FROM INTERESTS TO WOMEN'S POLITICAL RIGHTS: BENTHAM'S UTILITARIAN THEORIES AT THE TIME OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

"How is it that the natural right to enjoy certain political advantages is limited to one of the two sexes which make up the human species?", wrote J. Bentham around 1789-1790 (Rights, representation and reform, p . 247). At the same time as Condorcet's plea in favor of the admission of women to citizenship, Bentham proposes in manuscripts written on the occasion of the Revolution arguments of identical scope. However, while Condorcet bases his argument on jusnaturalist postulates, the second constructs a demonstration based exclusively on utility and the representation of interests. Moreover, in Bentham, the reflection on the status of women extends to the examination of civil relations and the institution of marriage. For him, the revolutionary moment is an opportunity to re-establish, according to the principle of utility, the place of women in politics as much as the legal relations between the sexes. Published very partially during Bentham's lifetime, these ideas did not have the impact they deserved and remain largely unknown today. By comparing them with the contemporary projects of Condorcet, and by explaining how the Revolution allowed the crystallization of utilitarian ideas on the status of women in the family and in the city, this article places his radical project in the European movement of writings, people and ideas at the time of the Revolution and in the decades that followed.