Why so few great Frenchwomen on the left?

Self Portrait, Vigée Le Brun

As I mentioned below, the Socialist president of France is looking to honor a great Frenchwoman in the government's Panthéon in Paris. The frontrunners are said to be Olympe de Gouges and Germaine Tillion, whose names don't exactly ring bells.

A reader points out that my nominee -- Joan of Arc -- wouldn't fly because the Panthéon is the Left's shrine, and St. Joan is a saint. Thus, three obvious giants -- Descartes, Pascal, and Pasteur -- can't be in the Panthéon because they were Catholics.

Still, you would think that the French Socialist government would be able to come up with a better list than Gouges and Tillion. After all, in contrast to most cultures around the world, the French have long celebrated the feminine element. Paris (or Versailles) has been the dream destination for women for hundreds of years. The reason the Statue of Liberty is of a woman is because she's French.

But, numerous famous Frenchwomen (e.g., Coco Chanel) can't be admitted because they weren't on the Left. The number of famous women in France during the Occupation who had admiring German officers as their protectors is a long one. (It even includes Gertrude Stein.)

This shortage of great Frenchwomen on the Left is not a coincidence. The question may have first been raised by Louise Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun (1755-1842), court painter to Marie Antoinette. She is usually considered the greatest female artist of her age, the John Singer Sargent of her time. Vigée Le Brun lived a long life, much of it in exile, and met everybody in Europe.

As an ardent royalist, though, Vigée Le Brun is ineligible for Pantheonization.

In her memoirs in the 1830s, she pointed out that after the stable, hierarchical 18th Century in which women at the top of society had flourished (think of the great salons that intellectual Frenchwomen had kept in Paris), the Revolution of 1789 had much strengthened the masculinist element within European culture -- politics and war came to the forefront, and women's concerns were depreciated. The new era was one where the dominant impulses were neoclassical rather than rococo, Beethoven rather than Mozart, David rather than Vigée Le Brun.

Mentioning the historic role of Parisian salons reminds me of the single most mysterious and fascinating thing I've ever read about the social history of Silicon Valley. With the media world currently up in arms about Twitter being run by stale pale males, it's worth recalling Jaron Lanier's 2011 reminiscence:

There were precious few girl nerds at the time. There was one who programmed a hit arcade game called Centipede for the first video game company, Atari, and a few others. There were, however, extraordinary female figures who served as the impresarios of social networking before there was an internet. It still seems wrong to name them, because it isn't clear if I would be talking about their private lives or their public contributions: I don't know how to draw a line.  

These irresistible creatures would sometimes date alpha nerds, but mostly brought the act of socialising into a society where it probably would not have occurred otherwise. A handful of them had an extraordinary, often unpaid degree of influence over what research was done, which companies came to be, who worked at them and what products were developed.  

That they are usually undescribed in histories of Silicon Valley is just another instance of what a fiction history can be. The advent of social networking software and oceans of digital memories of bits exchanged between people has only shifted the type of fiction we accept, not the degree of infidelity.

Anybody know who he's talking about?

I'm a complete outsider, so I probably don't know at all. Among public figures, I'd probably guess Esther Dyson (physcist Freeman Dyson's daughter) and Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen (daughter of Silicon Valley land baron John Arrillaga and wife of web browser inventor / venture capitalist Marc Andreessen), but, presumably, some of the women Lanier are referring to are unknown to nobodies like me.