubs of internationalist social life in Paris in the late 1860s.Footnote 32 Although men dominated discussions at First International congresses, internationalist consumer cooperatives succeeded in promoting greater gender diversity at a local level.
André Léo’s engagement with the cooperative movement was above all journalistic—in a letter to a young writer planning to found a producers’ association for artists, she described herself as a “worker of the mind.”Footnote 33 At its Geneva Congress of September 1866, the First International decided—after some debate—to admit “workers of the mind,”Footnote 34 and Léo joined around 1866–67. Around this time she was contributing to the cooperative press, which had expanded rapidly in France from 1864 onward—with titles such as L’Association (1864–66), later La Coopération (1866–68), and L’Almanach de la coopération (1866–70). It was mainly in La Coopération—to which Tinayre subscribedFootnote 35—that André Léo developed her socialist ideas. In its pages, she argued for workers’ association, presented as “the basis of all emancipation and future equality.”Footnote 36 Against the backdrop of the founding of the International League of Peace and Freedom, Léo connected associationism, internationalism, and pacifism, calling for the realization of “universal association” —which, she argued, would bring peace and equality: “between associates, no more war; between equals, no more obedience; between brothers, no more rivalry.” Like Marguerite Tinayre, Léo was especially interested in the educational role of cooperatives, which were to provide a way of anchoring workers’ mores in socialist democratic principles. In her view, this meant organizing associations as spaces of fraternal sociability. In an article published on March 24, 1867, she advocated staging cooperative festivals to convey to “the masses” the idea of workers’ association, and above all to instill a spirit of solidarity in their hearts. She wrote:
Workers’ association is, we all believe, one of those ideas destined to change the face of the world and unite all minds. It is the practical application, through the science of human relations, of fraternity, hitherto preached in vain. In days gone by, all guilds had their festivals. Why should not the association of workers—come together to achieve independence through well-being—likewise have its own to celebrate the anniversaries of its main founding events.Footnote 37
Calling for a return to festivals “in full sunlight, where all eyes shine with joy, where all lips smile in anticipation, where the crowd, animated by a single spirit, tends towards a common goal,” Léo makes the case for joyful associative sociability embracing children, women, and men, so that “association may truly come alive within the people.” In April 1867, Meitarel—a member of La Vie aisée, a food and consumer association located on Rue Grenier-Saint-Lazare, Paris—paid tribute to Léo’s article, which had apparently directly inspired the cooperative’s practices. It reportedly followed its recommendations: making the cooperative a sphere of popular sociability—through games, a library, and family outings—to kindle in people’s hearts the “world of work” and the “world of the future.” Meitarel wrote: “May all associations follow [André Léo’s] advice, become families and soon form a universal family.”Footnote 38 Close ties developed thereafter between La Vie aisée and Léo, who followed its development with interest. More broadly, the proliferation of festivals and banquets within the International’s sections in the following years answered Léo’s hopes: in Geneva, for instance, the women’s section organized several festivities, including the “Festival of the International’s Children”—centered on a New Year’s gift tree.Footnote 39
Restoring agency to proletarian “housewives”Footnote 40
Yet in seeking to promote this spirit of solidarity, Tinayre and Léo found their commitment to gender equality in direct tension with the anti-feminist positions prevailing in both the First International and the cooperative movement. Dominated by men and shaped above all by Proudhonists—a strong presence in the French and Belgian sections—the early IWMA congresses passed resolutions hostile to women’s industrial labor.Footnote 41 However, the General Council took a more nuanced stance on the issue, influenced not only by Marx but also by British trade unionists.Footnote 42 Similarly, Eugène Varlin and Antoine Bourdon recognized, as early as the Geneva Congress, not only women’s right to work but also equal pay for men and women.Footnote 43 But these remained minority positions; the IWMA’s ambiguous support for the Lyon silk-workers’ strike of 1869 revealed how ill-equipped the organization was to conceive of female workers as autonomous agents.Footnote 44 In her collection of essays La femme et les mœurs (1869), Léo took up her pen to denounce the persistence of anti-feminist views within the IWMA.Footnote 45 Equally, whereas feminists had played an active role in 1848 associationism, women were marginalized in the cooperativism of the 1860s. André Léo was one of the few women to publish in the movement’s press—which also ran arguments hostile to female workers, whose supposed ignorance was said to hinder the development of cooperatives. Specifically, women were accused of being hostile to new consumption practices out of loyalty to traditional shopkeepers.Footnote 46 After all, shopkeepers allowed women to haggle, occasionally to receive second-quality produce as a bonus, and above all to obtain credit—the foundation of working-class daily consumption at the time.Footnote 47 For Tinayre and Léo, the task was not to deplore these practices but to demonstrate to female workers that socialist cooperatives of consumers could not only solve their economic difficulties but also bring them new agency.
