Carving their names in stone

Date: 24/09/1998

They are a pretty bloodthirsty lot, our Green friends in the Parliament. They may be kind to animals, but their taste in historical heroines will certainly raise some eyebrows.

Responding to a Parliament initiative to name its many buildings in Brussels, Luxembourg and Strasbourg after prominent Europeans, the Greens came up with an all-female list.

To be fair, they had been provoked into their feminist stance by Christian Democrats who had unself-consciously put forward an all-male list including such worthies as Jean Monnet, Konrad Adenauer, Paul Henri Spaak and Winston Churchill.

In reply, the Greens suggested the German Communist Rosa Luxemburg, the Russian and French feminist revolutionaries Alexandra Kollontai and Marie Olympe de Gouges and the Byzantine princess at the Carolingian court Theophanu. Their presence overshadowed contemporary nominations like Petra Kelly, the co-founder of the German Greens and Simone Veil, president of the first directly elected Parliament.