women and the french revolution

Gender & Hisfory ISSN 0953-5233 Joan B. Landes, ‘Women and the French Revolution’, Gender & Hisfory, Vo1.6 No.2 August 1994, pp. 281-291

Women and the French Revolution

JOAN B. LANDES

Suzanne Desan, Reclaiming the Sacred: Lay Religion and Popular Politics in Revolufionary France (Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1990), pp. xviii + 263, $33.50. ISBN 0 8014 2404 6.

Christine Faurk, Democracy Without Women; Feminism and the Rise of Liberal individualism in France, tr. Clauda Gorbman and john Berks (Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1991), pp. viii + 197, $23.96. ISBN 0 253 32155 7.

Olwen Hufton, Women and the Limits of Citizenship in the French Revolu- tion: The Donald G. Creighton Lectures 7989 (University of Toronto Press, 1992), pp. xxvi + 201, $35.00 and $16.95. ISBN 0 8020 5898 1 (hb) and 0 8020 6837 5 (pb).

Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (University of California Press, Berkeley, 1992), pp. xvi + 214, $20.00 and $12.00. ISBN 0 520 07741 5 (hb) and 0 520 08270 2 (pb).

Elisabeth Roudinesco, ThProigne de Mkricourt: A Melancholic Woman during the French Revolution, tr. Martin Thom (Verso, London, 1991), pp. xi + 284, f39.95/$34.95; in paperback as Madness and Revolu- tion: The Lives and Legends of Theroigne de M6ricoufl (1992), f 12.95/$18.95. ISBN 0 86091 324 4 (hb) and 0 86091 597 2 (pb).

The bicentenary of the French Revolution has occasioned an ardent revival of interest in the role of women during the Revolution. Whereas women figured prominently in the narrative histories of the nineteenth century, they are nearly absent from the more ‘scientific’, analytical, even discursive histories of the twentieth century (Marxist and revisionist, Annales and post- Annales). It i s almost as if these historians, like the revolutionaries themselves, were seeking to secure their own legitimacy by repudiating the feminine aura of their predecessors’ work. In contrast, scholars who came of age in the women’s movement of the last few decades have begun to retell the stories of female actors-the Queen, Theroigne de Mericourt, Charlotte Corday, Olympe de Gouges, Madame Roland, market women, women of the sans-culottes, and religious women-within a more complex investigation of gender as a central category of revolutionary and counterrevolutionary 0 Basil Blackwell Ltd. 1994, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 I J F , UK and 238 Main Street, Cambridge MA 02142, USA

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politics. Insofar as the Revolution has been regarded as the founding event of modern politics, each of these books contributes to an ongoing exploration of the place of gender equality in modern, liberal democratic regimes. Likewise, they raise the question of how religion and women’s presumed attachment to ‘traditional’ religious hierarchies and practices intersect with the gendered organization of a secular, non-traditional society. These works are written by sociologists and psychoanalysts, as well as social historians and theoretically inclined ‘new cultural historians’, and therefore vary in their methods and conclusions.’ The deviations among them mark the contours of the emerging scholarship on culture, politics, ideas and gender in modern France.

Of this group, Christine Faure is least interested in the Revolution as an event. Her account of French arguments for women’s rights concludes, rather than begins, with the Revolution and its immediate aftermath. Faure takes a somewhat surprising approach to her subject, emphasizing the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries instead of the recent past. Democracy Without Women is best appreciated, first, as a strong brief on behalf of liberalism’s contribution to the rise and vitality of feminism in France; second, at least in the AngleAmerican context, as an attempt to disrupt the ahistorical impression of French feminism readers may derive from literary, philosophical or psychoanalytically-inclined authors such as Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, Helene Cixous, Michele Montrelay, and Monique Wittig. Despite French liberalism’s general political lapses, and concerning women in particular, Faure argues that feminism is best understood as the product of philosophical liberalism, not socialism. She attacks socialism for its ‘re- ductive critique‘ of liberalism (p. 10) and aims to sever socialism’s connec- tion with a philosophy of rights and human liberties. Originally published in 1985, this book contributes to ongoing efforts by post-Marxist, former ‘dix-huitards‘ to displace Marxist discourse in France. Perhaps most contro- versially, Faure opposes the (socialist-like) ’internationalist’ convictions of humanist and Enlightenment philosophy, defending liberalism’s role in the project of nation-state building and advocating a national culture approach to feminist study. Without fully confronting the difficulties this poses for a feminist philosophy of rights, she acknowledges that ‘feminism was not just a secular republican movement or a pacifist one; it was also patriotic and religious’ (p. 11).

