David Barry Auth - Women and Political Insurgency - France in The Mid-Nineteenth Century 1996 Palgrave Macmillan UK - Libgenlc

WOMEN AND POLITICAL INSURGENCY
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Women and Political
Insurgency
France in the Mid-Nineteenth Century
David Barry
Lecturer in History
University of Durham
~ in association with
~ -~UniversityofDurham
First published in Great Britain 1996 by
MACMILLAN PRESS LTD
Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG2l 6XS
and London
Companies and representatives
throughout the world
A catalogue record for this book is available
from the British Library.
ISBN 978-1-349-39538-5 ISBN 978-0-230-37436-2 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9780230374362
First published in the United States of America 1996 by

ST. MARTIN'S PRESS, INC.,
Scholarly and Reference Division,
175 Fifth Avenue,
New York, N.Y. !0010
ISBN 978-0-312-12947-7
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Barry, David, 1947-
Women and political insurgency : France in the mid-nineteenth
century I David Barry.
p. em.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-312-12947-7 (cloth)
I. Women political activists-France-History-19th century.
2. Women revolutionaries-France-History-19th century.
3. Insurgency-France-History-19th century. 4. France-Politics
and govemment-1789-1900. I. Title.
HQ 1236.5.F8B37 1996
320.944'09'034---<lc20 95-50898
CIP
© David Barry 1996
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1996 978-0-333-64174-3
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10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 I
05 04 03 02 01 00 99 98 97 96
Contents
List of Tables Vll
List of Figures Vlll
Preface IX
The Legacy of the 1789 Revolution: Defining the Issues

2 The Revolution of 1830 and the July Monarchy:
the Heroines of Liberty 23
3 The February Revolution of 1848 and its Aftermath:
the Call for the 'Democratic and Social Republic' 35
4 Defending Livelihoods and Neighbourhoods:
the June Days of 1848 47
5 The Red Republican Interlude, 1849-51 77
6 The Rebellion of December 1851: the Death Throes of
the Red Republican Cause 85
7 The Commune of 1871: the Great Venture in Female
Citizenship 105
8 Conclusion 155
Abbreviations used in the Notes and Bibliography 164
Notes 165
Bibliography 195
Index 204
v
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List of Tables
4.1 Women insurgents of June 1848. Arrested 61
4.2 Women insurgents of June 1848. Convicted 63
4.3 Statistics of domicile of convicted women in Paris 65
arrondissements
7.1 Professions of women tried before the fourth Conseil
de Guerre 133
Vll
List of Figures
2.1 The departments 22
3.1 The streets of Paris in 1848 34
4.1 Women on the barricade, near the Porte St Denis
Illustrated London News, 1 July 1848
By permission of the British Library 58
7.1 Women at bay at Montmartre
Penny Illustrated Paper, 17 June 1871
7.2 'Vive Ia Commune!'
Illustrated London News, 20 May 1871
7.3 A petroleuse at work
Penny Illustrated Paper, 10 June 1871
VIII
Preface
Recent years have seen the publication of numerous studies concern-

ing the origin of collective political protest in the French Revolution
of 1789 and its later manifestations in the nineteenth century. In con-
sequence we have now a better understanding of why and how pat-
terns of popular insurgency established themselves, and know something
about their importance in the revolutionary tradition of France. Always
the majority of insurgents were men, but in every phase of rebellion a
variable minority of women participants was present. Their role has
begun to receive systematic attention in the last 30 years. This has
taken the form of particular studies of individual episodes, though in
1979 an attempt was made to review the reasons for the changing na-
ture of French female protest over a broader span of the nineteenth
century by Michelle Perrot, in her thought-provoking essay La Femme
populaire rebelle, which was a source of inspiration for this work.
The involvement of women in the French Revolution of 1789 is
well known through particular stories learnt at school of the March of
the Parisian Women to Versailles in October 1789, and of the knitting
women (tricoteuses), who watched over the dispensing of revolution-
ary justice by the guillotine. The essay by Harriet Applewhite and
Darline Levy in their edited work Women and Politics in the Age of
the Democratic Revolution (1990) and particularly the meticulous study
of Dominique Godineau, Citoyennes tricoteuses (1985), have filled in
many lively details on the subject. They have done much to improve
upon the sketchy, incidental picture of female participation from 1789
found in George Rude's earlier work The Crowd in the French Revol-
ution (1960) by describing in a systematic way not merely the incidence
and distinct character of female insurgency, but also its meaning and
limitations. Likewise readers interested in the role of women rebels of
the Paris Commune of 1871 can still read with profit Edith Thomas'
monograph Les Perroleuses (1963, translated as The Women Incendi-
aries, 1967), which provides a lucid analysis of the why and where-
fore of female mobilization in 1870-1 and an abundance of stimulating,
well-written detail on many individual protagonists. Since 1985 a series
of articles have appeared on the character and significance of female
involvement in the Commune, both from a political and a symbolic
point of view. Eugene Schulkind, in an article in Past and Present for
IX
X Preface
1985, stressed the innovative and revolutionary nature of the Union

des Femmes pour Ia Defense de Paris, while more recently still, Kathleen
Jones and Franf1oise Verges (History of European Ideas, 1991) and
David Shafer (French History, 1993) examined women Communards'
claim to their own public space, the forms this took, and the varied
male response to it. Martin Johnson's article 'Citizenship and Gender:
The Legion des Federees in the Paris Commune of 1871 ', that ap-
peared in French History in September 1994, after this manuscript had
been finalized, describes how the women activists successfully breached
a gender taboo by establishing an officially recognized war battalion
in May 1871, laying claim to citizenship in yet another respect. The
women of the Commune have been well served by biographies of their
leaders, notably those concerning Louise Michel by Edith Thomas (1971,
translated 1980) and Xavier de Ia Fourniere (1986), and concerning
Paule Minck, by Alain Dalotel ( 1981 ).
This leaves the intervening period poorly covered, especially the
twenty-odd years of repeated upheaval from 1830 to 1851. What is
known of female insurgency in this period rests largely on anecdotal
or passing references in published secondary works. The article by
Charles Tilly and Lynn Lees, 'The People of June 1848' (1975), while
helpful in suggesting general criteria for defining the insurgents of the
June Days, surveys them in a predominantly male context, and has
little to say on women as a specific group. It was with the purpose of
filling this gap, particularly for the period 1848-51, that this study
was originally conceived. Research in the Archives de Ia Guerre at
Vincennes turned up many intriguing case histories of women arrested
after the June Days and the rebellion of December 1851. It became
clear that the assumptions of certain historians that the role of women
in these conflicts was marginal and could be safely passed over in a
few words was unjust, and that the manner and purpose of this female
protest merited its own study. Using archival and primary printed sources
this book seeks to demonstrate the significance of a continued pattern
of female insurgency throughout the period from July 1830 to the re-
bellion of December 1851 and account for the varied size of its pres-
ence from episode to episode. While certainly a statistical minority,
the protagonists were involved in actions and responses deriving from
women's gender role and their exclusion at this time from political
and civil rights. These actions will be examined and accounted for. In
this period, only a small number of militantes among the demonstrators
emerge as active combatants or neighbourhood organizers. Insurgent
women evoked ambiguous responses - admiration and pride in July
Preface xi
1830 and February 1848, visceral condemnation in June 1848 and

December 1851. These reactions will also be studied, and the discrep-
ancies in their character accounted for.
The second purpose of this book is to place this survey of French
women and insurrection in the wider context of a pattern that evolved
and shifted in character over the 'revolutionary period' of modern French
history from 1789 to 1871. For example, the barricade emerged on a
large scale as a weapon of rebellion only in July 1830, creating a new
mode of defensive neighbourhood action in which women, with their
strong involvement in community networks, could profitably partici-
pate. Yet there appear also to be elements of continuity with the past,
particularly the primacy of economic misery in motivating women to
rebel (though the expression might take political forms), and their
imitation, in some cases self-consciously, of the patterns of street be-
haviour of the 1789 Revolution. Efforts have been made to locate evi-
dence of an awareness on the part of rebel women that their actions
were justified by a sense of tradition as time went on, and to find
instances of personal involvement continuing from one outbreak to the
next. The dimensions of the study have thus been expanded to provide
a survey of the origins and background of the patterns of female mili-
tancy fostered in the 1789 Revolution; and, for the sake of complete-
ness, the experience of the Paris Commune of 1871, the final and most
sanguinary outburst of rebellion in nineteenth-century France, has been
treated in a separate chapter. Writing this chapter made it apparent
that adequate material exists for an entire new book on the signifi-
cance of female insurgency in the Commune alone, particularly if the
dossiers of arrested women in the Archives de Ia Guerre were utilized
extensively. To keep within sight of the purposes defined here, how-
ever, and to respect the length imposed for the book, the survey of the
Commune had necessarily to be made briefer than it might have been,
and it is based on primary printed sources and recent secondary sources.
Even so, it is hoped that some fresh explanatory light will have been
shed by it.
Insurrection has been studied in the context of emerging left-wing
nidicalisni of the republican or socialist type, though it is clear that by
the period of the Second Republic examples of female militancy on
behalf of conservative royalist or Catholic causes were present. One
or two are instanced in the text, and material for an article may well
exist on this subject also.
The book pays some attention to provincial insurgency, as a reminder
that the history of nineteenth-century France cannot be viewed solely
xu Preface
within the prism of Parisian activity; it must be admitted, however,

that the evidence suggests that the provinces only rarely witnessed the
same intensity of female militancy and consciousness as the capital.
Where female participation in rebellion did occur, it owed its presence
to strongly individual or local factors, and was short lived.
This work was made possible and encouraged at various stages of
its development by the comments and ideas of numerous people, among
whom I would mention particularly Professor Pamela Pilbeam, of Royal
Holloway, University of London, who read the draft manuscript, made
suggestions for its revision, and was generally very encouraging in her
response. The staff research seminar of Durham University History
Department offered penetrating and thoughtful comments about an early
draft that studied the women of June 1848. The undergraduates of my
Special Subject class on 1848 and the French Second Republic shared
my interest in the subject over many years, guiding and encouraging
me with their thoughts and opinions. Research grants and terms of
leave from the University of Durham enabled scholarship in France to
be undertaken. I owe a debt of gratitude to the archivists of a number
of French record offices, particularly the staff of the Archives de Ia
Prefecture de Police de Paris, whose helpful and courteous attitude
never wavered. The staff of the Archives de la Guerre and the Ar-
chives Nationales gave me valuable assistance in locating materials. I
would wish to thank the helpful librarians of the Bibliotheque Marguerite
Durand particularly, but also those of the Bibliotheque de 1' Arsenal
and Bibliotheque Nationale. The maps and illustrations in the text are
reproduced by kind permission of several copyright holders. I am in-
debted to the Trustees of the British Library for permission to repro-
duce the statistics in Table 7.1 from the Enquete parlementaire sur
['insurrection du 18 mars 1871 (Paris, 1872), and also for permission
to reproduce the following illustrations: Women on the barricade, near
the Porte St Denis (Illustrated London News, 1 July 1848); Women at
bay at Montmartre (Penny Illustrated Paper, 17 June 1871); Vive la
Commune! (Illustrated London News, 20 May 1871); and A petroleuse
at work (Penny Illustrated Paper, 10 June 1871 ). At Durham Univer-
sity Wendy Duery worked rapidly and efficiently to produce an accu-
rately typed manuscript for the publisher. Responsibility for the final
text, and any errors in it, lies with the author.
DAVID BARRY
1 The Legacy of the 1789
Revolution: Defining the
Issues
'The saviour of France had to be a woman', wrote the republican his-

torian Jules Michelet in his Histoire de France. 1 He had in mind Joan
of Arc, but could equally well have been referring to St Genevieve or
Jeanne Hachette. Genevieve had in the fifth century saved Paris from
Attila and the Huns; Joan of Arc had rallied the French armies at the
siege of Orleans in 1429 and turned the fortunes of the Hundred Years
War towards the eventual expulsion of the English; Jeanne Laisne, a
wool-worker of Beauvais, was nicknamed Jeanne Hachette because she
had rallied the townspeople against a Burgundian attack in 1472 by
her defiant seizure of a standard from an assault guard, whom she
struck with a hatchet. The memory of these women's actions became
part of French national lore and was not confined to educated people
but - as we shall see in this book - was evoked by individuals of
modest condition to justify a militant or insurgent mode of behaviour
which by the nineteenth century was held to be firmly in breach of
social conventions. The strength and survival of these historical mem-
ories is doubtless the result not merely of their epic qualities but also
of the association of the first two instances with the hagiography of
the Catholic church. 2 Genevieve and Joan could be represented as earthly
exemplars of the protective and redemptive power of the Virgin Mary.
In the nineteenth century, however, these women became icons in the
array of symbols justifying France's identification as a nation state.
This meant that people of republican or even socialist persuasion could
also cite them with approval as precedents for action. 3
Whether or not the humble women who on many occasions in the
ancien regime protested physically against burdensome taxes, food
shortages or loss of common rights and traditions had on occasion this
collective memory of French heroines at the back of their minds is a
matter for conjecture for the centuries in which the views of the masses
were ignored. What is certain, however, is that while the tradition of
female political insurgency associated with modern ideological beliefs
2 Women and Political Insurgency
only emerges in modern France with the 1789 Revolution, it grew out
of an earlier tradition of public protest over economic issues centred
on family, home and livelihood. In the last years of the ancien regime
common stimuli for such action had been food shortages, or taxation
that was considered unjust. In such straitened circumstances the wom-
en were often the first to suffer, and underwent the greatest rigours in
a deliberate effort to ensure that the rest of the family were provided
for. Women were noted in the ancien regime as, for example, going
without food, in enquiries conducted by the French bishops into the
state of their dioceses in 1740 and 1770-4. These revealed not only
that many women were suffering hunger in order to ensure that their
husbands and children were fed, but were also facing family break-
down, as husbands were threatening to leave them unless one child
was allowed to starve. By the final years of the ancien regime, the
right of women to demonstrate for food in times of severe shortages
was in fact widely recognized in France, so long as their demonstra-
tions assumed a collective form and did not result in violent action
towards persons and property .4 Since women in times of famine were
responsible for bread purchase in interminable queues, were forced to
devise endless stratagems for making dietary ends meet and experi-
enced the most intimate pain at the death of malnourished children,
they were usually well to the fore in food riots. Peter McPhee argues
that in the food riots that occurred in 22 of the years between 1765
and 1789 a 'disproportionate presence of women' was involved. 5 Fourteen
women were arrested as a result of the 'Flour War' in Paris in 1775,
in which dear flour and bread prices brought attacks on bakers' shops
and seizure of bread in markets. 6 Such protest reflected not only family
preoccupations but drew also on traditions of neighbourhood activity
- shopping, laundering, fetching water, spreading gossip and rumour
and fostering community spirit - that was essentially female and an
extension of woman's tasks within the house. It might also copy or parody
female participation in religious ceremonies, guilds and processions.
Such demonstrations, centring on domestic and subsistence issues,
would continue into the nineteenth century but in the 1789 Revolution
(as in the revolutions of 1830, 1848 and 1871 that followed) social
and economic stress coincided with political upheaval of a new kind
that was concerned with ideas of national sovereignty, bringing women
of the working class and lower middle class to the front of the histor-
ical stage. In 1789 and after, women were generally more involved in
riots concerning food supply and other economic issues than those with
The Legacy of the 1789 Revolution 3
a political or military purpose. 7 While women might incite their men-

folk to action in the latter instances the majority of them tended to fall
back once this function had been performed and it was a small, intrepid
female minority who dared to assume insurgent roles. Women attempted
instead to express the idea of civic sovereignty in other ways. 8
The 1789 Revolution began as a quarrel within the political elites of
aristocracy, clergy and lawyers of the Parlements as to the best way
to solve critical problems of state bankruptcy. The quarrel had moved
more progressive-minded members of the elites to raise the issue of
political sovereignty, and with the summoning of an Estates General
to Versailles in 1789 to solve the financial questions, the bourgeoisie
were given a national voice for the first time in the form of the Third
Estate, which they used to widen the debate over sovereign power.
The common people of Paris - artisans, shopkeepers, small businesspeople
- soon became drawn into the conflict because of the problems of
dear bread, hunger, unemployment and business bankruptcies set off
by poor harvests in 1788. Their personal discontents were inflamed
by the clubs, newspapers and pamphlets of liberals who favoured con-
stitutional reform and sought to press Louis XVI to share lawmaking
sovereignty with the Estates General. Demonstrations mounted by the
people of Paris early in 1789 took a traditional form of blind protest
against hunger, dear food and unemployment, but even before the Es-
tates General had opened in May it was possible to see that the propa-
ganda of the reformers had led the people to believe that political change
would solve their economic difficulties. On 28 April 1789 a violent
riot by artisans led to the sacking of the house of Reveillon, a wall-
paper manufacturer of the Faubourg St Antoine, after Reveillon had
expressed regret at his inability to lower wages. Among the 68 demon-
strators arrested was one woman, a marketwoman named Marie-Jeanne
Trumeau, Femme Bertin. She appears to have been a ringleader in the
incitement to attack Reveillon's house, uttering cries of 'A Ia Reveillon!'
and 'Vive le Tiers Etat!'. Though condemned to death for her partici-
pation in the riot she was subsequently reprieved on account of her
pregnancy. 9
Violence of this nature persisted and assumed a more evident politi-
cal character as efforts to secure the cooperation of Louis XVI in the
process of constitutional reform proved problematic. When on 17 June
the Third Estate invited the estates of the nobility and clergy to join it
in a National Assembly - a constituent parliament - and declared it-
self in permanent session it seemed as if the reformers had won the
argument. The king, however, proved obstinate in his response, dis-

missing his reforming minister Necker and moving troops to Paris. By
11 July rumours spread among the people of impending repression,
igniting fresh demonstrations that culminated in the attack on the Bastille,
a prison that was a symbol of the royal power of arbitrary arrest. The
crowd that led the attack on 14 July was made up largely, though not
wholly, of artisans, tradesmen and wage-earning labourers, though among
the listed 'Conquerors of the Bastille' is to be found the name of Marie
Charpentier, Femme Hauserne, a washerwoman of the Faubourg St
Marceau. 10 This essentially military operation was a masculine affair
(though other women may have been among those killed in the fight-
ing) but the first mass appearance of Parisian women on the revol-
utionary stage was not slow to follow. The issues of bread shortages
and hunger persisted into the autumn. Louis XVI continued to mani-
fest his displeasure at reform by free exercise of his veto power, en-
couraged by anti-revolutionary members of his family and court. Their
doubtful attitudes towards the Revolution were given expression in a
riotous party held to welcome the arrival of the Flanders Regiment at
Versailles at the start of October. Rumours soon circulated in Paris
that the Habsburg cockade had been displayed and the tricolour cock-
ade, one of the first emblems of the Revolution to appear, had been
trampled underfoot. Once again political indignation and fears of im-
minent political reaction moved club orators and the press to rouse
people. But the protest became one which, for the first time, women
made their own.ll
On the evening of 3 October a woman ran to the Cafe Foy to spread
the rumour and denounce the black and white Austrian cockade as a
threat to the Revolution. 12 The following evening a courageous woman
of the Faubourg St Denis, who could no longer bear the spectacle of
people who had not eaten for more than a day, went to the Palais
Royal, the 'Hyde Park Corner' of revolutionaries in Paris. There, this
woman in her thirties, well dressed and honest as Michelet tells us,
harangued the crowd, calling for a march to Versailles which she her-
self would lead. 13 The idea was enthusiastically taken up by the women
of the markets and other quarters; with a march to Versailles a protest
could be lodged with the royal family directly, and if they could be
brought to Paris the community of king and people would be restored
and their sufferings would end. Next day the anonymous woman ora-
tor of the Palais Royal was as good as her word, marching out, sabre
in hand, in the advance guard of several thousand women, picturesquely
armed and accompanied by many men. 14 A direct protest to the king,

made by a delegation of women that included a young former wood-
carver, Madeleine Chabry, 15 backed by a show of force, compelled the
royal family, 'the baker, baker's wife and baker's little boy' as the
king, queen and dauphin became known, to return with the crowd to
Paris.
Although the basic motive for the women's march was one of sub-
sistence their action was heavy with political consequences. By forc-
ing their plea on Louis XVI in person and bringing the royal family to
Paris they broke permanently the image of absolute monarchy in France,
forcing the king to adopt a contractual role with the National Assembly.
The March to Versailles of 5 October taught women and men alike
the power of collective action - a power that the women would resort
to again in the future, particularly in the early months of 1793 and in
the spring of 1795. The March to Versailles, in that it constituted the
first major insurgent intervention by women in the 1789 Revolution,
set a precedent for the symbolic feminizing of its image.
The next occasion for mass insurgency on the part of women came
in a period of renewed political instability in 1792-3. Inflation re-
newed the problem of dear and scarce food stocks; the outbreak of
war between France and the conservative powers Austria and Prussia
(who sought to put an end to the French Revolution) intensified the
economic stresses, bringing the fall of the monarchy in August and
September 1792 and the establishment of the First Republic. The shortage
of basic necessities in the winter of 1792-3 led to raids on convoys
and forcible price-fixing of commodities such as sugar, soap and can-
dles by gangs of women. The final collective female protest came in
the spring of 1795, following an abnormally severe winter that had
brought famine. In May 1795 women aroused their menfolk to make
an attack on the republican parliament, the Convention. This attack
was vigorously suppressed by the government for fear that it might
serve as a springboard for a ·mass revolt to restore the Jacobin terror
regime of 1793-4. At that point, the tradition of female collective pro-
test of the 1789 Revolution was finally broken.
What sort of women joined in these economic protests? Over thirty
years ago George Rude made clear the fact that the typical insurgent
crowd of the 1789 Revolution was not one of lumpenproletarian ele-
ments - the unskilled, unemployed and criminals. By studying eyewit-
ness reports and arrest records he concluded that the typical crowd
was composed predominantly of settled artisans of some skill, along
with some small businesspeople and wage-earning labourers. 16 While

