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Women in the French Revolution
BA (Hons.) History
University of Delhi
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Marisa Linton
Women as Spectators and Participants
in the French Revolution
Was the French Revolution only concerned with the
rights of man? his article explores how women created
a space for themselves in revolutionary politics. Some
were eyewitnesses who gave perceptive accounts of
dramatic moments of the Revolution. Others became
active participants, determined that the Revolution
should be truly universal and address their own
concerns.
Women and Revolutionary ideology
he principles of the French Revolution were set out in the 8Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen9 which in theory promised liberty and equality to all sections of society. But how far did the Revolution fulill this promise? his article traces the participation of women in the French Revolution, both as spectators and as active participants. It shows that women had a very diverse response to revolutionary politics, and that their varied experiences in turn throw new light both on the signiicance of the Revolution and the extent to which the gains of the Revolution extended beyond the world of aluent white males. Women9s experiences of the French Revolution were as varied as the women themselves. Noble women from the privileged world of Versailles, educated women of the middle classes, peasant women from the Vendée, silk weavers from Lyon, market women from Paris: all had very diferent responses to the Revolution. Many women were active participants in the Revolution: marching and protesting on the streets, debating in societies, viewing the proceedings of the assemblies and clubs from the public galleries, and writing pamphlets. Liberty, equality and fraternity were the founding principles of the Revolution. But should these principles apply to women as well as men? Some commentators thought they should.
Linton
Nevertheless many male revolutionaries were ambivalent about the idea of women playing a prominent role in revolutionary politics. Women achieved a number of social and civil rights during the Revolution, including the right to equal inheritance and the right to divorce on equal terms with men (though the later right was partially dismantled under Napoleon and removed altogether when the monarchy was restored). hey were given 8passive9 rights as citizens, and the protection of the law. hey did not, however, gain political rights, and were never accorded the status of 8active9 citizens. he extent to which the active involvement of women in politics was acceptable continued to be a contested subject throughout the period of the Revolution. 1 he diferent experiences of women in the French Revolution have implications for the very nature of the Revolution, and make us reevaluate what the Revolution was about. Revolutionary ideology was founded on the belief that active participants in the Revolution should be motivated by their political virtue, that is, by their selless dedication to the public good. Traditionally political virtue was a quality associated with men, but many women, both as observers and as activists, did not accept the idea that they themselves were incapable of political virtue. On the contrary, they saw themselves as virtuous citoyennes, with a clear capacity for devotion to the public good. he voices of such women can be particularly illuminating about the nature of revolutionary politics. Men who were active in revolutionary politics were oten constrained by their ambitions, by their desire for a career or empowerment in revolutionary politics, and therefore their need to conform to prevailing ideologies and rhetoric. Women observers did not have to toe the line in the way that their ambitious male counterparts were frequently obliged to do. Because women could not hope to be deputies in the assemblies, or to hold oicial roles in administrative posts, they could be more at liberty to voice their views, to say what they really thought, and even to challenge some of the underlying assumptions of revolutionary politics. There was a long-standing tradition of hostility towards women participating in politics. his stemmed largely from hostile perceptions of the role of women in old regime court politics. Women at court, such as the
1 On the involvement of women in revolutionary politics, see Dominique Godineau, Citoyennes tricoteuses: les femmes du peuple à Paris pendant la Révolution française (Aix: Alinéa, 1988); and Sara E. Melzer and Leslie W. Rabine, ed., Rebel Daughters: Women and the French Revolution (Oxford: Oxford Univesrity Press, 1992).
