François Poullain de la Barre

François Poullain de la Barre (də la baʁ; July 1647 – 4 May 1723) was an author, Catholic priest, and a Cartesian philosopher. François Poullain de la Barre was born on July 1647 in Paris, France, to a family with judicial nobility. He added "de la Barre" to his name later in life. After graduating in 1663 with a master of arts, he spent three years at the College of Sorbonne where he studied theology. In 1679, he became an ordained Catholic priest. From 1679 to 1688, he led two modest parishes, Versigny and La Flamengrie, in Picardy in northern France. In 1688, Poullaine de la Barre left Picardy and the priesthood to return to Paris. At the time the Catholic Church was critical of Cartesianism. By 1689 he moved to Geneva where he converted to Calvinism, a branch of Protestantism. The following year, he married Marie Ravier. After a year as a tutor, he got a position teaching at a local Genevan university. After the Edict of Fontainebleau revoked the Edict of Nantes, he was exiled in the Republic of Geneva, where he obtained the citizenship (bourgeoisie) in 1716. He spent the remainder of his life in Geneva, where he died on 4 May 1723. During a physiology conference in 1667 a friend of Poullain de la Barre introduced him to Cartesianism, the philosophy of René Descartes. Poullain de la Barre later adopted the philosophy and applied Cartesian principles to feminist thought and wrote many texts of social philosophy which denounced injustice against woman and by the inequality of the female condition. He opposed the discrimination women experienced and championed social equality between women and men. Six years after his introduction to Cartesianism, Poullain de la Barre published a three part series on the female condition. In 1673 he published On the Equality of the Two Sexes: A Physical and Moral Discourse, Which Shows That it is Important to Rid Oneself of Prejudice, which argued that the difference between men and women goes beyond the body, but is in the "constitution of the body".