Rude was evidently thinking largely in terms of male demonstrators
the same interpretation is to a considerable extent valid for the women
involved. 17 Dominique Godineau notes that the female militant of this
period was often a young woman under thirty or an older woman over
fifty, both categories being more likely to be free of the responsi-
bilities of child care; thus the age spectrum of women demonstrators
was wider than that for men. 18 Marketwomen recur frequently on ac-
count of their central role in food distribution and pricing, and the
likelihood that they might be moved to pity by the spectacle of starva-
tion.19 Washerwomen were another constant element, as they performed
a peripatetic job that made them highly effective agents of neighbour-
hood news and action, but also possibly because of their legendary
argumentative disposition.2° Women in artisan trades also appear com-
monly; dressmakers, bookbinders and metal or jewellery workers had
much to complain of in the uncertain conditions of these years. Weavers
in municipally run workshops were, for example, angered in 1790-1
by low piece rates and called for the establishment of wage tariffs. 21
Cooks and domestic servants turn up in crowds also, for while many
might, in order to retain their employment, be required to conform to
the counter-revolutionary sentiments of their wealthy masters and mis-
tresses, when working for revolutionary sans-culotte families the same
constraint applied. 22 When subsistence matters became of primary im-
portance bourgeois women might associate with these working-class
women, as they did on the March to Versailles of 5 October 1789,
rubbing shoulders with artisans, shopkeepers, marketwomen, women
porters and prostitutes.23 A few women of a declasse bourgeois back-
ground appeared in insurrectionary activity as feminist organizations
and protest developed.
From 1789 feminist women had appealed for political and civil rights,
but the coming of the First Republic in 1792 formally excluded women
from voting, public office-holding and the general exercise of sover-
eignty, except in a few political clubs. Godineau has, however, con-
vincingly argued that lower-class women reacted to this exclusion by
developing certain modes of insurgent behaviour specific to their gen-
der, behaviour that reflected the separate worlds of male and female
sociability of the popular classes. In so doing they reflected an uncon-
scious desire to exercise sovereignty for themselves. In markets, on
street corners and in cafes they helped to spread rumour and political
propaganda. In June 1793, at a time of shortages, women spread the
word that a fleet of boats was to leave for Rouen with a cargo; a
crowd of women met up at the Ports St Nicolas and de La Gn!nouillere
to seize and distribute the soap cargo at 15-20 sous a pound. 24 In May
1795 women were told by their menfolk to spread the slogan 'Bread
and the Constitution of 1793' in preparation for their attack on the
Convention.25 Women continued the age-old policy of taxation populaire,
or setting fair prices on grain and other goods by force in times of
dearth. In January and February 1792 crowds of women, particularly
marketwomen and washerwomen of the Faubourg St Marceau, forced
wholesalers and retailers to sell sugar at a fair price. 26 On 7 March
1794, weary of seeking dear and scarce butter, women seized quanti-
ties of it in the Faubourg St Jacques and sold it at a controlled price.
Soon women in other districts of the capital were imitating them. 27
Such direct action was replicated in more obviously political ways by
the practice of denouncing political suspects and assembling at execu-
tions to witness political justice. The occasion for denunciations was
provided by the coming of war in 1792 and the branding of royalists,
aristocracy and clergy as traitors by Robespierre's dictatorship of 1793-4.
A lemonade-seller at the Bains-Chinois denounced to the authorities
anti-government talk among the clients of her cafe in November 1793.
This woman, a Femme Boudray, secretary of the Societe Fraternelle
des Deux Sexes, later allowed her cafe to be a meeting place. for Babeuf s
communist conspirators of 1796. 28 Fran~oise Dupont, Femme Barbaut,
a washerwoman, wrote to the Jacobins to draw their attention to nuns
whom she accused of having made royalist remarks while she had been
a patient in their hospice. A letter of 1795 in turn denounced Femme
Barbaut as a 'fury of the guillotine', following which she was accused
of contributing to the arrest and execution of innocent citizens. 29 A
fear of counter-revolution or desire for revenge, and possibly a vague
wish to play the role of citizen, led women to attend sittings of the
Revolutionary Tribunal, call for executions, and witness the guillotine
in action. 30 A police official, Pontvoyeur, commented on his astonish-
ment at the zeal of women to attend executions every day in Year III
of the Revolution (1794)_31 A Femme Periot, accused in May 1795 of
rejoicing at the sight of condemned people, replied that she had only
done what many others had done, but had manifested neither joy nor
sorrow. 32 These forms of incitement or applause applied also to dem-
onstrations. Women from 1789 onwards roused their menfolk to mili-
tant action, although if a clash of arms were to ensue only a few hardy
females would participate, the majority then withdrawing. On 14 July
1789 Pauline Leon, a chocolate-maker destined to become a leading

feminist of the Revolution, incited men to leave their houses to join
the rebellion. 33 The marketwomen of Paris were roused to action on 5
October 1789 by a small girl who set out from the St Eustache dis-
trict, beating a drum and protesting at the scarcity of bread, while in
the Faubourg St Antoine women forced the bellringer of the church of
Ste Marguerite to sound the alarm. 34 Women of the Faubourg St Marceau
rang a steeple bell in February 1792 as a signal for people to break
into sugar warehouses at a time of high prices. 35 In May 1793 women
called for insurrection against the Girondin deputies, whom they ac-
cused of opposing the market controls favoured by their political rivals,
the Jacobins, and of showing insufficient zeal in defending France's
frontiers. 36 It was noted at this time that popular gatherings of women
were more numerous than those of men, and that for the first time
they were acting as a specific revolutionary group, under the influence of
their own political club, the Societe des Republicaines-Revolutionnaires.
Efforts were now made to restrict their access to the public gallery of
the Convention, where they could shout slogans, encouragement and
denunciations.
These confrontational activities suggest that by 1793 the pressures
of hunger, war, invasion scares and a situation of tense political rivalry
had modified the insurgency of women that derived purely from do-
mestic and economic concerns and had, on occasion, endowed it with
a more distinctly political tone. Popular stresses blended with political
confrontation and transition to produce an explosive insurrectionary
atmosphere drawing in women- as would happen again in June 1848
and March 1871, for example. Though the root of women's demon-
strations might still be economic they were performing rituals and shout-
ing slogans that gave them a sense of shared popular sovereignty. D.G.
Levy and H. Applewhite perceive the 'family' character of this sover-
eignty emerging in the spring and summer of 1792, when women marched
with their menfolk in a series of armed processions to pressurize Louis
XVI and the Legislative Assembly to interpret the constitution in the
interests of the sovereign people. For the first time, men began to
associate women regularly with major demonstrations, in which women
carried pikes and banners and shouted political slogans. Their pres-
ence was seen as a means of deterring the authorities from reacting
with force. 37 On 20 June 1792 women joined a march composed mainly
of artisans and shopkeepers of the Faubourgs St Antoine and St Marceau
to the Tuileries Palace to compel the king to obey the wishes of the
Jacobin Club and the electoral districts and express fears about war
defeats. 38 Profiting from an inadvertently unlocked door, the crowds
entered the palace and filed past the royal family in their apartments,
forcing the king to don the red cap of liberty and voicing political
opinions and threats. Women had the opportunity to parade and inter-
pret the new symbols of popular sovereignty; in the royal apartments
a woman held out her sword, decorated with flowers and a tricolour
cockade and offered it to Louis XVI in a spirit of compromise. The
king brandished it and joined in the cry of 'Vive Ia nation!'. But he
refused to give an undertaking to retract his veto power. A determined
group of republicans decided to strike a decisive final blow against
the monarchy but probably had their chance in August only as a result
of fears of war defeat and threats by the Prussians of vengeance against
the citizens of Paris. 39 On 10 August a crowd of sans-culottes attacked
the Tuileries Palace. In the conflict with the Swiss Guards three wom-
en were wounded, one of whom, Louise Reine Audu, was a veteran of
the March to Versailles. 40 Though few women appear to have borne
arms, many encouraged this deed that finally toppled the monarchy.
Another of the women injured in the attack on the Tuileries was a
27-year-old actress, Claire (or Rose) Lacombe. Her participation was
evidence of the fact that in this period when the people, armed and
organized in electoral assemblies, sought to practise a genuine popular
sovereignty, a few militant women sought to break down the tradition-
ally separate gender spheres by demanding equal rights of citizenship
and, in some cases, adopting insurgent or military roles considered
appropriate only for men. On 6 March 1792 Pauline Leon had pre-
sented to the Legislative Assembly a petition with 300 signatures that
requested that women be given the right to bear arms and establish a
National Guard, as a basic right of citizenship. But the Speaker urged
the petitioners not to overturn the natural law .41 About the same time
a campaign for women's battalions to defend France from attack was
undertaken by a young woman originally from Marcourt, near Liege,
who had led a bohemian life and unsuccessfully attempted a singing
career before entering revolutionary politics, where she became known
as Theroigne de Mericourt. 42 Once war had broken out between France
and Austria and Prussia some women of the people moved to enlist in
the French army in male disguise. Their names were recalled in an
article published in June 1841 in the ladies' journal La Gazette des
Femmes, an article that itself bears testimony to the impact that women's
roles in the French Revolution had on the public memory. A woman
named Rose Bouillon, a native of the Haute-Saone, entrusted her two

young children to her mother and, disguised as a man, was admitted to
the sixth battalion of her department, in which her husband served.
The Parisian woman Madeleine Petit-Jean left her family and, dressed
as a man, enrolled in a company of gunners that formed part of a
battalion leaving to put down counter-revolutionary insurgency in the
Vendee in 1793. She was later captured by royalists who released her,
unaware that she was a woman. 43 Women in frontier regions such as
Macon and Lons-le-Saulnier armed themselves with pitchforks to defend
their homes against the enemy in the absence of their husbands. 44 In
July 1793 a young woman from Caen named Charlotte Corday, a sup-
porter of the Girondins, committed her own lone act of revolutionary
justice by murdering the Jacobin Jean-Paul Marat. The increasing inci-
dence of women bearing arms, or seeking to do so, alarmed the Jacobin
government, which outlawed the practice by decree in 1793. 45
Women sought to claim sovereignty also by founding their own
political clubs in this phase of popular militancy, clubs that would
promote and widen the scope of consciously political action by women.
They also briefly associated feminist demands with insurgent activity.
Since 1789 a small group of women had logically argued that if En-
lightened thought and civil rights were the key to human happiness
women, as the sex that bore more oppression than men, must be en-
titled to the same benefits. Petitions of the Third Estate to Louis XVI
in the early months of 1789 had called for the right for women to
vote, to marry whom they chose, and to better education. In Septem-
ber 1791 the playwright Olympe de Gouges, in her pamphlet Declaration
des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne, called for equal political
and civil rights for women. In the same year a feminist club, the Societe
Patriotique et de Bienfaisance des Amies de la Verite, was organized
by Etta Palm d' Aelders to campaign for divorce and political rights
for women. 46 The climax of this feminist activity came with the founding
in May 1793 of the Societe des Republicaines-Revolutionnaires, which
embraced both feminists and leading militantes involved in popular
insurgency. Among its leaders were Pauline Leon and Claire Lacombe.
The club protested at the exclusion of women from the democratic
suffrage announced in the republican constitution. 47 In July 1793 a
deputation of its members demanded the right to enter the debates of
the Revolutionary Committee, for had it not assisted the rise to power
of the Jacobins by demanding measures against the 'mercantile aris-
tocracy' and demonstrating for the ejection of the Girondins from
power?48 They policed markets to spy out food hoarders and ensure
that grain was delivered to markets. Officials of the club took as their
symbolic uniform the red cap of liberty and a tricolour ribbon. 49 Women
in at least thirty French cities established their own political clubs to
discuss newspaper reports and debate revolutionary issues, organize
revolutionary ceremonies and engage in public welfare. From 1792
these clubs became radicalized as well. 50
The response of government to these demands was negative. While
the Girondins had been quite happy to incite the anger and activism of
women against Louis XVI they had no intention of granting them real
sovereignty; and once the Girondins had been discredited and sup-
planted in June 1793 their successors, the Jacobins, merely moved to
repress political clubs that might be rivals or a danger to the state
dictatorship, along with feminist demands for citizenship and equality
in the family. While very few revolutionary men espoused the femin-
ist cause it drew little more support from women either, well born or
obscure. 51 The hostility of working women to the Societe des Republi-
caines-Revolutionnaires was manifested in the clash of marketwomen
with members of the club in October 1793, after the latter had cam-
paigned for the wearing of revolutionary dress, including the bonnet
and cockade. The male Jacobin leaders used this incident as a pretext
to close down women's clubs that same month, appealing to natural
law, the teachings of Rousseau on the need for gender-based educa-
tion, and fears of female hysteria to justify their stance. 52 Their views
were well expressed by lean-Baptiste-Andre Amar, who in a report to
the Convention set out an early expression of the republican ideology
of the family.
According to Amar' s report, woman's role in the new state should
be basically a family and domestic one, the essential social buttress
for a liberal democracy of active male citizens. The report, presented
to the Convention on behalf of the Committee of General Security on
9 Brumaire (November) 1793, advocated the closure of the women's
clubs on the grounds of natural law, arguing that women lacked the
physical, moral and intellectual strength to defend liberty and take political
decisions. If women engaged in politics they would be distracted from
their most vital task of rearing children to respect the constitution, and
could imperil the entire civic order. If men were only just serving the
first stage of their apprenticeship in liberty how much less could women,
in general uneducated, grasp its concepts. Women were by nature prey
to a state of hysteria which, when they were assembled en masse, could
be highly disruptive for the state and civil society .53 Amar' s views
were echoed by Pierre Chaumette, who asserted that man had the right
to expect from his wife a well-ordered household, and woman's duties
should centre on home and family. 54 The Convention agreed and voted
to ban all women's clubs. When Claire Lacombe led a deputation of
women to the Convention to protest, the deputies howled them down.
For a time women could still participate in mixed clubs and district
assemblies, though their power was soon to be undermined by the growing
tyranny of Robespierre' s executive, which set out to repress all popu-
lar activity. The notion of popular sovereignty as a right to be shared
by both sexes was driven underground. The preoccupation of women
became principally food supply and food prices in the winter of 1794-5,
which proved harsh and brought on famine, especially since the govern-
ment had freed the market from economic controls in December 1794.55
Women then began to sound the alarm about subsistence again, de-
manding that their menfolk confront the deputies of the Convention
and appeal for bread; only a few militant women called for the Con-
stitution of 1793 and new popular assemblies. 56 Discontent climaxed
in an armed popular attack on the Convention, during the so-called
Insurrection of Prairial (20-23 May 1795), though only men partici-
pated in this military operation. But on 22 May women, provoked by
food shortages and low rations, spread a rumour that troops were de-
scending on the Faubourg St Antoine to spur on their menfolk, and
rang the steeple bells as a summons. 57 This attempt at insurrection
proved a failure. Though Robespierre and his immediate followers had
been dispatched by their own instrument of death in July 1794 the
more moderate-minded republicans now in power were determined to
surround themselves with sufficient armed force to smother further risings
and restore public order in France. Troops were drafted to the Faubourg
St Antoine, many militants were arrested and on 23 May 1795 the
Convention forbade women to gather in groups of more than five on
pain of arrest. 58 With the suppression of this rising the tradition of
popular political rebellion was effectively broken in Paris until July
1830.
Female insurrection may have been dead by 1795 but it had con-
tinued long enough to shape a tradition of female political involve-
ment that would revive and be remembered in the nineteenth century.
The French women of the common people had established, alongside
the French men, a right to gather together in a public place for a pol-
itical cause, whether or not the new ruling elites recognized it. The
1789 Revolution left a legacy of popular political rebellion and neigh-

bourhood action in the eastern suburbs, or faubourgs, of Paris (espe-
cially the Faubourgs St Antoine, St Denis, St Martin, du Temple, St
Jacques and St Marceau) that might, at times of political and econ-
omic crisis, involve women. When food was the issue, women might
act alone (October 1789, May 1793). But when popular political sover-
eignty became something of a reality in 1792-3 they were associated
with the men in political demonstrations, helping to challenge what
was considered bad government directly, rather than merely its econ-
omic symptoms. From the 1790s it is very likely that the above-mentioned
districts of eastern Paris transmitted from father to son and mother to
daughter a folklore of rebellion. We shall see later how, for example,
in June 1848 and during the Commune of 1871 Parisian women re-
called the deeds of their forbears of the 1789 era, and urged that they
be emulated. Women's actions were limited in political terms; it was
made clear to them that they could not vote or bear arms, but this did
not prevent women from embracing the forms of mediatory or initiatory
action that Godineau has well described. Only a few bold women took
part in armed insurgency itself, in defiance of social custom.
Women also associated themselves with the symbols of the conflicts
they were involved in - with the tricolour flag, cockades and red
'Phrygian' caps (symbols, it was claimed, of the freed slaves of the
ancient Roman world), as well as with figures of liberty. In the march
of 20 June 1792 on the Tuileries, for instance, women wore red caps
of liberty, paraded arms and sang one of the famous revolutionary
songs, the fa ira. 59 Symbols such as these not only kept the memory
of the insurgent tradition alive in periods of repression but in popular
pictorial imagery they came to be particularly associated with women.
These images continued after women's clubs and activities had been
suppressed; for what the female image aimed to portray was an ab-
straction. From 1789 female figures representing Minerva or the Wis-
dom of the Enlightenment appeared; these became transformed from
1792-3 into a more radical and politicized figure of the Republic, wearing
a red bonnet and carrying a pike. The royal family's abortive flight
from Paris to Varennes in June 1791 had destroyed the deference paid
to kingly power in Paris and with it, it has been argued, the masculine
icons of royal authority, creating a vacuum that was slowly filled by
other images. 60 An outward manifestation of this shift of loyalties could
be seen in the replacement of the equestrian statue of Louis XV in the
Place de la Concorde by a plaster figure of Minerva, representing
1iberty.61 The figure of a woman became not merely an allegorical

image of political values, but also a live image, the most notorious
example of this being the personification of the Goddess of Liberty by
an actress in red cap and blue cloak who presided at the high altar of
Notre-Dame cathedral (renamed a 'Temple of Reason') over a deliber-
ate parody of the crowning of the Virgin on 10 November 1793. She
was enthroned and taken to the Convention to receive the homage of
the deputies. 62 Though this ceremony invoked criticism the image of
woman as a politically partisan symbol became official in September
1792, when a young woman draped in a Roman tunic posed as the
Goddess of Liberty for the seal of public administration, replacing the
image of Louis XVI. 63 The live allegory of the Goddess of Liberty
that emerged with the First Republic appeared in many provincial towns,
where festivals were held in honour of liberty. 64 Though the re-
pression of women's clubs and the eventual fall of the Jacobins caused
the concept of republican imagery to recede, the idea of the Goddess
of Liberty would re-emerge in 1830 with the revival of the insurgent
tradition. 65
The Revolution threw up exemplars of political martyrdom in the
shape of Charlotte Corday and Theroigne de Mericourt, women whose
courage would be remembered by female radicals and militantes in the
future. Because Theroigne de Mericourt led the life of an emancipated
woman, wore riding dress, had called for a women's militia and had
participated in the attack on the Tuileries in August 1792, lurid stories
surrounded her name, which became a metaphor for the revolutionary
Amazon; ironically, hostile royalists had begun to manufacture this
legend in 1789-90. 66 Much later the story of Charlotte Corday received
acclaim from the republican Alphonse de Lamartine, in his Histoire
des Girondins of 1847. Fearing the approach of political tyranny with
the advent of the Jacobins to power, Corday had murdered one of their
principal leaders, Jean-Paul Marat, in his bath on 13 July 1793, a deed
for which she was executed but subsequently hailed by Lamartine as
comparable to Judith of the Old Testament. 67 She may further have
been the inspiration for a popular republican song that appeared soon
after the Revolution of February 1848 and was noted by Maxime du
Camp, who heard a 'robust blonde girl' sing a song whose refrain
declared that it was she who was proudly called 'Charlotte the repub-
lican', and that she was the 'plebeian rose' of her district. 68 Thus by
the nineteenth century public protest by women could assume political
overtones and became laden with the new imagery of liberal or repub-
lican values. Though it had been men who had originally permitted or
enabled women to adopt militant insurrectionary roles and their alle-
gorical meaning (and then put an end to them) by 1848 women in a
few cases spontaneously adopted such roles and symbolic stances them-
selves. But it remains to be seen whether in the Revolutions of 1830
and 1848 autonomous women's organizations were involved in insur-
gency, or the collective spirit of militancy revived which had at times
characterized the 1789 Revolution. The survey will be completed by a
study of the last and most extensive insurrection after 1789, the Com-
mune of 1871.
The repression of 1793-5 was accompanied by a stricter definition
of private and public political life than previously, which justified the
exclusion of women from political action. Not only did the Republic
and First Empire deny women the right to vote and to political as-
sembly; Napoleon's Civil Code of 1804 deprived them of most civil
rights, denying them equality in marriage, the right to go to law, and
control of their own property. Collective protest involving women would
surface again in the early nineteenth century, focusing on such issues
such as food, employment and rents. In the food riots following on the
famine of 1817 some women were sentenced to imprisonment and even
death. 69 The tradition of the food riot survived until at least 1846-7
and 1853-7, two periods of grain scarcity which brought demonstra-
tions by women in northern and western France. 70 A subsistence riot
in Mulhouse on 26 June 1847 known as the Fete des Boulangers brought
the arrest of a woman worker named Fran~oise Lemble, who was sen-
tenced to three years' imprisonment for her involvement. 71 In Novem-
ber 1853 a group of woodcutters' and labourers' wives, led by Marguerite
Simmonot, successfully prevented the departure of a consignment of
wheat from their home parish, Clinchamp (Haute-Marne), where food
was scarce, to Neufchateau (Vosges). They cut loose the tarpaulin ropes
and threatened the driver with a knife, forcing him to depart empty-
handed.72
In Paris in 1848, however, collective protest was not characterized
by the food riots that had been so important in the 1789 Revolution,
as the government had by then taken care to ensure that the capital
was regularly supplied with grain and bread, even in times of dearth. 73
After 1848, shortages of food became a comparative rarity in France
with the spread of railways, more efficient production and easier im-
portation. Collective protest centred on other issues, such as unem-
ployment, rents and wages. Women in 1848 organized demonstrations
against prison and convent silk manufacture, a cheap form of produc-

tion that undercut the costs of regular artisan workers. 74 Another form
of female protest linked to subsistence was resistance to excessive rents.
The population of Paris increased during the July Monarchy at a rate
that exceeded the provision of domestic accommodation, forcing rents
upwards. Between 1831 and 1846 the increase in population in Paris
was 34 per cent, while new housing increased by only 22 per cent,
forcing subdivision of existing accommodation and an increase in
cramped, unhealthy dwellings. 75 In the same period wages in many
artisan occupations either stagnated or (for instance, in the case of
textiles and clothing) fell in real terms. 76 The combination of the Feb-
ruary Revolution with these adverse economic conditions and high
unemployment brought vigorous protests by tenants against landlords
in 1848; those who consented to lower rents were carried in triumph,
while others who were less good-willed were burnt in effigy. 77 The
Parisian women of the suburbs of La Charonne, La Villette and La
Mouff mounted charivaris, or noisy satirical demonstrations, outside
the windows of their landlords. They banged pots and saucepans, call-
ing for rent discharge or death, and (in the tradition of the women of
Prairial 1795) denounced as cowards those of their husbands who shrank
from demonstrating. 78
Such autonomous female protest linked to traditional grievances like
food shortages and high rents, is thought by social historians to have
been on the wane by 1848 as a result of social and economic changes
in the earlier part of the century. The removal of centres of production
from the domestic sphere and the slow formulation of working-men's
politics, with the revival of republicanism and rise of socialism, seem
to have encouraged this trend. Charles Tilly considers that as traditional
forms of spontaneous crowd action fell away by the mid-nineteenth
century, there was an accompanying decline in female insurgency, both
socially traditional and overtly political; particularly since new forms
of republican political action did not favour women's involvement. 79
It may be no coincidence that in the early years of the July Monarchy
beards were worn as an emblem of republicanism. 80 Male-dominated
trade unions became wary of autonomous female protest and mechaniz-
ation ended communal working life for women centred on such insti-
tutions as the washhouse, in the late nineteenth century. 81 Changes in
social and economic practice helped to engender among the lower classes
a sense of 'separate spheres' for the two sexes, a notion already given
a sharper cutting edge in public and formal prescription through such
media as newspapers, household manuals and school education, which

