ABSTRACT

This chapter discusses the genre choices of female writers of political fiction in 1930s France as a means of ideological legitimization. It explains the interwar texts of Louise Weiss. The chapter compares Weiss's autobiographical project with her fiction and her journalism in order to analyse how she used different genres to construct herself as a political subjectivity. It aims to identify the relationships between gender, exclusion and legitimacy which emerge from Weiss's inter-war writing and from her retrospective reconstruction of her experience of inter-war France. From 1920 until 1934, Weiss was the director of L'Europe nouvelle, a respected centre-left political journal which published critical and other documents relating to international politics. Weiss believed that she could realize her Republican and European ideals through journalism, that good and responsible journalism could make world peace achievable, and that the identity of the journalist therefore constituted a viable political identity.