A Civil Society: The Public Space of Freemason Women in France, 1744-1944

Renewed Mixed Orders and Adoption Lodges, at Home and Abroad

While the DH stimulated interest in co-masonry, including the likes of Dorothée Chellier, the reform-minded members of the Grande Loge Symbolique Écossaise (GLSE) were also active. Since its inception in 1879, the GLSE had accorded its member lodges considerable autonomy, much more than did either the Grand Orient de France or the Suprême Conseil de France; the Rite Écossais Ancien et Accepté (Scottish Rite) regulated both side and its own blue degrees. Then in 1896 the GLSE joined with the Grande Loge de France and its sixty ateliers. But the Diderot preferred keeping the old GLSE in operation; this independently inclined lodge liked the relative freedom within an obedience more congenial than the new Grande Loge. So, in cooperation with Les Inséparables de l’Arc-en-Ciel, it formed the GLSE II Maintenue in late 1897. This arrangement established other lodges—a total of five more by 1907—that survived until the order finally dissolved and its last remaining holdout joined the Grande Loge in 1911. However ephemeral, the GLSE II Maintenue was important to the development of mixed masonry by offering another, more radical option than the one extended by the DH, which had become a comparatively moderate, bourgeois community of reformers.¹⁹

By 1897 a small, but progressive cluster of GLSE II lodges chose to initiate women, thereby founding the GLSE II Maintenue et Mixte (M&M) by the flexible terms of the GLSE’s constitution. It was this latter group of masons who earned a reputation for innovation and advocacy, especially the members of the Diderot and La Philosophie Sociale, within a highly democratic organizational structure that fostered rituals for both men and women, together and independently of each other, as their lodges chose. They were also notorious for their tolerance of freethinkers, neo-Malthusians, and above all feminists. Louise Michel and Madeleine Pelletier were among the more outré of these sisters and brothers, who sponsored numerous conferences not only on feminism, but also on anticlericalism, atheism, and social democracy. This order’s initiates assumed other visible (and controversial) guises in civil society during the belle époque: the syndicaliste teacher Marie Bonnevial, the socialist journalist Gustave Hervé, the socialist-feminist Caroline Kauffmann, the anarchist Charles Malato, the reproductive rights advocate Nelly Roussel, and the Russian-émigré playwright Véra Starkoff.²⁰

The overlapping memberships of feminist organizations and the lodges of the GLSE II M&M in the seventeen years before World War I is remarkable. Almost every possible reform for the emancipation of women found one or more of its champions affiliated with this strand of masonry. They had no trouble engaging allies, all of whom attracted others to share in the craft’s mysteries as an extension of their allegiances freely discussed in the lodge (a major break with earlier masonic practice). There were, however, fewer fellow travelers in the provinces; only one short-lived GLSE II M&M lodge functioned very far from France’s capital city, La Solidarité in Nevers (1904–06). This version of masonry was too advanced for the rest of the country, even for Lyon, long the heart of nontraditional masonry and resistance to central authorities. This order was strictly a Parisian phenomenon. There was nothing quite like it anywhere else in French masonry.

One of its lodges in Paris, La Raison Triomphante, drew the utopian feminist and scientific theorist, Céline Renooz (1840–1928), one of many eccentric personalities in the period.²¹ There, briefly, she found sympathetic colleagues who welcomed and offered her material assistance at a sad moment late in life. In 1903 when Renooz was initiated, she had already surrounded herself with a small circle of supporters outside the lodge, the Néosophes; they pledged subventions for her voluminous publications on the spiritual origins of scientific advances and the special role that women played as priestesses and goddesses in the history of world religions. “Social renewal will occur,” she affirmed not long afterward, “only by re-establishing in the world NATURAL RELIGION, which will re-create the moral life of humanity,” a sentiment consistent with masonry’s own ethos.²² The lodge supported her ideas by providing meeting halls to host her conferences, to sell her books, and to expand her following. While Renooz did not remain active in the craft, though she also contemplated initiation in La Nouvelle Jérusalem, she benefited from the special brotherhood of a GLSE II M&M lodge.

A more enduring mixed masonry parallel to the GLSE tradition was the DH.²³ Much of its success was owed to Maria Deraismes’s special combination of vision and persistence (see ill. 6). But even more is owed to the Martins—Georges (1844–1916) and Marie-Georges (1850–1914)—both of whom outlived the pioneering Deraismes by some twenty years. As one DH sister stated soon after her initiation in 1896, “they gave us the superb example of perseverance in the future accomplishment of a great duty! They proved that mixed Lodges are looking to unite what . . . others are seeking to separate, man and woman in the home [and] in Society.”²⁴ From the moment the middle-aged Martins married in 1889, they were inseparable in their activities. They embraced a host of closely related causes, women’s rights in particular, as manifested in the DH which they founded in collaboration with a dozen others and led for the remainder of their lives. Before 1900 the Martins made every effort to have the new obedience recognized, first by the Grand Orient and the GLSE, then by the Grande Loge, whatever the widespread resistance to the feminist premises of the DH (clearly inscribed in its proclamation of “Le Droit Humain,” which echoes the Constituent Assembly’s “Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen” of 1789 and Olympe de Gouges’s “Declaration of the Rights of Woman and Citizeness” of 1791).²⁵ Given the Scottish Rite’s inclusiveness for much of the nineteenth century, the DH chose its rituals, leaving the French Rite degrees for the all-male Grand Orient to work. It even underscored its commitment to sexual equality on the bond certificates issued in 1896 to build a temple on the rue Jules Breton in Paris with the new order’s name and subtitle—“Center of Action for the Feminist Movement”—redeemable in twenty-five years. Like retiring its debts early, the DH had an optimistic timeline for achieving its goals.

This co-masonry soon caught on.²⁶ Thanks to the aggressive outreach of the brothers and sisters at first, it realized new centers in Blois (briefly), Lyon, Rouen, and Zurich. Such ambition soon made the DH a true obedience in its own right, one that required a better-defined structure with administrative and oversight councils and a regular convening of convents (annual meetings of delegates) representing the larger number of lodges in the order. Its new temple in Paris was solemnly inaugurated in 1897. By then, the DH had created a masonic culture in keeping with its mission to promote equality, peace, and solidarity in the interest of humanity. Much of that culture emphasized a fellowship of men and women striving for a common purpose, in effect a civic morality, that enabled the DH to subsist in a difficult climate. The Grand Orient and the Grande Loge were far from welcoming; the new order’s lodges and their initiates needed careful mentoring; and the press found mixed masonry an object of fear and derision that cynical right-wing journalists like Léo Taxil and religious zealots like Mgr. Amand-Joseph Fava exploited for their own purposes.²⁷ The public hysteria arising from the Dreyfus Affair contributed much to the antimasonic—and anti-Semitic—rhetoric often deployed by the same sources. Consequently, the DH’s leaders turned discreet about their recruitment, politics, and public image, lest they provoke the authorities any more than the existence of a tolerated association already did. As it is, the police had maintained a hefty file on Maria Deraismes, whom they viewed as a social (and masonic) renegade.²⁸

By 1900 the new order’s growth had stalled everywhere in France—it would establish just its fifth lodge in 1902—but this disappointment was not reflected abroad. Several formal requests in the same period for affiliations in the Netherlands, Britain, and the United States suggested that the DH had earned widespread recognition. In time, as it achieved international status, the order required an administrative structure more like the Suprême Conseil de France. Accordingly, the DH elaborated a Suprême Conseil Universel Mixte to include authorization of the higher degrees (from the 4th to the 33rd) as an incentive for more initiations at every level and everywhere. Proclaimed Georges Martin after a select group of members instituted the organizational changes, “we must be united in our Ordre Mixte et International (OMMI), everyone gathered into a single Suprême Conseil Universel Mixte for the entire world, [to serve as] a generative power, a source of regulation, direction, and maintenance of our Ordre Mixte’s law.”²⁹ Thus marked the official justification for the DH’s version of mixed masonry worldwide, the OMMI, in 1901.³⁰ It seemed to be a natural evolution from the order’s modest beginnings among a select mix of politically progressive masons, but the secretive process leading to a fait accompli came at the expense of democratic principle.

Such a bold step encountered immediate and fierce opposition within the DH, led by Albert Lantoine and his wife Blanche Côte d’Arly. They raised a host of concerns; transparency, lodge autonomy, nationalist sympathies, and ritualistic focus on the first three degrees headed the list.³¹ By secretly elaborating a new governing structure, fostering expansion and working side degrees, they felt, the DH was sacrificing its tight sense of community. It did not take long for the obedience’s annual convents to turn divisive, and they remained so for fifteen years before World War I. The upshot was a split in 1913; two lodges (Nos. 4 and 5) and parts of two others (Nos. 12 and 27), out of twenty-one in France at the time, formed the Grande Loge Mixte Symbolique Écossaise (GLMSE). “A certain nerve is necessary to impose a new federation on the masonic world,” the dissidents declared. “The innovators [i.e., of the OMMI], in effect, are disturbing the order to which everyone is accustomed, . . . their gesture [is] inspired less by a desire to make things better than it is to satisfy ambitions.”32 All did not go well for the GLMSE once war broke out in 1914. Its outreach was frustrated by the extensive military mobilization of potential brothers and by the new responsibilities of potential sisters. Moreover, a sizeable recruitment base in the northeastern quadrant of the country was disrupted by military hostilities. Discouraged, the dissidents finally lost interest; and the remaining lodges rejoined the DH in 1920. Despite Lantoine’s postmortem, recounted at length in his history of the craft, Martin’s organizational legerdemain prevailed.³³

