"As I’ve said, there have been many names in the history of just the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that every little girl – and boy – should know, the women who blazed the trail for us today. As well as the countless anonymous workers and strivers behind them, of course. I’ve talked about Lydia Taft, Liberty Grey, LG Manders, Dame Eleanor Cross, just from our own fair shores. Elsewhere, Lady Rachel Russell, Horatie Bonaparte, Emilia Mendoza, Archqueen Henrietta Eugenie, from a handful of other countries. I could speak of others in China, or those whose fight was much longer and harder in Germany or Italy, those who never realised their dreams in the old UPSA before the fall.

But there is one name that everyone knows. Even a child who knows almost nothing else about France will recognise the name of Madame Héloïse Mercier, née Rouvier. (A little applause) Madame Mercier would have been a great trailblazer for Cythereanism even if her career had ‘only’ reached the heights of serving as Controller-General or Foreign Ministress. But she did far more than that. She was an elected female head of government in an age when that was unthinkable in most nations. Nor was she notable only because of her gender, because she shepherded France through a period of peril and change unlike any other. And, of course, she was instrumental in building the world order that we take for granted today.

Let’s not get ahead of ourselves, though, but start at the beginning. Héloïse Rouvier was born in 1868, two years later than her longtime nemesis Tsar Paul of Russia, whom she would long outlive. She was born into a political family, albeit not a major one, aligned to the National Party or ‘Verts’ who, at the time, were the major party on the doradist end of French politics. When Héloïse was growing up, the Verts were also the dominant party in the Grand-Parlement. The last government by their rival Diamantine or ‘Rouge’ party had ended in 1878, when she was ten. While she was studying for her university degree – another recent innovation for women in France – and helping her parents campaign, the Verts governed France under Prime Minister Jean Charpentier and then Charles de Saboulin.

Growing up, Héloïse’s political heroine and icon was Horatie Bonaparte, daughter of Napoleon Bonaparte – or Leo Bone as we often call him – and mother of a son named in his honour, Napoleon Leclerc, who was already a rising figure in the Verts. Horatie, as we’ve discussed, had been a great force fighting for Cytherean rights in France, and had been elected as a femme de robe to the Paris Parlement-Provincial, the highest office for which women could stand at the time (1870). Recognising this inspiration, Héloïse’s father Gabriel envisaged his daughter directly following in Horatie’s footsteps to become a femme de robe herself, but Héloïse had loftier ambitions. In 1891, de Saboulin’s government passed legislation that allowed women to be elected to the Grand-Parlement for the first time, as well as expanding the very limited female suffrage that had formerly existed.

The first woman elected to the Grand-Parlement was Fabienne de Gontaut in a by-election in 1892, followed by six more – five Verts and one Rouge – at the 1893 general election. Héloïse missed out then, being rejected for her youth, but then had an unexpected turn of luck when Rouge parlementaire Thierry Anciaux resigned only months later. Anciaux’s circonscription (we would say constituency) was the small city of Sens, Champagne Province. Few among the Verts thought the seat was winnable, as Anciaux had run a strong Rouge electoral machine there and de Sabolin’s government had just passed some unpopular tax laws. There was thus little appetite for prospective candidates to try for the race, leaving it open to the ambitious Héloïse.

Héloïse only had any campaign resources at all because of her parents’ influence, with the party organisation in Champagne Province seeing it as a lost cause. She was dismissed by Anciaux’s presumed Rouge successor, Pierre Lespiau, as ‘une jolie petite fille dans la robe de sa grand-mère’, referring to Héloïse’s practice of wearing the now-outdated ballon juppe dress in honour of Horatie Bonaparte. She retaliated by a broadsheet campaign using the slogan ‘Sens ou Non-sens?’ in which she attacked Lespiau’s lack of local connections and accused his policy positions of being against the economic interests of the people of Sens.

But it was not by a mere clever slogan, or by family connections, that Héloïse succeeded, but hard work, patience, leadership, and refusal to give up. She had luck and good fortune on her side, yes, when it began to emerge that Anciaux had not retired for health reasons, as he had implied, but to escape prosecution before an embezzlement scandal emerged. But that would not have been enough for the Verts to win the seat, if they had not already had a campaign infrastructure and fired-up volunteers in place to take advantage of the sudden, unexpected Rouge weakness. In the end, Héloïse was elected in a shock upset, at the age of just twenty-five. She had won over the people of Sens, and would continue to receive their support for the remainder of her long political career, despite party changes along the way. Remember that only one woman in five had the vote at the time, too, so she had been elected off the back of winning support from more male voters than female.

Three years later, the Pandoric War broke out. We are privileged that Héloïse was an inveterate diarist, and captured a record of her impressions throughout much of a chaotic century. Those diaries have now been released in an – almost – unexpurgated form. Of course, she has also exposed herself unintentionally to ridicule by doing so, by preserving the same misconceptions and poor predictions which we all make, recognisable only in hindsight. Her first impressions of her future husband were negative – of course they were, he was a senior figure in the opposing party, and would soon rise to lead it! Who could have truly predicted how the Pandoric War would have gone in those early days of madness? Let us not get sidetracked by such nonsense.