first affected the middle classes. 82 Accompanying this idea was the
proposition that the French home and its rituals were the bourgeois
woman's natural sphere of being in the nineteenth century, and the
source of her activity and emotional fulfilment; by contrast any serious
public role for such women was precluded by family imperatives
and her temperamental unsuitability. These social prescriptions filtered
down to the lower classes by, for example, the legally required bour-
geois patronage of the executives of workers' benefit societies. But
these prescriptions, assimilated by the bourgeoisie, were amongst ur-
ban workers subverted by the fact that work was often a necessity for
the women.
A decline in traditional female insurgency motivated by domestic
concerns, and the rejection of female participation by popular republi-
can or socialist leaderships who revived the traditions of the Jacobins
in the 1830s and 40s might suggest that by 1848 women could not
avoid complete marginalization in popular political action. Some his-
torians emphasize this impression; in the words of Maurice Agulhon,
'On the barricades of February and - to anticipate a little - those of
June - women fighters were few and far between.' 83 Jane Rendall,
too, seems to stress that women were hardly, if at all, involved in the
fighting of the June Days, and that their role at this time was a ritual-
istic one, exemplified by the symbolic leading of demonstrations or
bearing of flags. 84 Other historians, while not directly contradicting
the thesis of the decline of traditional female protest, nonetheless pre-
fer a different emphasis, that underlines the continuity of female pol-
itical activism that originated in the radicalization of politics in the
1789 Revolution. They argue that this activism revived and was strength-
ened in each successive French revolution of the nineteenth century.
The labour historian Peter Stearns argues that the number of French
women active in the February Revolution of 1848 was greater than in
the July Revolution of 1830, and that bitterness brought out even more
in the June insurrection of 1848 than in the previous February. Stearns
claims that women were finding new roles and participated vigorously
in the June fighting, many bearing weapons and some leading the men,
which would imply 'some development in the position and outlook of
lower-class women that historians have yet to articulate' .85 Edith Thomas,
in her study of the feminists of 1848, Les Femmes de 1848, writes:
'The women of the people joined the male workers who built barri-
cades. They fired weapons alongside them and fell for the same cause.
The division no longer ran between men and women but between bour-
geoisie and people.' 86 With regard to the Commune of 1871 Thomas
declares that 'if women had already participated in the great journees
of the 1789 Revolution, they were even more involved in the 1848
Revolution from which they expected recognition of their rights', and
that the involvement of women in the Commune struck all contem-
poraries by its importance. 87 Eugene Schulkind lists twelve conseils de
guerre before whom arrested women appeared (including 1051 known
to have been tried by the fourth conseil) and identifies some 700 women
who gave tangible support to the Commune. 88 This participation found
expression through the Union des Femmes pour la Defense de Paris,
that called for sex equality in socialist language, and would not be
matched again until the Popular Front era of the 1930s. 89
A complex picture emerges; on the one hand the traditional type of
protest associated with women seems to have been declining by 1848;
on the other hand, there is a view that proposed that women were
developing, articulating and strengthening political roles of their own,
that had been pioneered in the 1789 Revolution, every time a fresh
revolution occurred in nineteenth century France. Archival sources for
revolutions before the Commune are adequate to test this assertion on
statistical grounds only in respect of the rebels of June 1848. But what
sort of patterns of female political protest had emerged in the years
before 1848?
In all such protest from 1830 to 1871 women played a minor role;
no historian quoted above would question that fact, and all would ad-
mit that the pressures and preoccupations of life bore too heavily on
women of the artisan class, who were most likely to be caught up in
such activity, for circumstances to be otherwise. Arrest records suggest
that such women were usually employed, or in search of employment,
to supplement the meagre budget of a family which, in most cases,
they served both as housewife and breadwinner. For artisan women,
home life was often arduous and squalid, with frequent pregnancies,
home removal and incidence of disease, debt and alcoholism. As chil-
dren tended to stay at home to a later age in the period of industrial-
ization it seems that women's domestic responsibilities increased by
the nineteenth century .90
These pressures left few women with the time or incentive to en-
gage in political action, as did the exhausting and exploitative nature
of the workplace, for women had less education and fewer skills than
men. In 1848 working women could, on average, expect to earn half
the salary of a working man, and on average they earned scarcely one
franc a day. 91 The largest category of employed women in France was
domestic servants, who worked for 15-18 hours a day 92 and were
materially and mprally in no position to adopt a posture of rebellion; 93
indeed, like the manservant of Alexis de Tocqueville, Eugene, who
fought for order in the June Days, they were likely to identify with
the interests of their employers. 94 Other typical female trades were
garment-making, dressmaking or laundering, where women often worked
under subcontractors in sweatshop conditions; they could easily be taken
on and laid off, thus undermining efforts to establish solidarity through
trade associations like those of their male counterparts. Though women
might support male work protests, male workers tended to distrust fe-
male workers as potential blackleg labour, especially in the printing
industry. 95 The first female trade resistance organization emerged only
in 1844, among the Paris hatmakers, and appears to have been excep-
tional.96 In the textile industry, wages were driven down by the com-
petition of prison and convict labour and the advent of factories did
little to alleviate the lot of women workers, for it provided a closed
environment in which they could be exploited further, through low
wages, strict policing by nuns in boarding accommodation, and seduc-
tion by foremen and employers. 97 Unemployment among women was
common, and statistics show that, for example, in 1853 the number of
registered paupers in Paris who were female was 25 483, exceeding
the male total (14 509) by ten thousand. 98 Unemployment and poverty
might marginalize women further by pushing them into prostitution. A
survey by A.J.B. Parent-Duchatelet of 3120 Paris prostitutes in 1857
revealed that only 36 of them had not previously had a job in manu-
facturing industry. 99
In addition to burdensome domestic responsibilities and work ex-
ploitation, working women were denied access to political and many
civil rights. In terms of education they were underprivileged: a minis-
terial document of 1867 revealed that while 41 per cent of women
could not sign their names on their marriage certificates, the same
was true of only 25 per cent of men. 100 There were very few schools
for girls until the passage of the Loi Falloux in 1850 made primary
schooling for girls a requirement under certain conditions. The Cath-
olic church, wishing to control female education through the private
sector, was resolutely hostile to state schools for girls, and any sort of
formal education of the type that boys might benefit from. Victor Duruy's
plan in 1867 for state secondary schools for girls provoked from Mgr
Dupanloup, the Bishop of Orleans, the opinion that girls were to be

educated 'for private life, privately; he requested that they be not con-
fronted with the courses, exams, diplomas and prizegivings that pre-
pared men for public life' . 101 In the context of so many negative
circumstances, the working woman who made any time for political
action in her trade or on the street was fortunate and enterprising in-
deed; yet, as we shall see, such women did exist, some perhaps en-
couraged by their radical-minded menfolk, some single or widowed
without dependants, and thus with a margin of time to themselves, and
yet others driven perhaps only by exceptional force of character. Women
who were able or prepared to play such roles in nineteenth-century
France continued to benefit from certain advantages that derived from
their social duties. As wives and mothers they were the focus of neigh-
bourhood networks, a position reinforced by the type of occupations
that frequently recruited women: dressmaking at home, the job of con-
cierge, retailing or tavern-keeping. As women's lives were in general
more associated with the home than those of men, they would have a
good idea of the character and habits of at least their immediate neigh-
bours. Community links were further reinforced by the gathering of
women at market places to make purchases and exchange gossip, and
by their association at parish pumps to draw water, or at communal
washhouses to deal with the family laundry in the days before Paris
had a piped water supply. Women thus remained well placed to con-
tinue their roles as initiators of news and rumour of insurrections in
their quarters, as well as the shapers of moral consensus. Their role in
political resistance was crucial even if, in the thick of the conflict,
they might tend to fall away. They would be aware of which neigh-
bours to seek out for the conflict, and could rouse the sympathy of
female and male neighbours, setting in motion patterns of collective
action deriving from their daily lives. This was particularly important
from 1830, when the barricade emerged for the first time as a weapon
of rebellion (perhaps because of the contemporary appearance of the
large horse-drawn omnibus, that often formed the core of this defence
structure). In the 1789 Revolution women's energies had turned to raising
the alarm, marches, demonstrations and incidental riots; from 1830 they
assisted in carefully organized neighbourhood operations as well. They
collected household goods for domestic arsenals and for use on barri-
cades, and as armes guerrieres. The windows of their properties were
used for scouting, or by snipers covering barricade fighters in the street
below (for whom mattresses were obligingly put across the glass). They
took down old furniture and lifted paving stones for barricades, re-
layed weapons and victuals to the fighters. A few even bore standards
on the barricades to rally resistance and fired weapons, developing
further the combative roles of the 1790s. When political and economic
crises became linked and offered the spectre of social breakdown - in
June 1848 or March 1871 particularly - protest might spread from
female militantes to a wider number of women. Moreover, in each of
the major periods of revolt and revolution in the nineteenth century -
July 1830, 1848-51, 1871 - jobs, rents and the struggle for existence
may have provided much of the motivation for action, but possibly
not all of it. The character of, and motives for, female involvement in
each of these periods will be considered in the chapters that follow.
Figure 2.1 The departments

2 The Revolution of 1830
and the July Monarchy:
the Heroines of Liberty
The first major occasion for female protest in the nineteenth century
was the July Revolution of 1830. This presents a paradox, in that the
combatants were overwhelmingly Parisian artisans but few were con-
vinced republicans; the bourgeois politicians and journalists who in-
cited resistance were quick to seize the political initiative to prevent
monarchy and limited representation giving way to democracy. 1 What
roused the masses to violence in Paris in 1830 cannot be easily ascer-
tained; as Clive Church has remarked, 'People did not always partici-
pate in revolution with clearly defined expectations of what might result',
and 'Sources are poor and often give little indication of who was in-
volved.' 2 It is, however, clear that economic depression and mounting
unemployment, combined with a revival of sporadic violent protest
and carefully orchestrated resistance to the policies of Charles X and
Polignac had given the Parisian working class the impression that their
economic troubles were associated with political misrule. In 1828 market
riots had revived in the face of food shortages, and strikes followed
cuts in working hours and the lowering of wages. 3 Soup kitchens in
the Faubourg St Antoine did not assuage the wrath of the local popu-
lation; in October 1828 a police report noted a handwritten placard
put up on the corner of the Rue St Nicolas, which declared, 'Long
live Napoleon! War to the death against Charles X and the priests who
are starving us to death!' Workers of the neighbourhood talked of
marching on the Tuileries to demand work and bread. 4
By the start of 1830 there was serious unemployment in Paris, where
40 per cent of the population was reported to be indigent. 5 The clericalism
of the Restoration regime had also excited popular disapproval in Paris;
at the ostentatious ceremony of the Fete-Dieu in 1829 the expensive
apparel of the Dauphine and Duchesse de Berry had roused the hostil-
ity of an audience made up largely of women and children. The Irish
novelist Lady Morgan overheard an elderly marketwoman exclaim, 'Holy
Mary, it's we who are paying for it.' 6 Allied to this inchoate ill feel-
ing was a well directed and rising tempo of political agitation initiated
23
against the government by aristocratic and bourgeois liberals, through

the press, banquets and voter registration drives. 7 The effect of the
Four Ordinances of St Cloud at once made clear how royal policy was
to the detriment of the common people, as hundreds of printers were
thrown out of work by the virtual destruction of the freedom of the
press. When opposition politicians and journalists organized a protest
demonstration employers, fearing a violent reaction to the Ordinances,
voluntarily closed their factories and workshops. Even so, it was the
harsh reaction by police and Royal Guards against demonstrators pro-
testing at the closure of newspaper offices on 28 July that produced
the first violent confrontations. 8 The lack of strength and preparedness
of the forces of order led to two days of barricade warfare on 28 and
29 July, the desertion of two army regiments to the rebels, a victory
for the opposition with the capture of Paris, and the king's abdication.
In the 'Three Glorious Days' of the July Revolution women played
a minor role, but their actions were by no means negligible. David
Pinkney declares that very few women were involved in combat, while
only 52 of hundreds of people who applied for a state pension as a
result of suffering wounds in the July Days were women. No woman's
name is to be found in the list of people killed in the fighting that was
compiled by the Commission des Recompenses Nationales. 9 But such
fragmentary anecdotal evidence as survives on female insurgency in
July 1830 does not suggest that women were invisible in the conflict.
Though women could not benefit from the collective action that men
enjoyed as a result of association in trade fraternities and taverns, they
probably had a closer sense of street and neighbourhood solidarity,
reinforced by communal activity in market and washhouse. Thus Pinkney
describes them defending their neighbourhoods in 1830, 'pulling up
paving stones, throwing stones and caring for the wounded' . 10 They
scattered glass in the streets, especially in the Faubourg St Jacques, 11
fed insurgent menfolk and collected weapons. In the Faubourg
Poissonniere, Madame Millen, an actress of the Theatre des Varietes,
helped to lift paving stones for barricades, 12 while in the Faubourg St
Honore, Rue Royale and Champs-Elysees Josephine Harmand and her
two daughters helped to build barricades. 13 The memoirs of the Comtesse
de Boigne describe women making cartridges in the Place de la Bourse. 14
An anonymous contemporary account relates that 'women of all ages
were seen taking food to their husbands, fathers and brothers while
they were fighting, so as to enable them to do so better, as they wished
to stay in their positions.' 15
The same account further gives instances of women taking personal
The Revolution of 1830 and the July Monarchy 25
initiatives in the July combat and engaging in it. At the Point St Eustache
women secured victory for the rebels in a local skirmish by throwing
pots, jugs and bottles at the Swiss Guard. 16 There were instances of
women who refused to desert their menfolk, accompanying them to
battle in male dress: in the Rue des Martyrs a young woman dressed
as a man and armed with pistols was identified but refused to with-
draw, declaring that she would die with her husband if need beY A
young man who distinguished himself at the siege of the Caserne de
Babylone on 29 July collapsed with exhaustion at the Place des Petits
Peres and was discovered to be a woman. 18 Marie Coiffier, a lacemaker
married to a cooper, fought in the July Days and was injured in the
thigh by a shot; in 1841, when her husband was ill at the Hospice de
Ia Charite and she herself could obtain little work she applied for a
state pension as a blessee de Juillet. 19 On the Place de Greve two
anonymous women took the rifles of dead soldiers and fired on the
royal troops for over two hours. 20 One National Guard who took part
in the attack on the Tuileries Palace on 29 July was discovered to be
a midwife called Josephine Mercier. She was known to her detach-
ment of guards as 'Victor' and had told them that she was a medical
student. Her efforts secured her the decoration of July 1830 and the
offer of a job as a midwife. 21
The case of Josephine Mercier suggests that the presence of women
at such scenes might be complex and ambiguous; Mercier not only
fought herself but braved the fire to bring aid to the injured. While
women became involved in the conflict, they also sought to restrain
excesses, and cared for the wounded on both sides. Marie Boucot, a
shop assistant from Sevres, distributed food and medical aid to the
wounded in July 1830 and rescued a Swiss Guard from murder at the
hands of the rebels; she also took to the ranks of the insurgents bullets
and cartridges she had madeY On 29 July 1830 the courage and pres-
ence of mind of Hortense Moutardier prevented the fifth company of
line from firing on the sentry box at the Banque de France, and pre-
vented the Royal Guard from attacking the people in the garden of the
Palais Royal - though at the cost to herself of a bullet wound that
fractured her leg and Achilles tendon.2 3 Women spent the days of fighting
making bandages for the injured, while the Soeurs de Bonne-Nouvell e
set up ambulances. 24
These patterns of participation - defence of neighbourhood, prep-
aration of arms, combat, conciliation and provision of sustenance and
medical aid - would all recur in the Revolution of 1848, as would
also the phenomenon of woman as revolutionary symbol and standard-
bearer of liberty, whether of her own spontaneous volition or as a

delegate of male insurgents. The inspiration for such a role derived
from the 1789 Revolution, in which, as we have seen, women had
personified the Goddess of Liberty in numerous popular festivals, often
as a living figure - the most famous instance being that of the actress
who presided at the civic ceremony in Notre-Dame in 1793. 25 The
female image of liberty was also to be seen on medallions and engrav-
ings, and in 1830 the image of a woman bearing the flag of rebellion
or symbolizing martyred liberty appears to have taken on a renewed
importance in contemporary accounts. Several relate 26 how on 27 July
the first volley of shots by royal troops in the Rue St Honore killed a
woman of 30-35 years of age. Her corpse was carried to the Place des
Victoires by a hefty baker's boy, who cried 'Vengeance!' and laid it
down at the foot of the statue of Louis XIV. As a crowd gathered, the
baker's boy began to harangue them, presently taking up the corpse
again and thrusting it at the troops of the guardhouse at the Banque de
France with the cry, 'There. Look at how your comrades treat women ...
Will you do the same?' The anonymous woman had become a figure
of liberty assassinated in the street theatre of revolution. On the barri-
cade of the Rue St Denis a Mademoiselle Clara Levieux, a feather-
dealer, was reported to have raised the first revolutionary tricolour of
the July Revolution. 27 This was a standard that she had made herself.
She sang the Marseillaise while a crowd applauded and took up the
song. Women threw tricolour ribbons at soldiers in the district of the
Marche des Innocents, crying, 'Take these colours, friends, they are
given, they cannot be bought!' 28
A young woman who seized a cannon piece at the Place de Ia Bourse
and fired it during the July Days was two days later carried in tri-
umph, seated in a chair and crowned with a laurel-wreath, to the Hotel
de Ville, where she was presented to the Lieutenant-General of the
Kingdom. 29 The image of such intrepid women was to be immortal-
ized in the following year, when Eugene Delacroix exhibited his painting
of 'Liberty Guiding the People', which depicted an allegorical female
figure in a Phrygian bonnet leading men on a barricade that she her-
self dominates. In her left hand she carries a gun while her right hand
brandishes a tricolour in exhortation. The inspiration for this figure
has been variously ascribed 30 and is probably unfathomable; what is
important is that by 1830 women could be recognized as a symbolic
representation of liberty again, and the consequence of that was the
portrayal of 'Liberty' as a lower-class female insurgent.
It has been suggested that the portrayal of a woman of the people in
the role of victorious warrior or leader of a carnival constitutes a sym-

bolic sexual inversion, intended simply to reinforce the established order
by suggesting a world of disorder and role reversal that requires cor-
rectionY In this context, however, 'Liberty' (and any such material
expression of female insurgency or political symbolism) would be ac-
ceptable, as it would give expression to the values of a society in
which men remained supreme. Women who became rebels in July 1830
could subsequently be praised as 'heroines'; the young woman who
seized the cannon at the Place de Ia Bourse was described as having
shown 'the bravery of a hero' and having given 'the example of cour-
age' .32 The young woman wounded in the Place des Petits-Peres while
fighting in male uniform was compared in another account to the 'heroine
de Beauvais' (Jeanne Hachette), who had braved death 'to deliver her
country from tyranny and bring the benefits of liberty' .33 In the Feb-
ruary Revolution of 1848 a woman who insisted on bearing a standard
to a barricade in the Rue Mazagran was publicly applauded for her
'noble ardour' .34 An armed woman who invaded the Chamber of Depu-
ties on 24 February as one of a vast crowd, and demanded to speak to
Lamartine, was likewise praised by the critic Arsene Houssaye as a
'Joan of Arc of the barricades' .35 But the response to women rebels of
June 1848 and December 1851 was quite different; these insurrections
were widely perceived as a threat to property and the whole social
order, and their female protagonists are no longer labelled 'heroines'
but megeres (viragos) or 'furies', as we shall see presently. Although
gender prejudices came into play in attitudes to insurgent women so
too did class fears, and the two cannot be disentangled.
These dual fears were reflected in the response of the Salon Public
to the painting of 'Liberty'; such was the volume of criticism that it
was withdrawn and consigned to the Louvre basement. 36 The message
conveyed by 'Liberty' was equivocal; though supposedly an abstract
symbol, she was painted as a strong, muscular woman of the lower
classes commanding the centre of the composition and the heights of
the barricade, surrounded by men whom she was either leading on or
who were dying. As Marcia Pointon suggests, she is 'sexually domi-
nant in a world of male carnage' .37 Her earthy qualities contravened
contemporary Salon taste for respectable or Arcadian human subjects
in art 38 and implied the supremacy of the common people. 'Liberty'
was derided as 'sale', a 'poissade' and 'populaciere' .39 Such hostility
may help us to understand why women who took up combative roles
in 1830 and 1848 took the precaution of donning men's clothes. The
men who bore aloft the anonymous female warrior to the Hotel de
Ville in July 1830 felt much more at ease portraying her as a crowned
symbol of liberty than witnessing her firing a cannon in the Place de
Ia Bourse.
Such daring might suggest a strong political motivation in the women's
action, but motivation was as varied and complex as the revolutionary
action itself. Women who assisted in building barricades or scattering
glass were expressing a sense of neighbourhood solidarity in the face
of an overpowering threat that they might not necessarily understand
with any degree of sophistication. Others found themselves caught up
spontaneously in the July violence because of the strength of family
or neighbourly loyalty, such as 18-year-old Amelie Laurent, of the
Rue St Denis, who shot a Royal Guard who had killed her elderly
father. 40 Loyalties of kin led some women to the barricades out of a
wish to share their husband's fate, such as the young woman of the
Rue des Martyrs. Nevertheless, there are hints that on occasion their
motives had a clearer political dimension. Pinkney sees anti-Bourbon
sentiment as important, including personal grievances against the govern-
ments of Louis XVIII and Charles X, which resulted from dismissal
from office or political persecution. 41 Disgruntled veterans of the Rev-
olutionary and Napoleonic wars probably helped to organize the
fighting. 42 Marie Boucot's father had been a naval officer of the First
Empire, who had been captured by the British and ransomed at the
expense of the family fortune. On his death, she and her mother had
been left in great poverty. On a voyage to relations in the lie-Bourbon
she had seen St Helena and Napoleon's tomb, and during the July
Days she denounced the 'Cosaques' of Charles X for firing on un-
armed civilians. The Bourbons doubtless held little place in her affec-
tions.43 Others may have fought for a more positively republican vision
of liberty. Louise Bretagne, who fought in July 1830 and was decor-
ated for her involvement, was later to be imprisoned for taking part in
a republican conspiracy in 1832, temporarily forfeiting her right to her
pension. 44
Louise Bretagne was one of a number of radical republicans left
dissatisfied by the political outcome of the 1830 Revolution who turned
to insurrection, conspiracy and secret societies in the early 1830s.
Republican organizations such as the Societe des Amis du Peuple, es-
tablished by Franc;ois Raspail in July 1830, and the Societe des Droits
de !'Homme, which took over as the main republican club after the
state prosecutiop of the Societe des Amis du Peuple in 1832, brought
together professionals, students, non-commissioned officers and small
businessmen, who sought to exploit popular resentment at the failure
of the July Monarchy to provide more public assistance at a time of

continuing depression. The Societe des Droits de !'Homme addressed
the problem of the poor in particular, and appealed for the extension
of the vote to every adult male, trade union rights and free education.
It sought to provoke the forces of order into confrontation by mount-
ing conspiracies and efforts at rebellion in the period 1832-4. These
actions were further encouraged by secret societies that developed out
of worker or military fraternities, and so had little place for women.
But the years of republican unrest of the 1830s did not wholly exclude
women, who had a defined, if marginalized, role. They stored arms
and propaganda, sheltered insurgents escaping from justice, and helped
to organize prison breaks. Occasionally there is a fleeting glimpse of
more central involvement in the Parisian risings of 5 and 6 June 1832
and 13 April 1834. Louise Bretagne was arrested on 21 July 1832 for
pillage and involvement in the rising of the previous month. On 6
June she had led the insurgents in the Rue des Marmouzets, directed
the seizure of materials to build barricades and, armed with a paving
stone, forced local people to leave their front doors open, to provide a
refuge for insurgents in the event of a retreat. Described by the report
of her trial as having 'really extraordinary energy' and 'harsh, laconic
speech' ,45 Louise Bretagne was found guilty of treason and sentenced
to five years' imprisonment at St Lazare by the Court of Assize on 27
November 1832, but pardoned in April 1836. 46 The republican attempt
of 13 April 1834, a rising in sympathy with a workers' revolt in Lyon,
was more formidable, provoking two days of barricade warfare whereas
the rising of 1832 led only to skirmishes. On the evening of 13 April
a 32-year-old dressmaker, Catherine Delacroix of the Rue des Gravilliers,
was reported to have helped construct the barricade of the Rue
Transnonain, in the heart of the insurgent quarters. She led the rebels
with a pick-axe in her hand, crying 'Qui vive!' to passers-by. 47 In the
same street, women practised an age-old tactic of confusing the forces
of order that would be repeated in February 1848, by advancing ahead
of their menfolk on the soldiers and crying to them to shoot if they
dared. 48 Delacroix escaped after the bombardment of her street to the
home of a Femme Bereaux, capmaker of the Rue St Martin, and took
shelter there until her arrest on 18 April 1834 on charges of belonging
to a secret society. Also arrested was a 31-year-old clothes-mender,
Jeannette Dutron, of the Rue St Hyacinthe d'Enfer, on unspecified
charges of involvement in the 1834 rising. 49 In the simultaneous rebel-
lion in Lyon women joined the men in seeking out weapons in the
Caserne de Bon Pasteur; the wife of a bookseller, Jean Caussidiere,
made cartridges at home, while the common-law wife of a man named