The DH remained intact in large measure because of the Ordre Maçonnique Mixte International.³⁴ It made possible renewed and sustained growth in lodges and in membership. Already by 1914, the new order had recognized about five hundred lodges and more than twelve thousand members worldwide, while the French federation represented about twenty lodges and one thousand members in France, notwithstanding the schism with the Grande Loge Mixte Symbolique Écossaise. The Great War would check this uptick, reducing the total number of operating lodges to 285 while holding steady in France and its outre-mer territories with twenty-seven by 1921. Renewed increases occurred in the 1920s only to level off in France during the 1930s; on the eve of World War II there would be about eighty lodges and four thousand members, little more than a decade earlier. Much of the obedience focused on the 227 lodges working the blue degrees, leaving a minority of master masons to seek side degrees from the other lodges if they so wished. Meanwhile, the OMMI mushroomed in the United States, Britain and its colonies. Those lodges and their membership represented the bulk of co-masonry overseas, thanks largely to the strenuous efforts of Louis Goaziou and Annie Besant.³⁵ The global extent of the new order, whose constitution was formally approved at its first convent in 1921—the same year that the Grand Orient recognized the DH—substantiated the Fédération Française’s claims of responsibility when its by-laws were ratified in 1923. By odd happenstance, lodges in the capital city of Paris also proliferated between 1920 and 1940, from four to twenty-one, a jump from 15 percent to 25 percent of the order; the vast majority of the others were in cities of fifty thousand or more inhabitants (with the curious exception of towns to the west in Charente-Inférieure). This domestic trend toward urban association was due, most likely, to social and demographic shifts in the general population since the mid-nineteenth century.³⁶

As the third largest masonic obedience in France, though well behind the Grand Orient and Grande Loge with membership in the tens of thousands by 1940, the DH represented the order most clearly committed to the initiation of women. Their participation marked the DH in distinctive ways. Sisters constituted two-thirds of their members; one-third of them were married to another mason in the order; and if one considers the brethren in the Grande Loge and the Grand Orient, fully half of all DH sisters were “married” to the craft.³⁷ About sixty DH couples had louveton children. Still more extended family—siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces, nephews, and in-laws—confirmed the familial feel of the lodges. By the 1930s, as Yves Hivert-Mesecca and Gisèle Hivert-Mesecca point out, virtual masonic “dynasties” made their appearance, such as the Cambillards, the Desbordes, and the Martins (unrelated to Georges and Marie-Georges).³⁸ This density of relation replicated precisely the intimacy of an earlier era, which the festive adoption ceremonies of the nineteenth century sought to achieve. But it also contrasted sharply with the fears still expressed by the Grand Orient and the Grande Loge, the same concerns expressed in the eighteenth century, that sisters would disrupt the fraternity of the brothers. Women’s presence did indeed affect the nature of relations among the brothers—both masonic and actual—primarily because close relatives tended to join the lodge with them. Ironically, as more wives of masons shared in mixed masonry, the all-male obediences also experienced the shift at home, if not at the lodge, to a species of masonic domestication. “The Droit Humain [order],” writes historian Marc Grosjean with some exaggeration, “was above all and especially a family between the two world wars.”³⁹

At the same time, as masonic clans matured, the DH extended its reach to a broader middle section of the population.⁴⁰ The rapid turnover of lodges—during the interwar period, roughly a third of them disappeared and were replaced by new ones—afforded opportunities to a different social profile. As mentioned earlier, the DH attracted more professional women like Dorothée Chellier, but also a wider spectrum of the middle class: primary and secondary school teachers, office administrators and their staff, technicians, engineers, artists, and authors, as well as commercial and industrial personnel.⁴¹ By 1938, the plurality of sisters remained without occupation outside the home (21 percent); many more were engaged in clerical work (17 percent), small businesses (14 percent), education (12 percent), and the civil service professions (6 percent). For the most part, this employment made room for more independent women, but in circumstances that profoundly limited their abilities to sustain a household of their own (their possibilities were still ruled by men in their chosen occupational fields). Members of farming families, the industrial working class, artisanal and retail shops were nearly absent, as were representatives of the aristocracy and the upper middle class. For all intents and purposes, workers were never part of masonry, and the independently wealthy abandoned the lodges. On the eve of World War II, the craft’s membership trended to the middling bourgeoisie, particularly in the provincial cities and towns, giving masonry much of its distinctive social character, which owed much to France’s relatively slow process of modernization.

This trend is less apparent in the DH lodges of France’s overseas departments. While French colonies were underrepresented—for example, there were no DH lodges in the Pacific Ocean, the Indian Ocean, or Guyana before 1940—north Africa was in much better touch with developments in the métropole.⁴² Lodges in Tunisia (1), Algeria (3), and Morocco (1) undoubtedly benefited from French citizens in residence because of these territories’ strategic importance to France. In September 1938, during the last OMMI convent (a year before the outbreak of World War II), there were no fewer than eleven national federations, nine of them active (fascist Italy and post-Pilsudsi Poland were notably absent); there were also eleven multinational jurisdictions, seven of them active for much the same reason: relatively open, stable political regimes (Argentina, Bulgaria, Costa Rica, Greece, Netherlands, Peru, and Switzerland, for example, were eligible to send delegates). These counts subsume the various DH administrative units in the British Empire (see app. 6). But this is not all. The order’s outreach also accorded visiting privileges for brethren of other obediences to attend DH tenues (at the appropriate grade of the guest); eighteen in Europe, eighteen elsewhere in the world, plus the region-and state-specific orders in the United States, were recognized in this way.⁴³ Similarly, the DH earned additional bona fides internationally by its participation in the Association Maçonnique Internationale, the brainchild of Édouard Quartier-La-Tente in 1902 who had been a member of the Swiss lodge Alpina in Berne. By 1923, sixty obediences, mostly in Europe, had ties to this transnational masonic interest group open to mixed orders.⁴⁴

The major impetus of the geographical expansion of interest in the DH was the British Empire and its anglophone reaches in North America (Canada, the United States, West Indies), South Africa, south Asia (India, Ceylon), Australia and New Zealand. This component of growth was owed most to Annie Besant (1847–1933), among the earliest British citizens to be initiated in 1901. She carried her allegiance to the craft back to London where she founded its first DH lodge, Human Duty No. 6, in 1902 and then some four hundred others elsewhere in the world.⁴⁵ Besant’s theosophy, her feminism, her activism, her perseverance, her charisma, and her many allies all played into this singular achievement. As fellow mason Francesca Arundale observed years later, “With her tireless energy, and her characteristic devotion to a Cause, which she has reason to believe was considered important to some of those great Agents of the G[rand] A[rchitect] O[f] T[he] U[universe], to whose service she was utterly dedicated, Sister Annie Besant had set to work to interest [others] in the new project.”⁴⁶ Given differences with the DH over her religious beliefs, which resulted in revised rituals invoking a supreme being, Besant moved to a more congenial milieu, the late Hélène Blavatsky’s theosophical commune in Adyar near Madras, to build a center of her own to recruit for the DH. This transplantation fostered the creation of mixed masonic lodges in India—more than a dozen of them before its independence in 1947—where theosophical reflection and humanitarian action were welcome, indeed integral to Indian interest in freemasonry.⁴⁷ Besant’s work made the DH a truly global phenomenon.

These pioneers labored together at a propitious moment everywhere but especially in France. Historical factors favoring co-masonry included the legacy of the so-called New Woman, a significant cultural icon originating in the fin de siècle.⁴⁸ During the Great War, women contributed their own blood, sweat, and patriotic fervor in support of the troops at the front, despite concern on the part of reformers, like the freemason Hélène Brion, who advocated and worked for peace. Given the DH’s provision for political (and religious) discussion in the lodge, controversial matters could be hashed out for brothers and sisters to reach some modicum of consensus. Much could also be said about masonry’s social and deeply humane commitments, which attracted initiates keen on promoting progressive ideas and their application in the community by the 1920s.⁴⁹ The widespread support that these masons expressed for the women’s movement clearly attracted the attention of others of like mind. Notwithstanding the DH’s socially conscious members, the labor and socialist movements remained suspicious of freemasonry’s bourgeois tenor. Yet Georges Martin and his successors understood that membership in the craft had to be within the financial means of all its brothers and sisters. For this reason, the order’s initial bylaws set fees and dues appropriate to workers and women. In 1900 the annual capitation of 11 francs was a bit more than three days’ wages for the average laborer nationally, much less than two days’ wages for a stonemason in Paris.50

The DH also drew adherents by its tolerance for religious speculation. Besant was merely the best known of those initiates who found the order congenial to their extralodge engagements, such as the mystical musings of Hélène Blavatsky and her Theosophical Society, which had organized its own mason-like lodge (Isis) in 1886. Its Parisian headquarters settled on the Square Rapp fifteen years later. Based on Blavatsky’s six-volumed The Secret Doctrine (1888), this syncretic occultism derived from Hinduism, Buddhism, and other esoteric traditions made for passionate supporters but also schisms within the society itself. The overlap with freemasonry is hard to overlook.⁵¹ In 1891 the spiritually restless feminist (and subsequent DH mason) Alexandra David-Néel was inspired to visit Adyar, India, to learn more from the theosophical gurus there; it marked her for life.⁵² Because of concerns with the society’s false premises, lest they lead the craft further astray, René Guénon the self-appointed guardian of masonry’s legacy spent considerable time and energy attacking theosophy for its “théosophisme.”⁵³ Meanwhile, Marthe North-Siegfried the wealthy benefactor started a chapter in Strasbourg to complement the philosophical interests showcased in her Pythagoras Library, but also in her humanitarian work with the Red Cross, the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and efforts to help lepers and the orphaned. For mystically inclined masons, such synergy of word and deed characterized both mixed masonry and theosophy.⁵⁴