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to seven thousand women seized the initiative and marched on Versailles to demand the king9s capitulation to the will of the National Assembly and his acceptance of the 8Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen9. hese were women from the poorer quarters of Paris and their principal demand was for bread; but they were also marching to defend the political goals of the preceding summer. Several hours later the men of the National Guard arrived to give the women their support. Louis XVI was obliged to capitulate and the royal family was brought back by the crowd to Paris in triumph. his was the irst of many occasions when women took an active role in the political struggles of the Revolution. Such women provoked ambivalent and even hostile responses from many observers of the educated classes, even those sympathetic to women9s rights. Wollstonecrat, though a strong supporter of the principles of the Revolution, described the women who marched on Versailles as 8the lowest refuse of the streets, women who had thrown of the virtues of one sex without having power to assume more than the vices of the other 6 In this judgement she sounded surprisingly close to Edmund Burke, whose bleak assessment of the Revolution in his Relections on the Revolution in France (1790) she had so robustly contested in her A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790). After the king9s capitulation in the October Days, the traumas of 1789 subsided, and it seemed to most onlookers that the Revolution had succeeded. For many observers the Revolution at this time appeared as the fulilment of Enlightenment ideas of cosmopolitanism and universal rights, acknowledging no boundaries of wealth, skin colour 3 or gender. One of these observers was the young English poet, Helen Maria Williams. She went to France to see the Revolution unfold at irsthand, and for the rest of her life made France her home. he irst anniversary of the fall of the Bastille was celebrated by the Fête de la Fédération, a vast public festival during which people of all social ranks joined together in a moment of fraternity and fusion. In her letters Williams described the scenes. For her it was a deeply emotional deining moment that ixed her identiication with the Revolution: 8You will not suspect that I was an indiferent witness of such a scene. Oh no! this was not a time in which the distinctions of country were remembered. It was a triumph of human kind; it was man asserting the noblest privileges of
6 Wollstonecrat, An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution, 343.
Women as Spectators and Participants of the French Revolution
his nature; and it required but the common feelings of humanity to become in that moment a citizen of the world. For myself, I acknowledge that my heart caught with enthusiasm the general sympathy; my eyes were illed with tears; and I shall never forget the sensations of that day &9 7 Williams9 English compatriot, Mary Berry, who visited the National Assembly in October 1790, took a much less favourable view. She compared the Assembly with the British Parliament, and was unfavourably impressed by the dishevelled look of the French deputies: 8heir appearance is not more gentlemanlike than their manner of debating 3 such a set of shabby, ill-dressed, strange-looking people I hardly ever saw together; our House of Commons is not half so bad 8 The early stages of the Revolution were a time of great hope for change and this was relected in the degree of popular participation and mobilisation. In September 1790, Olympe de Gouges wrote a 8Declaration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne9. Why, she reasoned, should the universal rights proclaimed in the 8Declaration of the Rights of Man9 not apply to women also?
8Man alone (in nature) has raised his exceptional circumstances to a principle. Bizarre, blind, bloated with science and degenerated 3 in a century of enlightenment and wisdom 3 into the crassest ignorance, he wants to command as a despot a sex which is in full possession of its intellectual faculties; he pretends to enjoy the Revolution and to claim his rights to equality in order to say nothing more about it 9 his argument met with little response; most revolutionary women did not take a speciically feminist perspective of their situation but were content to put their energies into the broader revolutionary initiative. Some of the popular societies and clubs set up in Paris and other towns to promote education and political discussion admitted women. hese women were avid to learn; here they were taking their irst steps towards political experience. Some male revolutionaries eyed this transformation
7 Helen Maria Williams, Letters Written in France, eds. Neil Fraistat and Susan S. Lanser (this edition: Ontario: Broadview Press, 2001), 69. 8 J. M. hompson (ed.), English Witnesses of the French Revolution (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1938), 98. 9 Cited and translated in Darline Gay Levy, Harriet Branson Applewhite, and Mary Durham Johnson (eds), Women in Revolutionary Paris, 1789-1795: Selected Documents (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1979), 89.
Women as Spectators and Participants of the French Revolution
his race have triumphed 11 Despite her ideological opposition to the principle of hereditary monarchy, she found herself pitying the king in his plight. She was a courageous woman, but the experience shook her:
8I cannot dismiss the lively images that have illed my imagination all the day & once or twice, liting my eyes from the paper, I have seen eyes glare through a glass-door opposite my chair, and bloody hands shook at me. & My apartments are remote from those of the servants & I wish I had kept even the cat with me! 3 I want to see something alive; death in so many frightful shapes has taken hold of my fancy. 3 I am going to bed 3 and, for the irst time in my life, I cannot put out the candle 12 he outbreak of war between Britain and France in February 1793 made the position of British nationals such as Wollstonecrat and Williams more precarious. hough Wollstonecrat stayed in France throughout the period of the Terror, she let Paris and kept a low proile, away from the tumultuous events in the capital.