Here too, Tinayre’s approach was above all practical. She is one of only two women named on the November 14, 1867 list of eighty-three members of the workers’ food cooperative La Ménagère.Footnote 48 This cooperative was founded by her internationalist friends Varlin, Bourdon, and Nathalie Le Mel, with whom she had formed bonds while attending Jules Simon’s lectures on the condition of female workers.Footnote 49 A predecessor of La Marmite, La Ménagère—registered as a société civile de consommation—was located on Rue Saint-Jacques. Its aims are set out clearly in an address to “women workers, men workers, and consumers”:
By multiplying our strength, free association enables us to rid ourselves of all those intermediary parasites whose fortunes we see rising every day, at the expense of our pocketbook and often of our health. Let us therefore join together not only to defend our wages but also and above all to defend our daily food.Footnote 50
La Ménagère was intended for the proletariat and especially for “women workers,” who watched “their meager salary for [their] day of toil” vanish.Footnote 51 One of its goals was to free women workers’ time by relieving them of domestic cooking duties—establishing a cooperative restaurant that drew its food supplies collectively from other consumer cooperatives in Paris. However, the association soon faced major setbacks due to poor management and to the flight of the cashier named Loiseau.Footnote 52 Tinayre’s involvement with La Ménagère reflected her wider commitment to fostering solidarity between internationalist consumer cooperatives. The same concern led Les Équitables de Paris’s to take membership applications for the Boulangerie coopérative de Paris at their headquarters. Founded by Eugène Dupas, this cooperative aimed to provide working-class households with bread at cost; among its members was Victorine Brocher, who was also a member of the International.Footnote 53
André Léo, for her part, defended in her writing the crucial role of working-class housewives in guaranteeing that workers’ cooperatives endured. In a long and insightful article, “L’économiste et la ménagère” [“The economist and the housewife”] of August 25, 1867,Footnote 54 she introduces a narrator whose socialist convictions are shaken by a liberal economist endeavoring to convince her of the benefits of free competition. As she is preparing to go to a bookstore to educate herself in economic science, she passes in front of the apartment of one of her friends, a working-class housewife; she finds her “in deep respond, bordering on grief,” the cause being, prosaically enough, “a hole in her shoe.” Her friend explains: “I bought these shoes from Charles less than a fortnight ago, for eight francs, and they’re already unwearable—unless I have them repaired, which will cost me over half what I paid and may last even less.” Incensed, the housewife denounces the practices of merchants who, driven by greed, charge exorbitant prices for shoddy goods, defective items, and adulterated products. Rampant inflation unleashed by speculation compounds the problem, leaving the housewife unable to buy what she needs to feed and clothe her children. Playing devil’s advocate, the narrator observes to her friend: “‘But people,’ I said, ‘assure me that competition contains in itself the remedy to such excesses.’” Without hesitating, the housewife forcefully replies: “No. There’s something stronger than the brake of competition: the general spirit of greed driving merchants, causing them to reach agreement from one end of the earth to the other, without ever needing to exchange a word.”