Perhaps the most ardent adept of this synergy—or Synarchy, as it was called in the fin de siècle—was the mage Gérard Encausse. He was better known as Papus of the minor neo-Martinist paramasonic order for men and women. He pursued his interest in the occult as one of the original members of Isis, but soon grew disenchanted with Blavatsky and the Theosophists.⁵⁵ In 1889 Papus informed the subscribers of his journal L’Initiation, “The Theosophical Society has said that we are not exclusively Theosophical enough, the spiritualists have accused us of being too much so, Catholics have suspected us of too much Freemasonry, and Freemasons of too much Catholicism.”⁵⁶ By 1892 he had moved on to other organizations to explore the mystical knowledge underlying the secret rituals of freemasonry; and in 1896 Papus’s Ordre Martiniste started working degrees, but it struggled after his death twenty years later. This mixed variant of masonry remained unrecognized by the Grand Orient, the Grande Loge, or the DH, for a host of reasons concerning its principles, its rituals, and its membership (like many other entrepreneurial masons, Papus monetized the lodges he oversaw; members all paid steep initiation fees, membership dues, conference costs, and journal subscriptions). The intersection of masonry, theosophy, and the occult, culminating in the secret initiation, fascinated Papus and his devotees like Grande Maîtresse Anna de Wolska (a.k.a. Anna Wronski) and his wives Mathilde Innard d’Argence and Jeanne Charlatte. A half dozen other women participated in a ritual practice that was tied, albeit distantly, to the ideas of Martinès de Pasqually as mediated by Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin in the eighteenth century. It provided for the induction of women in the same lodge as men, though not necessarily by the same rituals or with the same enthusiasm.⁵⁷

Of importance to more women was the effort of the Grande Loge to modernize adoption masonry for women in their own lodges. The pioneers in this revival were found in Le Libre Examen (No. 217), which held its first tenue in March 1901. At the heart of the lodge was recognition that the regularity of adoption had never lapsed since the Grand Orient confirmed it back in 1774.⁵⁸ But what made this instance so enticing to some was the lodge’s dedication to both the initiation of women and the social action on their behalf. For example, it championed the protection of unmarried mothers and their children, as evidenced in the revision of the women’s initiation rituals. A summary of the official welcome of eight new women masons, nearly all of them wives or daughters of brothers, underscored their commitments to abandoned mothers: “[The orator spoke to] the spirit of the old Adoption lodges, the work which they accomplished, the work of solidarity, of assistance, protection of the unfortunates, of the young women so disgraced and so despised, when [on the contrary] their state of holy motherhood ought to make them deserving of everyone’s support.”⁵⁹ The lodge’s first year did not proceed smoothly after it was discovered that Grande Maîtresse Blanche Muratet had helped establish a competing mixed lodge, La Raison Triomphante, soon after her election in Le Libre Examen.⁶⁰ The result was a decision to close the adoption lodge just months after it had begun. It picked up again in a comparable format by 1912 at the request of Suzanne Galland during a tenue blanche. This time Le Libre Examen encountered no further complications until the unexpected loss of its oversight by the Grande Loge in 1937.⁶¹

Le Libre Examen’s troubled development was reprised elsewhere in feminine masonry, as adoption with new rituals came to be called by the Grande Loge in the first four decades of the twentieth century. La Nouvelle Jérusalem had a more successful launch in 1907, as did its sister lodges nationally. Paris was not the only city where women expressed interest, whether it was by adoption, a freestanding or mixed lodge. In fact, there was sharp competition for initiates, particularly during World War I and immediately after the Grande Loge’s refusal to recognize adoption. The upshot was a limited number of ateliers (twenty-five) and a relatively small membership (three hundred) by 1937. Internal divisions over the legitimacy of the rite were well represented by Marie-E. Bernard-Leroy (1885–1960) and Jeanne van Migom (dates unknown), both of La Nouvelle Jérusalem; they responded forcefully to assertions expressed by Amélie André-Gedalge (1865–1931) of the DH over the nature of their initiation rituals. As Bernard-Leroy put it, “it is not so much a question of making ourselves the equals of men as one of achieving the greatest perfection of which we are capable.”⁶² In no way did women in feminine masonry consider the working of degrees in their lodge as inferior to those worked in the DH. The principle was a masonry for women, a craft of their own making, as authorized by the Grande Loge. In short, their rite was not mixed, proudly so, even if the Grande Loge ultimately abandoned the sisters and they struggled to maintain their craft on their own just before World War II. In the interim, by 1938, a small number of other like-minded women in Marseilles founded a lodge under the aegis of the Memphis-Misraïm order.63

Freemason Women’s Feminist (and Labor) Networks

In the history of French masonry, Louise Michel’s initiations demonstrate the utility of social networks. The “Red Virgin,” as Michel was known after the Paris Commune, was nearly consumed by her oppositional politics, tapping into a long list of impromptu allies also working for grass-roots democracy, indigenous populations, labor unions, and women’s rights. These issues central to her work—like her lengthy terms in prison and exile in New Caledonia—meant a lifetime of engagement well before she came to masonry.⁶⁴ Michel was already seventy-three years old and in failing health when fellow feminists sponsored her first for the DH (1903) and then for the GLSE II M&M’s La Philosophie Sociale (1904). Association with these mixed lodges, filled as they were with Dreyfusards, radical republicans, anarchists, and neo-Malthusians, can be viewed as a culmination of Michel’s longstanding commitments. Her death in January 1905, while she was on a speaking tour to recruit other activists to her vision of freemasonry, ensured that her ties within the craft were relatively circumscribed, as evidenced by only twenty-three masons (or 19 percent) of the 120 people she had corresponded with since her adolescence (see app. 7). Notwithstanding a close affiliation with her lodges, Michel took after the elusive swallow she addressed in a poem with all too little time to make the fullest use of her newest connections: “I know not what echo of yours carried me / From distant shores; to live, a supreme law, / I must have, like you, air and freedom.”⁶⁵

Unlike the two earlier masons sans tablier, Anne-Catherine Helvétius in the 1780s and George Sand in the 1840s, Michel faced serious obstacles cultivating relationships, which often came at great risk during successive revolutionary uprisings and the state’s repressive responses to them. By 1901 when the Waldeck-Rousseau law on associations was enacted, however, civic activism in France reached an inflection point; it tipped at long last in favor of coordinated activities, including the promotion of women’s rights. It was much safer for dozens of officially sanctioned groups to contend nationally for controversial Civil Code reform, child welfare, coeducation, contraception, employment, and living wages in the job market (as well as the right of married women to keep those wages beginning in 1907). The Third Republic now afforded freemasons working in concert a remarkable range of options for long-term cooperative ventures.

In a new legal context, extended networks became easier to cultivate and to sustain, turning many lodges into public forums. According to historian Françoise Jupeau-Réquillard, the four principal obediences devoted the plurality of their discussions to women’s rights. The DH in particular deferred to its sisters—some two-thirds of its lodge members—whose interests were featured in the order’s annual questions for discussion after the lodges had provided their views.⁶⁶ Later, between the wars, the DH proposed such topics as coeducation (1923), equality of men and women before the law (1925), reorganization of the family (1927), prostitution (1929), approaches to rationalism, collectivism, and individualism (1931), organization of work and leisure (1933), and extracurricular life of children and adolescents (1937).⁶⁷ Most conferences held in the temples by masons (and nonmasons) spoke to these and other pertinent themes, underscoring masonry’s progressive social agenda in the period: strategies for disarmament, the socialist renewal of society, the democratization of education, and the reform of the craft itself. As for the DH’s explicit advocacy, historian André Combes explains, “its work was not much different from that of other obediences. It concerned mainly education and social problems, [such as] the emancipation of women.”⁶⁸

Well before World War I, the organizational reach of freemason women had been extensive.⁶⁹ The pioneering Eugénie Potonié-Pierre (1844–98), for instance, was an early member of the DH.⁷⁰ A primary school teacher like several of her lodge sisters, she came to masonry via feminism and socialism. Already by the 1870s, Potonié-Pierre had joined the Société pour l’Amélioration de la Condition des Femmes, where she met Maria Deraismes and Léon Richer. Eventually she would become the Société’s secretary while she expanded her array of interests. Together with Léonie Rouzade in 1880 she founded the Union des Femmes, the first feminist group of socialists in France. Internal differences over leadership and focus of this organization led to the creation of the Ligue des Femmes in 1889 and the Solidarité des Femmes in 1891. The next year, Potonié-Pierre teamed up with Maria Martin and Julie Pasquier, the DH’s first initiates in 1893, to establish the Fédération Française des Sociétés Féministes (FFSF). This federation’s charter and its congress of feminist organizations in 1892 gave wide currency to the term féminisme as it is known today.⁷¹ Living with Edmond Pierre, the founder of the Ligue du Bien Public and a sincere pacifist with utopian leanings, Potonié-Pierre in time became more idealistic as she coauthored prose fiction with him.⁷² This partnership was a useful antidote for the antithetical politics of her socialist colleagues who refused to recognize the importance of women’s rights, especially at the congress of Jules Guesde’s Parti Ouvrier Français in 1893. One upshot of that failure was her implausible collaboration with a (likely) freemason, Paule Mink, in the pages of La Question sociale (The Social Question). But Potonié-Pierre’s sudden death by cerebral hemorrhage at age fifty-three cut short her masonic alliances with workers and feminists alike.

