André Léo (1824–1900) was a French novelist and feminist, born Léodile Béra, who took part in the Paris Commune. Her writing was closely bound up with the social upheavals of nineteenth-century France and with the question of women's emancipation; her representative work is La Guerre Sociale (The Social War). Public information about her is limited, and many details of her life can no longer be established with certainty. Judging from the works that survive, however, she habitually interwove political debate with personal destiny, using fiction to carry her critique of social injustice and her concern for the condition of women. This orientation toward literature as engagement with reality gave her a place in the social movements and the tradition of women's writing of her time, and offers later readers valuable textual evidence for understanding the intellectual life of French women during the Paris Commune.
