Her name may not mean anything to you, and yet millions of French women have one thing in common with Julie-Victoire Daubié: they have obtained their baccalaureate.
This woman, born in 1824, was the first to have passed the exam for the precious sesame, in 1861, at the age of 37.
The fruit of a long struggle, which pushed her to overcome all the obstacles in her path, to then become a sociologist and economic journalist, among others.
Officially, Julie-Victoire Daubié became “bachelor” on August 17, 1861, the word not yet being used in the feminine form.
At the time, no one had considered for a single moment that this national diploma, established half a century earlier by Napoleon, could one day reward a woman's educational achievement.
While we are currently celebrating the bicentenary of her birth, notably with the issue by the Post Office of a stamp bearing her image, Julie-Victoire Daubié remains one of the great pioneers of the fight for female emancipation.
Recognized throughout Europe and the United States, translated into English, she notably corresponded with George Sand, Marie d'Agoult and Alexandre Dumas fils.
Refused in two exam centers
“We live in a social environment where women will only get what they are able to take,” she wrote in one of her essays.
The youngest of eight children in a lower-middle-class family, Julie-Victoire Daubié then chose to apply her maxim to herself.
Even as a child, she assiduously attended her school in the Vosges, later perfecting her skills with her older brother, a priest, who taught her Latin and Greek.
The one the whole family called Victoire even passed, at the age of 20, a “certificate of competence”, the key to teaching.
In the 1860s, the young woman noticed that the law did not prohibit women from taking the baccalaureate exam.
So she left to get her diploma.
But its modernity clashed with the conservatism of the time and it had to endure successive refusals from the University of Paris and the rector of Aix.
“So you want to ridicule my ministry!
», even choked up the Minister of Public Education, upon receipt of his request.
His perseverance ended up paying off with the Lyon academy, which however had him take the exam in a room separate from the men.
Pioneer for women's right to vote
Julie-Victoire Daubié had to wait six months to receive the diploma - with, it is said, a helping hand from Empress Eugénie - but she preferred to salute the "impartial benevolence" and the "generous sympathies" encountered in his quest for the Grail.
However, she did not stop there: although courses at the Sorbonne were forbidden to women at the time, nothing prevented them from taking the exams.
In 1871, Julie-Victoire Daubié became the first woman to obtain a degree in literature.
Also read: “Voting was progress for all of us”
She then embarked on a doctoral thesis on the condition of women in Roman society.
A work that remained unfinished because the pioneer died at the age of 50, on August 26, 1874, from tuberculosis.
As soon as the Republic was proclaimed in 1870, Julie-Victoire Daubié also launched the Association for Women's Suffrage and wrote to the authorities to request their registration on the electoral lists.
His final fight until his death.
It then took 70 years for the right to vote to be granted to women in France, in 1944.