Faure’s effort to restore faith in liberal feminism involves nothing less than the invention of a durable liberal past in France. This project may not reson- ate as strongly in an AngleAmerican context, given our own strong liberal heritage. Faure’s method is that of a sociologically oriented history of ideas. The book’s dense early chapters, laden with unfamiliar references to primary texts, authors, and historical debates, may pose a further difficulty for English- language readers. However, the book has the merit of introducing an English- language audience to the early modern continental discussions of women’s place, and to the French intellectual, religious, and political contexts for E Basil Blackwell Ltd 1994

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these debates: absolutism, neo-platon ism, classicism, reformation and counter- reformation Christianity, humanism and enlightenment philosophy. By far the most successful chapters are those on the Enlightenment and the Revolu- tion where Faure summarizes the contradictory legacy of liberal democratic theory and practice on the topic of female equality. By demonstrating the failures of modern legal structures, philosophical liberalism, and democracy, Faure adds an appreciation of the tension between equality and difference in modernity. Rather than offering solutions, however, she merely exhorts ’the increasing number of women in France’s political structure . . . to resolve’ these contradictions (p. 135). Like so many other French and post- modern theorists, Faure registers a strong ambivalence to reason, without explaining how that can be reconciled with a liberal philosophy or politics: ’Once the vehicle to which women attached their hopes for political equality during the struggle against power and the authority of tradition, it later became the principle on which their exclusion was based’ (p. 131).

In The Family Romance of the French Revolution, the distinguished historian, Lynn Hunt, invites her readers to a bold journey beyond the more familiar territories of revolutionary historiography into the ’psychosymbolics of the Revolution’. In her previous book, Politics, Culture and Class in the French Revolution, Hunt introduced linguistic approaches to the study of revolutionary politics. Here, she probes further the cultural and psychological dimensions of politics. From Freud and Rene Girard, Hunt fashions a concept of the ’family romance’ to explore ’the psychosexual meaning of fraternity in revolutionary symbolics’ (p. 13). What counts are all manner of creative efforts to re-imagine the political world unhinged from the old patriarchal authority after the revolutionary ’brothers’ kill the fathedking and then return to shape a powerful new social organization: the revolutionary fraternity in which men were restrained from incest with mothers and sisters. Hunt’s sources are wide-ranging: novels of a pornographic, sentimental or romantic persuasion; plays; paintings; engravings; family laws; and the press. Hunt aims to chart ’the operations of power, and the ways in which the imagination shapes and is in turn shaped by political and social processes’ (p. 8). She offers a probing analysis of the relations between parents and children, men and women, brothers and sisters. By way of a methodo- logically bold and theoretically innovative investigation, Hunt moves gender -in its deepest manifestations-to center stage in revolutionary historiography. She views art and politics as activities animated by common, not separable, imaginative processes.

Hunt writes convincingly of the manner in which eighteenth-century French novelists and painters helped to undermine the authority of the patriarchal regime, and articulated a deeply experienced anxiety about the relationship between family and state obligations. She reads cultural artifacts through the lens of Northrop Frye’s literary genres, as depicting initially the comedic movement to a new society, next the degradation of the comic image of the good political father of 1789-92, and later the romantic dream