In Léo’s article, the housewife’s anger at a business driven solely by profit functions as the pivot: though everything seems to place this woman far from the rarefied domain of political economy, her daily experience shows her that the free competition championed by liberals not only fails to resolve but actively exacerbates her poverty. Far from being ignorant, as cooperativists of the time claimed, the working-class housewife instinctively and concretely perceives the flaws of abstract economic science. Because she bears the burden of domestic and caregiving responsibilities, she sees a facet of reality that eludes the dominant.Footnote 55 The housewife’s conviction restores the narrator’s faith in what she holds to be right: the socialist alternative of consumer association. She then proceeds to convey to her friend the case for workers’ association:
Association is quite simply the elimination of the intermediary—useful solely to himself and harmful to others—of whom you complain so vehemently; it is the elimination of this foreign body, placed between producer and consumer, which gorges on the substance of both. Association is a pact between thrifty, hard-working people hungry for justice who, persuaded of the truth that Unity is strength, pool their efforts to help one another and to fight the enemy. […] Association is the strength and consequently the freedom of the worker. It is common interest replacing individual interest; it is the moralization of society by the destruction of the terrible antagonism between duty and personal interest, in which so many consciences founder.Footnote 56
After hearing explanations about how consumer cooperatives function in practice, the housewife declares that she is convinced and enthusiastic: “‘But it would be our salvation!’ she cried, clasping her hands.” Because their concrete aspirations intersected with cooperative projects, working-class women would prove not obstacles to but the very pillars of the association they heralded. Beyond this article articulating her feminist and cooperative commitments, Léo also sought to build connections between the different arenas of struggle. Following the creation of the Ligue en faveur des droits des femmes in 1868, Léo announced in the summer of 1869 the founding of the Revendication des droits de la femme. The very name of the association is a reference to Benoît Malon’s Revendication de Puteaux, which Léo publicly supported even as he, along with other members of the Paris section of the International, was tried and convicted in a trial in May 1868. Several members of the Puteaux cooperative, among them Aglaé Jarry and Amélie Rahon, were signatories to the first manifesto of the Ligue des droits des femmes.Footnote 57 Léo also published in the Almanach de la coopération an article on women’s rights in which she denounced those who “wish to condemn half the human race to subjugation—all subjection being inevitably abject and disastrous.”Footnote 58
Producers’ cooperatives and women workers: A premature path?
Despite the reservations about cooperativism repeatedly voiced at the Basel Congress, the paradigm of the socialist cooperative of producers attracted strong interest among the Paris sections in 1869. This revival was bound up with the major strike movement of the late 1860s, as trade associations proliferated across the city. Rather than setting strikes and cooperation against each other, as in previous years, internationalists like Varlin argued that the two forms of struggle could be articulated—a strike potentially giving rise to a producers’ cooperative.Footnote 59 At the great workers’ associations banquet held at Saint-Mandé on September 19, 1869—a vivid expression of the renewed alliance between associationism and internationalism—Citizen Douvet, president of the Chambre syndicale des employés de commerce, raised a toast to “the international Association of workers” and to fraternity “irrespective of race or of people.”Footnote 60 Against this backdrop, Le Commerce—the organ of the Parisian International—returned to the question of women’s labor. In response to an article by Alphonse Leclercq about the Anduze spinners’ strike—in which he criticized workers for their lack of solidarity with women—the IWMA-affiliated Association générale d’ouvriers tailleurs of Rue Turbigo, founded in 1863, weighed in with an open letter dated August 5, 1869. While seeking to explain the position of workers hostile to women’s labor, the tailors aspired to open an alternative path: “We say: Nobody is free unless free from want.”Footnote 61 They therefore decided to accept women as members of their association, concluding their letter with: “Women of all countries! Have hope!.” During the 1870 siege of Paris, the association—tasked with outfitting the Parisian National Guard—employed around 30,000 female workers, paying them a far higher wage than ordinary garment workers received.Footnote 62
The International’s Geneva section also supported cooperation. In spring 1870, a report presented by the Geneva Commission and adopted by the Romandy Congress mounted a defense of the cooperative movement against those who accused it of surreptitiously serving the bourgeoisie:
Cooperation is like all good things: there are those who distort and divert it from its path […]. Just as there is bourgeois revolution and socialist revolution, there is bourgeois cooperation and socialist cooperation. But one cannot stop the cooperative movement any more than one can prevent the revolution from bursting forth once its time comes: what matters is to ensure that cooperation and revolution benefit the entire people, rather than serving the interests of the cunning and the ambitious.Footnote 63