Nor was the indefatigable Madeleine Pelletier (1874–1939) altogether atypical a full generation later. At one time or another, she was a member of five lodges (La Philosophie Sociale, Diderot, Stuart Mill—which she instituted, La Nouvelle Jérusalem, and Le Droit Humain) plus five other associations.⁷³ During World War I, given her medical training, she also tended the wounded on both sides of the conflict under the auspices of the Red Cross. The extent and depth of her social networks in and beyond these groups grew despite Pelletier’s well-known proclivity for ideological purity at the expense of personal relations.⁷⁴ She developed strong bonds with other determined activists, such as Louise Michel whom she recruited into masonry and later, in the 1930s, the labor organizer and pacifist Hélène Brion who faithfully visited Pelletier at the psychiatric ward (where she had been committed during the last months of her life after a debilitating stroke). Much of what we know about Pelletier comes not from her personal theatrics but from her abundant publications.⁷⁵ By her writing as well as by her lodge involvement, Pelletier touched many others besides her most ardent followers.

Pelletier’s views were much less amenable to her contemporaries than they have since become to us. Given her understanding of the cultural construction of gender, what she called “psychological sex,” she rejected widely accepted assertions of those who believed that men and women could be equal in their complementary gender-role differences.⁷⁶ An ardent individualist, she dressed as a man because she expected to be accorded the rights of a man. As she bluntly explained in an unpublished letter to another gender-bending female, Arria Ly, “My clothes say to men, ‘I am your equal.’”⁷⁷ When the Section Française de l’Internationale Ouvrière (SFIO) organized the Groupe des Femmes Socialistes in 1912, she refused to be shunted aside by participating in what she viewed as a sideshow to the main tasks at hand. Moreover, she performed and supervised abortions in explicit violation of the law (for which she was ultimately arrested in 1939). By comparison, Pelletier’s campaign for women’s suffrage was more of interest to the middle class than it was for workers, the very women she sought to rally as a socialist until the SFIO split in 1920 and she joined the Parti Communiste Français. By this time, Pelletier had long since ceased attending initiations at her masonic lodges. She no longer needed their networks to further the rights of women, preferring to tap into those offered by the all-male Grand Orient that she considered far more influential, “the most interesting portion of freemasonry.”⁷⁸ One can imagine what the brethren of the oldest and largest obedience in France made of her overtures.⁷⁹

Potonié-Pierre and Pelletier represented one commitment that dozens of other freemason women also embraced, the labor movement, particularly after the 1884 law permitting unionization. These masonic sympathies had appeared much earlier among the Saint-Simonians such as Suzanne Voilquin, Pauline Roland, and Eugénie Niboyet in the 1830s and 1840s and Élisa Lemonnier and André Léo in the 1860s and 1870s. The anarchist Louise Michel, the socialist Marianne Rauze, and the unionist Hélène Brion translated these sentiments into more concerted action also apart from masonry (like Michel, Potonié-Pierre was late to be initiated, Rauze chose a more conservative adoption lodge, and Brion’s initiation was mis-recorded and has been easily overlooked).⁸⁰ But their civic morality was consistent with the craft’s social activism. Influenced by Pelletier’s socialism, for example, Brion (1882–1962) organized primary school teachers like herself into sociétés amicales.⁸¹ Contending that there could be no victors in the war—neither women working on the home front nor men fighting in the trenches—Brion was brought before a military tribunal and convicted of defeatism in 1918. Her cause célèbre—the trial was well covered in the popular press—blazed a path for pacifist women during the interwar period when the stakes were lower.⁸² As Brion stated during her trial, “The accusation alleges that under the pretext of feminism, I am a pacifist. This distorts for convenience sake the logic of my cause: I affirm that it is the just reverse. . . . I am an enemy of war because I am a feminist. War is the victory of brute strength, feminism can only prevail by moral force.”83 The masonic Brion owed this insight in part to her active participation in six women’s rights organizations, in addition to those she organized on behalf of working women.⁸⁴

It is clear that lodges in the GLSE II M&M were given to more radical tendencies than either the Grande Loge or the DH. If some socialists like Louise Saumoneau expressed disdain for the bourgeois nature of freemason women during the Third Republic, they surely overlooked the politics of Potonié-Pierre, Pelletier, Rauze, and Brion, but also that of three equally formidable sisters initiated in the Diderot: Véra Starkoff, Nelly Roussel, and Marie Bonnevial.⁸⁵ Their sensitivity to the struggles of working-class women belied their nominally middle-class origins. Starkoff, for example, was a Russian immigrant; as a teenager, she had been drawn to anarchism in her home country; in 1887 she fled the secret police to Switzerland and then to France. Like other freemason women of her generation, Starkoff supported a variety of causes: free thought, women’s rights, child welfare, and international peace. But even advocacy of free love in her play, L’Amour libre (1902) staged for the first time in her lodge, was deliberately addressed to workers: “Dear comrades, I dedicate to you my first theatrical work, in witness of my profound gratitude.”⁸⁶ As actress and dramatist, Starkoff performed for the Universités Populaires, which highlighted problems of interest to her intended audiences, such as the oppression of domestic service work in M. C. Poinsot and Georges Normandy’s Les Vaincues (The Defeated, 1909). An elegant translator of the Russian novelist Tolstoy, Starkoff had a broad vision of social justice. Quoting Tolstoy, she wrote, “everything that unites humankind is good and attractive, everything that separates us is evil and unseemly.”⁸⁷ Peace, justice, and egalitarianism are the natural results of this masonic tenet.

Nelly Roussel (1878–1922) shared this vision, as a matter of principle, in her promotion of reproductive freedom for everyone, rich or poor, middle or working class.⁸⁸ After her initiation in 1902, Roussel sustained her work on behalf of masonic ideals as they pertained to women in particular, especially in her first years as the Diderot’s oratrice.⁸⁹ She knew firsthand the pain and complications of childbirth—she had three children, one of whom died in infancy— and was impressed by how theatrical performance, on and off the rostrum, could convey powerful messages. A disciple and distant relation of Paul Robin, who taught contraception to women in his clinic, Roussel committed herself to generalizing this effort in opposition to the sacrificial ideal of the suffering female.⁹⁰ She started lecturing in 1901, first in Paris, then elsewhere in France, Belgium, and Switzerland, as her reputation for effective public speaking grew. It did not take Roussel long to broach related topics, such as women’s rights, world peace, and free thought, in various fora, including masonic lodges.⁹¹ Her principal themes drew from a doctrine of individual happiness grounded in justice and harmony. “The war between the sexes, alas! has existed since the day man arrogated to himself an illogical and unjustifiable power over woman!” she exclaimed in her lecture on “the eternally sacrificed” in 1905. “There is no peace possible between the master and the slave.”⁹² She invariably finished her speeches with readings from her play Par la révolte (1903, By Revolting).⁹³ Roussel believed firmly in reproductive rights, just as did her fellow neo-Malthusian, Émilie Lamotte (1876–1909), with equivalent masonic connections.⁹⁴

The lodges of the GLSE II M&M were not the only ones to attract a cadre of social activists. The adoption lodges in the Grande Loge also spoke out, albeit with more attention to reforms of masonry itself. A member of Le Libre Examen Adoption, Marianne Rauze (1875–1964) participated in the Section Française de l’Internationale Ouvrière and later in the Parti Communiste Français.⁹⁵ But there were others like Suzanne Galland (1882–1961), the lodge’s grande maîtresse for twenty-eight years (1912–40), and Marie Linval-Lantzenberg, the lodge’s delegate to the 1920 congress of pacifists in Geneva, both of whom enjoined their sisters to consider women’s rights as a natural extension of their masonic practice. From a privileged position in Le Libre Examen, Galland exhorted the newly initiated and the audiences of her lectures sponsored by the lodge. She was tireless in her call for a purely secular education for children. “School should train secular minds open to the light,” she stated. “Secularity is the liberation of conscience, the hatred of falsehood, the love of enlightenment, the mastery of oneself, the freedom of thought.”⁹⁶ Secular thinking was “the religion of Humanity,” masonry’s special charge, she asserted, one fully in keeping with the inclinations of its sisters and the tradition of masonic sagesse (philosophical truth) since the eighteenth century. Closely allied to this theme were, not surprisingly, the childrearing practices women needed to learn so that such an education could have its greatest impact. Speaking to a larger audience about the rights of children, she extended her social network of influence during her long masonic engagement, which continued for another decade after World War II. Her attention then turned to loges féminines (lodges for women) during the establishment of the Union Maçonnique Féminine de France in 1945 and the Grande Loge Féminine de France in 1952.⁹⁷

Less well known but no less tied to progressive adoption masonry was Marie Linval-Lantzenberg (1889–1944?), a talented musician married to the Spinoza scholar and fellow mason Raoul Lantzenberg.⁹⁸ Her idée fixe was world peace. Soon after World War I, during the meeting of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom in Geneva, Linval-Lantzenberg was persuaded by others in attendance that they had identified a feminist issue. “The effort of women in all countries,” she reported to her lodge soon afterward, “tends entirely towards peace, and women must not rest until they are distanced forever, at last, from war.”99 Accordingly, Linval-Lantzenberg believed, there could be no better expression of what masons meant by universal brotherhood, or more compelling interest for women who were anxious to protect their families. These two aspirations for her were one and the same, which stuck with her for some time. In 1925, not long before the Treaty of Locarno outlawing war was signed, she founded the Union et Bienfaisance adoption lodge and in 1936 its successor, La République Sociale. As these lodges’ grande maîtresse, she supported in her numerous lectures and publications, travels to international conventions, and Franco-German interlodge relations to advance a better-informed understanding between the two former adversaries (it helped that she spoke fluent German). Masonry was, in effect, her platform for coordination beyond her lodge, spearheading masonic adoption’s participation in the fraternal reconciliation of the Grand Orient, the Grande Loge, and the DH, as part of the French federation in support of the League of Nations. She maintained this vision during the Vichy-led restrictions on the craft before she was deported; she never returned after World War II.