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of heroic fraternity among forever-youthful brothers. Hunt argues that radical iconography between 1792 and mid-1794 instantiated a new family romance of fraternity wherein brothers and sisters- mothers rarely, and fathers almost never-held sway. In this context, she offers a compelling analysis of the trial and execution of the king, focusing on the tensions which revolutionaries experienced between forgetting and commemorating (the death of the father), feeling and rejecting guilt (in the context of the Terror), and implementing democratic equality through popular sovereignty and practicing a cult of dead heroes (in the radical republic). In an absorbing chapter on the Queen, she relates prerevolutionary and revolutionary attacks on Marie-Antoinette to the growing notion ’of a woman-man as monster’ that came to dominate much of male revolutionary thinking about women in the public sphere (p. 91). In the extreme charges against the Queen, especially incest, Hunt finds evidence of what Girard calls a ‘de- differentiating crime’: making a scapegoat an appropriate victim for the community’s violence. Thus Marie-Antoinette plays a crystallizing role for what was an implicit, often unconscious, republican gender drama after patriarchy, custom and tradition were abandoned as justifications for authority in the state or the family.

Hunt concludes by recounting efforts, beginning before Thermidor and climaxing in the Napoleonic Code, to ’rehabilitate’ the family. She surveys some familiar material on the legal reversals affecting women and children. Yet she argues that the newly reconstituted family differed importantly from its patriarchal forerunner, above all in the role assigned to fathers. The new father was a rightful head, but he was expected to be a nurturing, not a tyrannical figure; mothers were accorded greater value; and children became iconic figures for the new society. By tracing the implications of the political invasion of virtually every aspect of life, Hunt disputes those who see the past as a seamless patriarchy. She underscores how the claims of liberal individualism during the Revolution led to a rejection of Old Regime patriarchal family organization. As a result of revolutionary family legislation, primogeniture was abolished, fathers granted autonomy to their children, daughters and sons had equal rights of inheritance, and wives as well as husbands could sue for divorce. However, these reforms in the civil law introduced further paradoxes concerning the status of women, some of which remained even after the Napoleonic reversals: ’Women had been incorporated into the new civil order, they were civil individuals under the law; but they had been excluded from certain political rights, with no evid- ent explanation‘ (p. 202). Hunt appears to side here with Faure, though without the latter’s polemical strain, and against feminist authors Carole Pateman and Joan Wallach Scott, whom she charges with reducing liberalism to a masculinist victory. In contrast, she insists on liberalism’s contribution to feminism: ’The exclusion of women was not theoretically necessary in liberal politics; because of its notions of the autonomous individual, ’- Bdril Blachwell Ltd 1994


liberal political theory actually made the exclusion of women much more problematic‘ (p. 203). indeed, Hunt sees the emergence of domestic ideology in France as a political and cultural response to the need to justify systematically the continuing exclusion of women from politics, ’while they were admitted to many of the legal rights of civil society’ (p. 203). Hunt’s exploration of the psychological, even unconscious dimension of political processes, and her acknowledgement of the forces mobilized against women, warn against an overly sanguine conclusion.

In Theroigne de Mericourt: A Melancholic Woman during the French Revolution, psychoanalyst Elisabeth Roudinesco recounts a chastening tale of the interlocking fate of feminism and revolutionary modernity, cast ineluctably through the fateful lens of one particular woman’s mental illness. Theroigne’s life is indeed a fascinating one. Born in LiGge, she passed in adulthood, following her seduction and betrayal by an English officer, from her childhood home to the life of the demi-monde in London, Paris, and Italy. Infatuated from the start with the Revolution, Theroigne moved to Versailles where she attended the sessions of the Assembly. When the Assembly moved to Paris in October 1789 she established a salon, enter- taining such men as Sieyes, Petion, Brissot, Desmoulins, Barnave, Cloots, the poet Chenier, and the mathematician Gilbert Romme. Just as quickly, Theroigne became the object of royalist attacks. In image and text, the royalist press described her as the people’s lover, the patriots’ whore, a female war-chief, escalating their attacks on her and on republican liberty as a form of sexual debauchery. Theroigne moved among such men as Romme and Condorcet who shared her views on civil and political equality for women. Between January 1791 and August 1792, Theroigne returned to her native country to support the patriot forces, only to be abducted by counterrevolutionaries and imprisoned at Vienna before winning release from the Emperor Leopold himself. In papers from Theroigne’s Viennese period, Roudinesco reads signs of her subject’s developing melancholic illness, even of what Hunt would term ‘the family romance’: her powerful investment in the Revolution as a therapeutic family to substitute for the real family she lacked.

