WI: Napoleon emancipates women

What if Napoleon shortly after becoming emperor had given women equal rights?
How would others react and what effects could it have assuming that Napoleon still loses?
 
Forget this what if which has as much credibility as Pope Pius VII naming women as priests.

Napoleon was a conservative corsican of his time. He edicted a civil code which made women almost perpetual legal minors.
 
I should have probably posted in asb thread, well suppose something changes early in his life that makes him have different views on women.
 
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Suppose something changing in the life of the king of Saudi Arabia ?

No way.

He was not alone. He governed a a socially conservative country.
 
Talleyrand might have supported the idea, but I think not Napoleon.

Would equal rights mean equal responsibilities, too? As in, being drafted into the armed forces?
 
Talleyrand might have supported the idea, but I think not Napoleon.

Would equal rights mean equal responsibilities, too? As in, being drafted into the armed forces?

I think not but it could have been interesting. It could be made so that women would be excluded from conscription but volunteers would be accepted.
 
Would equal rights mean equal responsibilities, too? As in, being drafted into the armed forces?
I could just possibly see that being a reason for Napoleon to, in desperation, try this. It would never work, of course, even if French women do in a fit of anachronistic feminism show up to fight - but that's what they said about the levee en masse, too!

But then, this isn't the ASB forum, so I'll shut up on the Rise of French Feminism TL.
 
Talleyrand might have supported the idea, but I think not Napoleon.

Would equal rights mean equal responsibilities, too? As in, being drafted into the armed forces?
Tallyrand of all people? Hardly. When once asked, if ladies wouldn't make good diplomats he answered: "Never. Why? Well, if a diplomat says 'yes' he means 'maybe', if he says 'maybe' he means 'no' and if he says 'no' he is not a diplomat worth his money. If on the other hand a lady says 'no', she means 'maybe', if she says 'maybe' she means 'yes' and if she says 'yes', she's most definately not a lady."
 

Anaxagoras

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Agreed you would have to change Napoleon's entire personalty to even make it a possibility.

Yeah, it's like when people ask "What if Hitler hadn't been anti-Semitic?" If you posit PODs around the personality and character of a historical figure being radically different than they are IOTL, then you have to assume that the course of that person's life is radically different than it was IOTL. If we turn Napoleon into some sort of pseudo-feminist progressive, he will never do most of the things he did IOTL, which derived largely from having a forceful personality that valued order and authority above all else.
 
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