What these women’s networks indicate is the variety of their connectedness. Much of this fellowship was focused on the lodge, as nearly all the grandes maîtresses and oratrices like Bernard-Leroy, Galland, and others demonstrated, very early on in their masonic careers. It is easy to understand the natural ardor of recent initiates for their new-found solidarity in adoption. As a consequence, their early networks tended to be limited but intense. In time, however, the masonic connections attenuated as sisters pursued their ideals outside the lodge, sometimes in other lodges (whether or not they were in the same order), more often in other associations (generally those more focused on social action). These figures joined other communities, especially for the promotion of women’s rights, which made their networks more expansive but their masonry less central to their identities. In many cases, like those of Roussel and Rauze, these civic-minded joiners found more satisfaction and support in other groups, thereby drifting away from their lodges. This tendency was particularly evident in adoption orders, which were smaller, more intimate, and occasionally more conflicted (Pelletier was alleged to have waved a pistol at a fellow mason in La Nouvelle Jérusalem).¹⁰⁰ Eventually, the larger, mixed lodges in the DH became more cosmopolitan, less constraining, much less of a family. More sisters like Dorothée Chellier moved on soon after their initiations, even if they remained active in another lodge elsewhere within the obedience. The DH’s familial quality had its limits even before Georges Martin and Marie-George Martin had died. The DH became more an institutionalized organization with an extraterritorial reach in a larger, more fully elaborated third sector during the interwar years.

An active participant in this organizational trend is Ghénia Avril de Sainte-Croix (1855–1939), arguably the best networked member of the masonic community during the last decades of the Third Republic.¹⁰¹ The “Josephine Butler of France,” the leading French feminist of her generation, Avril de Sainte-Croix enjoyed the modest resources of a respectable bourgeois woman residing in Paris’s 16th arrondissement. There she briefly hosted at-home gatherings for remarkable individuals like Clémence Royer (the scientist and DH lodge member) and Maude Gonne (the Irish revolutionary and initiate in the paramasonic Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn). Her first calling was as a journalist and writer; early in her career, she published in no fewer than five Parisian dailies, such as Marguerite Durand’s La Fronde (The Rebellion). In 1907 she published her foundational study Le Féminisme. Whatever her masonic affiliations, Avril de Sainte-Croix developed a long list of causes to champion, hosting international conferences in order to bring public attention to women’s rights (including universal suffrage), abolitionism (ending the traffic in women and children), and gainful employment for women. Her preferred organizations sponsored a number of collaborative efforts before, during, and after World War I.¹⁰² She led a long, busy, consequential life.

Mixed masonry seems dwarfed by Avril de Sainte-Croix’s manifold associational allegiances. They centered on issues of concern to many more people than the members of a masonic lodge, however engaged brothers and sisters were in their own work on behalf of others. But Avril de Sainte-Croix did not ignore the place of co-masonry in her telling book on French feminism. The chapter on the early organizations of the women’s movement makes a point of mentioning not only Maria Deraismes’s pioneering initiation at Les Libres Penseurs (Le Pecq) in 1882, but also her founding of the first DH lodge in 1893.¹⁰³ Although the account is brief, it is central to the chapter, which quotes a feminist principle stated in Georges Martin’s rare, privately printed Étude abrégée de la franc-maçonnerie mixte et de son organisation (1893–98, An Abridged Study of Mixed Freemasonry and its Organization, 1893–98) specifically for DH initiates: “woman, the equal of man in the family, in society, in all of humanity, is one of the primary reforms needed to achieve an ideal social state.”¹⁰⁴ Avril de Sainte-Croix clearly understood this masonic aspiration.

Mixed masonry’s dense links to women’s rights during the Third Republic are thus far from coincidental. As this book contends, one cannot understand the one without reference to the other, so convergent were the objectives of both movements. Their networks overlapped and drew upon one another, making possible the personnel and resources necessary to achieve the gender equality so earnestly sought by freemason feminists. Indeed, little distinction exists between the two currents when the likes of Avril de Sainte-Croix advocated their mutually reinforcing goals. Antimasonic publications in particular, such as the so-called exposés by Jean Tourmentin, Gabriel Soulacroix, Abel Clarin de la Rive, and Ernest Jouin, underscored this connection time and again to the delectation of reactionary readers who were as hostile to women’s rights as they were to the craft.¹⁰⁵

Avril de Saint-Croix was no anomaly. There were no fewer than twelve DH masons who held leadership positions in organizations of serious interest to such women from the fin de siècle onward. These pioneers of the nineteenth century, the most extensively networked among them at least, also laid the associational infrastructure for the French women’s movement, often in concert with others. Marie Bonnevial (1841–1918), in particular, was a member of several groups with converging interests in women’s rights and work.¹⁰⁶ An unyielding freethinker, caring teacher, eloquent speaker, passionate syndicaliste, and contributor to Marguerite Durand’s La Fronde and to Benoît Malon’s Revue socialiste (Socialist Review), Bonnevial was much more than a creature of mixed masonry. But the conjuncture of her innumerable activities appeared, by and large, in the prominent roles she played in lodges of two different orders, the DH and the GLSE II M&M. Her masonic connections to multiple causes were intentional—they were how she got things done—in keeping with her belief in masonry’s vision of fraternity for the public good, starting with wage earners. “The moral and material as well as the economic and political emancipation of workers,” she explained in 1903, “must be pursued without distinction of either sex or race.”¹⁰⁷

In masonry, as elsewhere in French civil society, progressive women often had multiple connections. In the meetings of representatives to the Conseil National, for example, the socialist Maria Martin (1839–1910) frequently crossed paths with her fellow masons from the DH, Bonnevial and Potonié-Pierre, but also Eliska Vincent, Maria Pognon, and Louise Wiggishoff, all of whose activism closely resembles one another’s.¹⁰⁸ DH members were omnipresent at feminist gatherings in Paris. But these women with a wide array of affiliations did not necessarily accomplish more than those with a narrower range of ties to a more single-minded purpose. Tighter social networks were remarkably effective given the right context for their particular sphere of engagement, be it scientific inquiry, community work, or national welfare. In this regard, more focused commitments are also recognizable among DH masons, like the scientist Clémence Royer (1830–1902) and the philanthropists Louise Koppe (1846–1900) and Marie Béquet de Vienne (1844–1913).109 Their achievements, especially in their respective domains, were considerable. Royer, Koppe, and Béquet provide another view of women’s sociabilité outside the masonic lodge, just like their counterparts who in other masonic orders turned to symbolic ritual at home and abroad, such as Annie Besant the theosophist and Alexandra David-Néel the Buddhist.¹¹⁰ Each in her own way pursued related masonic passions for self-discovery and exploration, journeys both inward and outward in the world, the two sides to masonic initiation as described much later by other freemason women.¹¹¹

For more effective collaboration, associations promoting women’s interests were gathered very early, in 1892–93, into the Fédération Française (FFSF) under the initial direction of Eugénie Potonié-Pierre (and then the nonmason Aline Valette). Altogether in this group there were eleven other DH sisters at the head of or representing their respective constituents at one time or another (one of which was also led by a mason from another obedience). That so many personal connections arose from one masonic lodge suggests some kind of coordination at the local level, albeit with a national impact (see table 1).112 One sees a similar apparent “collusion” in this order among the leaders of the Conseil National des Femmes Françaises.113 The cofounders and driving forces behind this federation in 1901, Pognon and Avril de Sainte-Croix, also had ties to the DH, as did Bonnevial (in 1901–18) and Wiggishoff (1901), each of whom played instrumental roles in the Conseil National.114 It is this density of relationship that gave co-masonry a special place in the women’s movement on the eve of World War I. In fact, as sociologists have amply demonstrated, women’s rights organizations depended upon such federated, cross-associational networks to achieve their goals despite—and because of—the substantive differences among the activists themselves.115

Table 1. Leadership of Associations in Fédération Française des Sociétés Féministes (1892)

Source: Hivert-Messeca and Hivert-Messeca, Comment la franc-maçonnerie, 286, 378–79. * Indicates initiation into a DH lodge before 1901.

The Communities of Freemason Women across Two World Wars

What the Great War of 1914–18 meant was not so much a dramatic break with the past, we know, as it was an acceleration of trends that had their origins earlier in the long nineteenth century.¹¹⁶ This historical continuity was evident in gender relations, mass democracy, industrial technology, and the fading legacy of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, a complex of developments affecting French civil society and the public space of women.¹¹⁷ The war sharpened the divide between men in the trenches and women at home; bearing arms in wartime was a man’s job, while literally everything else required women to backfill the loss of men in the household, on the assembly line, in the fields. Remarked historian Françoise Thébaud, “France at war found its feminine side” as women made considerable sacrifices of their own.¹¹⁸ Meanwhile, combat casualties were of massive proportions and touched nearly every family in the country. To pursue victory, whatever the cost, the regime proclaimed a state of siege (a legal contrivance from 1849 and 1878), thereby holding in abeyance fundamental civil liberties. The union sacrée stifled political differences; the popular press voiced no dissent; unauthorized public assembly was strictly forbidden. The result was in stark contradiction with a liberal republic since its inception in the 1870s. For all intents and purposes, an independent third sector, like truth and trust, was the war’s first casualty. Its leaders, men and women alike, whether or not they were feminists or freemasons, preserved a unity largely imposed by the state for five long years.