Upon her return to Paris, Thkroigne gravitated to the Girondins, sym- pathizers with the cause of women’s rights and now advocates of war; ThCroigne called publicly for the formation of phalanxes of amazons. Roudinesco traces the beginnings of patriotic attacks on women to this context of political division among the republican forces. Theroigne’s ‘warrior feminism’ soon became the object of lampoons (resembling those by royalists) in the republican press. From this point forward, moreover, Roudinesco suggests how Theroigne began to merge with ‘the simulacrum which had been devised to represent her’ (p. 981, even dressing in amazon costume. Roudinesco places Theroigne’s personal drama in the context of women’s growing militancy and the response that this generated among republican and royalist men. She describes a series of public humiliations

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suffered by Theroigne: misogynist attacks; accusations of madness, murder- ousness and (venereal) disease; climaxing finally in the public whipping which she suffered in front of the Convention at the hands of sans-culotte women in May 1793, halted only by Marat who shielded her from the women’s fury. In spring 1794, Theroigne passed from the machinery of the Terror, through a definition of legal madness, into a permanent condition of ’asylum dementia‘. Roudinesco rejects firmly the often-repeated charge that the Revolution produced her madness, arguing instead that ‘the Revolution had “carried” Theroigne’s madness to such a degree that it had effectively masked it’ (pp. 150-51 1. In 1797 Thkroigne was transferred to the great hospice of the H6tel Dieu, and in 1799 she entered La Salp&ri&re where, but for a brief stay elsewhere, she died in 181 7.

Roudinesco interprets Theroigne in several, often overlapping, contexts from her era down to the present: the birth of feminism during the Revol- ution as a response to the conditions of women in the Old Regime; Theroigne’s own efforts to fashion an identity in a revolutionary context which opened up radically new possibilities for political action and feminine performance; the construction of her madness during her incarceration and after her death by founding members of French psychiatry; and her post- humous life as a legend in post-revolutionary narratives of female excess and revolutionary hysteria. Roudinesco blends biography and history, submitting history to psychoanalytic questions and psychiatry to a historical analysis. The result is an unusually rich account of the destructive significations attached to politically active women in the modern era, and a penetrating reading of Theroigne’s life and ’madness’. Roudinesco resists the temptation to present Theroigne as pure female victim, assigned to the asylum for her revolutionary excesses and violations of normative codes of femininity. Rather, she addresses her subject’s victimage without dismissing the suffering Theroigne experienced because of her illness. This book is about the act of representation and its resulting chain of representations, about readings and mis-readings, by a psychoanalyst who has delved deeply into the archival and historiographical sources. Roudinesco closes with an ambiva- lent appreciation of the post-1 960s scholarship dedicated to the ‘rehabil- itation’ of women of the Revolution on the basis of the actual sources. She regrets the loss of al l the former ‘radiance of her legend’ which disturbed and inspired audiences in former times: ’Nowadays, it is rare indeed for a writer to place Theroigne at Versailles, at the head of a squadron of “proletarian amazons”, or to describe her, in hackneyed terms, as a “priestess of Eros, who, for want of a lover, became the mistress of liberty”’ (p. 235).

Olwen Huf’ton‘s Women and the Limits of Citizenship in the French Revolution originated as a series of lectures delivered at the University of Toronto in 1989. Claiming to be an empirical historian, Hufton i s at pains to distance herself from theory and theoretically informed history. Tutored by Alfred Cobban and Richard Cobb, she brandishes her professional 0 Basil Blackwell Ltd 1994


training as a social historian. This book synthesizes other writings on the topic (primarily nineteenth-century works, along with those of English revisionists), as well as her own (1971) article on revolutionary women and her former research on the political economy of poverty in the eighteenth century and the role of the Church. Nonetheless, Hufton claims to be an ‘empiricist’, discomforted by ’grand claims about the changing nature of women’s lives which have surfaced during the bicentennial year when political discourse became the sovereign preoccupation’ (pp. xvii -xviii). She exhorts her fellow historians to engage in writing about the ’actual experi- ence of real women’, being ‘conscious of the demarcation between theory and what actually happened’ (p. xviii).2