Unlike in France, the support for the cooperative movement led to the creation of an all-women producers’ association, as reported in L’Égalité. On the initiative above all of Marie Sattler and Elisabeth Dmitrieff—in Geneva at the time—the Geneva women’s section founded a “productive association for the manufacture of clothing.”Footnote 64 In March 1872, they proclaimed: “Remember, Working Women, that the day when we shall succeed in forming a federation of women’s trades, and demand loud and clear equal pay for equal work—wages equal to men’s—that day, we say, will be a triumph for the International. For that day, it will have taken a giant step towards its grand goal—the complete emancipation of labor in all its forms.”Footnote 65 In its August 27, 1870 issue, L’Égalité noted that this “salutary movement among women workers” was also evident in America, Ireland, and Austria where the formation of a trade union for female workers was under discussion.Footnote 66
In the years leading up to the Paris Commune, the majority of French socialist activists advocating for gender equality did not follow this path. Admittedly, without a women’s section of the IWMA in Paris, they lacked the organizational strength of their Geneva counterparts. Notable here, however, is Paule Mink who, at the Vauxhall public meeting on July 13, 1868—attended by André Léo—proposed creating women’s producers’ cooperatives.Footnote 67 She acted on this in 1869 by founding the Société fraternelle de l’ouvrière (also known simply as the Ouvrière); this was initially intended as a producers’ cooperative, but ultimately took the form of a mutual assistance association.Footnote 68 As for Tinayre and Léo, though doubtless aware of the Geneva women’s experiments as reported in L’Égalité—to which Léo, who had contributed from 1869 onwardFootnote 69—they never publicly championed the cause of working women’s cooperation: a cause that stood at the very intersection of their feminist, associationist, and internationalist commitments. This silence is all the more puzzling given the stance of their predecessors of 1848, who had actively supported the creation of all-female workers’ associations, particularly in Berlin and Paris, where some twenty women’s cooperatives were founded.Footnote 70
Several hypotheses may explain why Léo and Tinayre did not encourage all-women worker cooperatives. First, they may have shared the view, widely accepted within the French cooperative movement of the 1860s, that consumer association, though admittedly less ambitious than producers’ association, was a more achievable goal. In 1868, Élie Reclus, editor of La Coopération, argued that the cooperative project could only succeed if it began with the models most likely to do so—mutual credit, mutual assistance, and consumer cooperatives—before venturing into the perilous terrain of worker self-organization through collective ownership of the means of production.Footnote 71 This view applied with even greater force to female workers, whose low wages made it all the harder to raise the share capital needed to found a producers’ association. A second hypothesis, specific to Léo, rests on her critique of the producers’ cooperative model. Beyond the economic difficulties facing such cooperatives, which aimed to replace the capitalist model with a socialist organization of labor, Léo identifies another pitfall: the conception of workers’ democracy on which they rested. Léo advocated an anti-authoritarian socialism, which led her to criticize Marx and align, for a time, with Bakunin. Her entire body of work is permeated by a critical interrogation of the concept of power, and a radical denunciation of all forms of verticality and hierarchy, whether in the public realm or the family.Footnote 72 The same critical stance runs through her thinking on association: in an article on producers’ associations published in La Coopération on May 5, 1867, André Léo examines the causes of the difficulties experienced by members of workers’ cooperatives, particularly the Parisian tailors’ association mentioned above.Footnote 73 According to Léo, these stemmed from the “despotic” practice of most managers and the “lust for power among others.” The appointment of a manager—a common practice in associations, already denounced in 1848 by another feminist, Pauline RolandFootnote 74—necessarily reintroduced inequality among members. More profoundly, the power of the manager, compared to a “Louis XIV,” revealed—Léo argued—“a spirit of absolutism” inherited from the Ancien Régime and still prevalent in social mores: “these long habits of mind run in the blood; they are suckled at the teat and remain tenacious. There are very few among us in whom authoritarian traditions do not live.”Footnote 75 This leads Léo to the following conclusion: “We must admit that the democracy of which we speak so much has struggled to become reality precisely because it is barely present in individuals.”Footnote 76 A “new order of relations between men” therefore had first to be established before any lasting association between producers could be founded. Léo makes the same point concerning the establishment of agricultural cooperatives. Sensitive to the plight of smallholders—whom she felt were often neglected by socialist activistsFootnote 77—she envisaged bringing the cooperative movement to the countryside, while conceding: “but intellectual activity is almost nonexistent in our countryside. The peasant lives without reading; the few who are literate engage only in useless or harmful reading.”Footnote 78