Jouard, Adele Krug, not only forced her husband to fight but set to
work herself to build barricades. 50
The troubles of April 1834 frightened the government into a wave
of repression, as a result of which resistance moved mainly to the
level of secret conspiracies and assassination bids; in connection with
these the names of other women turn up in the arrest reports of the
Prefecture de Police. The conspirators involved in the attempt to se-
cure the escape of political prisoners of April 1834 from the prison of
Ste Pelagie involved six women, four of them from the Rue de Ia Cle,
including a grocer and an umbrella-makerY Marie Picard, aged 30, of
the Rue de Commerce, was arrested on 4 November 1839 for belong-
ing to a secret society established by a carpenter, Jean-Baptiste Kareski;
on 4 May 1842 Renee Ory, a dressmaker of the Passage Violet, and
Opportune Merard, also a dressmaker, of the Rue des Vieux Augustins,
were arrested for the same offence. 52 Eupbemie Soret, Femme Mallet,
a porter of the Rue de Charonne, was arrested on 19 September 1841
for storing arms associated with an attempt by a sawyer, Jean Nicolas
Papart, to assassinate the Due d' Aumale in the Faubourg St Antoine
six days earlier; for this crime Femme Mallet was sentenced to depor-
tation. 53 A graver fate awaited Laure Grouvelle, who had tried to pro-
mote democratic and socialist propaganda through the Association Libre
pour !'Education du Peuple. While women such as Renee Ory appear
to have become involved in sedition through their husbands or other
male associates, Grouvelle had undergone a more conscious ideologi-
cal apprenticeship in the republican circles of the Bouchotte and Domes
families in her native Metz. Compromised in Huber's planned attack
on Louis-Philippe, she was condemned in May 1838 to five years'
imprisonment; she went insane while in prison, and came to be re-
garded by the republicans of her day as a heroine and martyr worthy
of Antiquity. 54
The continued economic depression after 1830 that stimulated this
political resistance also revived more traditional forms of economic
protest: attacks on speculators and protests against dear food or high
taxes. There was a naive belief that the new government should at
once solve all popular problems, and the administrative hiatus follow-
ing upon changes in security personnel made protest easier in some
areas. In so far as such protest often attacked the institutions of politi-
cal power, it may be said to be 'political', though it was not yet linked
to specific left-wing programmes and doctrines. 55 In disturbances in-
volving subsistence, the presence of women was again frequently noted;
the avocat general of Poitiers (Vienne) noted on 29 September 1830

that in the district of Parthenay he believed that women outnumbered
men by five to one in popular disturbances. 56 The French historian
Georges Bourgin describes how, in the autumn of 1830, in the neigh-
bourhood of Paris, crowds led by women met at several markets to fix
wheat prices. 57 As well as forcing the sale of grain at a 'fair price'
below the current market price by such taxation populaire, women set
upon grain convoys and looted their stock; near Issoudun (lndre) in
September 1830 a crowd of women surrounded a merchant travelling
to Bourges with three carts of grain, stopped him and fell upon the
sacks, cutting them open and seizing the contents. 58 In Lorient (Morbihan)
women led a crowd that invaded the town hall in October 1830, call-
ing for lower bread prices. The alleged perpetrators of social misery
were attacked, one bakery being looted and all others in the town threat-
ened with pillage. 59 Food riots and raids on food stores in Limoges on
31 August 1830 represented a protest against a rise in bread prices
and bread shortages, that were blamed on bakers. In the Place Tourny
a mother of seven harangued a crowd, attacking those who, she said,
sought to cause the deaths of the poor, and denouncing the bakers as
rascals. The police arrested a woman named Fran~oise Gery as she
carried a sixty-pound bag of grain to her home in the Place des Carmes. 60
Food demonstrations revived from 1846 in northern and central France,
spurred on by agricultural disaster. Failure of the potato crops since
1842 and disastrous harvests in 1845-6 brought on a cyclical econ-
omic slump. Grain speculators sought to exploit the situation of food
shortages, and where the forces of law and order were inadequate vi-
olence occurred. In Loir-et-Cher a group of women attacked and pil-
laged a convoy of rye being taken from the local market as it passed
the village of La Ferte-St Aignan on 27 March 1847. 61 In Rouen in
January 1847 women forced the lowering of the price of grain sold at
high prices in local markets, intervening by physical force and de-
nouncing the cowardice of their husbands. 62 The protests may in cer-
tain instances have extended beyond a concern for reasonably priced
food; Jeanne Petit of Vieux-Moulin (Nievre), arrested in 1847, admit-
ted that she was not merely hostile to grain speculators, but favoured
redistribution of property to the benefit of the poor. 63
Demonstrations against unpopular taxes might involve not merely
women but the entire community, if the matter came to be perceived
as an attack on the property of the community. When a bailiff ap-
peared at the village of Tillac (Gers) on 8 November 1848, to take
away the clock and horse of a local peasant who had defaulted on
paying the 45-centime tax, an armed gathering of four to five thou-

sand inhabitants forced him to abandon the property and flee for his
life. 64 Women acted specifically as firebrands; in Ajain (Creuse) in
June 1848 they threatened to shoot the 'cowards' who refused to march
to Gueret to deliver tax protesters taken into custody there. They abused
the sacristan of the petit seminaire, who had refused to sound the alarm
bell convening the marchers, and a 19-year old girl compelled an aged
farmer to replace him. 65
Such traditional forms of protest were still more influential in 1848
than industrial unrest associated with Luddism or strike activity. In
general, incidents of Luddism were less common than might be sup-
posed,66 perhaps because perpetrators could expect harsh punishment.
A revolt by wool-spinners of Chalabre (Aude) against mechanization
in July 1837 led to the arrest of Marianne Bouichou, who was con-
demned on 15 September to a 50-franc fine and 50 days' imprison-
ment for her part in the troubles. 67 Strikes were not common in the
July Monarchy, despite widespread deterioration of worker conditions:
Peter Stearns, correcting earlier figures by Aguet, suggests a possible
total of 130-150. 68 Most strikes were the result of an immediate single
grievance (usually a pay cut), were spontaneously planned and lacked
real leadership or funding. 69 The factors militating against female labour
protest in particular have already been noted, and any strikers, male or
female, would be firmly dealt with in the July Monarchy. A woman
named Forge, who instigated a strike of the rabbit-skin cutters of Paris
in September 1830 in protest at a lowering of their salaries by 5 per
cent, was sentenced to three days' imprisonment. 70 A female employee
named Pillant, of a shawl factory in the Rue du Cadran, Paris, was in
1831 imprisoned for a month because she had tried to lead a demon-
stration over conditions of work. 71
The sporadic political plotting and economic unrest of the 1830s
and 1840s were handled successfully by the regime because these troubles
failed to invoke a mass political protest that coincided with disruption
caused by widespread unemployment. Although the severe economic
depression of the mid-1840s was abating by February 1848 its effects,
in terms of hunger and unemployment, were still being widely experi-
enced in Paris and elsewhere. The severity of the economic crisis had
also shaken confidence in the government of Fran~ois Guizot, which
had made the free market, prosperity and hostility to political reform
its watchword. 72 In 1847 the parliamentary opposition to Guizot initiated
a campaign of subscription banquets calling for suffrage reform, which
soon became associated with republicans determined to secure politi-
cal change. The final banquet of a series was scheduled to be held in

Paris in February 1848, but was banned by the Minister of the Interior
as a threat to public order. The parliamentary opposition was prepared
to back down in the face of this challenge, but some republicans were
not. The growing loss of confidence in Guizot's ministry and the rel-
ative strength of the republicans in Paris made them feel more confident,
especially as the presence of large numbers of unemployed and dis-
contented workers provided a large potential body of demonstrators.
Out of a protest by republicans on 22 February against the banning of
the banquet planned for that day developed a revolutionary situation
that would bring the rapid fall of the July Monarchy, a second repub-
lic, and a period of popular mobilization more intense than any seen
in France since the 1790s.
34 Women and Political Insu rgency
Figure 3.1 The streets o f Paris in 1848

3 The February Revolution of
1848 and its Aftermath:
the Call for the 'Democratic
and Social Republic'
Despite the slump and consequent unemployment of the mid-1840s,

there was no sudden increase in strikes or violence in Paris on the eve
of the February Revolution of 1848, though food demonstrations had
occurred in the Faubourg St Antoine in the winter of 1847-8. 1 As in
1830, the predisposing causes of popular manifestations in February
appear to have been political and fortuitous. The banning of the re-
form banquet in Paris brought republican-led demonstrations that spread
because of ill-coordinated repression by the Municipal Guard and armed
forces, and the reluctance of many National Guardsmen to take firm
action against the agitators. Although the disorders seemed to subside
with the news of Guizot's dismissal as premier on the evening of 23
February, an accidental volley fired by troops at a crowd of peaceful
marchers in the Boulevard des Capucines renewed and intensified street
warfare on some fifteen hundred barricades across the capital. A div-
ided command among the forces of order and lack of clear govern-
ment leadership enabled the insurgents to gain control of the city.
Republican militants on this occasion acted more decisively to organ-
ize street calls for a republic; though republican politicians dithered
over the issue the Second Republic was proclaimed at the Hotel de
Ville on 24 February.
The suddenly enhanced profile of popular politicization, as in 1830,
again brought women on to the streets such as the dressmaker Adelaide
Bettrette, who summoned the men of her quarter to march to the barri-
cades, made gunpowder and delivered arms to the insurgents. She helped
build barricades and was one of the first persons to raise the tricolour
flag on them. 2 A burn on her face caused while making gunpowder in
the February Days rendered her incapable of working and eligible for
a state pension. On 23 February women with dresses tucked up against
the wet, muddy streets joined men in the Rue St Honore in stoning the
hated armed police, the Municipal Guards. 3 A female equestrian performer
35
of the Cirque laid the first stone of a barricade in the Rue de Temple
- an action which evinced from the eye-witness Noel Castera the same
type of fulsome praise accorded to the heroines of liberty of July 1830:
'It was she who laid the first stone of the Republic. ' 4 Records of fe-
male insurgency in February 1848, though scantier than those for July
1830, testify however to the presence of women as firebrands or standard-
bearers in the thick of the combat. One contemporary pamphlet de-
clares that 'women were seen in the thick of the struggle, inciting the
people, while others fulfilled the role of victuallers and a great number
were engaged in the melancholy duty of preparing bandages', but lays
stress on one woman who, pushing through the crowd 'to reach the
battle first, carried a flag that some sought to snatch from her; emerg-
ing victorious from this struggle she climbed onto a barricade in the
Rue Mazagran and seemed to challenge the group she had just tra-
versed. Her noble ardour was then applauded and she was allowed to
march to battle.' 5 Other women planted a flag in the barricades of the
Rue Fontaine-Moliere. 6 Occasional evidence suggests that women went
armed as well, such as the 'Jeanne d'Arc des barricades' referred to
by Arsene Houssaye, who, bearing a sabre, joined in the invasion of
the Chamber of Deputies on 24 February and demanded to be intro-
duced to the author of the Histoire des Girondins (Lamartine).7 Houssaye
spoke of this warrior in terms of approval, but when, on the same
morning, the symbolism of female combat became an intransigent re-
ality, it excited the disgust of the English banker Edward Blount, who
describes in his memoirs how he disarmed a woman 'smeared in blood,
mounted on a horse of a Garde Municipa1e ... dressed in a soldier's
coat and ... brandishing a loaded horse pistol' .8
Some women went to battle in solidarity with their husbands, as in
1830. Barbe Chiron, or Chirou, a cook, accompanied her common-law
husband to the barricades at the Palais Royal on 24 February, to honour
the pledge that she had made in church to share his fate unswervingly.
She took her two sons, her husband declaring, 'Come, if I or your
sons perish, you will be proud to say: They died for rightful justice
and the fatherland.' She claimed a state pension after her husband was
killed and she was wounded while building barricades. 9 Other women
assisted in secondary ways noted by Percy Bolingbroke St John, who
was sympathetic to the republican cause and wrote of the 'many women
and children' who 'brought down articles of furniture to assist in forming
impediments' . 10 Women were alleged to have walked ahead of armed
men to conceal their guns and confuse the forces of order during street
confrontations in the February Days - a tactic recalling the deliberate
The February Revolution of 1848 and its Aftermath 37
inclusion of women in armed processions in 1792-3. This claim was

made by Joseph Jules Dupomey, a lieutenant of the Municipal Guard
accused of dereliction of duty during the February Days on 13 May
1848. He reported that on 23 February he and his men had encoun-
tered in the Rue St Denis, opposite the Rue du Petit-Hurleur, a hostile
crowd whose front ranks were made up of women. The women hid
men armed with rifles who fired several shots at the Guards and reg-
ular troops. As the latter advanced down the street to clear the crowd
and barricades they first ordered citizens to close the windows of their
houses and took aim at those who did not. 11
But to many women, the work of insurrection clearly belonged to
the men, a view mooted by the marketwomen of Les Hailes who, on
finding their stalls occupied by soldiers, offered them food free of
charge, while begging them to spare their husbands. 12 Women injured
in the February Days and claiming pensions might well have been on
missions of mercy to the wounded, such as Aurelia Fargant, a shirtmaker,
who was wounded in the Galere d'Orleans while working at the am-
bulance station set up in the Palais Royal as a principal nurse. 13 At the
same ambulance station a young actress, Maria Lopez, whom Daniel
Stern refers to as 'a young and beautiful person', assisted the wounded,
braving the fire to take them to her home in the Rue de Chartres and
earning the compliment 'a true Roman woman' from a man of the
people. 14 Yet her humanity on this occasion did not prevent Lopez
from later adopting a possibly rebellious posture in 1850-1, when she
would twice be the subject of police investigation on suspicion of in-
volvement in left-wing insurgency. There were, as will be seen pres-
ently, other women who took an active part in the February Days, but
for whom the promise of the Republic was not to be fulfilled, leading
them to take up arms again in June. But others, having fought in Feb-
ruary for the Republic which they felt was enough to guarantee their
interests, remained on the side of order in June. Augustine Leblanc, a
shoe-stitcher of the Rue St Maur du Temple, who had cast bullets in
the February Days and was wrongfully arrested in June, protested her
innocence, declaring that her husband, a republican carpenter,
did not like the government of Louis-Philippe, but my husband is
an excellent worker, a good-hearted, orderly man, and even if I had
wished he would not have allowed me to cast bullets in June against
the government of the Republic which he loved and which gave him
a pension ... We still have the means to work and we have always
worked. 15
Her last assertion offers a clue to one of the factors that determined
loyalties in the June Days - whether or not workers had access to
financial security. Adelaide Bettrette, also happy to raise the flag for
the Republic in February 1848, supported the forces of order in June,
sustaining injury while rescuing five Mobile Guards and a drummer
of the twenty-first regiment of line. 16 Though an invalid and unable to
work, she had been assured a pension by the state.
To these autonomous roles, male republicans, at critical moments in
the February Days, added the employment of women as convenient
allegorical figures to spur on men to combat or to celebrate victory,
as they had done in July 1830. The tableau of the baker's boy carry-
ing a dead woman shot by royal troops to rouse the crowd with a
speech at the Place des Victoires was answered on the night of 23
February 1848 by the macabre parade of corpses following the shoot-
ings on the Boulevard des Capucines. By torchlight bystanders could
observe a muscular workman lifting from time to time the bloody corpse
of a woman and calling for revenge for the massacre of unarmed civ-
ilians.17 The corpse served not only to rouse the people, but as a con-
venient figure of martyred liberty. The following day, when the rebels
celebrated the fall of the July Monarchy by sacking the Tuileries Pal-
ace they removed the throne to the Place du Carrousel and set upon it
a young woman wearing a crown of artificial flowers that had been
found in the palace. The throne was later burnt in the Place de Ia
Bastille in a ceremony at which 'two girls dressed in white, symbols
of purity, were in attendance ... seated on horses of the ex-king.' 18 In
24 hours the imagery had changed from one of martyrdom to one of
triumph; like the woman borne aloft to the Hotel de Ville in July 1830
the young girl on the royal throne symbolized the victory of the people
over despotism; her fellows dressed in white who were present at the
burning of the throne symbolized the virginity of a new regime that
had excised old corruption and would restore liberties, the ceremony
being accompanied by cries of 'Vive Ia Liberte!' and 'Vive Ia
Republique!'.
This euphoria appeared to be justified by the initial actions of the
Second Republic: the introduction of manhood suffrage, restoration of
freedom of the press and association, and democratization of the National
Guard. But crucial problems in the economy beset the young regime;
a dearth of investment and falls in production after the February Rev-
olution adversely affected industry, while agriculture continued to suf-
fer a blight of overproduction. The problem of unemployment in Paris
intensified, with at least 150 000 people out of work by 23 June 1848. 19
Unemployment had direct implications for rents and tenancies, many

women being unable to pay their rent. Rent strikes developed in areas
such as La Charonne, La Mouff and La Villette, as described earlier,
in which women led the local community in vociferous charivaris. On
6 April it was reported that the majority of tenants were refusing to
pay rent in the Faubourg St Antoine and were hanging landlords in
effigy. 20 In the Cour de Ia Juiverie, off the Rue de Charonne, a furni-
ture-finisher named Elisa Parmentier, Femme Debeurgrave, led a depu-
tation of tenants in April 1848 to their landlady, a Mademoiselle Nelle,
and demanded with threats that the tenants be acquitted of three in-
stalments of rent that were due. Although this demand was conceded,
Debeurgrave was to be arrested three months later as a ringleader of
rebellion in her quarter during the June Days_21
The rent strikes in the spring of 1848 underlined the presence of
more generalized poverty among Parisian workers, a problem exacer-
bated by the rapid growth of the capital and shortage of lodgings noted
earlier. Between 1800 and 1851 the population of Paris had risen by
50 per cent. 22 In 1846 72 per cent of all Parisian tenants were pre-
sumed to be unable to pay even the minimum tax of five francs on
rental, 23 while in the twelfth arrondissement, which was more poverty-
stricken than any other, only 10 per cent were so taxed. 24 The grim
poverty of the Faubourg St Marceau is well characterized by Louis
Chevalier, who speaks of it as a district damned by both reality and
reputation, a 'sick' faubourg where people performed the most dirty
and degrading work, 'disinherited' quarter of tanners, skin-dressers,
curriers and ragpickers, which did not appear to belong to the rest of
the city. 25 Conditions there were epitomized in the life of poverty,
hardship and disease suffered by Louise Bretagne, the former rebel of
1830 and 1832. By the late 1830s and 1840s she was earning a precarious
living in the Rue Censier and Rue Mouffetard as a washerwoman, and
later as a nurse. Her husband, a tanner named Boindon, earned little,
and she had also to care for three children, including a daughter who
was almost blind. She was frequently drunk, and made repeated pleas
for state assistance as a decoree de Juillet. 26 A study of poverty made
by Armand Husson, a senior official at the Prefecture of the Seine,
revealed that in 1846-7, at the height of the depression of the eighteen
forties, 3345 charwomen and 17 346 other females were on temporary
aid. 27
The response of the Provisional Government to these problems could
have been publicly financed welfare and viable public works projects.
But the moderate republicans who dominated the government refused
to consider reforms that might alter the existing structure of society or

impugn the workings of the free market economy. Sweeping aside Louis
Blanc's idea of 'social workshops' run by the workers, who would
share the profits of production, the Provisional Government established
National Workshops that resembled the charity workshops of the July
Monarchy and were devised as a means of controlling the working
class. The introduction of the Workshops nonetheless made for a more
charged political atmosphere by raising worker expectations to an in-
ordinate degree; they believed that the Workshops would form a per-
manent refuge from unemployment and a possible means to developing
workers' producer cooperatives that had been canvassed during the July
Monarchy. The National Workshops were established primarily for the
benefit of male workers and could not employ all of those who were
jobless. After unemployed women had besieged the mairies calling for
work in March 1848 the Provisional Government agreed that women's
workshops should be set up in every arrondissement of Paris with
municipal assistance. But comparatively few were opened, and of the
female trades only the dressmakers and sewing women benefited from
them. Eventually 22 000 women workers were employed in nineteen
establishments. 28 Like their male counterparts the female workers soon
became embittered by the low pay based on piecework that the work-
shops afforded, and the division in status between workers and fore-
men manageresses which promoted petty tyranny. A story in a very
short-lived radical newspaper, Le Volcan, suggested that by mid-June
1848 a host of grievances had arisen concerning 'preferences, tyran-
nies, unfair favours!' The supervisors were condemned as 'these ladies
who nonchalantly read the newspaper, accompanying each phrase by
swallowing a strawberry dipped in sugar and claret; these ladies are
the supervisors, who are paid at the rate of three francs a day ... ' A
fictitious worker called Julie complains that it takes her three days to
make a shirt, and that her 20 sous, the daily wage, just sufficed to buy
bread. 29
Yet unemployed women who could not depend on even this meagre
wage fared worse still; in a women's workshop of the eighth
arrondissement workers themselves earning only 60-70 centimes a day
collected on behalf of a fellow worker who was destitute, to pay for
her bread, shoes and two weeks' rent. The beneficiary's landlord was
moved by this act of charity to forego a further two weeks' rent. The
moderate republican newspaper Le National, while applauding this 'most
touching deed' chose not to look beyond the case of individual hard-
ship to root causes. 30 The corpses of other women facing such destitu-
tion turned up regularly in the Morgue in the spring of 1848_31 Others

threw themselves on the charity of relations. Genevieve Lecaufette, an
unemployed shawlmaker of the Rue Alibert, was paid 24 sous a day in
the workshop of the Rue Grand St Michel; eight sous were paid over
for her lodgings on 22 June 1848, leaving her with no money for the
next three or four days. While seeking to visit her brother in order to
borrow money, Lecaufette became caught up in the June rebellion in
the Faubourg St Martin, and was arrested on suspicion. 32 The source
of these problems of poverty was seen clearly by Desiree Gay, a super-
visor and municipal delegate for the workshops of the second arron-
dissement. She spoke out publicly by writing an article of protest in
the feminist newspaper La Voix des Femmes. 'The women workers are
dying of hunger,' she declared, 'the work given to them in the work-
shops is a lure .. .' For her, the answer lay in proper representation of
the interests of female labour on the Luxembourg Commission. 33
The Luxembourg Commission, established to mobilize the working
class and provide a sounding board for their grievances at the insist-
ence of Louis Blanc, afforded another opportunity to provide evidence
of economic and social distress, but had no power to enforce reforms
that might alleviate it. The petitions forwarded to the commission by
the female trades reveal that low salaries and unemployment were the
main grievances. Of 31 petitions drawn up by different trades in Paris
and its suburbs, 20 specified demands concerning salaries - such as a
desire for a uniform wage tariff and minimum wage (sewing women
and glovemakers) or an increase in wages (such as carpetmakers, who
requested a wage of 50 centimes a day). Others called for the end of
competition from ready-to-wear manufacturers (sewing women); the
establishment of National Workshops, which reflected the growing
scourge of unemployment (mattress corders, lacemakers, artificial flower
makers); the suppression of prison and convent labour, which undercut
even modest female wages (washerwomen, embroiders, trousermakers);
and a shorter working day of ten hours (washerwomen and women in
the ready-to-wear trade). 34 But few of these grievances were likely to
find a satisfactory solution, as the role of the Commission was purely
advisory, not executive. While a ten-hour working day for Paris was
decreed by the Provisional Government on 2 March, there was no ef-
fective means of enforcing it. Louis Blanc recommended that a decree
be published on 24 March to ban work in prisons and convents, but
this decree remained a dead letter and was repealed in January 1849.35
Efforts to reduce hours and raise wages benefited few categories of
women workers. The washerwomen secured a daily reduction of their
working day by two hours. 36 Attempts by Blanc and other reformers

to use the Commission to sponsor the formation of workers' corpora-
tions by trade and producers' associations kindled hopes among the
protagonists of the Societe de la Voix des Femmes that women workers
could similarly organize themselves. Plans for producers' cooperative
associations were aired in the newspaper La Voix des Femmes but did
not materialize. 37 Only the female hat-makers established a corporative
organization, the Societe Chapeliere de Sainte Marie; their agreement
on a single wage tariff as early as 1844 suggests a unique degree of
solidarity amongst them. 38
The hopes and protests of working women represent the first col-
lective attempts to define and assert the dignity of their trades, the
right to work, and a living wage. Alongside this new economic self-
awareness and mobilization, political mobilization of the working class
was made possible by the decree of freedom of the press and associa-
tion. Some two hundred clubs sprang up in the wake of the February
Revolution, attracting perhaps one hundred thousand members; at the
same time a large number of newspapers appeared, many of them des-
tined to be short-lived. 39 According to Peter Amann, most of these
clubs aimed to provide a basic political education for the newly en-
franchised mass electorate. 40 But a minority at once began to preach a
radical message that raised the hopes of some workers still further.
The most notorious club, the Societe Republicaine Centrale of Auguste
Blanqui, a lifelong agitator and revolutionary conspirator, argued that
the workers themselves were not yet in power, and a second revolu-
tion was needed to effect this. A similar message was preached by the
Club de la Revolution of Armand Barbes and the Societe des Amis du
Peuple of Fran~ois Raspail. Raspail's club had nearly six thousand
members at most, including one thousand women. 41 Etienne Cabet's
club, the Societe Fraternelle Centrale, advocated a peaceful and volun-
tary transition to a communist society based on rigid equality. It is
clear that women attended at least some of these clubs and acquired
radical notions, even if in general the clubs did not take feminist issues
seriously and their assemblies comprised a church in which women
were to remain silent. 42 Significantly, the clubs which most attracted
women amongst those of more radical tinge were the clubs of Raspail
and Cabet, but neither club permitted free discussion from the audi-
ence; rather they were gatherings at which the political leader handed
down political orthodoxy to the faithful. 43 Some of the women arrested
as ringleaders of the June rebellion had attended these clubs and had
read the newspapers sponsored by their leaders.
Radical anger at the failure of the Provisional Government to decree