In this context, what happened to masonry for women? Like much else in French associational life unrelated to the war, it was neglected for the duration of the conflict. As men left for the front, lodges ceased to meet, freeing the sisters to engage in other activities more directly supportive of the country’s defense. No hard numbers exist for mixed or adoption lodges, but the Grand Orient can serve as a crude proxy. During the war, it lost about a third of its brethren—down from thirty-three thousand to twenty-three thousand members—and about 12 percent of its lodges—down to 410, sixty fewer than it had in 1914.¹¹⁹ The decline of lodges in the Ordre Maçonnique Mixte International was greater abroad, about a third, but not at home; all twenty-seven French DH lodges survived. Sisters were also lost to the craft, though for different reasons: volunteer work, paid employment, and familial dislocation. Although no women died in combat, their fathers, brothers, sons, and husbands disappeared (by 1916 there were six hundred thousand war widows); and they made accommodations to the carnage as best they could. Moreover, they confronted an increasingly smaller pool of eligible men to (re)marry; 1.4 million men between the ages of twenty and thirty-nine died during the war; there were only one thousand eligible grooms (including those maimed at the front) for nearly 1,200 eligible brides (including those with children).

The potential disruptions to women’s lives in the lodge are obvious, and yet their allegiance as masons to the nation went unchallenged. Like many others, they responded to Prime Minister René Vivani’s exhortation in August 1914 for women not solely to harvest the crops that men had left behind, but to rise to a higher calling. “There is, at this grave hour, no demeaning work,” he proclaimed. “Everything is grand that serves the country. Get up! Get going! Get to work! Tomorrow there will be glory enough for everyone.”¹²⁰ A well-known mason thereby made community a patriotic duty. And so the philanthropy organized by the Conseil National des Femmes Françaises and the Union Française pour le Suffrage des Femmes, in cooperation with the DH, drew sisters to help unemployed women find work, to provide soldiers with warm clothing, to nurse the wounded on behalf of the Red Cross, and to create a registry for refugees and separated family members in order for them to trace their loved ones. In all this activity, freemason women with a feminist leaning solidified their reputation for good works, a respected image of heroic self-sacrifice for the nation.

Freemason women’s passions for feminist causes remained firm despite the war and the nationalist enthusiasms that sustained it.¹²¹ But the reinforcement of traditional gender norms, the self-censorship on women’s rights, the competing full-time jobs at work and at home, in short, the retreat from social action required a creative response to the situation that temporarily silenced the feminists. As the historian Margaret Darrow points out, “In the main, French women were left to find their own way to acceptable female war service amid the pitfalls already identified by pre-war commentators. . . . A misstep meant undermining gender” roles more pointedly prescribed during the conflict.¹²² While basking in the reprieve from the insistent antifeminist rhetoric that had belittled the women’s movement in the long nineteenth century, freemason women still had to find ways to assert their views publicly, discreetly but no less firmly than earlier, on reproductive rights, women’s suffrage, white slavery, and, yes, international peace. Activists thus confronted a new, more dangerous double-bind.

In this regard, Nelly Roussel was exemplary.¹²³ Distraught about the war from the outset, often too ill to speak in public, she gave voice to her feminist ideals as a member of the Union Fraternelle des Femmes. She addressed women’s rights in articles for three different newspapers written with an eye to the considerable personal sacrifices that women were making for the nation; good citizens deserve their rights, not the selective provision for war widows and grieving mothers that Maurice Barrès had proposed in 1916. Moreover, she regretted the armed conflict and the hatred that the press had whipped up to drive it onward. In response to Romain Rolland’s gratuitous critique of women’s failure to exercise their moral authority to have stopped the war before it began—a theme Roussel herself would take up briefly after the war—she drew careful distinctions between bellicose regimes and their otherwise peaceful citizens. “We women,” she declaimed in 1916, “have the responsibility to guard jealously the sacred flame . . . just and generous, a source of love and happiness, a safeguard for Peace.”124 Roussel subsequently did what she could to oppose the draconian 1920 law limiting women’s access to information about contraception, but by then she was already too ill with tuberculosis to do any more. She died, age forty-four, in 1922, a year after the publication of her hauntingly wistful, melancholic verse: “I am weary, sick and sad; everything hurts me; / Life is stupid and the world mean; / My ideal is dying, and hope deserts me, / Fast flees my youth.”¹²⁵

As noted earlier, the multifaceted Marie Bonnevial had been active in Conseil National des Femmes Françaises since its inception in 1901. Her commitment to national solidarity during the war was an outgrowth of her understanding of solidarity in the labor and feminist movements; what was good for the working class and women was also good for the country. With workers and middle-class progressives united, Bonnevial felt, France would defeat Germany; and the people whose interests she defended would reap the benefits of their contributions to victory. She remained deeply engaged with masonry, serving as the DH’s grande maîtresse, as well as with women’s rights, especially women’s employment and suffrage. She allowed herself to be elected president of the Ligue Française pour les Droits des Femmes and to head the suffrage section of the Conseil National (all with a particular focus on the concerns of women working at home). But in April 1915, like her associates in the CNFF and the UFSF, she could not agree to proposals for a peace conference, certainly not so long as German troops continued to occupy northeastern France. As a volunteer nurse, she had seen firsthand the results of their presence on French soil. Germany must withdraw its forces, she said, before there could be any efforts to reach an armistice. Ironically, Bonnevial was herself a victim of the conflict; while crossing a street in Paris, she was struck and killed by a military ambulance from the front in early December 1918. It was just days before the Conseil National’s first public meeting since 1914, during which she was to speak on women’s suffrage. As the CNFF president Julie Siegfried stated at the funeral, Bonnevial was “one of the most eminent feminists of our time,” ever sensitive to the needs of the children she taught for many years, of her fellow teachers whom she helped to organize, of poor workers whose subsistence wages were never paid, and of her brothers and sisters in the lodge.¹²⁶

Arguably Bonnevial’s antithesis was the provocative mason Hélène Brion whose anticipation of peace was much less patient and whose patriotism was indeed questioned. Like others at the beginning of the war, Brion called for a cessation to German hostilities before disarmament could be discussed. Her name headed the list of socialist feminists writing to La Française (The French Woman) in early 1915 to propose that women be invited to sit on any future peace commissions.¹²⁷ But Brion’s concerns with the never-ending war moved her to prepare pamphlets on peace without victory, la paix blanche (a peace with no preconditions), an instance of defeatism after the horrific battle of the Somme in 1916. She did so with the tacit support of the Confédération Général du Travail, for which she served as secretary-general during the conflict. Her secret meetings with other pacifists did not go unnoticed. Remarked one unnamed police spy, “Hélène Brion, a teacher in Pantin, an unkempt woman, an hysteric in speech and writing, . . . stimulates the ardor of her comrades, union members, all over the country.”¹²⁸ In short, she was a threat to the war effort.

After a police raid on Brion’s home, which uncovered incriminating evidence of her peace work, she was fired from her teaching job in July 1917. Four months later, she and her godson, Gaston Mouflard, were arrested and held for trial by a military commission in March 1918—during Big Bertha’s shelling of Paris. At least one freemason feminist testified on Brion’s proper “morality”: Nelly Roussel, vice president of the Union Fraternelle des Femmes, of which Brion was also a member. But to no avail. Even the journalist Séverine (Caroline Rémy), an imposing presence dressed in mourning, could not dissuade the judges of their inevitable decision. “I have given myself over to a study of Hélène Brion,” she testified. “It reminded me a lot of another woman I have known and who has also been defamed, who has often been tried by her country, who has been sent to prison for nine years, and whose statue stands in Montmartre. I mean Louise Michel” (another mason).¹²⁹ Brion got a three-year suspended sentence, and quickly moved to establish a newspaper, La Lutte féministe (The Feminist Struggle), which earned her invitations to lecture at various masonic lodges. Her death in 1962 left behind a huge, disorganized archive on French feminism now at the Bibliothèque Marguerite Durand in Paris.

A masonic life parallel with Brion’s, but one full step ahead of the police during the war, was that of the dramatist and Tolstoy specialist Véra Starkoff (1867–1923). Starkoff, too, championed the pacifist cause, beginning long before hostilities erupted; and she managed her politics at Le Libre Examen in a tactically shrewd manner. In May 1913, for instance, she persuaded her sisters to endorse a resolution, what masons call un voeu (an appeal), against the impending conflagration. It called on the vénérables in German lodges to press a campaign against war on both sides of the Rhine. Her intentions were to bring about a Franco-German rapprochement, which she actively promoted against daunting odds. Her strategy was simple and, under the circumstances, simplistic: appeal to the women of Germany to turn against the perpetrators of their misery, “the wretches who keep women and children in their trenches, who rape and mutilate these poor creatures.”¹³⁰ Starkoff’s manifesto was adopted unanimously by her lodge and without the slightest concern of a police informer in their midst. She continued her campaign in May 1917 with a lecture to her lodge about Bertrand Russell’s arguments for pacifism. “We must fight the savage beast,” she concluded, “that draws on our fighting instincts, our pride, and our mental laziness. And this beast can only be defeated by our force of will developed in freedom.”¹³¹ Such sentiments made it much easier and more effective to fundraise in her lodge to help the families of POWs. When the October Revolution in 1917 brought the Soviets to power in Russia, Starkoff’s sympathies for the poor in her former homeland drew her to support the new regime briefly.¹³² Her lectures on this topic prompted publications like Le Bolshévisme (1922), expressing sentiments that her memorial service in 1923 emphasized: “Tolstoy would not admit the recourse to arms; civilized people have other means, they ought to expose the lie and appeal to human reason.”¹³³

