French women were granted full political rights in 1944, yet 50 years later, they accounted for only 6% of the members of the national assembly. In her book, Joan Scott discusses the constitutional reform adopted in 2000 to answer this chronic underrepresentation of women. Rather than engaging philosophical arguments, Scott adopts the perspective of an “historian of the present” (p. ix). She traces the movement for parité from its inception in the late 1980s among feminist groups and European bodies to the adoption of the law, after the movement lost much of its original trenchancy along its transposition into mainstream political discourse.

In a remarkable first chapter, Scott lays out the context of the crisis in French universalism that opened the political space for parity. She presents a clear and concise narrative of the foundations of France's republican doctrine articulated around the figure of the abstract individual. These foundations rested on a neat separation between representatives and represented, and on the exclusion of an array of unwanted participants. Despite the deep entrenchment of the republican creed, the model episodically stumbled when the representatives were perceived as excessively removed from the citizens, as in the late 1980s, when a series of scandals tainted the image of France's hommes politiques, and when the particularities of postcolonial immigrants and women proved irreducible to abstraction. A law to “refigure the terms of French universalism” (p. 2) and give women equal access to elective office proposed to tackle the crisis and revive the model.

Scott subsequently conducts an intellectual history of the movement, revealing that the ideas that prevailed and inspired the law had little to do with the original aims set forth by feminist groups. She focuses on the faction of feminists considered the founders of the movement, gathered around former socialist member of parliament and historian Françoise Gaspard. Gaspard and two fellow feminist activists laid out a project for parité in a 1992 manifesto, which challenged the singular abstract individual of the republican model, to grant women the status of “individuals” (p. 2) and therefore symbolically allow them to become representatives. Scrupulously shying away from any gender stereotypes or essentialism, they refuted the notion that the difference of sex was an obstacle to abstraction. By conceiving of the abstract individual as sexed, they aspired to “unsex the national representation” (p. 5); they coded the ontological identity of the subject as either male or female to oppose the social characteristics ascribed to it. In other words, they transposed the “anatomical dualism” of bodies to an abstract level, in order to prevent it from influencing the concrete level of “sexual difference” and embodiment (p. 56). This resymbolization was meant to sever the link between masculinity and abstraction, and to shore up equal access to elective offices.

Scott drew heavily from Gaspard's personal archives while researching the book. As a result, she, like Gaspard, dismisses the feminist opponents of parity as “wrong” (p. 58), or unable to grasp the theoretical minutiae of a framework they “could not hear” (p. 70) or “distorted” (p. 56). They are crudely dealt with in the space of a few pages, and their rebuttals not given much weight. Scott concedes, however, that the model imagined by Gaspard was conceptually so complicated that it was misunderstood “by some of its own supporters” (p. 56); its influence might accordingly be relativized. The book suffers from this debatable endorsement of one strain of the movement, whose ontological reworking of the universal Scott hardly questions or problematizes.

Yet the displacement of a category of difference into the abstract and the absence of interchangeability at that level open up new questions for representation. For instance, once difference is situated on an abstract level, it is not clear how it should command the organization of the sphere of embodiment. The deeply contentious notion of representation mobilized by the parity movement could have been more fully articulated, especially since Scott maintains that the argument for anatomical duality did not rest on a notion of representation as mirror. Furthermore, the original model was eventually not the one that served to inspire the law. It was supplanted by a concurrent, essentialist framework, defended by philosopher Sylviane Agacinski, which was in many ways its opposite. Agacinski insisted on the “perfect complementarity” (p. 119) of male and female bodies, and promoted a system of representation rooted in heterosexual normativity. The parity law can thus be interpreted as a Pyrrhic victory for the universalist cause defended by Gaspard, and offers a sobering perspective on the trajectory of conceptual ideas through the grind of practical politics.

Finally, Scott maps out a political narrative of the adoption of the law, from early attempts in the 1980s to institute gender quotas struck down by the Constitutional Court, to the eventual vote, which underscores the very limits of the reform. It chronicles the progressive slippage toward essentialism in the preparation of the law, and the disappointing elections that have taken place in its aftermath; the law has yet to disrupt the entrenched positions of male politicians. Political parties feign to accept the new rules in local elections, but ensure that executive positions consistently remain in the hands of men. In national elections, they openly challenge the law, taking advantage of some glaring loopholes, and the proportion of women in the two chambers of the French parliament has not dramatically improved: It is now 12% in the national assembly. This slow progress attests to the hypocrisy of the parties and to the relatively poor design of the law. The internal dissensions within the campaign for parity and Agacinski's influence might partly account for those limits. Undismayed, Scott argues at the end of the book that, however flawed, the law should be approached as a first step toward genuine equality.

Despite a narrow emphasis on one group of activists, and a regrettable lack of critical engagement with their ideas and those of their challengers, Parité! offers a fascinating overview of the current state of French political thought and its articulation with practical politics. Its treatment of the crisis of French universalism is an invaluable contribution to the study of the representation of gender, and of minorities, in France and elsewhere.