reform and provide adequate work at a satisfactory wage was com-
pounded by the outcome of the elections to the Constituent Assembly
in April 1848, which produced a majority of landowners and professional
bourgeois representatives; of some 900 elected representatives there
were some 500 crypto-royalists, about 270 moderate republicans and
only about 80 radicals or socialists favouring structural changes in society.
The conservative temper of the provinces prevailed over the radical-
ism of Paris. 44 The government executive was reshuffled to exclude
socialists and include only one token radical, Ledru-Rollin. This turn
of events bitterly disappointed the radical Left, which had repeatedly
pressed for the elections to be postponed, to permit time for the schooling
of the provincial electorate in the virtues of republicanism. This de-
mand, among others, had been voiced in massive demonstrations that
had further alarmed the moderate republican and conservative forces
and provided active rehearsals for the great mass mobilization of the
June Days.
The first of these demonstrations occurred on 17 March, and in-
volved 150 000 to 200 000 participants who marched from the Champs
Elysees to the Hotel de Ville, to serve a warning on the Provisional
Government and the bourgeois demonstrators who, on the previous day,
had protested against the democratization of the National Guard, that
the progress of the republican revolution could not be reversed. 45 A
petition, presented by a delegation of demonstrators, called for the
postponement of elections to the Constituent Assembly and the
officerships of the National Guard. A demonstration that followed on
16 April was seen by the authorities as more sinister; the aim was to
put pressure on the Provisional Government immediately before the
constituent elections, but it became confused. 46 It did not amount to an
armed coup but offered a threatening aspect as tens of thousands of
workers, headed by the corporation leaders and delegates of the
Luxembourg Commission, marched from the Champs Elysees to the
Hotel de Ville, causing the government to raise the alarm and summon
the National Guard to seal off the building. By mounting a successful
propaganda offensive against the radical left the moderate republican
government strengthened its position. Dissatisfaction with government
obduracy over radical reform persisted and spilled over in a third great
popular demonstration on 15 May on behalf of Polish liberties. As in
March, a larger crowd assembled than had been expected, suggesting
to a few radical extremists such as Blanqui and Aloysius Huber that
perhaps the moment for a putsch had come. The Constituent Assembly
was invaded by a crowd of several thousand, producing tumult and an

abortive bid for a provisional government of the radical left. The fail-
ure of this bid simply discredited radicalism further and strengthened
the hand of conservative political forces; the leaders of the attempted
coup were arrested and gaoled, depriving the radical movement of its
established leadership and making it more likely that a popular rebel-
lion would rely on a spontaneous leadership emerging from neighbour-
hood or trade networks.
The initiators of these demonstrations - the clubs and trade corpora-
tions - were male-dominated bodies; but contemporaries report the
presence of women in the processions, especially on 17 March when,
for example, Daniel Stern observed 'a compact mass of men, women,
old people and children' .47 As in the great processions of 1792, the
women may have wished to emphasize the 'family' nature of worker
protest and defer violence by the forces of order. On 15 May, when
red caps and pikes reminiscent of the demonstrations of 1792 were
noted,48 the working-class group of feminists known as the Vesuviennes,
organized in military fashion by a half-crazed agitator and would-be
scientific inventor, Daniel Borme, appear to have marched, bearing
aloft a banner that read 'Droit des Femmes' .49 The same observer noted
also the grisettes, 'not forbearing to add their quavering sopranos to
the ('a ira chorus .. .' 50
After 15 May the politics of the Second Republic moved into a danger-
ous phase. The conservative majority in the Assembly was determined
to use the events of that day as a pretext to harass radicals and close
down the National Workshops that were increasingly condemned as a
useless burden to the taxpayer. Troops were moved back into Paris
and the Director of the National Workshops, Emile Thomas, seen by
the government as too sympathetic to his subordinates, was removed
from office by a squalid manoeuvre that did much to increase a sense
of solidarity and persecution among the Workshop employees. 51 The
closure of political clubs after 15 May simply drove workers onto the
streets of the capital to continue their discussions. Working-class ap-
prehension at the growing repression, and preparations for the by-elections
of 4 June fostered vast open-air assemblies almost nightly on the boul-
evards. These gatherings alarmed the government, which took steps to
disperse and ban them. In anticipation of the by-elections, paid agents
of the royalists and Bonapartists began to mingle with these crowds,
to fuel their anger at government policies. At the end of May an Orleanist
agent named Anne Lemoine, aged 38 and describing herself as a nun,
was arrested as she offered for sale to a bookseller in the Rue Ponceau
a brochure entitled Rejfexions d'une femme de cinquante-huit ans sur

Ia Republique et sur son lmpossibilite d'exister en France sans un
Chef Monarchique, written by one Marie Rosny and advocating the
claims of the Comte de Paris and Prince de Joinville. 52 Women who
sought, on 19 June, to speak at the Place du Chatelet in favour of
'Henri V' (the Comte de Chambord) and Louis-Napoleon were heckled
and pursued by a crowdY On Friday 9 June and Saturday 10 June the
National Guard effected a number of arrests among people assembled
on the Boulevard St Denis. On 9 June a woman named Hawarden
(sic), arrested wearing male dress after refusing to leave, was later
sentenced in absentia to two months' imprisonment. 54 On the follow-
ing day a number of women disguised as men were apprehended near
the Porte St Denis. 55
In the Faubourg St Antoine, whose reputation for revolt had long
been seen as formidable, 56 joblessness, hunger, the threat to employ-
ment in the Workshops and rent debts brought women on to the streets.
An eyewitness report described how, in that part of the Place de Ia
Bastille adjoining the Boulevard Beaumarchais, a gathering persisted
on a continuous basis for almost a fortnight before the outbreak of the
June Days. Here the issues of local poverty and the inaction of the
Executive Commission were aired by demagogic speakers to crowds
who complained that the necessity of feeding their children meant that
they were unable to eat every day, while 'women, much more violent
in expression than the men, maintained that the Mobile Guard was,
and always would be, on the side of the workers; and that nothing
would be achieved on this occasion without the women, as they were
tired of suffering and being exploited.' 57 It was noted that whereas
women had been less apparent in earlier street agitation, on the two
evenings before insurrection broke out on 23 June, they became nu-
merous among the vast crowds assembling on the Place de !'Hotel de
Ville. In the words of Le National, there were 'many women and girls
giving their arm to their husbands and fathers.' 58
The announcement on 22 June that the National Workshops would
be closed and their beneficiaries would suffer the humiliation of being
drafted into the army or sent to provincial public works schemes fi-
nally shattered any lingering hopes on the part of many workers that
the Second Republic as then constituted would offer them a better social
future, and confirmed their worst suspicions of covert political reac-
tion. Louis Pujol, a Workshop foreman and leader of a delegation of
protest to the Executive Commission, reported the refusal of the gov-
ernment to reconsider its decision to close the Workshops to crowds at
the Place du Luxembourg and Place de Ia Bastille, and urged them

that their only recourse was to a policy of liberty or death - a fight to
the death. 59 By recalling the victors of July 1789 Pujol implicitly re-
minded his audience that a popular rising against state repression was
now part of a legitimate political tradition. Workers processed the streets
in their hundreds on 22 June, denouncing the decision to close the
Workshops; a long parade left the Faubourg St Antoine on the evening
of that day, passing via the Rue StJacques to the Place du Pantheon,
to join a great public meeting. A police witness of this procession
reported that 'confused shouts arose from the midst of this multitude
which included women: "We want work", to which was added: "We
won't leave. We'll have it! We'll take it! Long live the republic."
Some called for massacres and pillage ... ' 60 After a final address by
Pujol on the morning of 23 June crowds scattered to put up barricades
in the traditional centres of insurrection, the northern, eastern and south-
eastern districts of Paris. Possibly as many as 15 000 Parisians were
involved in the rebellion, 61 driven onward by a conjunction of con-
tinued economic misery and frustration, for which there seemed no
promise of redress from the government, and new politicization made
possible through the freedoms that that same government had provided.
Political and economic causation became intertwined and indivisible
for the rebels of June; only a new political order, a 'democratic and
social republic', would guarantee them the right to work, right of as-
sociation and social reform. 62
4 Defending Livelihoods
and Neighbourhoods:
the June Days of 1848
The basic organizational framework of the insurgent struggle of June

1848 was a neighbourhood one, as in previous risings in Paris. The
radical leaders had been arrested in May, but a spontaneous popular
leadership emerged through the organs of the democratized National
Guard and the National Workshops. Although most of the clubs had
disappeared by 23 June 1848 and few other than the Montagnards de
Belleville fought on an organizational basis, 1 the convictions of many
individual club members, female as well as male, carried them into
battle. Rapid resistance was aided by the strategy of the forces of or-
der. General Eugene Cavaignac, who was put in charge of military
operations to end the rebellion, concentrated his troops slowly and
carefully, enabling insurgents to organize neighbourhoods for defence
and seek to establish local consensus by browbeating reluctant bystanders
into participation or acquiescence - a role in which women were to be
significant. From 23 to 26 June three days of bitter street fighting
occurred, the rebels taking to the battle-lines on an intermittent and
localized basis, as the needs of attack and defence required. The de-
feat of the June rebellion by Cavaignac's forces brought the arrest of
thousands of rebels, of whom at least 11 600 were noted in arrest records.
The fact that the rebellion of June 1848 - unlike that of the pre-
vious February but like that of December 1851 - was a failure and
treasonable has left a rich archive on the female participants in the
conflict, in the form of dossiers on arrested rebels held by the Archives
de 1' Armee de Terre division of the Archives de Guerre at Vincennes
[formerly Series A, now known as series JM (Justice Militaire), Insur-
rection de Juin 1848]. These dossiers, and a corresponding register of
arrested persons in the Archives Nationales de France, series F7 2585,
were consulted for the statistical part of this study .2 Together they
comprise the most extensive body of archival evidence about female
insurgency in France in the period between the 1789 Revolution and
the Paris Commune of 1871, and are supported and in some instances
corroborated by the observations of contemporary eyewitnesses and
47
the press. This contrasts with the more sparse nature of source material
for the revolutions of July 1830 and February 1848, consisting as it
does of a few dossiers on female beneficiaries of a government pen-
sion scheme for the relatives of the dead and for the injured, and oc-
casional reports of arrondissement mayors. 3 It is therefore the primary
evidence for the 'June Days', particularly the arrest records at Vincennes
which, with respect to female rebels, have never been systematically
examined before, that provide the basis for the most assured determi-
nation of the character of women insurrectionaries in mid-nineteenth
century France.
The following study of women insurgents of June 1848 is drawn
from evidence concerning all females arrested in the archival register
F7 2585, and from the evidence provided by a detailed survey of some
two hundred dossiers at Vincennes, including all surviving dossiers
from letters A to M inclusive. Additional material is drawn from eye-
witness accounts in memoirs and reports in the contemporary press.
We will seek to establish whether the role of women in the June Days
was an auxiliary one, as some contemporaries tend to imply, or whether
on occasion women did assume organizational initiatives, contrary to
what is suggested by Agulhon and Rendall; and whether women's par-
ticipation did on occasion denote any sort of political awareness, as
distinct from purely domestic concerns or an ill-defined hatred of the
wealthy. Contemporary evidence tends to imply that female collective
protest in June 1848 was an extension of domestic preoccupations.
The Recollections of Alexis de Tocqueville patronisingly describe women
in June 1848 as bringing to the conflict 'the preoccupations of a house-
wife ... They loved this war much as they might have enjoyed a lot-
tery.'4 Daniel Stern reported that women resorted to innumerable
ingenious stratagems to bring foodstuffs, messages and ammunition to
fighters who were by implication male - by simulating pregnancy; by
carrying powder in the double bottom of a milk canister, or in hol-
lowed out bread or pastry; and by helping to manufacture cartridges. 5
Lord Norman by, the British ambassador in Paris, noted how women
hid baskets beneath their skirts to carry provisions and cartridges to
the battle lines, and forged false passes to proceed from quarter to
quarter. 6 Those who played more combative roles- men and women-
tended to be dismissed as criminals, prostitutes or marginaux in gen-
eral. The increased visibility of such people with the growth of urban
agglomerations in early nineteenth-century France had caused much
alarm to contemporaries. Studies of working-class poverty by Dr Louis-
Rene Villerme and the journalist Eugene Buret in 1840 demonstrated
Defending Livelihoods and Neighbourhoods 49
how the increased demand of modern industry for cheap labour had
promoted rural migration to the cities, creating on their margins un-
stable populations of lumpenproletarians prone to crime and delinquency. 7
'Governments are rightly concerned,' wrote Buret, 'they fear that one
day formidable dangers will burst forth from the midst of these de-
graded, corrupted populations.' 8 Growing divisions of wealth and pov-
erty and a new ruthless aristocracy of manufacturing would bring social
war and anarchy, he warned, 9 and in England the poor had already
been exploited by Chartist agitators. 10 In times of political stress the
protagonists of rebellion would be the unemployed, rootless, degraded
individuals who fascinated and horrified contemporary social observers. 11
Victor Hugo suggested that the women who were shot on the barri-
cade of the Porte St Denis were prostitutes, 12 though there is no proof
that they were, and some contemporary reports suggest that they were
of respectable employed background. 13 The conservative magistrate M.A.
Pages-Duport wrote of the women rebels of June 1848, 'They were
prostitutes or frightful creatures of the human species, beside them-
selves with threats, oaths and imprecations, brandishing weapons
frenetically.' 14
However, the 'riffraff' thesis of the causation of the June Days did
not pass unchallenged at the time, 15 and has been demolished in recent
years, notably by the studies of Roger Price and Charles Tilly and
Lynn Lees. 16 The latter sought to evaluate the class and occupational
background of the June rebels in general. 17 Tilly and Lees identified
11 616 suspects arrested as a result of the June Days, of whom 273
were women. The survey conducted for the purposes of this study,
allowing for errors, omissions or duplications in the two sets of records
cited, found 292 female insurgents, or slightly more than two and a
half per cent of the total listed. 18 This cannot be the total of female
participants in the rebellion, since others doubtless evaded arrest by
flight or by denouncing neighbours. Some clearly died in the fighting,
such as the two celebrated women who on 23 June were killed on the
barricade at the Porte St Denis defiantly brandishing a flag, a sym-
bolic scene recorded by many contemporary chroniclers. 19 Tilly and
Lees estimate that some 1500 of a total of I 0 000 to 15 000 rebels
involved in the June Days were killed. 20 They reveal that the average
male insurgent was not likely to be unskilled, labourer or a criminal,
but an artisan worker aged between 20 and 40, representing a craft
with mixed skill level, living in the eastern suburbs of Paris, very probably
a native of the provinces rather than Paris, though domiciled in the
capital for a sufficient length of time to have become integrated into
neighbourhood social networks. 21 Tilly and Lees distinguish between

the male and female profile only in respect of occupation, noting a
sharp discrepancy; a third of the women worked either in the clothing
industry or in service employment while 'another large proportion' were
either merchants or small traders. 22 Whether the profile of male and
female rebels, making allowance for this occupational discrepancy be-
tween the sexes, does in fact correspond may be validated by the stat-
istical evidence examined.
It must be borne in mind that the evidence of the Vincennes dossiers
presents shortcomings: it is evidence viewed from the perspective of
the legal authorities; 23 most of the people arrested came from certain
areas where the conflict had persisted most bitterly and where the
authorities evinced an acute thirst for vengeance, often seizing people
in the street or in house-to-house searches. Cross-questioning might
reveal that those apprehended were in fact innocent or had been falsely
denounced by landlords or neighbours. Marie Charlotte Comeau, a
toymaker of the Rue du Faubourg St Martin, protested her innocence
of involvement in the June Days after her arrest, claiming that she had
stayed indoors throughout the conflict. When the fighting had been at
its most intense she had taken refuge with her children in a neigh-
bour's cellar. Witnesses all spoke in favour of her innocence, and it
was discovered that her landlord wished to remove her from her job as
a concierge of several houses, and that he had a son usefully em-
ployed in the Prefecture de Police. 24 Some care was taken by the auth-
orities to expose false and malicious denunciations, of which this was
only one example. Rumours of attempts by women victuallers to kill
members of the forces of order by selling poisoned eau-de-vie and
liqueurs, 25 led to the arrest of a Veuve Marie Genreau on 25 June. She
had sold liqueurs at the Esplanade des Invalides, and on her arrest had
sought to demonstrate the sound quality of her merchandise by spon-
taneously drinking two glasses of liqueur herself.26 She was acquitted,
as was the more unfortunate Stephanie Gagneur, the young wife of a
writer, Edouard Fraissinet, of the Rue de Verneuil. She had been ar-
rested on 25 June for allegedly preaching civil war on the streets but
was subsequently found to be suffering from menstrual hysteria, a con-
dition certified by her doctor. 27
Thus the fact of arrest did not necessarily denote a criminal case to
be answered. Of the 292 women in the register F7 2585 160 were
judged innocent and freed after investigation; 14 were found to have
no case to answer, or died in hospital; and 118 were eventually found
guilty and sentenced to transportation. Arrested women were taken
initially into custody at the Prefecture de Police. They were cross-

questioned by police and examining magistrates, statements were taken
from witnesses and the resulting evidence was assessed to determine
innocence or guilt by a court martial. Though in theory the guilty were
to be transported in practice, in all cases, they were imprisoned in the
principal women's prison of Paris, St Lazare. Some women judged
guilty of the most serious crimes of rebellion were later transferred to
a prison at Clermont sur l'Oise. Simone Leblanc and Catherine Leclerc,
who by August 1849 were as politically fervent as they had been a
year before and were inciting fellow prisoners to revolt were trans-
ferred from St Lazare to a prison at Haguenau (Bas-Rhin). 28 Evidence
of complicity of women convicted is thus derived from police and
magistrates' records, and statements from witnesses. In support of its
validity it may be said that some women confessed to all or part of
the charges laid against them; some had a family bac'kground of radi-
cal left-wing activity; others produced in their defence alibis that were
specious or contradictory; some were presented with compromising
evidence found in their homes, or were denounced by people who were
not immediate neighbours nor personally known to them.
The evidence about women arrested in June 1848 confirms in detail
what contemporary writers say in general terms about accessory roles,
but also reveals that some female participants played a determined and
assertive role reminiscent of those of Josephine Mercier in July 1830
and Adelaide Bettrette in February 1848. Forty of the 118 women
convicted on the list in register F 7 2585 are known to have played
what may be termed a primary role in the June Days: specifically they
built barricades, appeared armed on them, fired on troops from barri-
cades or windows, sounded the alarm by ringing the local steeple bell,
and organized the defence of their own quarter, inciting men to battle.
Undoubtedly some of these militant women were acting on political
motives, and a few had a past history of insurgency. A 76-year-old
veteran of previous revolutions, Veuve Anne-Marie Henry, a retired
dressmaker, led women in the fighting on the barricade of the Rue des
Trois-Couronnes in Belleville. 29 Described by the historian Pierre
Dominique as 'an old virago', 30 Veuve Henry demanded arms at the
Mairie de Belleville with the cry 'Kill and assassinate!' She threatened
to stab those who dismantled the barricades, exclaiming, 'There they
are, the brigands who took down the barricade; kill them', and de-
clared that, had she had her knife to hand, she would have plunged it
into their stomachs. In particular she designated the home of a chand-
ler named Lhomme for attack. 31 A wood-carver, Elisabeth Guibal, of
the Faubourg St Antoine, who had been wounded in the shooting on

the Boulevard des Capucines on 23 February, lost her claim to a state
pension when it was discovered that during the June Days she had run
around the streets carrying a sabre, smashing gunshop windows in or-
der to seize armsY Arrested on 25 June, Guibal was denounced by
her whole neighbourhood for being constantly at the barricades of the
Faubourg St Antoine, and attempting to terrorize the tenants of the
quarter into joining the rebellion by threatening to set their houses on
fire. 33 Rose Jeanjean, a 34-year-old ragpicker of the Rue Vandrezanne
at Gentilly, who was implicated in barricade warfare and incitement to
murder General Brea in June, had been seen working on barricades in
February, armed with a sabre, standing sentry, and seeking to burn the
toll house of the Barriere d'ltalie. 34 Augustine Falaise, a young piano-
teacher of the Place des Vosges (then still referred to as the Place
Royale) tore up a pavement in the Rue du Temple with her two cousins
in February 1848, for which action they earned the nickname of the
Depaveuses; in June the three women helped to erect barricades in the
Rue Jarente and Rue du Val Ste Catherine, their radical affiliations
leading many later to testify against them. 35 Another woman with a
revolutionary past who may well have participated in the June Days
before evading arrest and disappearing for two years was Louise Bretagne,
the veteran of 1830 and 1832. In 1848 she was living in the Rue
Mouffetard and working as a washerwoman, and was reported (as we
have noted already) to be very poor and frequently drunk. The Com-
mission des Recompenses Nationales, seeking her whereabouts in June
1850, discovered from the Prefecture de Police that she had left her
home in the Rue Mouffetard nearly two years previously without pro-
viding a forwarding address. 36
In various parts of the capital clusters of militant women fought
together and organized their quarters for battle. At the Porte St Martin
on 23 June five women, one of them in mourning, armed with sabres
from the props room of the Theatre de la Porte St Martin, appeared on
the barricades, 37 while another group fought in the Clos St Lazare. 38
In the Rue Jarente and Rue du Val Ste Catherine Augustine Falaise
and her two cousins, Anna Libra and Josephine Petitjean, admitted to
building barricades that blocked the streets. Neighbours testified to
seeing Augustine Falaise in riding costume with a bayonet, inciting
the rebels of the Rue Jarente and Rue d'Ormesson. 39 When the first
barricades were destroyed by government troops on 23 June the women
rebuilt them next day. A tenant of their-house, Marc-Antoine Dulcenay,
had heard Josephine Petitjean and her married sister Anna Libra say
on 24 June, 'They never stop firing, those scoundrels of National

Guardsmen. They must be mad. I do hope we will get the better of
them and all these aristocrats tomorrow.' Madame Libra expressed joy
when the rebels seized the mairie of the eighth arrondissement on 24
June, crying, 'What luck, there are some cartridges - provided they
aren't duds.' Her sister Josephine Petitjean declared, 'Now we're saved.
The army has surrendered.' 40 On 25 June the two sisters fetched rebels
to their house to compel the men to go to the barricades; though the
accused women protested that they had acted under duress, the weight
of evidence led to their imprisonment until late 1849.
The attack mounted against the mairie of the eighth arrondissement,
and its seizure by the rebels, which so enraptured Anna Libra, resulted
from the inadequate defence of the building. A rebel leader, Leon
Lacollonge, was installed as a temporary mayor. A report of the former
mayor described how the mairie was surrounded by rebels who had
rushed upon it and disarmed the troops guarding it with the cry of
'Vive Ia ligne!'. In the crowd 'there were more women than men' .41
One of the women involved was a prostitute, Marie Leroy, of the Rue
Neuve St Gilles. Having already commenced the building of a barri-
cade in the street, along with all the women of her house save two,
Leroy provided a stove to melt down metal for the casting of bullets.
She assisted in the attack and pillage of the mairie, returning home
with two sabres tucked under her dress and an umbrella, crying, 'What
luck if we win! We'll be able to pillage at leisure.' 42
The neighbouring Place de Ia Bastille was the scene of intense con-
flict between the forces of order and rebels, one of whose leaders was
the unemployed furniture-finisher, Elisa Parmentier, Femme Debeurgrave,
who had organized the successful rent strike in the Cour de la Juiverie
in April. She was arrested on 26 June, dressed in workman's clothes
and bearing a red flag, on the barricade of the Carrefour Charenton;
the National Guardsman who arrested her noted that her hands and
face were black with gunpowder. Cross-questioning of witnesses re-
vealed that Debeurgrave had compelled her husband to go to the bar-
ricades with her, and had herself gone from one barricade to another
during the three days of fighting. 'That woman was more worked up
than the other rebels; she frightened everyone with her fanaticism',
declared Madame Fran~oise Petit, one of the tenants of Debeurgrave's
house. On 25 June Debeurgrave threatened to burn down the Cour de
Ia Juiverie if the male tenants did not descend to the barricades. The
tenants had then fled to seek sanctuary at the Hospice des Quinze-
Vingts, pursued by Debeurgrave and other insurgents. 43 The same pattern
could be seen in the Faubourg St Antoine in thoroughfares such as the

