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PARIS — Sandrine Rousseau had simply prompted an implosion in French politics, once more.
Within the final moments of a tv program earlier this fall, she was requested about an inner investigation into the chief of her personal political social gathering, the Greens, and his romantic relations. She didn’t dodge the query.
“I believe there was habits that was more likely to shatter ladies’s psychological well being,” stated Ms. Rousseau, 50, a self-described “ecofeminist,” a philosophy that mixes ecological issues with feminist ones.
Her phrases had a swift affect: Radio and tv reveals lit up in debate, and Julien Bayou stepped down because the Inexperienced Social gathering’s chief per week later, whereas denying he had emotionally abused a former accomplice.
“Earlier than, we spoke solely about rape, and after we talked about sexual aggression and harassment. Now, I believe we have to discuss psychological violence as a result of many ladies are victims of psychological violence. It’s a type of domination,” Ms. Rousseau stated just a few weeks later, in her small parliamentary workplace outfitted with a mattress, for lengthy nights when debates rage on within the Nationwide Meeting, the decrease and extra highly effective home of Parliament, to which she was elected this yr.
“It’s the subsequent battleground,” she added.
Few had ever heard of Ms. Rousseau earlier than final yr. However she has not too long ago turn out to be a brand-name in France for her penchant for leaping into the nation’s fierce tradition wars on a number of fronts.
She has positioned herself as one of many predominant torchbearers of the #MeToo motion in France.
And after a summer time of scary warmth waves, forest fires and file droughts, she has additionally all of a sudden turn out to be the nation’s loudest champion of preventing local weather change.
Her newfound prominence stems partly from her confirmed potential to spin off one attention-grabbing concept after one other, which her ideological followers and opponents alike discover irresistible.
Amongst her statements which have delighted, or infuriated, a lot of France: “The precise to be lazy.” That she lived with a “deconstructed man.” And “now we have to vary our mentality in order that consuming a barbecued entrecôte is not an emblem of virility,” a line that underscored her view that meat consumption should be diminished to assist struggle local weather change, and that males eat extra meat than ladies.
The intentional provocations are a part of a technique, she says, to wrest the themes of the nation’s ongoing cultural battles from the controlling thumbs of the far-right, which has fueled debates on safety, immigration and the perceived risk of Islam to French society.
“We’ve been swept alongside by the best and excessive proper who’ve set the questions of political debate,” stated Ms. Rousseau, a skilled economist and a former college vp. “I see my position to vary the controversy and convey it to ecology and feminism.”
Ms. Rousseau has turn out to be a favourite goal of the nation’s political proper, who paint her because the humorless face of self-righteous, American-influenced cancel-culture and “le wokisme.” A parody account poking enjoyable of her has greater than 130,000 followers.
The feminist thinker Élisabeth Badinter on Twitter described her as desirous to “burn every thing,” whereas the chief of the far-right social gathering, Jordan Bardella, stated on Fb that she “embodies a radical insanity.”
Her rising fame and resolution to denounce Mr. Bayou have made her unpopular in her personal social gathering as properly, the place many think about her unruly, divisive and a distraction.
Ms. Rousseau has been on the heart of a political and media storm earlier than.
In 2016, when she was the Greens’ spokeswoman, Ms. Rousseau and three different feminine politicians publicly accused her highly effective social gathering colleague, Denis Baupin, of sexually harassing them. A Paris prosecutor closed the case, as a result of the incidents the ladies described fell exterior the statute of limitations. In any other case, the prosecutor stated, the info of the case “would possible represent prison actions.”
A choose later threw out Mr. Baupin’s defamation lawsuit, as an alternative sentencing him to pay a 500 euro effective ($523) to every of the defendants.
Some French feminists thought-about it a landmark win, and a brand new stage of the struggle towards sexual violence.
“It was a precursor of the #MeToo motion,” stated Geneviève Fraisse, a French feminist thinker. Earlier than, French ladies had talked about their particular person experiences, and now they had been exposing a pattern, as a bunch. “That was the set off that turned every thing the wrong way up,” Ms. Fraisse added.
However Ms. Rousseau didn’t really feel profitable on the time.
