Jules Valles and Severine Romantic Socialism and the Afterlife of a Cross-Sex Friendship in French Political Culture, 1880-1929

French political culture had a postrevolutionary tradition that considered gendered Ciceronian or fraternal friendship crucial to maintaining ideological movements across time inside the nation. The brief cross-sex friendship between Jules Valles (1832-1885) and Severine (nee Caroline Remy, 1855-1929) has served as a biographical footnote to an 1871 Communard and a Dreyfusard journalist. This article frames the Valles-Severine social relation as a fraternal friendship that ideally secured Valles's political posterity and strategically empowered Severine to publish opinions as a woman. Valles self-consciously transferred his legacy of barricade-driven, romantic socialism to Severine. Severine, in turn, attempted to invoke Valles's heritage in an effort to protect her published opinions as a woman without civic rights. The Valles-Severine friendship was a paradoxical social relation that revealed how two historical actors subverted gender norms and the limits of a cross-sex fraternal friendship inside a liberalizing French political culture.