Does Hufton, then, tell us what did actually happen? How does she explain the role of ideas? What counts for evidence and sources? The book consists of chapters on revolutionary women (mainly urban Parisian women of the popular classes), the position of women in the shift from Old Regime charity to revolutionary institutions of social welfare, and counterrevolutionary women (mainly peasant women). Hufton views women in revolutionary politics from the perspective of her earlier work on ‘the engendered crowd’, an Old Regime phenomenon in which bread riots were often initiated and led by women, transformed during the Revolution into a more pro-active and political than simply reactive and economic phenomenon. Following Suzanne Peterson, she describes female sans-culottes as engaged in vigilant market practice that blended traditional notions of moral economy with democratic principle (p. 39). As against Roudinesco or Faure, Hufton barely pauses to mention the arguments for women’s rights or their advocates, dismissing the limited impact of certain clubs for their failure to address ’issues in ways understandable to the majority of Parisian women’ (p. 24). In her estimation, issues of philanthropy or bread rather than rights-least of all political rights-were and remained the most important questions to the female populace. Gender relations are not a major theme in Hufton’s work, except insofar as women are portrayed as the victims of revolutionary legislation and cultural or economic reform. However, she vividly recounts by now familiar events from the storming of the Bastille and the October Days to the final crowd actions of Germinal and Prairial, as well as the emergence in 1793 of the Club of Revolutionary Republican Women. Although her bibliography and notes indicate an awareness of the recent outstanding work on these topics by Dominique Godineau, Harriet Apple- white and Darline Gay Levy, Hufton fails to engage substantively with their evidence or arguments. Indeed, her overriding goal is to replace their captivating portrayals of militant revolutionary women with what she deems to be the dominant figure of the age, counterrevolutionary woman: peasant, Catholic, and anti-republ ican.

Without any careful evaluation or reconstruction of the sources, Hufton rifles freely through literature and political thought for influential intellectual positions. Complex arguments appear in her text with such names as



Rousseau’s ‘Sophie’, Diderot’s ’Suzanne’, or Isabelle de la Charriere‘s ’Caroline‘. Similarly, she extrapolates a portrait (or ‘type’) of ‘the sans-culotte woman’ from police reports, records of revolutionary clubs, sections and the gutter press (in her own words, the results of ‘masculine reportage’); and she constructs another figure, labeled ’the counter-revolutionary woman from the Haute Loire’, based on provincial archival sources and her own earlier work on the French Church (pp. 19, 11 3).

Hufton repeatedly invokes ’the evidence’, yet her references to sources are irregular. Her portrait of the sans-culotte’s wife, down to her ’ugly face’, is drawn from Hebert’s P&e Duchene, but without any specific referen~e.~ A paragraph later, Hufton moves to a series of general claims about all such women: ’The evidence would suggest that her political ambitions were ambiguous and may have varied enormously. There is no evidence to suggest that the overwhelming majority of women had any political pretensions on their own behalf on the issue of the vote’ (pp. 21-22). This is not an implausible view, but Hufton does not make her case in terms of the evidence; she merely asks that we accept her authority on a body of evidence with which she is presumably acquainted. Moreover, Hufton offers little methodological advice on how to deal with the problems of biased or selective sources. In fact, she is most excercised by this issue when forced to rely upon Jacobin reports that do not conform to her own preconceptions about rural women as staunch adherents of Catholicism. Hufton holds to a manichean view, allowing no room for a syncretic mix of republicanism and Christianity, even when the evidence points in that direction. Likewise, she alleges repeatedly that women are non-violent, despite instances of women’s participation in violent actions against property or calls for violence by men. She states confidently that women with young children were not part of the revolutionary crowd, but never asks whether the crowd’s composition may be an artifact of who was actually arrested by the police and hence who appears in the archival records. Perhaps women with small children, especially those with husbands or fathers to whom the authorities might transfer ’authority’, are absent from police documents because they were granted greater leniency than the very young and women over fifty.