Revolutionary Politics Through the Eyes of Madame Roland
Madame Roland played a leading role in revolutionary politics, both as the wife of the Minister of the Interior, Jean-Marie Roland de la Platière, and as the hostess of a political salon. 13 She irst founded this salon as a meeting place for the radical Jacobins; and later, when she and her husband had fallen out with Robespierre and his group, as a salon for the rival faction, which became known as the Girondins. We know a great deal about Madame Roland9s experiences and observations thanks to the many letters she wrote and the Memoirs that she composed in secret during the long months in 1793 when she was imprisoned as a 8conspirator9 on behalf of the Girondins; an ordeal that ended with her execution on 8 November 1793. As her Memoirs testify, she was articulate, clever, and opinionated, and more politically astute than most of the men around her. Yet she herself,
11 Cited in Janet Todd, Mary Wollstonecraft: A Revolutionary Life (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2000), 206. 12 Ibid., 207. 13 See the recent in-depth study by Siân Reynolds, Marriage and Revolution: Monsieur and Madame Roland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
Linton
well aware of the hostility towards politically active women, was wary of appearing in the spotlight. Paradoxically, she agreed with Rousseau that such activities were not suitable for a woman. For her salon and for the dinners she held when her husband became a minister, she provided the venue, the sociability, the refreshments, and then sat back to let the men talk politics. She did not invite other women to the ministerial dinners, and she herself avoiding speaking as much as possible. As a consequence, she claimed, the male guests did not hold back from discussing political business. She herself occupied the smallest salon, using it as her bureau where friends could ind her for political business and to ask her to speak to the Minister on their behalf. 14 She kept up a similar tactic during Roland9s second ministry of giving regular dinners, which she organised with care:
8Two days a week only I gave a dinner: one for the colleagues of my husband along with whom would be several deputies; the other for a variety of people, either deputies, or high-ranking oicials, or others connected with public life or preoccupied with public afairs. Good taste and neatness reigned at my table, without profusion, and luxurious ornaments were never seen there; people were relaxed there, without consecrating a lot of time to the meal, because I served only one course and I never let anyone but myself do the honours. Fiteen was the usual number of guests, on rare occasions eighteen and once only twenty 15 Nevertheless, her participation inevitably brought her more into the political forefront. Despite the fact that Madame Roland was from a fairly modest bourgeois background, her manner of doing politics was characterised by opponents of the Girondins as 8aristocratic9, recalling the machinations of women courtiers under the old regime. Her Memoirs show that she was highly indignant at the way the Jacobin press represented her dinners as scenes of aristocratic opulence and conspiratorial politics, and furious at being characterised by Jacobin journalists such as Desmoulins and Hébert as a 8Circe9 who had corrupted the Girondin leaders:
8Such were the dinners that the popular orators at the Jacobins transformed into sumptuous feasts where I, a new Circe, corrupted all those who had the misfortune to attend. Ater the dinner we would talk for a while in the
14 Marie-Jeanne Roland, Mémoires de Madame Roland, ed. Paul de Roux (Paris: Mercure de France, 1966), 72. 15 Ibid., 168; see also 66, 72.
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Madame Roland wrote a letter to Robespierre, taking him to task for his self-righteous assumption that anyone 8who thought diferently to him about the war was not a good citizen9. (Robespierre had opposed the drive to war, spear-headed by the Girondin faction). According to Madame Roland, he was not the only one who 8has good intentions, who is without any personal motives, without any hidden ambitions&9 She defended her friends, denied that they were his 8mortal enemies9, and denied that she 8received them in on intimate terms in her home She inished by saying that her frank criticism of him was a sign of her own authenticity: 8&I never know how to seem otherwise than whom I am We do not know if he replied to her. hey were equally strong-minded people, each convinced of the authenticity of their own virtue. his letter, repudiating the friendship that had existed between them, marked the moment of the open breach between the Jacobin and Girondin factions. 20 Other women, those who sympathised with Jacobin politics, saw Robespierre very diferently, as a paragon of domestic virtue, whose modest home life indicated the integrity of his politics. One of these was Madame de Chalabre, at whose home Robespierre occasionally dined. Another was Madame Jullien, who described the home life of Robespierre and his sister as 8all openness and simplicity9. 21 Since 1791 Robespierre had lived as a lodger at the home of the master carpenter, Maurice Duplay, whose family was devoted to Robespierre. Many years later Elizabeth Le Bas, one of the four daughters of Maurice, provided descriptions of life in the Duplay household that are the principal source for Robespierre9s private life during the Revolution. he Duplay women ministered to Robespierre9s domestic comfort, providing simple family meals. Elizabeth described how he joined the family in the day to day pleasures of family life: walks in the
Roland, Lettres de Madame Roland, Claude Perroud (ed.), 2 vols (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1902) 2: 244; 270. In Madame Roland9s letter to Bancal of 22 June 1791 she recounted approvingly Robespierre9s courage in saying in the Assembly what she herself was thinking. See Ibid., 2: 304. 20 Letter to Robespierre, 25 April 1792, Ibid., 2: 418-20. 21 Robespierre accepted invitations to dinner from Madame de Chalabre, his political admirer, who became his friend. hey seem to have been simple meals. Her letters to him are in Papiers inédits trouvés chez Robespierre, Saint-Just, Payan, etc., supprimés ou omis par Courtois, 3 vols (1828; republished Geneva: Baudouin Frères, 1978) 1: 171-8. Madame Jullien9s account of a dinner she had with Robespierre and his sister in February 1793 is cited in R. Palmer, From Jacobin to Liberal: Marc-Antoine Jullien, 1775-1848 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 28.