Greater than a yr earlier than the #MeToo motion swept the globe, the case left her feeling battered by criticism and deserted by her social gathering colleagues, a few of whom she believed had turned a blind eye to the sexual harassment for years, she stated.
“After I checked out my political social gathering, I noticed it as a patriarchal group, the place males had the facility,” she says. “It was a brand new sort of violence.”
She left politics and returned to northern France to concentrate on her job as vp of scholar life and a professor-researcher at Lille College.
She wrote a guide about her expertise with the Baupin case and launched a company referred to as En Parler, or “Talking Out,” to convey collectively victims of sexual violence.
Ms. Rousseau was not born a rabble-rouser. The daughter of two tax inspectors from a small city within the southwest of the nation, she was a bookish little one who needed to be ripped from homework for dinner and “by no means prompted us any issues,” stated her father, Yves Rousseau, who was additionally the city’s Socialist mayor.
She studied economics in faculty. For her postgraduate diploma, she labored with a group group preventing a plan to chop down a neighborhood forest to make approach for a lodge. Her contribution, as an economist: calculating the value of the forest, if it remained a forest.
The lodge mission was canceled, she stated, including: “It was my first activist motion.”
She married one other economist on the college. After having three kids, they turned their educational eyes to the supply of their marital preventing: the division of cleansing duties.
The paper they wrote collectively revealed that males spend one-third the time of ladies on family chores; the analysis later turned the inspiration for Ms. Rousseau’s argument that “not sharing family chores” must be made unlawful.
The method turned a part of a sample: Her arguments are sometimes obtained as outlandish, however are primarily based on educational analysis — together with a feminist sensibility that the private is political.
“There’s little area between what she defends and what she feels. Typically they’re intimately linked — that’s her approach of doing politics,” stated Nicolas Postel, a longtime educational colleague.
She was in her kitchen making lunch at some point in 2020, nonetheless working on the college, when she heard on the radio that President Emmanuel Macron had named Gérald Darmanin the nation’s inside minister, some of the highly effective positions within the authorities.
On the time, Mr. Darmanin was below investigation for rape. In his new job, he can be in command of the nation’s police forces, which feminist activists already thought-about dismissive of rape and sexual assault reviews.
“It was a slap, a spit within the face of the ladies’s motion,” Ms. Rousseau stated.
When Mr. Macron later defended the appointment, saying he had spoken to his new inside minister “man to man,” Ms. Rousseau determined to run towards him within the 2022 presidential election because the Inexperienced social gathering candidate.
“That stated, ‘The world of ladies doesn’t depend. That girls are exterior of this recreation right here, they will say what they need, however it’s of little significance, actually,’” she stated of Mr. Macron’s feedback.
(A choose dismissed the rape case towards Mr. Darmanin final summer time; the plaintiff has appealed that call. Mr. Darmanin has by no means been charged.)
Within the race for the presidential nomination, Ms. Rousseau offered herself as the novel, ecofeminist candidate and, to the shock of many, misplaced solely narrowly to Yannick Jadot. She later ran as a Inexperienced candidate in final June’s parliamentary elections, profitable a seat in Paris. But there are indicators that Ms. Rousseau’s ecofeminism and culture-war ways should not supported by the majority of her social gathering’s members.
“She makes a buzz. That’s how Sandrine Rousseau has acquired such an enormous media viewers with none official put up within the social gathering,” stated Daniel Boy, a retired analysis director at Sciences Po, who specializes within the politics of the environmental motion. “Will that change issues? I doubt it. Altering folks’s values is lengthy, chaotic and tough.”
Nonetheless, there’s little doubt that Ms. Rousseau continues to occupy an outsized place within the French creativeness.
Final month, her claims that members of the French soccer group had been “cowards” who had not taken a symbolic stand for L.G.B.T.Q. rights on the World Cup in Qatar made information throughout the French press.
She believes she is seeding the nationwide dialog towards ideas anchored in respect — of ladies, and the atmosphere.
“There are essential questions being requested, that at any given second, will convey modifications,” she stated. “But it surely may be too early.”
Tom Nouvian contributed analysis.
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