[10][13] She stood on a platform demanding civil rights for women, campaigned against the damage that alcoholism caused amongst the working classes, and against child abandonment.

She argued that French women should not "be taxed in a personal capacity, either directly or indirectly, as a duty must always have as its immediate corollary the exercise of a right".

[16] In April 1912, she wrote an article based on personal research in which she put forward the hypothesis of Jean-Baptiste Lully's Picard origins.

[18] In Le Journal of 26 December 1912, the journalist Fernand Hauser wrote: "Feminists have sometimes claimed that Congress can elect a woman; this is a mistake.

[19] Marie Denizard decided to take up the challenge and announced it to Hauser, who interviewed her and published her photograph on the front page of Le Journal on 4 January 1913.

Denizard pointed out that there had already been female heads of state, citing the historical examples of the regents of the kingdom of France, alongside Empress Catherine the Great of Russia and Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom, as well as contemporary examples of Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands and Grand Duchess Marie-Adélaïde of Luxembourg.

The least sympathetic of them was the editorial writer Jean Ernest-Charles, who considered Denizard's "childish and ostentatious candidacy" and "compromising antics" akin to the British suffragettes, whose campaigns for women's rights he branded as "sickly eccentricities" attributed to "hysteria" caused "by too long a celibacy".

[20] Although she did not give Denizard much attention, Jane Misme's La Française journal was more sympathetic to this "simple demonstration of principle", which "achieved its propaganda goal", and stressed that the candidate was "a zealous and serious feminist".

[26] Denizard's financial situation became precarious, and she could no longer pay the rent on the flat she and her mother occupied in rue Lavalard in Amiens.

[32] In 1926, at the request of the police commissioner of the Odéon district, Denizard was hospitalised for delusions of persecution and demands, the psychiatrist concluding that she had a complex psychosis.

[37][38][39] On 20 May 2024, as part of the Journées du matrimoine (Heritage Days), a plaque in memory of Marie Denizard was unveiled at Pontru town hall.