Léo argues that the success of men’s cooperatives depends on a democratic education capable of reforming social mores; for women’s associations, this condition seems more essential still. This third hypothesis is based on her critique—shared by Victoire Tinayre—of clerical influence on women’s education, which is seen as a major obstacle to their efforts toward emancipation. Since the Falloux Law of 1850, religious congregations had dominated girls’ education, shaping women’s minds—the two feminists held—in ways contrary to democratic values. Hence their relentless calls for a secular education for girls. As early as Un rêve de femme, Tinayre had made it the essential prerequisite for women’s autonomy. Likewise, the first undertaking of Léo’s Revendication des droits de la femme is to create a democratic school for girls.Footnote 79 Within the cooperative movement, Léo and Tinayre were not alone in stressing the need for a new, secular education for girls. Speaking at a public meeting on September 5, 1869, the Fourierist cooperativist François Cantagrel argued that women could not yet hope to free themselves from wage labor through association, so strongly were their mores still shaped by religious precepts. He therefore saw secular education as a prerequisite for women’s economic emancipation.Footnote 80
Léo develops the idea that democratic education must precede any women’s cooperative project in her fiction. At the end of Aline/Ali (1868), the heroine Aline attempts to put her socialist ideals into practice by creating a space of solidarity for women workers. It is composed of two workshops—one for book-stitching, one for sewing—and a college for schoolmistresses: these two places are connected, the schoolmistresses teaching the workers. The whole endeavor is dedicated to showing that “general interest and individual interest fuse in justice”Footnote 81—terms that echo Tinayre’s in Un rêve de femme. The content imparted by the teachers, presented as an alternative to the instruction given to women by the Church, is radical and deeply feminist. To a priest, Aline explains: “You preach resignation, I deem struggle necessary; you impose obedience, I recommend revolt against oppression; you teach humility, whereas I—especially to these women you have so despised and degraded—I teach pride!.”Footnote 82 The cooperative project seems modest in comparison. Aline mentions a mutual assistance association between female workers, arguing that it is impossible to go further for the time being: “we do good individually, that is all, and, under laws that deny women freedom, fruitful labor, a proper education, and the rights of citizenship, nothing further may be done.”Footnote 83 From this perspective—which appears to be Léo’s own in the late 1860s—the internationalists’ project of creating female producers’ cooperatives seems unattainable: in a context where women remain perpetual minors and the democratic ethos is yet to take root in social customs, such a project may indeed herald the future—but it remains premature.
Conclusion
Marguerite Tinayre and André Léo challenged the dominant socialist ideas of their time in order to defend gender equality within internationalist and cooperative movements, which remained marked by gender power dynamics. To this end, they pursued two different strategies. Tinayre worked to open internationalist consumer cooperatives to women as well as men, while Léo theorized cooperation from feminist and anti-authoritarian perspectives. In the second half of the 1860s, both advocated a peaceful form of socialism. However, the outbreak of the Paris Commune on March 18, 1871, acted as a catalyst, reorienting their commitments and reshaping their political subjectivity.Footnote 84 Caught up in the revolutionary maelstrom, Léo and Tinayre wholeheartedly supported the Parisians’ armed insurrection. Yet they kept their distance from the Union des femmes pour la défense de Paris et les soins aux blessés, which was spearheaded by Elisabeth Dmitrieff and Nathalie Le Mel and set out to reorganize women’s work by establishing producers’ associations. This ambitious cooperative project, which ran out of time before it could bear fruit, was undoubtedly inspired by the Geneva women workers’ association, which Dmitrieff knew well.Footnote 85 Tinayre’s and Léo’s reserve towards this project has been attributed to rivalries between the various women’s organizations during the Commune and to Dmitrieff’s domineering personality.Footnote 86 It may also reflect the priority given since the 1860s to women’s democratic education, which they held to be a prerequisite for working women’s emancipation. During the Commune, Tinayre was appointed inspector of girls’ schools in the twelfth arrondissement of Paris and devoted her efforts to secularizing education. Léo, for her part, co-founded the newspaper La Sociale and sat on the Comité de Vigilance des citoyennes de Montmartre alongside Louise Michel and Paule Mink. She also pursued her commitment to the secular education of girls, serving with Tinayre on the commission established by Édouard Vaillant to organize and oversee girls’ education.
Following the Commune’s suppression, which drove them into exile, Tinayre and Léo found refuge in Geneva, where they remained true to their internationalist commitments. Although she had denounced the persistence of political inequality between the sexes during the Commune,Footnote 87 Léo continued to defend its legacy in exile, notably in a speech at the 1871 Peace Congress. Meanwhile, Tinayre joined the Geneva women’s section and resumed her involvement in consumer cooperatives. With other internationalist women such as Virginie Barbet, she took part in the Marmite sociale, founded by the Jura section in late 1871 to run a restaurant for Communard exiles. In the late 1870s, she welcomed the revival of the Société des Équitables, which was then having premises built.Footnote 88 Neither Léo nor Tinayre was under any illusion about the marginalization of women in the First International, yet both saw it as a space for activism from which new possibilities for emancipation could emerge. This may explain why André Léo came to judge the First International more generously in retrospect: in 1878, in her journal Le Socialisme progressif, she paid tribute to the IWMA as a pioneer on the feminist question: “Throughout socialist working-class democracy across Europe, [the issue of women’s rights] has been adopted beyond dispute. The International Workingmen’s Association had set the example.”Footnote 89
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