Hufton‘s argument is with republican men, their institutions and their history. She aims to rescue from their clutches a Catholic, counterrevolutionary, rural woman-the unjustly victimized, irrational woman whom republicans believed to be the ignorant supporter of the papacy and the clergy. There is considerable merit in Hufton’s effort to redress the anti- feminine (and anti-feminist) legacy of French republicanism and to address the feminization of religion. However, just as republicans erred in portraying women as enemies of the republic, she errs by casting nearly all women as counterrevolutionaries. Without documentation, she writes of urban women returning to the Church out of guilt, and rural women (presumably never having been tempted by republican values) suffering no guilt in their embrace of Christianity (p. 123). She even posits that Catholicism may be the 6 Basil Blackwell Ltd. 1994.


ideal form of cultural feminism (p. 149). She leaves readers thinking that post-revolutionary, modern France was an increasingly religious society. So it i s something of a surprise when we learn from Hufton that France was becoming instead more secularized. Unlike Suzanne Desan, she offers no real explanation for this phenomenon; nor, unlike Hunt, does she evaluate the meaning of actions by counterrevolutionary women to return in the years 1796-1801 to the ‘hallowed . . . structure of family life’ (p. 130). Hufton certainly argues strenuously for the ‘limits of citizenship in the French Revolution’ and for the Revolution’s many failures. What is missing in this work are reasons why countless women and men might have welcomed the Revolution as a vehicle for the achievement of rights and freedoms in the social, political, religious, or economic domain.

Suzanne Desan’s Reclaiming the Sacred offers a welcome corrective to Hufton’s work. Her nuanced and captivating account of politics and religion in the revolutionary era adds enormously to our understanding of female activism in the religious revival that accompanied the freeing of popular culture from clerical control and gave the laity the opportunity to revive traditional popular practices suppressed under the Catholic Reformation. Desan examines the effect of gender on religious expression, female leadership in religious riots, and the long-term influence of the revival movement on the feminization of religion. In place of a one-dimensional counterrevolutionary woman, Desan underscores the complexity of Catholic women’s response to revolutionary politics, religious faith and forms of public worship. Focusing on the department of the Yonne to the southeast of Paris, Desan selects for study a region that was both prorevolutionary and religious in the 1790s, influenced earlier by the Catholic Reformation, Jansenism, and popular devotional practices, yet dechristianized in modern times. Demon- strating a thorough command of the historiographical and archival sources, Desan shifts the focus away from the much studied (but not altogether repre- sentative) traditional counterrevolutionary regions of France. The Yonne was characteristic of the vast heartland of France which did not witness large-scale, violent resistance to the Revolution, and most of its population welcomed its early phases.

In the towns and villages of the Yonne, Desan discovers novel forms of political activism and religious change whereby lay Catholics ‘adapted and created new rituals to respond to the Revolution’s challenge to traditional religious assumptions, social structure, and community identity’ (p. 121 1. She finds women in the forefront of the religious revival in 1794 and 1795: leading religious riots, dominating attendance at lay assemblies, even per- forming in public the private rituals of the Old Regime, such as saying the rosary or singing hymns. Sometimes mounting to the altar to lead each other in worship, they rarely sang white masses but instead drafted a male lay minister to celebrate the church’s established rituals. Desan argues that lay cults did not ‘cause’ de-christianization: rather, ‘they expressed a curious

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2 90 Gender and History

mixture of religious fervor and detachment from the clergy . . . [the danger- ous ’lai’cisme’] made it easier to drift gradually away from regular practice’ (p. 121).

Desan directly challenges the common assumption that Catholics inevit- ably adopted counterrevolutionary attitudes. On the contrary, she finds that many Catholics ’actively participated in revolutionary politics and, above all, reinterpreted the meaning of revolutionary ideology to accord with their traditional religious assumptions and their demand for public worship’ (p. 123). In this way, the principle of liberty came to mean the freedom of religious worship, and lay Catholics actively canvassed their communities to gather signatures on formal petitions. They used the ideology of popular sovereignty at the grass roots to lend greater authority to their local (not national) and communal cause.

