ABSTRACT

M. Pierre-Etienne Flandin, committee spokesman. Gentlemen, to attempt to demonstrate, to an Assembly composed exclusively of representatives of the male sex, that the strict application of the democratic principles on which the Republic is founded from now on requires the granting of political rights to women might seem to be foolhardy. The fact is that our predecessors and ourselves have demanded these democratic rights, which we even think our public laws have incorporated, without our institutions until now granting any voting rights to women. In France, demands for universal suffrage up to the present have been limited to demands for male universal suffrage, and it seemed to our predecessors that to have extended the right to vote to male electors, even infirm and illiterate males, sufficed, and that there was no need to enfranchise women . . .