Article originally published on October 10, 2021.
Can you cite the name of a revolutionary who is not Olympe de Gouges? Did you know that a queen, by the sweet name of Brunehaut, had ruled France for nearly forty years? When we were in school, we were taught history. But that of men. The women were barely mentioned. And yet, don’t they represent half of the population?
In “the Great Forgotten. Why history has erased women” (L’Iconoclaste), essayist and novelist Titiou Lecoq aims to resurrect these little-known women who have never stopped acting. By giving them flesh, she also draws the contours of a larger project, that of tending towards an inclusive history and devirilizing our society. Maintenance.
In her preface, the historian Michelle Perrot, using the words of Aimé Césaire, sees in your book “an attempt to fight against the oblivion” in which women have been rejected for centuries. Can we say that there was an undermining to make them disappear from history?
The mechanisms of invisibilization are multiple. Some are akin to malevolence. I am thinking in particular of women artists. Most of the time, they have not been inadvertently forgotten, but they have been deliberately deleted from the anthologies. This is what Voltaire did in 1751, when he wrote the notice of Catherine Bernard (1662-1712) for her “Siècle de Louis X
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