Philatelic document - Hubertine Auclert

Hubertine Auclert 1848-1914 Hubertine Auclert was a militant feminist, the first French suffragist. In 1873, she left her native Bourbonnais for Paris after reading a letter by Victor Hugo denouncing the iniquity of the condition of women, excluded from citizenship under the Revolution, deprived of their civil rights by the Napoleonic Code, exploited in the workplace and despised. She set herself apart by presenting the right to vote as the keystone of all other rights. In her journal La Citoyenne, organ of the Le Suffrage des femmes society, she uses the term "feminist" to designate those who fight for gender equality. In it, she denounced the incompleteness of a democracy that excluded women from national representation. "No duties without rights, no rights without duties", she chants. Disdainful of sarcasm, she imagines actions with high symbolic impact to raise public awareness. Prevented from registering to vote, she refuses to pay her taxes: "I don't vote, I don't pay. After a stay in Algeria, where her husband had been appointed justice of the peace, she returned to France, wrote a weekly column for Le Radical and reconstituted her group. She multiplied her petitions and propaganda, distributing feminist stamps and calling for the feminization of the French language. In a bold move, she organized the autodafé of the Civil Code during the centenary celebrations; burst into a polling station to overturn the "urn of lies", earning her the sobriquet of "French suffragette"; and ran in the 1910 legislative elections. Auclert succeeded in putting suffragism on the political agenda, but French women would not win the right to vote until 1944, thirty years after her death.

Timbre-poste (taille-douce) : création et gravure Sophie Beaujard d'après photos Bibliothèque Marguerite Durand, Paris, France © Leonard de Selva/Bridgeman Images, © Keystone France/GAMMA RAPHO, © Xosé Bouzas / HANS LUCAS. Document philatélique : création Sophie Beaujard d’après photos Bibliothèque Marguerite Durand, Paris, France © Leonard de Selva/Bridgeman Images, « vignette philatélique dessinée par L.Mangin et gravée par H.Wullschleger, 1906 » © Leonard de Selva / Bridgeman Images. Cachet d’oblitération : création Sophie Beaujard d’après photo © Keystone France/GAMMA RAPHO. Texte : Nicole Cadène.