Rue de Reuilly and Rue de Charonne. Women, individually or in groups,
helped to organize the erection of barricades and arms factories, par-
ticipated in the capture of strategic installations and incited the men-
folk to battle. In the Rue de Reuilly a barricade was built on 25 June
by two costermongers, Veuve Josephine Dufour, a butterseller, and
her 18-year-old daughter Heloise, a fruitseller, accompanied by two
washerwomen, Louise Bergeron and Adelaide Carre. They attempted
to force neighbours to go to the barricades, including a gardener named
Louis Huet; when Huet' s mother urged the women to desist from building
the barricade and making 'the most inflammatory kind of remarks',
Bergeron sought to strike her with a paving stone and a key. 44 During
the attempt to burn down the Caserne de Reuilly, Louise Lucas, a
prostitute 'feared in the household' at 13 Rue de Reuilly, poured petrol
on straw she had brought to the barracks to fan the flames. 45 In the
Rue de Charonne a pursemaker, Marie-Fran~oise Guillaume, joined other
women from her house in the building of a barricade on 24 June. They
invaded the house of a neighbour living across the road, Monsieur
Beausse, and took away ladders, a table, wheelbarrows and a shutter
as materials for their work.46
Other centres of such initiatives were Belleville, and the Faubourg
St Jacques on the Left Bank. In Belleville the authorities arrested a
pursemaker, Josephine Clabot who, with her husband Charles, a wood-
engraver, was accused of being continually present on the barricades.
She was reported to have been dressed as a man 'so as not to be
insulted', and armed with a sabre. On her arrest, she announced that
she had indeed been present on the barricade and would perhaps go
back to it. Though she later sought to deny this, the weight of evi-
dence suggests that she was a determined organizer of resistance in
her quarter. An engraver named Leroy who was a neighbour of the
Clabots declared that they had appeared at his house to force him to
march to the barricades, but that Madame Clabot had seemed the more
fanatical of the two; Leroy alleged that her husband had later apologized
for her behaviour, declaring, 'The devilish woman, she was even more
carried away than me.' Leroy spoke of Josephine Clabot as having
egged on her husband to rebellion, and of being the most relentless of
her band of rebels- 'she makes her husband do everything she wants'.
Though the Clabots proposed that they had manned the barricades on
the orders of the National Guard, they were both sentenced to trans-
portation.47 On the Left Bank, Therese·Calayon, a 30-year-old dress-
maker and prostitute of the Rue de la Harpe, then a main artery of
communication, rang the steeple bell of St Severin to rouse the rebels,

and admitted at her interrogation to having built barricades in the Rues
St Severin and de la Boucherie, dressed as a man. 48
Through their networks of neighbourhood sociability women were
well placed to locate and seek out men to fight on the barricades,
denouncing as cowards men who would not march - the same 'fire-
brand' role described by Godineau for the 1790s. In the Rue de Reuilly
the costermonger Heloise Dufour, unable to find a neighbour's hus-
band, declared, 'If her husband isn't there, she has children. They must
be made to march.' 49 In the Marais, the 'firebrand' was Genevieve
Boulanger, a shoelace maker of the Rue Jarente and wife of a
cabinetmaker, Desire Vassort, who built and commanded a barricade
on the corner of the Rue St Louis and Rue du Val Ste Catherine. On
24 June Boulanger was reported to have declared: 'Tomorrow is the
day of decision and it is vital that everyone goes', and 'In an hour
we'll make the aristos dance.' The next day she led insurgents into the
houses of neighbours, to force them to come down to assist in the
fray. When the rebels' knocks on doors elicited no reply, Boulanger
cried 'Knock harder', and in one instance sent them back to force out
a 19-year-old hairdresser's apprentice, Fran~ois Ritry, remarking, 'The
married men have gone so why shouldn't the bachelors?' 50 Adele Jarlet,
Femme Lachaux, a sewing woman, invited rebels into her house in the
Rue de l'Orme on 25 June to seize arms, designating who should be
led away to the barricades and crying: 'The cowards! They stay at
home while their brothers are being murdered!' In consequence the
landlord's son went out and was ambushed and shot in the Rue de la
Cerisaie.51 Failure to comply with the order to march could bring physical
intimidation; Marie Porcher, a cream-seller in the Rue des Bourguignons,
broke the windows of a neighbouring bottle-seller, Jean-Baptiste Lucas,
because of his unwillingness to go to the barricades. 52 Josephine Falotte,
of the Rue des Amandiers Popincourt, tried to force a grocer, Isidore
Parere, to fight on 24 June by calling for his house to be burnt down.
'He doesn't want to go,' she told the neighbours, 'because he's got a
small fortune. Burn his house down. He'll soon be forced to go.' 53
The duty of rousing the neighbourhood once accomplished, many women
then fell back from the front line of combat - though not all. A
victualler of the National Guard named Debureau, who lived in the
Rue de la Montagne Ste Genevieve, threatened that she would blow
her husband's brains out if he did not march, forced out the tenants of
a neighbouring house and then stood sentry alone on the barricade of
her street which she had helped to build, a pistol in her hand, right
through a heavy thunderstorm that occurred on the afternoon of 23

June. 54
Alongside these militantes other women engaged in the kind of sec-
ondary activities described by contemporaries like Daniel Stern and
Lord Normanby. Women sought out neighbours who could give them
metal to be melted down for bullets. When Marie-Madeleine Cheron
demanded lead to make bullets in the district of Popincourt she showed
a neighbour, Madame Laurain, two pistols, saying that one was for
herself and the other for her 'coward of a husband who wouldn't march' .55
Florentine Bacle, a prostitute, was convicted on 9 September 1848 of
having assisted Jules Bonvicini, a dentist of the Faubourg du Temple,
in the making of bullets and cartridges on his premises. She offered a
variety of excuses for having suddenly left her home to live elsewhere
under an assumed name. Like other women of her profession, Bacle
may well have been drawn to involvement in the June Days by the
man who was her lover and protector. 56 Likewise Adolphine Bouffiet,
a 19-year-old prostitute and flowerseller, was condemned for having
assisted three other rebels in the casting of bullets at her home in the
Place Maubert; a large packet of cartridges was found in her mattress
on her arrest on 26 June. 57
Bouffiet also undertook another form of assistance to the rebels:
sheltering fleeing men in her own flat on 26 June. Jeanne Gaudion, a
second-hand dealer of the Rue Beaubourg, provided shelter for two
rebels, one of whom was a Mobile Guardsman who had deserted the
cause of order, and stored their arms in chests of drawers. 58 Women
displayed their support for the rebellion by taking food and drink to
the combatants, who often fought in relays for hours at a time. A prostitute
named Marianne Marie, of the Rue des Trois-Bornes, whose lover, a
market porter named Cottin, fought on the barricades of the Rue Ste
Marie, took bread and wine to the rebels of her street in the first two
days of the rising. 59 Such provisions were sometimes obtained by force,
as happened when Louise Croquet, a sewing woman of the Rue St
Sebastien, went to a neighbouring pork butcher's shop, accompanied
by armed rebels, and compelled the owners to hand over food without
payment.60 Prudence Lesueur, an unemployed woolwinder who had taken
a job as a victualler to the eighth legion of the National Guard, abused
her position to supply rebels with drink in the Rue St Ambroise. 61
Women serving as victuallers could be of service to the rebellion in
other ways. Dressed in their uniforms they might appear to have turned
out for the cause of order, while in fact acting as spies and scouts for
rebel positions. Sylvie Macaire, one such woman, took arms to the
insurgents of the Place du Pantheon on 23 June and incited them to

battle with the cry 'Those scum in the eleventh (legion) have fired on
the twelfth, to arms, avenge our brothers!' She gave these insurgents
instructions as to where to fire, having spied out the positions of the
forces of order. 62
In the heat of conflict, women also incited the men to undertake
'revolutionary justice' against their enemies. Such actions roused un-
comfortable memories of the tricoteuses of 1793, and led to the circu-
lation of exaggerated stories of atrocities committed by women to
galvanize the courage of the forces of General Cavaignac. Women of
the Faubourg St Marceau were accused of pouring boiling oil on the
troops 63 at the time of the conflict itself, and rumours grew subsequently.
The prim Scots observer, John Palgrave Simpson, remarks in his eye-
witness account of the June Days, 'The Gardes Mobiles ... are hide-
ously massacred, in ways unmentionable by furies in the shape of women,
more frantic in their intoxication of bloodshed than the men.' 64 One of
the most notorious instances of genuine female incitement to atrocities
was, however, the case of the treacherous murder of General Bn!a at
the Barriere de Fontainebleau on 24 June. Here such incitement took
on the tragic proportions of a Greek chorus. Brea had approached a
rebel barricade and offered to parley. He appeared to be in no danger
until a number of women approached from the direction of the Latin
Quarter, warning that Brea's troops had been responsible for the exe-
cution of male rebels at the Place de l'Estrapade, and describing the
death there of one of the most popular leaders of the rebellion,
Raguisard. 65 Their accounts exasperated the rebels, who imprisoned
Bn!a in a guardhouse along with his aide-de-camp, Mangin. Presently,
more women reported that troop reinforcements and Mobile Guards
were approaching; they cried treachery and called for Brea's execu-
tion, an action subsequently carried out. 66 Among this group of women
was a dressmaker named Louise Cormery, the wife of a National Guard
drummer who had deserted to the rebels According to a number of
witnesses she was heard to cry of Brea: 'He must be shot!' and 'Kill
them, they've massacred our brothers.' 67 Rose Jeanjean, the ragpicker
who had been active in the February Revolution and had supervised
the erection of a barricade in June, added her voice to this demand,
declaring, 'Hurry up and shoot the general, the Mobile Guard and army
are there, hurry up!' 68
On a more banal level, Marie Bourgeois, a bandage-maker of Belleville,
incited the rebels to hang citil!ens who were dismantling barricades on
25 June, and offered her garters for the purpose. 69 A rebel woman
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with a long memory, Veuve Anne Goussery, a 64-year-old costermonger

of the Rue Basfroid, denounced on 23 June a wallpaper manufacturer
named Gillot, who was in dispute with his workforce. She declared
that his home should suffer the same fate as that of the manufacturer
Reveillon in the 1789 Revolution. 70 Goussery added menacingly, 'He
must be made to eat hay and straw', and Gillot was subsequently dragged
off to the barricades. 71 Marie Porcher, recognizing on 24 June the wife
of a Mobile Guardsman named Kuntz who was lodged at the Caserne
de l'Oursine, seized her and led her into her dairy shop with the help
of other women. Here she proposed to hold an impromptu court mar-
tial, threatening Madame Kuntz with death as a 'whore', 'prostitute'
and 'an infamous wretch whose husband was fighting against the people
at the Pantheon' - an ordeal from which the hapless victim escaped
with difficulty. 72
In one notorious case a female rebel, far from inciting others to
commit acts of 'revolutionary justice', appears to have proceeded to
undertake such acts herself. This woman, Simone Leblanc, mentioned
earlier as one of the most obdurate prisoners of the June rebellion,
was a varnisher, of the Rue Neuve-St Laurent, who lived quite com-
fortably at the time of her trial in 1849. She had been arrested in the
Faubourg du Temple by a Mobile Guard named Roch as she was about
to strike one of his injured comrades with a kitchen knife. In her first
and second interrogations Leblanc confessed to having beheaded eight
Mobile Guards and expressed regret at not having beheaded more, though
later she was reported to have declared that she had been 'dreaming'
that she did it. No antecedent political behaviour was found, though
there was a suggestion of an abnormal physical condition at the time
of the atrocities, one of the Guardsmen protesting that Leblanc was
red and bloated like a lobster. She showed little emotion as her pun-
ishment, ten years' forced labour, was imposed by a court martial on
27 March 1849, after a spectacular trial that attracted society figures. 73
Finally, women assisted the cause of rebellion by playing the role
of living symbols of resistance, as they had done in July 1830 and
February 1848. The best-known example of this is the two women
standard-bearers of the barricade at the Porte St Denis, who were killed
on 23 June as they brandished the flags of the National Workshops
and hurled words of defiance at the National Guard. More women
than these two seem, however, to have been involved in carrying the
flag on this barricade, as reports exist of flags being passed from
woman to woman. 74 One of these was a 20-year-old wood-gilder of
the Faubourg Poissonniere, Adele Guerre, who appeared on the barricade
bearing a flag, with the inscription 'Cent quarante-unieme brigade'. A

woman beside her with a similar flag was reported to have been killed,
and when the barricade was taken by troops Guerre escaped with the
flag to a baker's shop in the Boulevard Bonne-Nouvelle. The baker's
wife threatened to have her arrested, to which she replied that she
feared nothing and Ledru-Rollin would protect her. Adele Guerre per-
haps helped to shorten her sentence by providing testimony that she
had assisted with the ambulances of the Salle des Spectacles Concerts. 75
This tableau of female standard-bearers may well have been replicated
in many parts of the city. Elisa Debeurgrave carried a red flag in the
Place de Ia Bastille, and in Belleville Jeanne-Marie Benoist, a corsetmaker
of the Rue St Laurent, was wounded at a barricade that she had helped
to build in the same street and was carrying a flag at the time. 76 Anna
Libra was reported to have demanded a red flag to carry on the barri-
cade of the Rue du Val Ste Catherine. 77 Whether or not the women
concerned had been prompted to adopt this symbolic role by male in-
surgents (and the evidence suggests that some, at least, were acting
spontaneously) the episode involving Adele Guerre suggests that they
made it very much their own, and did not stand poised like the dra-
matic female images in the engraving published by the Illustrated London
News. 78
The evidence reviewed makes clear the significance of the role played
in the rebellion by women of the skilled working class. By correlating
the findings concerning female insurgents with those of Tilly and Lees
concerning male insurgents we may analyse the occupational and social
background of these women and perhaps further our understanding of
their motivation. Of 292 women for whom arrest warrants were issued,
the occupation of 269 are known (see Table 4.1). All but 14 belonged
to the small business class or working class, and the largest category
was of artisan occupations, 113 or 42 per cent of the total, of whom
no less than 68 were engaged in the clothing industry, as dressmakers,
sewing women, shoemakers and so forth - reflecting the fact that the
largest proportion of employed women in Paris in 1848 was to be
found in the clothing industry. The remaining artisans arrested were
involved in occupations of some skill, such as jewellery and metal-
work, the furniture trade or leather work. Fifty-six of the arrested women
(representing 21 per cent of known occupations) were engaged in service
occupations as cleaning women, washerwomen, servants, concierges,
deliverywomen and victuallers to the uniformed forces of order - another
sector of employment that relied heavily on a female labour force and
paid it badly. Seventeen were in unskilled occupations such as labouring,
Table 4.1 Women insurgents of June 1848. Arrested, 292
Origins 0
Profession Number Median age Paris/Seine Provinces Foreign ~
::s
"'
Skilled Clothing 68 36 8 56 1 (of 65 known) !:::
artisans Textiles 11 35 3 7 1 ::s
OQ
Jewellery/Metalwork 6 25 1 3 2 t""<
Other skilled trades 28 35 10 17 0 (of 27 known) ~·
"'
;;:
~
Service Washerwomen 20 31.5 3 15 0 (of 18 known)
-
~
trades Victuallers 12 37 (of 11 known) 2 10 0 f}
Other service trades 24 39 (of 22 known) 2 20 2 tl
::s
tl..
Unskilled 17 38 1 14 1 (of 16 known)
Prostitutes 30 33 9 19 1 (of 29 known) ~
c)Q•
Retailing 36 42 12 20 1 (of 33 known) ;:s-
~
Other bourgeois 14 39 5 6 1 (of 12 known) ~
Viticulture 37.5 (of 2 known) 2 0 ;:::
3 1
Unknown/none 23 37 (of 15 known) 1 13 0 (of 14 known)
;;.
~
~
f}
Total 292 36 58 202 10
(+22 origin unknown)
0\
ragpicking and machine-minding. Another idiosyncrasy of the female

insurgents was the relatively high number of prostitutes among them.
They constituted 30 of the 269 women whose professions were known
(11 per cent). This would suggest that among women participants in
the rebellion, the so-called dangerous classes, the marginal elements in
society, while still a minority element, as Tilly and Lees and Price
suggest/9 were a rather more significant minority than among the men.
The remaining women whose professions were known were mainly
retailers (36) or women associated with a business such as landlordism
or inn-keeping. Bourgeois professionals numbered 14.
Female artisans are predominant likewise among the total of women
convicted, the professions of 118 of whom are known (see Table 4.2).
38.9 per cent of convicted women were skilled artisans, within which
group women in the clothing trade comprised 23 per cent of the total
convicted. Another 17.7 per cent of the convicted women were in service
occupations, which more than reinforces the conclusion of Tilly and
Lees that one-third of all the women convicted in their sample were in
clothing or service occupations. 80 The proportion of unskilled labourers
among the convicted was only 5.3 per cent, but prostitutes made up
18.6 per cent, reinforcing the occupational discrepancy between fe-
male and male referred to above. The percentage of retailers convicted
(13.3) was smaller than Tilly and Lees implyY The relative import-
ance of professions such as retailing [shopkeepers and costermongers
(15)] and washerwomen (11) among the 118 convicted should not come
as a surprise; their trades placed such women at the centre of neigh-
bourhood female sociability in 1848 as much as they had in the Rev-
olution of 1789, enabling them to rouse their quarters and identify
sympathizers and enemies at the moment that insurrection broke out.
A correlation can also be established between the general age median
of the sample of rebels examined by Tilly and Lees, and the ages as
represented in the statistics of convicted women. Tilly and Lees estab-
lished a table of characteristics of persons arrested for participation in
the June Days, by industry. According to this, the median age of every
occupational category was between 30 and 35 years of age, and the
global median 33 years. 82 Of the 292 arrested women, the ages of 279
are known, and the median age of these is 36 years, 57 per cent being
in their twenties and thirties, though there are greater variations in
average age per profession for female than for male insurgents. This
may be explained by the tendency of independent single women to
become involved in the conflict, who would be likely to be very young
unmarried women or middle-aged or elderly widows. It may also be
Table 4.2 Women Insurgents of June 1848. Convicted, 118
Percentage 0
Profession Number convicted of Median age Origin: Provinces Foreign ~
total arrested Paris/Seine ::s
"'
1:1..
Skilled Clothing 26 38 20 I (of 25 known)
;:;·
37 4 C)Q
artisans Textiles 7 63 31 2 4 I t--o
Jewellery/Metalwork l 16.6 38 0 0 1 ~-
Other skilled trades 10 36 35 4 6 0 ~
:;:
<:)
<:)
Service Washerwomen II 55 35 l 10 0 ~
trades Victuallers 3 25 35 (of 2 known) 2 I 0 ~
Other service trades 6 25 38 1 4 l ::s
1:1..
Unskilled 6 35 37 I 4 I ~
Prostitutes 21 70 30 5 16 0 o'Q"
::s-
Retailing 15 42 41 6 9 0 \::1-
<:)
Other bourgeois 6 43 36 3 0 ;::
3
Viticulture I 33 50 0 I 0 ~
<:)
<:)
Unknown/none 5 22 49 (of 4 known) 0 4 (of 4 known)
~
Total 118 40.4 38 29 82 5
(+ 2 origin unknown)
0\
w
accounted for by the greater importance of a solidarity based on neigh-

bourhood (rather than political or professional) links, in the case of women;
to exploit that solidarity for the purpose of insurrection, a woman needed
to have been domiciled for a few years in a particular district.
With respect to geographical origin, Tilly and Lees found that the
typical arrested rebel was likely to be a native of the provinces, rather
than of Paris and the Seine department. 83 The birthplaces of 270 of the
292 arrested women are known; I 0 were born outside France. Of the
remaining 260, 58 were born in Paris or the Seine. 202 were born in
the provinces, 168 of them north of the St Malo-Geneva line, in the
more literate regions of France. Of 116 convicted women whose birth-
place is known, the proportion born in Paris and the Seine is larger:
29, or 24.5 per cent. 82 (or 76.5 per cent) were born in the provinces,
67 of them north of the St Malo-Geneva line (56.7 per cent of the
total convicted), and the remainder south of it. These percentages bear
out the assertion that most provincial immigrants to Paris came from
northern and eastern France, and not generally south of a line bounded
by the Yonne, Cote d'Or and Haute-Saone. 84 Women, too, had partici-
pated fully in the mass migration from the provinces to Paris in the
early nineteenth century. There is evidence that at least some of the
women convicted had been domiciled in Paris for over a year (though
evidence is fragmentary and sometimes allusive), and could be said to
be reasonably integrated into their local neighbourhood community.
These communities help to account for the concentration of the June
rebellion in certain arrondissements of the city. Tilly and Lees found
that two-thirds of the rebels were from areas of heavy fighting, suggesting
a close correlation between density of conflict and scale of participa-
tion.85 Their figures reveal that nearly one-quarter of convicted rebels
were from the eighth arrondissement and an eighth were from the twelfth
arrondissement. 86 Making allowance for the prejudices of those con-
ducting arrests, it seems that the Faubourg St Antoine and wretchedly
poor Faubourg St Marceau had preserved their fearsome reputations
for civil disorder. 17 per cent of the sample of Tilly and Lees were
domiciled in communes of the Seine department outside the walls of
Paris. For women rebels convicted the proportions are similar (see Table
4.3), though rise to almost one third (30.5 per cent) from the eighth
arrondissement alone, with 10 per cent from the twelfth, and 13.5 per
cent from the suburbs to the north, south and east of the city walls,
but especially from Belleville (10 of 16). The only other areas where
significant numbers were convicted were the sixth arrondissement (11)
and the ninth.
Table 4.3 Statistics of domicile of convicted women in Paris

arrondissements (total: 98)
Arrondissement Arrondissement
First I arrest Seventh 6 arrests
Second 2 arrests Eighth : 46 arrests
Third I arrest Ninth 10 arrests
Fourth 0 arrest Tenth I arrest
Fifth 5 arrests Eleventh 3 arrests
Sixth II arrests Twelfth 12 arrests
In other respects, there are differences from the general sample of Tilly
and Lees, that arise from the women's lack of a public profile. Tilly
and Lees argue that the typical male insurgent was likely to be a member
of the National Guard or the National Workshops; in their sample three-
fifths of men arrested belonged to one or the other. 87 Women, of course,
could not join the National Guard, though the arrests after the June
Days turned up the curious instance of Marie Eustache, a midwife,
and mistress of a sergeant in the fourth legion, who claimed to be a
member of the second battalion of the third legion, to wear her uni-
form regularly, and to have fought for order at the barricades of the
Barriere Poissonniere and La Villette. She had worn her uniform in all
the skirmishes since February and was nicknamed, 'notre Petit [sic]
Mobile'. 88 Her story was believed, and she was released. Though the
National Workshops in principle were a response to a recognition of
female as well as male unemployment, in practice, as we have seen,
few women were admitted to them, and the draft bill published to
announce that Workshop members would be dispersed did not take
into consideration women members. Very few of the women convicted
are known to have been members of the Workshops- a detailed analy-
sis of the first two hundred dossiers turned up only two instances -
but of this total, 18 had lovers or husbands who had been in the Work-
shops, the National Guard or both. Mark Traugott has recently argued
that group loyalties fostered in the National Guard and National Work-
shops were of far greater importance as determinants of political re-
bellion in June 1848 than strength of class affiliation in the sense of
Marx's interpretation of the event. 89 While this 'organizational hypothesis'
may hold true to some extent for female motivation, the evidence suggests
a more complicated matrix of motives than Traugott's schematic the-
sis would imply for male rebels.
Unquestionably some women convicted had a genuine awareness of
the political implications of what they had done, which had been fostered
by previous indoctrination. A few of the women appear to have at-

