The erotic republic : dynamic exchanges between politics and sexology in the French Third Republic

La Gueuse (the whore), in right-wing propaganda descriptions of the Third Republic, was not merely a symbol or sign standing for some otherwise unrelated object, rather 'she' was deemed to contain that object's attributes, standing for it because of a similitude of contentimpoverished, decadent, debased, defiled. She was an evocative imaginary medium. This chapter explores the way in which such metaphoric representations of sexuality and gender, in relation to political ideology, operated throughout the period from the end of the nineteenth century until the outbreak of the Second World War. Such evocations worked not merely in symbolic and iconographic terms, but as interreferential, dynamic, and hyperbolic colligative mechanisms that both imbued ideological aspirations with erotic charge, and problematized modern women's place in the nation.