Undoubtedly the most visible, and formidable, freemason feminist during the war was Ghénia Avril de Sainte-Croix, otherwise known by her journalist pseudonym Savioz.¹³⁴ As Conseil National des Femmes Françaises’s secretary-general, she was responsible for leading French women through a fraught time. Accordingly, she coauthored a circular in August 1914 to the Conseil National’s member organizations in support of national defense. She figured as everyone else did that feminists’ selfless, patriotic efforts would eventually be repaid by legislative action on women’s issues, notably women’s suffrage, which had been sidetracked by the outbreak of war. It was a calculated tactic that in retrospect did not succeed, just as Gabrielle Duchêne, head of the Conseil National’s section on work, had warned.¹³⁵ Avril de Sainte-Croix did what she could to rein in such defiance to this strategy. In January 1917, she ventured to lead the coordinated protest of the Conseil National, the Union Française pour le Suffrage des Femmes, and other women’s groups against the German Reich’s plans to impress women in Belgium to work in Germany. This gesture, deliberately but diplomatically, cast the organizations in a prewar light by reasserting women’s rights.¹³⁶

The time for feminists to wait-and-see had long passed. In May 1919, as the Chamber of Deputies resumed work on women’s suffrage, the Conseil National joined forces with four other feminist organizations—including the Droit Humain order no less—to circulate a flyer, “La Femme Doit Voter” (Votes for Women).¹³⁷ An officer as well of the International Council of Women, Avril de Sainte-Croix advised the peace conference in Versailles to ensure that the treaty respected women’s views. Ultimately, she was nominated to serve on the League of Nations’s Permanent Consultative Council pursuing global protections of women and children subject to human trafficking, which in time led to a number of other commission appointments during the interwar period. By 1922, Avril de Sainte-Croix succeeded Julie Siegfried as the Conseil National’s president, a position she held for a decade, presiding at each of the Estates General of Feminism for three years in a row (1929–31).¹³⁸

Avril de Sainte-Croix was not the only freemason woman in the transnational arena. Nearly all the participants in the Conseil National des Femmes Françaises’s allied women’s rights organizations found themselves meeting their counterparts from other countries during the many congresses over the decades. The year 1900 had witnessed no fewer than three of them convened in Paris.¹³⁹ But the Great War brought other far-reaching concerns to the fore. For instance, the Bolshevik Revolution saw a number of sisters sympathetic to communism who commented on events in Soviet Russia and what they meant to the first socialist state. Pelletier and Brion actually travelled there to see it for themselves. They both confessed their disappointment with the political chaos and the Bolshevik violence during the bitter civil conflict. Starkoff and Rauze also condemned it (sight unseen) in their publications. These women’s perspectives were consistent with the pacifist tendencies of other freemason women, well long before the 1930s when the threat of war with the fascist regime in Italy and the Nazi regime in Germany became increasingly real. Here the work of Avril de Sainte-Croix with the League of Nations and Linval-Lantzenberg with masonic lodges in Germany is worth recalling, as is that of the journalist Marcelle Capy (Marquès, 1891–1962), another DH sister, who supported the pacifist cause during World War I. Her Une voix de femme dans la mêlée (1916, A Woman’s Voice in the Melee) saw its choicest passages censored before publication: “It was war; and war kills the freedom to think, to write, to judge, and even to cry, in order to kill men.”¹⁴⁰ Like other women on the political left, though not the DH sister Marya Chéliga-Loewy (1853–1927), Capy found pacifism an issue far more compelling than either women’s rights or socialism.¹⁴¹

The peace sought by the freemason Alexandra David-Néel (1868–1969) was far more otherworldly than it was political.¹⁴² She found true solace in her travels to distant lands. “What an unforgettable vision!” she enthused upon her arrival at Sikkim in 1912.¹⁴³ For the next several years while Europe was tearing itself apart, she learned Sanskrit and Tibetan to study sacred Buddhist texts. As with other mystics in turbulent periods, David-Néel discovered a local spiritual guide, the revered Lachan Gomchen Rimpoche. She also adopted a traveling companion, the youthful Aphur Yongden, who introduced her to a hermit’s contemplative life in the caves on the mountainous border between Sikkim and Tibet. Together they plotted an improbable trip to Lhasa, a city forbidden to all foreigners. Early en route they visited Tashilhunpo Monastery, close to Shigatse in southern Tibet, where David-Néel had access to a library of rare Buddhist manuscripts. “The special psychic atmosphere of the place enchanted me,” she later mused, “I have seldom enjoyed such blissful hours.”¹⁴⁴ At the height of the Great War, she turned eastward to Japan, Korea, and China on a personal voyage still farther from the miseries back home. Reaching Lhasa at long last in 1924, David-Néel returned to France. Another trip, again to China and Tibet (1937–1946), was prolonged by new hostilities: the Japanese invasion of the Chinese mainland and the outbreak of World War II in Europe. The inner peace she experienced during her religious studies abroad was thus owed in large measure to the lack of peace nearly everywhere. She was not alone. Other idiosyncratic feminist freemasons, such as Renooz and André-Gedalge, indulged in similar quests at the time.¹⁴⁵

The German invasion of Poland in September 1939 returned the world to the unfinished conflict twenty-one years earlier, even though much had changed in the interim.¹⁴⁶ The principal belligerents in World War II were very nearly the same as in World War I, but the public lives of freemason women had turned more international in scope, more professional in social profile, more transparent in organizational identity, more central to the women’s rights movement, and more fully invested in the social capital of extensive networks beyond the masonic lodge. There are in fact several gendered histoires croisées (intertwined narratives) at work in the first four decades of the twentieth century. As women became more visible in a growing civil society, which even the Great War could not suppress completely—women continued to volunteer, albeit for different purposes than either before or afterward—their public engagements grew and evolved, slowly but discernibly, at home, in school, at work, in popular culture, and to be sure, with masonry. Various objectives grew more insistent, especially in the mixed lodges of the DH. A feminized masonry pushed women’s rights hard immediately after World War I when integral suffrage seemed so very close to being realized. Thanks to international developments, however, new issues loomed large: communism, antifascism, and transnational relations. Avril de Sainte-Croix exerted palpable influence in the organizations she led, but her younger counterparts went further; they took up many more causes. They defined a larger third sector in France in spite or because of the divisive, ineffectual national politics of the 1930s, which contributed much to the collaborationist regime in Vichy and the disastrous occupation of the country by Germany.

After the collapse of the Third Republic in June 1940, freemasons as well as Jews were particularly concerned about their future, and for good reason. Maréchal Philippe Pétain is known to have accepted a longstanding bromide from believers in a Judeo-masonic conspiracy: “A Jew is never responsible for his origins; a freemason is always one by choice.”¹⁴⁷ This hostile assumption about the dangers posed by the craft drew no distinctions among the different obediences, including the DH, which took the precaution of burning records that might identify its members. “The fire was no longer a symbol,” commented Éliane Brault of the task undertaken by the two women who volunteered to destroy her lodge’s papers as German troops approached Paris. “It devoured the life of masonry and kept it from being sullied in the hands of its profane enemies.”148 Myriad masons took similar measures to protect themselves and their families as soon as they heard that the Germans had seized the main offices of all the obediences. It did not take the Occupation forces and the Vichy regime long to confiscate the remaining records.

Proscriptions against the craft soon appeared in the Journal officiel. An August 1940 law banned “secret societies” and, in particular, required all public officials to swear that they had never been a mason, otherwise they would lose their jobs. In August 1942 another law authorized the publication of the names of masonic dignitaries (with some mistaken identities like Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin, the eighteenth-century’s mystical mason).¹⁴⁹ As historian Pierre Chevallier put it, the brotherhood now faced “the Third Profanation of the Temple,” the desecration of lodges subject to the indignities exacted by five different antimasonic agencies.¹⁵⁰ Rituals ceased in order to protect masons from Vichy (and German) efforts to identify, monitor, and interrogate them, to confiscate their property, and to execute or deport them. The craft still lost no fewer than 549 men and women.¹⁵¹ In due time, after the Germans occupied the Vichy regime’s portion of the country in November 1942, news of the Axis Power’s setbacks in north Africa, Soviet Russia, and Italy reached a broader French audience. The Resistance grew accordingly, linking the Free French with armed groups in the countryside to prepare for France’s eventual liberation in 1945. And the women, like the pseudonymous character in Marguerite Duras’s war memoirs whose husband was deported, waited anxiously for their men to return.¹⁵²

The actual number of freemason women—as victims of the Occupation, fighters in the Resistance and/or members of the Free French forces—is unknown. But we have more than anecdotal evidence of their activity.¹⁵³ Masons who were also Jews faced few good prospects if they had not already fled the country. Their lodge activities made them vulnerable. Before the war, Camille Charvet (1881–1943), for instance, had been an exemplary activist in the DH in Besançon and Lyon. Teacher, journalist, and lecturer, active in a Conseil National des Femmes Françaises affiliate and several other progressive associations, she was arrested by the Gestapo in February 1943 and deported to Birkenau.¹⁵⁴ Another Jewish DH mason who died in the camps was Berthe Bouchet (1896–1945), teacher, later writer for the Eaux et Forêts in Nancy, member of the Parti Radical and the Ligue des Droits de l’Homme, and Résistante.¹⁵⁵ She, too, was arrested by the Gestapo in May 1943 and sent to die at Ravensbrück in March 1945.