tended the clubs themselves. In this manner they could exercise, in an
informal way, the political rights long denied to them. Marguerite Guebart,
a dressmaker of the Rue Piat in Belleville, was described as 'a habituee
of the clubs who seeks by all means to make converts'. She had also
read the radical newspapers Le Pere Duchesne, La Vraie Republique
and La Canaille, and reproved a neighbour for reading Le Constitutionnel,
declaring of her own choices, 'Those are the good papers'. Her lover,
Jean Frederic Dargout, had participated in all the demonstrations of
1848. In the June Days Guebart went from barricade to barricade, con-
gratulating the rebels and pointing out and threatening the inhabitants
of her quarter who were opposed to the rebellion. On 26 June she
optimistically declared: 'We've got Caussidiere as our leader and to-
morrow General Cavaignac's head will be paraded through the streets
of Paris.' 90 Marie Go yon and her husband Antoine, shoemakers of the
Rue Coquenard, both belonged to Blanqui's club, the Societe Republicaine
Centrale, membership cards having been seized at their house by National
Guards on 28 June, along with a red cap, correspondence with the
socialist Thore and tickets for the proposed Banquet du Peuple. Having
blocked the windows of their house to make it a point of attack on the
troops, Madame Goyon fled with her husband to Montmartre, but did
not escape arrest and conviction. A year's imprisonment did not seem
to have modified their sentiments, for Goyon then wrote to his wife, a
prisoner at Clermont-sur-l'Oise: 'I will let you know that for amuse-
ment we read Le Constitutionnel, nicknamed la Calomnie [slander] ...
in the Restoration it lied; in the July Monarchy it defamed; in the
Republic it slanders. ' 91 Marie-Fran~oise Perrin, a concierge of the Rue
St Martin, was likewise influenced by the radical opinions of her hus-
band, a tailor for La Belle Jardiniere, and read La Republique Rouge.
Her husband, who had attended the Club des Droits de l'Homme, in-
veighed against a republic that let workers die of hunger on 25 June,
while she incited neighbours to build barricades, having declared the
previous day that: 'the people cannot allow themselves to be slaugh-
tered without defending themselves.' 92 Julie Mitouflet, wife of Charles
Mitouflet, a draper's clerk, who was a founder member of the Societe
de la Montagne and a member of the Club des Droits de l'Homme,
appeared armed on the barricades of the Faubourg Poissonniere, dressed
as a man ('a woman in petticoats would be harassed', she explained),
and allegedly continued to cast bullets after the June Days until her
arrest. 93 Victoire Goden, a prostitute of the Rue Perigueux, who built
barricades on the corner of the Rue de Poitou and Rue Fontaine de
I'Echaude, and loaded guns on the barricade of the Faubourg du Tem-

ple, was the lover of Adrien Leclerc, who had attended the Societe
des Droits de l'Homme and had been a lieutenant of the National
Workshops. 94 Catherine Leclerc, a victualler of the twelfth legion of
the National Guard, described in a report of the Gazette des Tribunaux
as 'reputedly a political individual in her neighbourhood who attends
the popular societies', was accused of stealing combustible material
by force in order to burn down the Mobile Guards' sentry post in the
Place Maubert; found guilty by a court martial in January 1849 she
was sentenced to five years' imprisonment. 95 Annette Defer, spectacle-
seller of the Faubourg St Antoine, wife of the optician Jean-Louis Defer,
who was Vice-President of the Club des Quinze-Vingts and was blamed
for indoctrinating 'a whole mass of workers in her quarter', supplied
powder and cartridges to the barricades from a powder factory in the
Passage du Chantier. 96
However, some women were married to men whose record of politi-
cal subversion extended back many years. Marie Chassang, a grocer
of the Faubourg St Marceau, who organized a barricade in the Rue
des Postes and gave food to the rebels, crying, 'We need gold and two
hours of pillage', was married to a man with a dossier of political
offences extending back to July 1832, when he had been fined and
imprisoned for insulting the person of Louis-Philippe. Antoine Chassang,
a partisan of Barbes, had participated in the February Revolution and
the demonstration of 15 May; on 23 June he had confronted the govern-
ment representative Fran~ois Arago, who endeavoured to persuade the
rebels to withdraw from the Rue Souffiot, with the riposte: 'We've
been robbed twice and we don't want to be robbed a third time' (either
a reference to the outcome of the Constituent Assembly elections and
the demonstration of 15 May or to that of the July and February Rev-
olutions).97 Catherine Depesne, a paper-seller, who was sentenced to
transportation for storing arms in her home in the Rue Constantine,
from which firing was reported, was the wife of a veteran of previous
revolutions called Jean-Baptiste Depesne, a florists' papermaker, wounded
in July 1830 and a combatant in February 1848. On 23 June he had
declared that Barbes should be put at the head of the republic. 98
Though the women arrested spoke the language of class grievance,
and some were clearly influenced by their husbands, there was a poss-
ible link between feminist ideas and insurgency in a couple of instances.
Elisabeth Bruley, a 21-year-old artist of Menilmontant, was a friend
of Abbe Chatel, whose 'French Church' pleaded the cause of women's
equality in 1848. Chatel had been an orator at the Societe de Ia Voix
des Femmes, where he spoke in favour of legalizing divorce. 99 Bruley's

brother was a priest of the church, and she had encouraged Chatel to
attend the Club des Montagnards, which she patronized. During the
June Days she allowed insurgents to make powder in her courtyard in
the Chaussee Menilmontant and enabled them to flee, throwing arms
and shot into the latrines. 100 Abbe Chatel seems also to have influenced
Augustine Falaise, the piano teacher, and her two cousins, Anna Libra
and Josephine Petitjean, and was described as having paid visits to
their home. 101 But none of the feminist leaders of 1848, even those of
working-class origin such as Jeanne Deroin and Suzanne Voilquin,
adopted a rebel posture in the June Days; all were committed to a
policy of peaceful propaganda, constitutional methods and class con-
ciliation. 102 They had learnt from the mistake of their association with
the St-Simonian movement in the previous decade, and were anxious
to avoid a repetition of eccentricity or extremism, that might bring
them into disrepute. 103
Though few female rebels had been in the National Workshops, they
might have been predisposed to rebel by husbands who had been mem-
bers. Catherine Miollane, a cleaning woman who built barricades in
the Rue Rambuteau and fired on troops, lived with Henri Miollane, a
member of both the National Workshops and the National Guard. 104
However unemployment and membership of the Workshops was not
necessarily a cause of rebellion; Marie Berton, an unemployed dress-
maker who claimed that she could earn up to four francs a day in
normal circumstances, was convicted of stealing food from a butcher's
shop for the rebels, 105 but Genevieve Lecaufette, an unemployed
shawlmaker who could earn only 24 sous a day in the Workshops,
was found innocent of the charge of wilfully mounting a barricade,
having been driven by her desperate search for money to cross one. 106
The influence of the National Workshops could also be felt in other
ways than simply through membership. Sylvie Macaire, victualler of
the National Guard, admitted under interrogation that she was also in
the habit of supplying Workshop members, which had caused her to
attend their protest rally on 23 June in the Place du Pantheon, and to
join the march thence to the Place de la Bastille. 107
But economic deprivation alone was not correlative with insurrec-
tionary zeal. Some women arrested, who were clearly unemployed and
living in reduced circumstances - such as Josephine Barre, an unem-
ployed dressmaker who sold drink to the National Guard, or Henriette
Collaen, an unemployed shoemaker who lived by hawking brandy -
were found to be innocent and freed. 108 Some of the most zealous
militantes were small-business people, or people with steady employ-

ment, such as the clockmakers Augustin and Eugenie Fortin, of the
Rue St Antoine, who were partisans of Auguste Blanqui. Although
Augustin Fortin was too infirm to fight, he and his wife carried build-
ing materials to a barricade at their front door, and gave rebels safe
passage through their house. 109 Barbe Bichet, a furniture-seller of the
Rue du Jardin des Plantes, who provided bullets from a domestic arms
factory, was known in her quarter to be 'very fanatical', her husband
'openly broadcasting his communist opinions', though 'the Bichet woman
is even more fanatical than her husband.' 110 In the same way, the grocer
Marie Chassang, and Marie Porcher, who had a cream-selling business
in the twelfth arrondissement, organized barricades in that district.
A bias to social deprivation among the women convicted is found
only with prostitutes- 21 of whom were convicted out of 30 arrested,
or 70 per cent. This is hardly surprising, given that prostitutes were
frequently subjected to harassment and civil arrest, which had been
growing in intensity in the years before 1848, thanks to an increas-
ingly rigid and interfering body of regulations imposed by the vice
squad. These measures reflected a determined bid by the authorities to
stamp out clandestine operators not subject to regulation and inspec-
tion. The prostitutes of Paris reacted with deviousness and not infrequent
violence. 111 An opportunity to defy the authorities in June 1848 might
thus be only too welcome for some. 112 We have also seen already how
the myth circulated that the rebellion was the work of the
lumpenproletariat, a view echoed in the evidence of witnesses who
testified against the accused women. Frederic Henricet, bandmaster of
the forty-eighth regiment of line, who described the insurgent activi-
ties of the prostitute Louise Lucas at the Caserne de Reuilly, declared
that she had been 'very excited; she was shouting with the attackers
who were made up of the dregs of the district'. For dubious characters
such as the prostitute Marie Leroy, who declared 'We'll be able to
pillage at leisure', criminal opportunities were presented by the disorder. 113
Whether socially respectable or dregs of society, female insurgents
expressed a common hatred of the wealthy and privileged that echoed
the language of 1792-3, and may well have passed down from mother
to daughter. Genevieve Boulanger, early on the morning of 23 June,
broadcast round the neighbourhood of Le Marais her exultant belief
that the rebels were winning the battle across Paris and declared, 'In
an hour we'll make the aristos dance.' 114 Louise Cormery, who incited
rebels to murder General Brea, had been heard before the rebellion
protesting against the 'tyranny of tlie rich' . 115 Allied with a hatred of
the rich was a fear that even the moderate republic represented by
Lamartine and Marrast was at risk from mounting political reaction, of
which the attempt to close the workshops was a grave symptom. Hopes
for Ia belle Republique - the republic that would fulfil the dream of
workers' rights- were being fatally betrayed, and, in the words of the
actress Louise Couchot, of Belleville: 'We must avenge the workers.' 116
Marie Chassang and Annette Defer both pleaded in mitigation of their
avowed activities that they had heard that the white flag, the symbol
of a Legitimist reaction, had been run up on the Left Bank. 117 Marie
Pittet, a woolspinner of the Rue Menilmontant, who was in 'a constant
state of exasperation' during the June Days, incited the men of her
house to go to the barricades, and tried to make her house an assault
post for the rebels, declaring, 'If we don't win, we'll be finished, we
shall be slaves and die of hunger' - words that betrayed the deeper
elemental fear of joblessness and hunger that now mingled with politi-
cal motives. 118
However, as in any insurrection, the incidence of violence led to
involvement for less considered and more personal reasons: out of motives
of personal loyalty, a desire for vengeance, or because of threats and
pressure. Some women accompanied their menfolk into battle, as they
had done in July 1830 or February 1848. Marie Poivre, a perfumer of
the Rue d' Arcole, accompanied her common-law husband, Arsene Ruthon,
a gold-beater, to the barricades of the Rue Constantine on 23 June and
fled with him, bearing his powder in her apron, when these barricades
were stormed, swearing that she would knife the National Guards. 119
Veuve Marguerite Daix, a water carrier of Belleville, followed her lover,
Amaga, to the barricades of the Rue de Courtille and Rue d'Orillon,
taking bullets and powder to him and later assisting his escape to
Enghien. 120 Motives of simple vengeance - the wish to repay the death
of a loved one - caused the involvement of other women, as it had
caused that of young Amelie Laurent in July 1830. News of her lover's
death led Marie-Louise Garnier, a 34-year-old prostitute, 'big and de-
termined', of the Rue du Paon St Victor, to drink with the rebels at a
tavern in the Rue des Noyers on 24 June and declare: 'My lover has
been killed. I must kill a Mobile Guard!' 121 Fran~oise Brousse, a washer-
woman of the Rue Fauconnier, on hearing that her husband, a captain
of the Montagnards, had been killed on 23 June in the fighting in the
Place des Vosges, opened her window in a drunken fit and yelled
threats against the National Guard, asserting that she was 'the queen
of the barricades'. 122 Rosalie Lecerf, a shawlmaker of the Place de Ia
Bastille, seeing her husband take~ away by troops, went down to the
barricades of the square armed with a sabre, crying 'Down with the
rich!' 123 Others wanted revenge on former landlords, with whom they
were in dispute: four instalments of rent were owned by a labourer
named Marie-Anne Gautier to her former landlord, Pierre Gascoin, who
lived in the A venue des Triomphes. She had moved out of his house
before the June Days, uttering threats against him and during the re-
bellion guided insurgents to Gascoin's residence, claiming that arms
could be found there, and inciting them to kill Gascoin's neighbour,
Captain Mery. 124 Fran~oise Beaulieu, a washerwoman of the Rue de la
Vieille Monnaie, who owed one instalment of rent and had paid the
previous one on account, and whose husband had petitioned for a low-
ering of the rent, issued public threats against her landlord during the
June Days, and was subsequently denounced by the porter of her lodg-
ings. 125 Other women claimed no personal interest but insisted that they
had been forced to take part. A common plea was that rebels had com-
pelled them to place paving stones on barricades before they could
cross them; this had been the fate of Julie Baroux, a 25-year-old jew-
ellery worker of the Faubourg St Denis, who had sought to cross the
Rue de l'Echiquier on 23 June. 126
Whatever their motivation, it is clear that militantes often took lead-
ing initiatives alone, unbidden by their menfolk. Some were single
women or widows used to taking personal initiatives. Augustine Falaise
went to the barricades accompanied by her two female cousins, but
not by the husband of one of them, Augustin Libra, an inoffensive
individual to whom it was left to write letters appealing for clemency
on behalf of his female relations. 127 In the eighth arrondissement we
also find the Dufour family and Elisabeth Guibal taking the initiative
alone; in the twelfth arrondissement it was Sylvie Macaire. There is
frequently evidence - some of which has already been noted - that
when a female rebel lived with a legitimate or common-law husband,
she was the more fanatical and determined of the pair. The washer-
woman Fran~oise Beaulieu, who built a barricade in the quarter of the
Rue des Lombards and appeared armed upon it, was described by wit-
nesses as a feared woman in her neighbourhood: 'These individuals
and particularly the woman are the terror of the neighbourhood.' 128 Of
Marie Porcher, the cream-seller of the Faubourg St Marceau, a wit-
ness stated, 'The violence which we were subjected to was largely the
result of that woman's incitement', and that her husband 'let himself
be led on by her rather than acting on his own behalf'. The examining
magistrate summed up the evidence by writing, 'The Porcher woman
is a virago ... [who] ... clearly exercised the most detestable influence
in her neighbourhood.' 129 Marie-Anne Lecuyer, Femme Duclos, an inn-

keeper of the Rue de Charonne, who designated neighbours who might
assist the insurgents in building barricades, was described, with her
husband, as 'the most ardent promoters of the revolt' in their street by
a witness, but he added, as an afterthought, 'especially the wife' . 130
Personality was evidently a further factor determining involvement in
the June Days.
The defeat and arrest of many women and men spread despair in all
the popular quarters of Paris. On 26 June women flocked to the barri-
cades of the last rebel redoubt, the Faubourg St Antoine, crying, 'Since
you've killed our husbands and brothers, kill us too.' m Women suf-
fered a common fate with male rebels in the butchery that accompanied
the repression of the rebellion; three women were reported to have
been thrown from windows in the Rue de Charenton, while women
and children who took refuge in the cemetery of Pere-Lachaise were
killed there along with their menfolk by Mobile Guards. 132 Implacable
hatred had been stirred up by atrocity stories, whether based on fact or
fabricated by individuals and newspapers representing order: that the
Mitouflets, for example, had devised and put into practice a six-piece
guillotine to execute hostages; 133 and that Simone Leblanc, the var-
nisher of the Rue Neuve-St Laurent, had personally beheaded Mobile
Guards. 134 When it was rumoured on 19 August that a massive demon-
stration of over one hundred thousand women was to take place out-
side the Constituent Assembly for an amnesty for the June rebels energetic
measures were taken by the Assembly to prevent its arrival, although
a petition from the wives, sisters and daughters of the June rebels was
received. 135
For many proscribed women, the shock of sudden arrest and re-
moval from their families, interrogation and imprisonment alongside
common criminals at St Lazare was enough to ensure that they did not
become involved in such civil rebellions again. Julie Mitouflet gave
birth to a stillborn child in St Lazare in January 1849. 136 Confronted
with the social poise and superior education of male examining magis-
trates, most arrested women were apt to blurt out simple denials, in-
sisting that they were the victims of conspiracies of slander. Marguerite
Daix, Femme Amaga, the water-carrier seen with her lover Amaga at
the barricades of Belleville, simply denied her presence there and al-
leged that she had not been aware that Amaga had been involved. 137
Josephine Martin, Femme Falotte, wife of a nailmaker in the National
Workshops, who lived in the Rue des Amandiers and had threatened
to burn down the house of the grocer Parere, denied she had gone out
at all until Sunday, 25 June, and then only to Bagnolet. 138 Marie Bour-
geois denied that she had offered her garters as incitement to hang
those who dismantled barricades, claiming she had 'only enemies against
her'. She had, she claimed, merely offered a garter to a rebel to make
into a sling for his gun (unaware perhaps, that this act constituted an
offence in itself). 139 Some arrested women invented implausible alibis.
The ragpicker Rose Jeanjean maintained to her examining magistrate
that she had not been out in the June Days, except to eat at an inn on
the Route de Fontainebleau called La Petite Republique, where she
had been 'frightened' to see the passage of the procession that includ-
ed General Brea; after that, she claimed, she had fled to Peis, a vil-
lage in the Ile de France, with her lover. She blamed her arrest on a
gardien de Paris, who wanted revenge on her because she had beaten
his dog. But this story contradicted the statements of several witnesses
and the Mayor of Gentilly. 140 Antoinette Contois, Veuve Lechallier, a
clothes-seller of the Rue Bichat who was accused of loading weapons
for the insurgents, rejected the charge, alleging that the taking of the
barricade near the Rue Bichat and Faubourg du Temple had frightened
her so much that she and her lover, a stonesawyer, had run to take
refuge with a friend. When the alleged host denied her story, stating
that he did not even know Veuve Lechallier, she changed the evidence
to claim that she had only sheltered in his doorway . 141 Only a few had
the courage, and sufficient belief in the validity of their defeated cause,
to surmount their sense of discomfort and admit partial or total re-
sponsibility - among those who did confess to their actions were Therese
Calayon, Josephine Clabot and Annette Defer.
Though these women were originally sentenced to transportation they
did not suffer this fate. On 27 June 1848 the Constituent Assembly
had voted to send rebel leaders to courts martial and deport all other
arrested rebels without trial. The expense of deporting so many insur-
gents to the colonies, rather than humanitarian considerations, caused
the Constituent Assembly to withdraw its original proposal in favour
of another scheme to transport relatively few of the men arrested (many
of whom were kept in gaol or on offshore prison-ships) and none of
the women. 142 In practice, the female insurgents of June 1848 remained
in the Paris prisons and, despite the intransigent attitude of the As-
sembly, were given hope by General Cavaignac's policy of at once
seeking to mitigate sentences through revision of cases by committees
of clemency. But with women rebels in prison there was meanwhile
often a need to secure support for their children or aged relatives. Aid
for the dependants of convicted rebels was refused by the mairies of
Paris, and only circles of Assembly representatives on the Left interested

themselves in the matter, so families and friends of the rebels had to
make provision, where possible. The wife of the Christian socialist
representative Cormenin organized a committee of benefactresses in
the Rue Caumartin to provide for the children of the insurgent women
who had been imprisoned. An appeal was made to her from St Lazare
on 7 November 1848 by Marie Porcher, who wrote that her indigent
daughter and son-in-law could no longer provide for her four other
children. 143 The plea of family necessity was a favoured one in politi-
cal letters of clemency, epitomized in the letter sent by 15 remaining
detenues at St Lazare on 24 January 1849 to the President of the Re-
public, stating that they were:
nearly all mothers, who had been separated for seven months from
their husbands, shut up themselves in the prison-ships, and from
their mothers and children; in short, had been deprived of the sole
happiness that the wife of the proletarian enjoys on this earth, that
of lavishing her care and tender caresses on her family} 44
Given the gravity of their crimes in certain instances, the women might
have expected long sentences, but these were shortened both by the
activity of Cavaignac's committees and by the concern of his successor
as chief of the executive, the adventurer Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte,
to stabilize his drifting ambition in a secure bedrock of popular sup-
port. The proclamation of the republican constitution in November 1848
had already occasioned the release of some women; others were am-
nestied with the formation of Louis-Napoleon's first government in
January 1849. The most hardened cases of political recidivism were
transferred to prisons outside Paris, and the final 12 were released on
14 November 1849. Early release does not seem necessarily to have
been determined by whether the woman in question had dependants,
but rather by whether she manifested a reformed political attitude and
good behaviour. Marie Kerisvin, a trouser-maker convicted of build-
ing barricades in the Rue des Battets, was reported by the secretary
general of the Ministry of the Interior to have reverted to 'worthier
sentiments ... She has even asked to be separated from her
companions ... and has provided a fine example of good conduct and
resignation.' 145 Equally, intervention by a politically influential person
might speed the release of the women. The wife of an Assembly rep-
resentative for the Yonne, Julie Guichard, interceded in September 1848
on behalf of Marie-Anne Duclos, the innkeeper convicted of having
incited rebellion in the Rue de Charonne, pointing out in a letter that
Duclos' husband was ill, her ten-year old daughter had contracted a
nervous disease and her business had collapsed. This letter helped to
secure her early release on 2 October 1848. 146 Marie Chassang was
freed in February 1849, to face a ruined grocery business and the se-
questration of her furniture by her landlord against six months' unpaid
rent. An appeal was made on her behalf by neighbours in the Rue des
Postes to deputy Cormenin. 147
However, there were doubtless insurgents who evaded denunciation
and arrest and were not chastened by the repression of the June Days.
In July 1848 the deputy mayor of the sixth arrondissement warned
Odilon Barrot, President of the Commission of Inquiry into the disturb-
ances of 15 May and the June Days, that the siege should not be lifted
too soon. In this arrondissement ex-rebels had been heard to declare,
'We have lost the first round', but 'soon we shall have the real con-
test and we'll see who wins it.' The Club des Clubs and Societe des
Droits de !'Homme were said to be still active and 'Belleville,
Menilmontant and the districts across the canal, the Faubourg St Antoine,
the Faubourg St Marceau, have not yet been searched or thoroughly
purged.' 148 At the same time a woman named Legros, of the Rue Breda,
was reported to have said that the battle was not over yet, and would
resume once the state of siege was lifted; and that she knew of a woman
who was casting bullets. 149 On 7 July the police arrested two men and
a woman who were making nocturnal signals from the Rue des Bons
Enfants to Montmartre. 150 Seven days later the Gazette des Tribunaux
reported the arrest of people who had propagated 'absurd and sinister'
rumours that the Faubourg St Marceau and the Faubourg St Antoine
were in a state of revolt. 151 As the sweep of arrests continued and
political clubs were closed women reverted to the roles that they had
played during the repression of the 1830s: providing venues for se-
ditious gatherings, sheltering political subversives and acting as archi-
vists or propagandists for secret societies. On 5 August 1848 the Prefect
of Police of Paris wrote to the Minister of Justice, referring to a min-
isterial note that had enquired about clandestine 'anarchist' meetings.
These were alleged to be taking place in the Rue Royale, Montmartre,
at the house of an unnamed washerwoman, and were attended by the
editor of the newspaper Le Pere Duchesne, Laroche. The Prefect of
Police had given orders that the house should be watched by his agents. 152
In Belleville Veuve Leopoldine Laporte, who kept an inn in the Rue
de Ia Mare, welcomed subversives and the rebels of June 1848 when
later they were released from their sentences. 153
It was clear that, although a subversive rebellion had been crushed,
the spirit of left-wing opposition refused to admit defeat, and might

yet mount further lively resistance. Alarming reports such as those
just outlined reinforced the determination of conservative and, increas-
ingly, of some moderate republican politicians, to monitor popular
political activity more closely and, if necessary, eliminate it. Out of
the sanguinary horrors of the June Days, and the climate of social fear
engendered by it and sustained by repeated disturbances and a vigor-
ous radical left-wing movement, was born a rising tempo of conserva-
tive repression, that gathered pace from mid-1848. But neither Paris
nor Lyon had yet seen their last political disturbances, and rural prov-
incial France would increasingly become the theatre of radical left in-
surgency instead.
5 The Red Republican
Interlude, 1849-51
The insurrectionary pressure to transform the moderate republic founded

on a laissez-faire economy into a radical republic that would respond
to the popular needs for work, welfare, credit and education revived
briefly in the form of two abortive rebellions in June 1849. The urban
industrial economy had begun to improve but radical republican leaders
had reason to be concerned at the growth of political reaction that
seemed to threaten the democratic values of the Second Republic, and
adopted a posture of guardians of these values. Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte,
elected President of the Republic in December 1848 with the assist-
ance of experienced conservative politicians, rewarded them by select-
ing a first cabinet dominated by royalists, with the Orleanist Odilon
Barrot as premier. This government launched a campaign of legal ad-
ministrative repression against the activities of the radical left, whose
forces had to a degree sunk their differences in November 1848 and
allied in a political coalition of radical republicans and socialists. Members
of the coalition were known as the Democrates-Socialistes or Montagnards
and supported a common programme of reform that included the right
to work, freedom of workers to form trade associations, a system of
state primary education, agricultural credit banks, and nationalization
of railways and insurance companies. The popular programme and more
coordinated tactics and propaganda of the democ-socs, as they became
nicknamed, paid off when they won at least 180 seats in the elections
of May 1849 to the Legislative Assembly that replaced the constituent
body of 1848, whose mandate had expired. 1 The moderate republican
centre fell away so that the democ-socs, or rouges, now became the
most important opposition force to the 'Party of Order', whose com-
bined ranks of royalists, Bonapartists and conservative republicans formed
the majority that supported the Barrot cabinet. The electoral success
of the democ-socs (though a parliamentary minority) came as an un-
pleasant shock to the Party of Order; for their part the democ-socs
became increasingly suspicious of the government's intentions in sending
a French expeditionary force to Rome to restore Pope Pius IX, who
had been evicted from his throne by a republican coup late in 1848.
As it became apparent that the French expeditionary force was not
77
interested in negotiation with the Roman Republic, Alexandre Ledru-

