Juliette Adam (1836–1936)

Juliette Adam was born in Picardy to a bourgeois French family. She later wrote about her unhappy childhood before her 1852 first marriage as a teenager to Alexis La Messine, a physician and government official with whom she moved to Paris. There she established her career as a serious writer with her rebuttal of the socialist Joseph Proudhon’s anti-feminist position with her "Idees antiproudhoniennes sur l’amour la femme et le mariage" (Anti-Proudonist Ideas on Love, Women and Marriage, 1858), written in support of Daniel Stern -- pen name of Marie d’Agoult -- and George Sand. During her second marriage to the French senator and journalist Antoine Edmond Adam, Juliette created a prominent salon, hosting men and women of letters, artists, and politicians such as the Italian nationalist Leon Gambetta. A champion of Republicanism, in 1879 she started and edited the magazine La Nouvelle Revue and also wrote more than 50 novels. Her 1917 book The Schemes of the Kaiser was a bestseller and was published worldwide. It led to her being perhaps the only woman present on June 28, 1919 at the ceremonial signing of the Treaty of Versailles ending World War I. Her seven-volume autobiography continues to be highly regarded today.