Much trickier to verify are the surviving Résistantes—for many of them, we have only the evidence that they, their family, and their immediate entourage provided—but among the best documented was the Grande Loge Mixte Symbolique de France and DH mason Marguerite Martin (1877–1956). Her interwar allegiances included the Parti Communiste Français (which she joined with Pelletier and Kauffmann), grande secrétaire of the Grande Loge Mixte Symbolique, and president of the Conseil National of the Ordre Maçonnique Mixte International. Her leftist resistance group worked in Landes where she and her husband had family.¹⁵⁶ We know something about less prominent DH masons, Marie Rolland and Irène Rossel (née Chiot), who also joined the Resistance; Rossel the militant socialist and journalist, however, died two years after her deportation to Bergen-Belsen.¹⁵⁷ Then there were the freemason women who joined the Free French, such as Eugénie Eboué-Tell, the wife of Félix Eboué (governor-general of the French colony of Chad who rallied to General Charles de Gaulle after his June 1940 plea in Brazzaville for the peoples of the empire to liberate the métropole). Initiated into the DH after the war, Eboué-Tell joined the Forces Françaises Libres Féminines as a nurse in the military hospital at Brazzaville. She was later awarded the Croix de Guerre and the Resistance Medal.¹⁵⁸

The exceptional war record of Éliane Brault (1895–1982) deserves special attention. Her accomplishments during the conflict came as a consequence of a lifetime of social action in response to the Great War when she shared in nursing the wounded and organized assistance to the families of fallen soldiers.¹⁵⁹ Widowed in 1918, shortly before the armistice, Brault lost her faith and turned instead to everything she could do to see that another world war never occurred. Her pacifism was guided by her second husband, Louis Gallié, a freemason who also encouraged Brault to join two adoption lodges in Paris, Union et Bienfaisance (1927) and Général Peigné (1930). She led the latter for three years as grande maîtresse (1932, 1934–36). She eventually joined two other progressive lodges. Throughout her subsequent efforts, Brault sought answers to questions arising from her masonry: “What places would be more propitious than the masonic temple for progress with regard to tolerance, sensibilities, ideas, in a mutual respect and a total equality of rights and duties? Where can one build with more passionate reason a feminine emancipation as preparation for a better future?”¹⁶⁰ She went on to publish newspaper articles on issues of specific interest to her—workers and women’s rights but also the Spanish Civil War—in no fewer than three regional newspapers. This work led her to join the journalists’ union, a step consistent with her participation in the Parti Radical and the Union Française pour le Suffrage des Femmes. When Léon Blum assumed leadership of the Popular Front government in 1936, Brault served the minister of commerce, Paul Bastid, by attending to the needs of youth, particularly those children who had been failed by social services under previous ministries.¹⁶¹

But it was World War II that, by necessity, moved Brault in a very different direction.¹⁶² Besides her masonic work, her parents’ Jewish origins put Brault and her two children in harm’s way. In October 1940 she lost her civil service job and anticipated worse. “My escape is summarized in a few words,” she wrote later. “To go from Paris to London, it took me four months, 7,000 kilometers and two prisons.”¹⁶³ Ultimately, Brault succeeded in reaching the Free French forces to join with other women the Auxiliaires Féminines de l’Armée de Terre, which she loyally served as a captain, assuming ever higher levels of responsibility for the rest of the war.¹⁶⁴ Her first assignment was to organize a nursing and medical assistance corps, some of whose staff she took with her on a circuitous trip to Cairo by automobile via French Equatorial Africa and then on to Beirut and Moscow. Her next important assignment was to assemble teams of assistants, better known as “Help Liaisons,” to ensure the proper care of prisoners and deportees attached to the Free French First Army Corps. When French forces moved from Algeria into Provence, she accompanied them all the way to Alsace and Baden, where she supervised “vacation colonies,” paid for by the Provisional Government at her request, for the children of refugees. Brault was made an officer in the Légion d’Honneur in 1947.165

As Eric Nadaud observed recently, Éliane Brault “deserves historians’ attention not only because of [her] different roles, but also because her story shares—to a degree yet to be evaluated—in the histories of the French political left, freemasonry, feminism, and the emancipation of women.”¹⁶⁶ Brault indeed embodies an ethos of selfless service, whatever the difficult circumstances of France’s civil society during two world wars and its politically troubled interlude. The issues she embraced—such as the welfare of orphaned children—and the network of associations she joined to address them—such as the Parti Radical’s advisory councils—are familiar ones in the period. For this social activist and still others like her in the first half of the twentieth century, female suffrage, a major step proposed by de Gaulle in 1944, actually represented just another stage in an enduring, cooperative effort to expand women’s rights in modern France.¹⁶⁷ After the war and the heroics of its female combatants, de Gaulle’s political gesture seemed anticlimactic to many more than the freemasons who had drifted away from this particular issue.

The woman suffrage campaign had struggled before World War II. An intense burst of activity on its behalf occurred in 1919, when the Chamber of Deputies at last proposed a law according women the vote. Three years later, the Senate failed to take it up, much to the dismay of the suffragists. “Long live the Republic all the same,” cried Maria Vérone, president of the Ligue Française pour le Droit des Femmes.¹⁶⁸ The mainline Union Française pour le Suffrage des Femmes found itself besieged by fourteen other rivals above and beyond the catholic-conservative Union Nationale pour le Vote des Femmes (in 1920), then by the confrontational La Femme Nouvelle (in 1934).¹⁶⁹ Meanwhile, the Senate ignored several more Chamber propositions broadening suffrage; one of them would have allowed women to participate in municipal and cantonal elections. Using ladies’ hatboxes as urns, La Femme Nouvelle’s Louise Weiss organized a parallel system for women to have their ballots counted. The town of Louviers went further and seated six duly elected females on its city council in 1937. By then the Popular Front’s Léon Blum had already named Cécile Brunschvicg, the grande-dame president of the Union Française, as his Under-Secretary of State for National Education. Weiss’s disdain for Brunschwicg’s putative compromise of principle—“I fought to be elected not to be appointed,” she sneered in perfect hindsight—reflected the less-than-optimal collaboration by suffragists.¹⁷⁰ Nothing more advanced the cause before war erupted in 1939.

It would appear that the delay in the vote for French women—fully twenty-five years after several west European states had granted it—occurred in spite of such a prolonged quest on the part of its beneficiaries. This stymied drive for reform begs analysis. Historians, like Siân Reynolds, Christine Bard, and Karen Offen, have already insisted that women were not to blame.¹⁷¹ From the perspective of freemason women who joined the rights movement earlier in the century, I would suggest, the relative lag may have owed not so much to the lack of direct action, the failure of leaders, religious or class differences, or the wrong strategy for eliciting the support of the Senate, as it did to a shift from one generation of women progressives to another. New groups stepped to the fore after the decisive legislative defeat of woman suffrage in 1922; the loss of élan in the Union Française seems to have invited competing societies to organize. But the last stage of the third sector’s historical elaboration may also have played a role.¹⁷² By 1918, if not earlier, the women’s rights movement entered a phase of bureaucratic and structural change, as was the historical norm for mature associations that attenuated much of their personal touch.¹⁷³ The distant leadership of established federations like the Conseil National des Femmes Françaises and the Union Française made decisions without much regard for the militants of their affiliated organizations. As historian Steven Hause has shown for suffragists before the Great War, their meetings drew the same tiny numbers.¹⁷⁴

Finally, there seems to have been an uncoordinated expansion of women’s collective attention from suffrage to other worthy causes. It certainly bears further study, as well. Women’s new, wide-ranging interests turned to various aspects of public welfare, international peace, communism, and antifascism, burning concerns in the period. Younger women at the head of many new societies, each one addressing different issues, felt reassured by the numbers of dues-paying members; but they had lost their more valuable resources, activists (not just freemason feminists).¹⁷⁵ The third sector accorded them a plenitude of opportunities, not a paucity; and the impact of women’s disparate efforts suffered accordingly. There was only so much social capital in the networks, at home and abroad, that these women could mobilize to achieve a profusion of objectives. From the interpretive perspective of A Civil Society, the result may have been a diminishment of social and political pressure on any one matter.¹⁷⁶ It was certainly not for trying. Freemason feminists (and their allies) had been better networked and more focused before the Great War; their frustration and disaffection between the wars thus arose from the liberalism of a regime whose political failure, thanks to intransigent men, bears ultimate responsibility for the undue delay of women’s rights in France.¹⁷⁷ Suffrage was merely one of them.

Early on, freemason women like Pelletier, Brion, and Avril de Sainte-Croix had been active in the suffrage crusade.¹⁷⁸ As a founding member of the Conseil National des Femmes Françaises, Avril de Sainte-Croix partnered with the Union Française pour le Suffrage des Femmes to drive home the issue with political friends in the Chamber of Deputies before and after World War I. But the repeated failure of the Senate to take it up led many sisters to turn to other causes of acute interest to them. Pelletier and Brion, but also Marianne Rauze and Marguerite Martin, joined the Parti Communist Français, a logical intensification of their longstanding socialist sympathies. Others like Marie Linval-Lantzenberg joined Brion in their ardent support for pacifism, while Éliane Brault and Rauze also became alarmed by the rise of fascism as a threat to world peace. Still other sisters disengaged from feminist activities almost entirely. Once a champion of emancipation, Alexandra David-Néel retreated to the study of Buddhism in the mountains of central Asia. It is unclear if Amélie André-Gedalge or Marie Bernard-Leroy ever worked for the vote, but in the interwar period they directed their energies toward masonic ritual and its symbolism. Consistent with French civil society otherwise at its best, freemason women exemplified the fullest range of activism long before World War II, which abruptly halted every initiative on behalf of women’s rights, including suffrage, for five brutal years. By then, however, the historic alliance between freemasonry and feminism had already paused for a host of other reasons, some of which were perhaps inherent to the limitations of the third sector itself whose associations had not yet become fully functional social institutions in France.¹⁷⁹