Women carved out a sphere of cultural influence as the dominant leaders of goal-oriented religious riots, thereby winning power and identity. They took direct and coercive action to reclaim and defend the sacred spaces, leaders, objects, and especially rituals of their faith. ’They might assemble en masse to demand church keys, defend a priest from arrest, or prevent the demolition of an outdoor cross’ (p. 168). Women participated in, though they were less likely to initiate, less explicitly religious violence (collective action which erupted on the occasion of Catholic celebrations, especially saints’ festivals) or Catholic attacks and mockery of the symbols and sup- porters of revolutionary cults. Whereas Catholic men as legal citizens could use the petition, the vote, and the village assembly, women more often resorted to direct and illegal actions. Furthermore, they were accorded greater leeway than men in collective action by authorities who believed women to be more gullible and hysterical by nature, a point which helps to explain certain women’s absence from Hufton’s revolutionary crowd. Desan also relates women‘s leadership of religious riots to their traditional role as leaders of grain riots and defenders of community, networks of female sociability within the village, and their stronger attachment than men to the public practice of Catholicism. Religion legitimated the potential spiritual value of those without earthly power and simultaneously provided women with an earthly arena for collective activism, initiative, and voice in the larger community. In other words, while women may not have anticipated a radical increase in rights and power under the Revolution, by creating both personal and collective forms of piety they were able to express their autonomy and self-worth even within the patriarchal structures of the village community. To that extent, they struggled ’to return religion to the public realm‘ (p. 209). In the process, women’s spirituality led them to take a more public religious role than before the Revolution, and infused religious actions with political importance.

In women’s role in religious violence, Desan finds the roots of the sexual dichotomization of religious practice in the nineteenth century noted by Hufton. Whereas the Revolution opened unprecedented outlets for men‘s

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political participation, women’s continuing exclusion from political structures reinforced their subordinate social position and channeled their participation toward unofficial or illegal means. Women were encouraged to turn to religion to find identity, friendship, consolation and meaning that men sought elsewhere. Desan shares Hufton’s reservations about the revolutionary stereotype of Catholicism as i ts natural, counterrevolutionary enemy. However, she adds that ’in their fervor to construct a new world, [revolutionaries] underestimated the resiliency and flexibility both of Catholicism and of their own revolutionary discourse . . . [and] oversimplified the con- nections between religion and politics‘ (p. 228) . Syncretism was one vital avenue among many within the complex, multi-layered change in culture and politics that the Revolution achieved.

These studies add immeasurably to an ever more complicated picture of women’s role in the revolutionary era and of the impact of the Revolution on women’s public and private lives. Together, they make a compelling case for the dynamic and historically constituted interconnection between gender and politics, though some women’s historians would confine their task to the empirical reconstruction of women’s behavior in the past. On balance, these books make a compelling case for the fruitful interaction of theory and evidence, and show the enormous benefit of cross-disciplinary approaches to historical inquiry.

Notes

1. For an important perspective on this development, see Lynn Hunt’s introduction to The New Cultural History, ed. Lynn Hunt (University of California Press, Berkeley, 1989).

2 . Certainly, not all members of the historical profession share Hufton’s overly confident empiricist approach. Nor does Hufton take note of the debates on these questions among historians. In addition to Hunt and the contributors to The New Cultural History, those who are engaged in rethinking the mutual interaction of history and theory, or the ‘linguistic turn’ inside history, include John Toews, Dominick LaCapra, Hayden White, Natalie Zemon Davis, Keith Baker, Roger Chartier, Martin Jay, Alan Megill, David Harlan, and Joan Wallach Scott.

3. Hkbert’s journal was only one of some half-dozen publications based on this char- acter, though it was the longest-lasting and most influential of this group of publications. Yet, it was less the expression of an individual author than the successful adaptation of a generic formula employed by numerous writers. As Jeremy Popkin establishes, the Pere Duchgnes ‘were a collective product not of the Parisian sans-culottes themselves but of journalists who sought a formula for addressing and representing the poorly educated common men and women of the revolutionary decade.’ Jeremy Popkin, Revolutionary News: The Press in France 7789-7799 (Duke University Press, Durham and London, 1990), pp. 151 -52.


women and the french revolution

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