Women as Spectators and Participants of the French Revolution
country, impromptu singing and making music, and discussions about the daily matters of family life; love and suitors, and family disagreements. 22 In Elizabeth9s eyes Robespierre was a man of private virtue and sensibility, 8we loved him like a good brother!9 23 By contrast, Williams9 portrait of Robespierre and the Jacobin faction of 1793/4 was unremittingly hostile. Shortly ater the execution of the king, she wrote:
8At the head of this band of conspirators is Robespierre 3 gloomy and saturnine in his disposition, with a countenance of such dark aspect as seems the index of no ordinary guilt 3 fanatical and exaggerated in his avowed principles of liberty, possessing that species of eloquence which gives him power over the passions, and that cool determined temper which regulates the most ferocious designs with the most calm and temperate prudence. His crimes do not appear to be the result of passion, but of some deep and extraordinary malignity, and he seems formed to subvert and to destroy 24 Williams, though she was more sympathetic to the struggles of the urban poor and to ensuing revolutionary violence than Wollstonecrat, saw the Jacobins as unmitigated villains. 25 Williams9 had close friends in the Girondin group, a fact that undoubtedly coloured her views. She preferred to overlook the fact that the Girondins had played a considerable part in initiating the politicians9 terror. In May 1795 Williams visited the Revolutionary Tribunal to see the former public prosecutor, Fouquier-Tinville and a number of the jurors, on trial for their lives in the same place where they themselves had judged many others. Williams, who had herself been imprisoned for a while during the Terror as a British national, recalled that several of her friends, including Madame Roland, had been tried and sentenced to death by these same men. She expected to ind their faces 8impressed with the savage character of their
22 Elizabeth Le Bas (née Duplay) is the source for much of what is known about Robespierre9s private life in this period, see 8Manuscrit de Mme Le Bas9, in Stéfane- Pol (ed.), Autour de Robespierre: le Conventionnel Le Bas, d9après des documents inédits et les mémoires de sa veuve (Paris: Earnest Flammarion, 1901), 102-50. 23 Ibid., 104. 24 Williams, Letters Written in France, 160. 25 On Williams9 negative view of the Jacobins at the time of the Terror, and especially of Robespierre, see Adriana Craciun, British Women Writers and the French Revolution: Citizens of the World (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2005), 95-137, esp. 108-9.
Women as Spectators and Participants of the French Revolution
to the more socially conventional Madame Roland, and from the written words of the elite to the crowd protests of lower class women, there is one recurring theme: the French Revolution should not merely be seen as a single movement that fought against the lack of equality, freedom and brotherhood endured under the class system of the old regime 3 which implies that other social inequalities were less of a priority. hese women, in their diferent ways, showed their desire that the Revolution should also address the concerns of women. For these women there was a keen expectation that if the Revolution was to fulill its promise to promote universal rights then it should not only give its attention to 8brotherhood but, in a very real sense, it must also be about 8sisterhood9.
Women in the French Revolution
Course: BA (Hons.) History
University: University of Delhi
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- More from:BA (Hons.) HistoryUniversity of Delhi999+ Documents
