Vive la Carla!

After publishing an open letter in support of Sakineh Ashtiani (the Iranian woman sentenced to death by stoning for supposedly committing adultery), Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, the wife of French president Nicolas Sarkozy, was vilified in an Iranian newspaper as a “prostitute” who “deserves to die.” To Westerners, such a brazen insult to the wife of a head of state staggers the mind. To those traditionalist Iranians who believe a good society rests on men controlling women’s sexuality, however, it would make total sense. With her multiple affairs, a history of a modeling career that includes nudity, and her public declaration that she is “easily bored with monogamy,” Bruni-Sarkozy is the ultimate example of modern, free womanhood. Maybe something was lost in translation, but it seems that our clear distinction between Bruni-Sarkozy’s somewhat extreme form of liberated female sexuality and the behavior of a prostitute would never move any Iranian conservatives.

There’s an uncanny connection in all of this to Montesquieu’s Persian Letters (1721), the extraordinary, brilliant and witty epistolary work of fiction that satirizes contemporary French mores while simultaneously exploring deeply serious questions about the nature of justice, law, the existence and nature of God, the meaning of freedom and happiness, and—in what’s relevant here—the way the eternal struggle between the sexes manifests itself so differently according to how much women are controlled or to what extent they are free.  Much of Persian Letters is preposterous, especially the imagined life in a seraglio. But like all great fiction, the book gives us a feel for the truth. By inventing two Persian characters who travel to Paris for an extended visit, Montesquieu gives us Westerners a means of seeing ourselves from the outside.

Persian Letters centers on Usbek and Rica, two friends who leave their home in Persia in 1711 and come to Paris, where they end up staying for eight years. Reading their many letters to and from a variety of friends and family back home, and sometimes back and forth with one another, or, in Usbek’s case, back and forth with the eunuch left in control of his harem of five wives, we observe them struggle to come to terms, each in his own way, with what, in their eyes, are the radically strange customs of the Europeans. 

Usbek is a traditionalist who believes that to keep a family intact, men must exercise strong control over women. In Persia, this means secluding wives in the seraglio and preventing them from coming into contact with any men other than their husbands. Deeply repulsed by the behavior of almost all the emancipated European women he encounters, he nevertheless feels guilt at having come to Paris, reneging on his husbandly duty to tend to the sexual and emotional needs of his five wives.

In writing to his favorite wife (who, in his absence, becomes miserable), Usbek reminds her that she should be grateful for her loneliness. “Roxana, how fortunate you are to be in the sweet land of Persia, and not in these polluted climates, where modesty and virtue are unknown! How fortunate you are! In my seraglio you can live as though you were in the home of innocence…” (Letter 26). Later in the same letter he observes, “The women here have lost all restraint,” and asks, “But what am I to think of these European women?  Their skill in making up their faces…the trouble they take over their personal appearance, and the desire to be attractive that continually preoccupies them, simply detract from their virtue and are an affront to their husbands.”

Rica, on the other hand, proves more open in his response to European women. In Letter 38, he ponders the question of justice toward women, writing, “It is a great problem for men to decide whether it is more advantageous to allow women their freedom, or to deprive them of it.” He goes on to consider whether men are superior to women by nature, agreeing with an unnamed philosopher who said, “Our power over women is mere tyranny.” Rica writes, “We [men] use all sorts of methods to reduce their courage.” Rica becomes so open to the idea of women’s freedom that he writes that “although it runs counter to our way of thinking…among the most civilized nations, wives have always had authority over their husbands.” Yet even the free-thinking Rica ultimately recoils from his ruminations and returns to his own customs and beliefs: “The Prophet has decided the question, and defined the rights of each sex. Wives, he says, should honor their husbands; their husbands should honor them also, but have one degree of advantage over them.”

In a million years, Usbek never could have understood a Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, but Rica? It’s unclear if even three centuries would have been enough for him to understand such a woman, but at least he showed possibility. Carla Bruni-Sarkozy spoke not from any platform of female virtue, but from the modern platform of complete female freedom—a Western-style freedom that clearly scares a whole lot of men in Iran.