As you’ll be aware, France adopted a policy of armed neutrality during the war. Prime Minister Leclerc brought the opposition Rouges into a coalition government and appointed their aforementioned leader, Robert Mercier, as Foreign Minister. Héloïse, who had proved herself with tireless work on parliamentary committees, was effectively appointed as his deputy to keep an eye on him for Leclerc. When Mercier fell ill during the ‘Peace Flu’ at the end of the war, Héloïse had to negotiate directly with then-Tsarevich Paul, and the two became nemeses thereafter – though Paul seemed to think about Héloïse much more than the reverse. Héloïse also had to negotiate with the equally misogynistic Lodewijk de Spoelberch of Belgium.  She held her own and proved herself, and for that reason alone, became a target of jealousy and innuendo by men of lesser vision – and a few women. Invented rumours of an affair between her and Mercier circulated, and worse.

After the war, the coalition government broke and Prime Minister Leclerc needed a new Foreign Minister. Héloïse had impressed him enough that he wanted to promote her to the office, whose duties she had effectively already carried out when Mercier was indisposed. But prejudice and pressure led Leclerc to appoint Philippe Soisson instead, a lesser man whose tenure led, in part, to the failure of the IEF, which could have strangled Societism in its cradle. Angered and distressed by the lack of support from her party, Héloïse semi-retired from politics, crossed the floor to the Diamantines and began a relationship with Robert Mercier. Some have said she did so out of spite alone, but that, again, represents the words of her envious rivals. Sens re-elected her despite her party switch and marriage – at the time, it was considered an unspoken rule that while women could have jobs, married women were expected to terminate their careers to focus on their families.

Robert Mercier was a successful Prime Minister, but also prone to repeated bouts of illness, and – once again – Héloïse would often informally deputise for him. It was a similar arrangement, in some ways, to what we’d later see here in the Empire with Lilian Marley. Héloïse was certainly part of the ‘Mercier Mitigation’ policy that helped shore up French finances in the aftermath of the Panic of 1917, but also ended up hurting Pérousie and Bisnaga. She always retained some popularity in Pérousie, though, because she accompanied King Charles XI on a visit there in 1908 and made an impression the Pérousien people, inspiring women there to fight for representation too. Along with her husband, she had been instrumental in pushing through the 1914 settlement that gave representation to Pérousie in the Grand-Parlement. When Robert finally passed away in 1918, leaving Héloïse a widow with two children, Renée and Valéry, the King was so impressed by her that he encouraged the Diamantines to make her the first Prime Ministress then and there. However, aside from prejudice because of her gender, the Diamantine caucus was also rather suspicious of her as a former Vert who still remained on the doradist end of the new party. Instead, Camille Rouillard became Prime Minister, but Héloïse did rise to become the first female Controller-General. It is remarkable that this is technically the first ministerial office she officially held – everything prior to it had been informal deputising!

The Verts returned to power under Cazeneuve in 1920. When the first phase of the Black Twenties conflict broke out in 1922, Cazeneuve approached Héloïse in opposition and asked her to be his Foreign Ministress as part of a war coalition. Héloïse saw it as a potentially poisoned chalice, knowing that Rouillard and Vincent Pichereau would not follow her and it would split the Diamantines. She would also be painted as a serial traitor. However, both a desire to do the right thing and an ambition to finally be recognised for her work at the Tuilleries inspired her to agree. By doing so, she inadvertently set the first pebbles of the avalanche in motion that would lead to the destruction of a French party system that had endured for more than seven decades.

At the end of the war in Europe, that party system crumbled. Politics in France had become defined by one’s support or opposition to the continuation of the war in the midst of the plague pandemic, with formerly defining economic questions falling by the wayside. Héloïse was effectively the leader of the pro-war Rouge faction in coalition with Cazeneuve’s dwindling pro-war Vert faction, while on the opposite side, Vincent Pichereau of the anti-war Rouges now plotted to team up with Roger Marin’s anti-war Verts. Both sides adopted a coupon election strategy in which selected candidates would be endorsed on the basis of their war positioning, regardless of their pre-war party membership. With Cazeneuve caught offguard – and this being presented by Héloïse’s enemies as another example of her alleged ‘serial backstabbing’ – French politics would now be dominated by the division between the pro-war Saphirs, as they became known, and the anti-war Rubis. This would become an ancestral distinction important long after the war itself retreated into memory.

When you read about this in history books, the writers often act as though the parties had just transformed overnight. That’s not the case. Both sides were still extremely loose alliances of people who had been in bitterly-opposed, mutually incompatible factions before the war. Héloïse was a good manager of her party, especially with help from her right-hand man Alain Orliac, but both she and Pichereau could not rely on a solid majority in the way that the pre-war parties had. A government in a seemingly-comfortable position could unexpectedly fall when certain factions withdrew their support over a crucial bill without warning. It is important to understand this when seeing how volatile and unstable French politics were in the Electric Circus era, with governments rarely lasting a full term before fresh elections were called.

Pichereau managed to lead a Rubis government from 1926 to 1929, at which point it collapsed and Héloïse was swept to power – helped, according to some, by a certain Cytherean incident at the Paris Technological Expo just before the election. France’s first female Controller-General, her first Foreign Ministress, had now become her first Prime Ministress. It was an extraordinary rise. Some say Héloïse is not a good role model for girls because she came from a privileged family with political connections. But that is, as she might say, Non-sens. Yes, those advantages helped give her a shot at the Grand-Parlement, but everything else was her own work. She certainly faced more opposition than a male politician from a poor background in this era would have. Her success and popularity survived multiple occasions of burning bridges with her original party and all the connections it brought. Nor was her rise meteoric; it required years of patient hard work, and being unrecognised for much of it, before she reached the highest elected office in the land. At the age of sixty-one, she was the first elected female head of government of a major country in the history of the world.

Nor was her first term in power an easy one. Héloïse inherited a growing crisis in both Pérousie and Bisnaga…"

What does the French in this text mean?