Rollin, spokesman of the radical republicans, sought to exploit the Roman
issue to impeach the cabinet of Barrot for contravening an article in
the constitution that forbade the Second Republic to make war on a
sister republic. The failure of a motion of impeachment with respect
to this matter on 12 June 1849 determined some left-wing National
Guardsmen and members of clubs and electoral committees to mount
a dignified procession to draw popular attention to what they consid-
ered to be a flagrant constitutional violation that symbolized the re-
solve of the government to undermine the letter and the spirit of the
republic.
Opinion is divided as to whether the demonstrators of 13 June 1849
intended to use the protest as cover for a coup against the government
from the start or not. 2 What is certain is that the whole attempt was
marked by much indecision; an effort was made by radicals such as
Alphonse Gent and Etienne Arago to calm firebrand elements among
the demonstrators who were calling for a democratic and social repub-
lic with the plea that they cry 'Long live the constitution!' 3 In the Rue
de la Paix the procession was charged unexpectedly by dragoons led
by General Changarnier, a determined royalist who overreacted to any
suggestion of a 'red' challenge. 4 Ledru-Rollin and his followers then
met in the Conservatoire des Arts et Metiers, where they may have
made a confused effort to draft a list of names for a provisional govern-
ment. They were quickly dispersed by loyal National Guardsmen, arrests
followed though Ledru-Rollin escaped and eventually took refuge in
London. Sixty-eight persons went on trial for conspiracy against the
government before the High Court of Justice in October 1849. None
of the accused was female, the affair being essentially political, aris-
ing out of a protest of parliamentary representatives and neither at-
5
tracting, nor making any conscious effort to attract, women participants.
The only trace of female involvement revealed in records of the
trial of the 68 suggests a symbolic presence, and even the evidence
for this is conflicting. A corn chandler named Jean-Pierre Fabre, who
served as a lieutenant in the second legion of the National Guard and
commanded a sentry post at the Opera, declared that he had arrested a
group of young men who had surrounded a woman bearing a tricolour
flag emblazoned with the words Vive la Constitution! and Comite des
Ecoles.The woman had claimed that she was a dressmaker and was off
to seek work in the Faubourg Poissonniere. Fabre added that he would
have taken her for a 'Jeanne d'Arc' rather than anything else. The
young men concerned were students, or mature students, of the Paris
The Red Republican Interlude, /849-51 79
schools and included Wilfrid de Fonvielle (later a distinguished scien-

tific writer), who had attempted to convert the sentry guard to a rad-
ical view of the constitution. Some doubt surrounded the age and calling
of the woman. Advocate General Suin, for the prosecution, asked whether
she was not a registered prostitute called Martin, a question that pro-
voked indignant protests from the defence. On interrogation the woman
had confessed to the age of 33, though Fabre believed she was younger
and report in La Reforme of the previous day had described her as
being in her forties. Another witness, Paul-Cesar Pave, an auctioneer
who also served as a lieutenant in the second legion, claimed that he
too had seen the woman at the sentry post, and to have been told that
she was carrying the flag of the radical students. But a witness named
Deblois, called for the defence, insisted that the flag of the ecoles
democratiques had never been carried by a prostitute, but by himself. 6
The truth of the matter remains conjectural but not without interest for
the historical metaphor that the symbolism evoked.
The news of this demonstration in Paris, misrepresented as a suc-
cessful coup by the newspapers Le Peuple Souverain and Le Republicain
of Lyon, inspired a more serious and bloody attempt at revolt in that
city. 7 Lyon, like Paris, had a tradition of working-class organization
and republican secret societies that went back to the 1830s and fed
upon grievances associated with high rents, unemployment, low wages
and, in particular, grievances on the part of silkweavers against prison
and convent labour that undercut their pay and job security. In the
spring of 1848, at a time of serious unemployment, female silkweavers
had joined their male colleagues in demonstrations and protest, and
had tried to form associations to mitigate the effects of economic re-
cession. Early in March bands of women had gone through silk-reeling
workshops, physically threatening anyone who did not call for an in-
crease in wages. Later on in March four hundred women assembled in
brigades and marched to the beat of drums, leading men on to the city
gaol, where they freed all the prisoners in what was probably a ges-
ture of defiance against these institutions as both a political and an
economic enemy. At the request of women workers a National Work-
shop for silkweavers was opened on the Place du Petit-College, with
places for 200 female employees. They had followed up this success
by seeking to establish producer and consumer cooperatives, some for
women only. One producer cooperative provided a child-care service. 8
These activities may have borne testimony to a growing collective
consciousness of their particular problems on the part of female work-
ers in Lyon. 9 But, having secured these gains, the women workers of
the city do not seem to have played a significant role in subsequent

demonstrations and unrest. As in Paris, the popular left-wing societies
in Lyon were dominated by men, and in June 1849 it appears to have
been their members who coordinated the attempted rising, which rep-
resented a protest against the growing political interference of the Pre-
fect of Lyon and a gesture of solidarity with Paris. On 14 June, as the
word of a rising in Paris spread, armed bands, in which weavers and
students from the veterinary school were prominent, assembled out-
side the city hall, but an attempt to storm it was thwarted by troops.
Skirmishes followed in the working-class quarter of La Croix-Rousse,
arms shops were looted, the local town hall seized and barricades
erected. 10 The revolt was crushed by the army on 15 June before it
could develop further. The instigators of the rising included four pol-
itical societies, one of which, the Voraces, had grown out of a journey-
men's social club and had played a key role in the disorder of 1848.
In the face of growing repression some of its members reformed it as
a secret society and in 1849 it was headed by a young man named
Marechal. On 14 June this society had declared itself in permanent
session at the tavern in La Croix-Rousse run by his mother, Veuve
Marechal, known in the society as Soeur Bon-Service, probably ac-
cording to the tradition by which journeymen's fraternities had had a
mere, or patroness of hospitality. She was the only woman among 31
people arrested and tried by the eleventh council of war at Lyon in
November 1849. When the false news of events in Paris had reached
the V oraces they had left the inn to parade a red flag in the Place de
Ia Croix-Rousse as a summons to the population. Though Veuve
Man!chal's tavern had thus been a key strategic point in the rising,
she sought to deny her son's involvement in the Voraces, but was
unable to save him from deportation. She herself was acquitted as no
evidence was forthcoming of any direct participation in the rebellion
on her part. 11
Thereafter no other such rebellions occurred in provincial France
until December 1851 although rumours of imminent risings persisted
in areas where left-wing radicals were well established. At the time of
the troubles of June 1849 in Paris and Lyon demonstrations occurred
in Perpignan (Pyrenees-Orientales). These spread over the two days of
13 and 14 June, and were partly the fruit of efforts to maintain radical
activism and a state of military resistance by Barbe Gerbal who, with
her husband, worked actively for the democ-soc cause at the fishing
community of Port-Vendres, receiving letters and propaganda material
from Paris and disseminating them in the region. She was in touch
The Red Republican Interlude, 1849-51 81
with Emile Marquier, a radical officer of the National Guard at Perpignan

and at the start of 1849 had written to another activist, Mouchoux, a
former sub-prefect, to relate how she sought to maintain the enthusi-
asm of local democ-socs, who would fly to the defence of the 'social
and democratic Republic' at the sound of the steeple bell. She implied
that they only awaited the signal for a rising but the content of her
letter was too vague to provide conclusive evidence of prior intent to
collude in a national rebellion, and thus to prosecute her successfully
in November 1849. 12
The failure of the risings of June 1849 intensified the cumulative
repression of the radical republican and socialist Left, forcing it to
pursue more coherent and ingenious strategies of propaganda and or-
ganization. The propagandist activities of Barbe Gerbal in the Pyrenees-
Orientales bear witness to the elaborate network of agents and political
material created with the assistance of central committees in Paris, to
ensure that at departmental and local level hawkers, booksellers and
political sympathizers would spread the word. One such committee was
La Propagande Politique et Sociale, established in February 1849 in
the Rue des Bons Enfants, which corresponded with each departmen-
tal capital, arrondissement and canton, and had 20 pedlars in Paris to
distribute publications. 13 An intensive propaganda drive was aimed at
the rural and small town lower classes, using cartoons, songsheets,
pamphlets and engravings. 14 This material advocated the programme
of economic, social and educational reform that the democ-socs had
agreed on and also promised that the 'democratic and social republic'
would triumph at the parliamentary and presidential elections of 1852.
Continued rural deprivation, manifested in foreclosed mortgages, col-
lapsing prices and anti-tax riots made this programme appealing in
many areas but especially in rural areas of the Centre, South-West and
South-East France. There compact communities bred a strong sense of
lower-class solidarity, and firm links to local and urban economies
provided a conduit for radical ideas. 15 As long as the provincial masses
could vote, radical propaganda carried serious dangers for the govern-
ment dominated by the conservative Party of Order. Thus one of the
key measures in the pattern of right-wing repression was the law of 31
May 1850, which effectively ended manhood suffrage by imposing a
longer residential qualification for it while cynically professing to preserve
the abstract principle.
Repression and political inhibitions such as voter disqualification
simply caused political agitation increasingly to assume culturally tra-
ditionalist or clandestine forms. Political demonstrations were manifested
through the communal processions, dances and carnivals that had long
been an important feature of social life in the Midi. Women had al-
ways participated in such events and now their involvement might take
on a political character, for example by representing symbolically the
figure of the martyred republic. 16 Peter McPhee thus sees women be-
coming more involved in rural political demonstrations as political state-
ments came to be made through expressions of public life in general.
When Lenten celebrations were banned in a small town in the Pyrenees-
Orientales, there was defiant dancing in the streets by the local women
to shouts of '(:a ira, fa ira, our turn will come!' The Prefect reported
that the women involved had been surprisingly obstinate, for when he
had asked one of them to leave she had declared that she was pre-
pared to die, and if she had to defend her husband she would seek
weapons, whether knives or stones. 17 Collioure, a fishing village in
the same department that lay close to the Spanish border, was in March
1851 the scene of a procession in which, according to the local Justice
of the Peace, two local women named Courtade and Delcasso were
dressed as Liberty in red costumes and carried aloft through the streets.
Their costumes had been made by the democ-soc activist Barbe Gerbal.
The demonstration ended with the arrest of the two female protago-
nists and persecution of local radicals followed. 18 The populist wing
of Legitimist royalism, the Droit national faction, was not slow to
appreciate the value of such tactics in areas of traditionally intense
and continuous political conflict mingled with religious sectarianism
such as the department of the Gard. In the village of La Grand-Combe
(Gard) the clash between reds and whites was reflected in the adop-
tion by women of identical symbols of differing colours: in the carni-
val celebrations democ-soc women paraded in red, Legitimist women
in white. 19
Alongside the politicization of popular protest we also see re-emerging,
as repression closed off more and more legitimate avenues of protest
such as the press, clubs and electioneering, the phenomenon of the
secret society. Often based on Carbonarist, Masonic or trade fraternity
structures they were very much a masculine organization, binding
members together with the aim of mounting resistance to any attempt
to destroy the Second Republic, and to assist in effecting a radical
left-wing victory in the presidential and legislative elections of 1852.
A typical oath imposed on initiates was that of the Jeune Montagne at
Orleans:
The Red Republican Interlude, 1849-51 83
You will swear to defend the democratic and social republic by all
the means in your power. You will swear to hate and exterminate
all royalty and those who sustain it, to exterminate the whites and
the rich. You will swear that you will leave your family, mother,
father, wife and children to defend the democratic and social repub-
lic when a leader commands you to. 20
Though such societies overwhelmingly recruited young men of the
community on occasion women were associated with them, acting as
archivists and messengers, or sheltering society members on the run
from justice. The homes of such women provided gathering places for
secret societies to hold discussions or hear readings from the press.
Some of these women already had a pedigree of radical activism; others,
by virtue of their occupation, were well placed to serve as conveners
of secret society meetings. Such societies existed not only in the prov-
inces but also in Paris and one at least, the Societe des Menages, had
a female archivist. This was Adele Desmars, a jewel-polisher by trade
and an Icarian communist, who lived in the Rue Aumaire and admin-
istered the propaganda of the organization, which sought to escape
police attention by masquerading as a cooperative retail society, boasting
upwards of 2500 members and four depots. It also served as a rallying
point for democ-soc activity. 21 The Paris correspondent for socialist
propaganda in the Jura department was Marie-Rose Dard, a concierge
of the Faubourg St Martin, who in February 1851 went to her native
town of Poligny with her husband to disseminate political material
given to her by a man named Droz, a former tenant of her house, who
had been a republican commissioner in 1848. 22 Poligny was notorious
with the authorities for its support of the democrate-socialiste cause;
it had a carbonarist secret society that provided a base for a rising in
the locality in December 1851. 23 Another network that kept radicals
together was the committee of assistance that was organized by Anne
Greppo, wife of the radical weaver of Lyon, Louis Greppo, for the
benefit of left-wing victims of the political repression. 24 After the im-
prisonment of Pauline Roland in January 1851 for membership of a
subversive organization Anne Greppo frequently cared for Roland's
children. 25 Women who permitted their homes to be used as meeting
places for radicals might read aloud to them from the press; radical
journals were by 1851 reaching quiet villages. Suzanne Jarreau, a farmer's
wife at Batilly (Loiret) admitted on her arrest early in 1852 to having
received the newspaper Le Bien-Etre Universe/, which she read aloud
in her house and at the home of a Dr Mabilat, who had joined her in
the rebellion of December 1851. 26 Even in a remote area such as Le

Mas (Lot-et-Garonne), Anne Poujalet was described as a 'dangerous
woman on account of her fanaticism', who had read 'the very worst
newspapers'. 27
Through their covert meetings, front organizations, secret societies
and elusive propaganda the democ-socs sought to perform a political
holding operation until May 1852 when, they hoped, they might chal-
lenge any effort to implement the new restriction on manhood suf-
frage. Women not only supported the left-wing resistance in such ways
as they were able, but in so doing sometimes found themselves well
placed to initiate or coordinate rebellion should Louis-Napoleon at-
tempt a pre-emptive military strike. Apprehension that this would be
the most likely political outcome for the Second Republic mounted
after July 1851, when the Legislative Assembly vetoed any proposal
to alter article forty-five of the constitution in order to permit the Presi-
dent to run for a second term of office in 1852. History soon revealed
that fear and suspicion of Louis-Napoleon were all too justified, and
democ-soc hopes that the 1852 elections would see the arrival of La
belle Republique of social justice were to be dashed by the presiden-
tial coup d'etat of December 1851.
6 The Rebellion of December
1851: the Death Throes of
the Red Republican Cause
The underground network of secret societies, assistance and propaganda

was moved to a new attempt at rebellion in December 1851 following
the military coup d'etat carried out in Paris on the night of 1-2 De-
cember by the Prince-President, in a bid to seize personal power be-
fore the elections of 1852 might reject him. Men and women of the
radical left were roused to resistance by the coup, but not as rapidly
or spontaneously as in June 1848. The June Days had been a fully
fledged civil war that many had expected; the coup d'etat of Decem-
ber 1851 was planned in secret and, while not unanticipated, came as
a surprise to most people at the moment when it occurred. On this
occasion, barricade warfare in Paris was brief, sporadic and easily dealt
with. Despite the attempt made by radical journalists and politicians to
rouse the people they faced considerable scepticism in the light of
earlier insurrectionary defeats, the domination of the Legislative As-
sembly by conservative interests, and the restriction of manhood suf-
frage in 1850. Barricades did not go up until 3 December and by the
evening of the following day the capital was pacified. The number of
arrests was consequently smaller than in 1848, and the main focus of
political resistance was not in Paris and the major cities, where the
forces of order were well prepared to prevent insurrection, but in rural
areas of central and southern France. Even there, however, the power
of the regular army had put down the rising almost everywhere within
a week of its commencement. The rebellion of December 1851 was
unsuccessful, partly because political repression had to a considerable
extent already picked off potential leaders, silenced the rank-and-file
and crushed overt opposition; and partly because, as in June 1848, the
armed forces remained loyal. The President could also rally the sup-
port of many frightened members of the elites of land, business, clergy
and administration, who were persuaded of a continuing red danger
that could only be dealt a terminal blow by extra-legal action. Follow-
ing the coup d'etat rentes rose rapidly on the stock exchange and services
of thanksgiving were celebrated in churches throughout France. 1
85
In the whole Paris region covered by the First Divisional Army

Command, 5260 people were arrested, 61 or just over 1 per cent of
these being women, a smaller proportion than that of female insur-
gents of the June Days. 2 This might seem to denote a withdrawal of
women from political engagement with the passage of time; but such
an argument is complicated by the abortive nature of the December
rebellion, at least in Paris, where the majority of the 61 women ar-
rested about whom we have details were apprehended (39 of 58). Ar-
rests in December 1851 were even more random than in 1848, deliberately
aiming at the elimination of all dangerous suspects. Women were ar-
rested on suspicion, or on account of having a left-wing background;
Pauline Roland, the socialist feminist, though not directly involved in
the street insurgency of December 1851, was, for example, arrested
and deported to Algeria as a dangerous subversive who had propa-
gated politically destructive ideas. She was accused of posting up a
proclamation of resistance to the coup d'etat in Paris, an act she stoutly
3
denied, and for which there was no hard evidence forthcoming. The
people arrested were tried by ad hoc mixed commissions of civilians
and military officials, that often meted out harsh sentences. The al-
leged ringleaders of rebellion were to be deported to Guiana or Alge-
4
ria; lesser offenders were imprisoned, exiled or put under house arrest.
The sample of women arrested in December 1851 in the region of
the First Divisional Army Command cannot reasonably be subjected
to the statistical analysis applied to the insurgents of June 1848, on
account of its small size. Even so, individual case histories permit an
impressionistic study of roles and motivation to be made, in a manner
that invites comparison with the June Days. The pre-emptive arrest of
numerous male radical leaders of itself necessarily led certain women
in Paris to assume the role of militantes, rousing their quarters for
action, and even attempting to coordinate the rebellion. Ten of the 61
women arrested were described in the table of arrests as fanatical social-
ists, or as being associated with secret societies and propaganda. Anne
Greppo, after the arrest of her husband on 2 December, at once took
up the cause of resistance, and with the help of the Assembly rep-
resentative Malardier tried to rouse the workers of a factory at Chaillot.
She arranged for proclamations to be drawn up and distributed in answer
to those put up on the order of Louis-Napoleon. She tried repeatedly
to persuade radicals to call a meeting of the Comite de Resistance for
the evening of 3 December, and to rouse the workers of the Faubourg
St Antoine. Her efforts had little effect, however, and she was arrested
5
on 8 January 1852, compromising papers being found in her house.
The Rebellion of December 1851 87
Through the network of the Comite de Secours aux Families des Detenus
Politiques Anne Greppo could call on the assistance of Armandine Huet,
a wine merchant of the Rue de I' Hotel de Ville and wife of a rebel of
the June Days who belonged to the secret society named Le Vengeur.
Huet distributed bulletins given to her by Greppo on behalf of the
Comite de Resistance and on 4 December allegedly encouraged work-
ers to go to the barricades at the Carre St Martin. 6 In this task of
incitement she was accompanied by Claudine Monniot, a hat-trimmer,
who in June 1848 had been arrested for making cartridges at her home
in the Rue de Ia Tixanderie. In December 1851 Monniot allowed her
home to be used to print posters to be put up in answer to those of the
coup plotters. 7 As the efforts of these women failed to help detonate
civil war on the scale of 1848 it is not surprising to discover that only
one of the women convicted in Paris appears to have been involved in
the fighting. This was Augustine Pean, a domestic servant who had
been wounded on the barricades, and who was eventually deported to
Algeria with the group of women that included Pauline Roland. Pean
was seen by the lodgers of her house and neighbours to go to the local
barricade in the Rue Beauregard, armed with a sabre, and in her inter-
rogation she admitted that she had helped to erect the barricade. 8 Other
armed women doubtless escaped arrest, such as a woman who appeared
on the barricade of the Rue du Petit-Carreau armed with a rifle. The
radical deputy Charles Beslay sought in vain to persuade her to give
up her weapon and abandon a hopeless cause. 'The brigands must be
made to pay for it!' she declared, before using the rifle to wound a
lieutenant-colonel who led a military attack on the barricade from the
direction of the Porte St Denis.9
Other women took materials for the building of barricades, stored
or manufactured arms, sheltered rebels, or were accused of ill-defined
conspiracy. Marie-Louise Burck, a flower-seller, helped to build a bar-
ricade in the Rue St Denis, witnesses claiming to have seen her re-
turning thence with an iron bar in her hand and asserting that she had
encouraged men to join in the fighting. Her costume at the time was
perhaps an intended badge of political affiliation: she was wearing a
red dress with fashionable tartan patterns and a bonnet of black lace
trimmed with red ribbons. Democrates-Socialistes wore red ribbons
and red articles of clothing when other forms of propaganda were banned
by the authorities, and there were even attempts to prosecute people
for wearing the colour red from 1849. 10 Her association with the abor-
tive rebellion is explained by the copies of radical songs and obscene
engravings found by the police at her home, though she claimed that
the songs belonged to her lover, a bookseller's clerk who cohabited

with her, and the engravings to someone else. 11 Also convicted partly
on the basis of incriminating papers was Marie Rose Dard, already
noted as a secret society archivist who took propaganda to her native
town of Poligny in February 1851. In December 1851 Dard, who claimed
to have saved a National Guard officer from the rebels in June 1848,
was alleged to be in contact with insurgents who built a barricade at
81 Faubourg St Martin, almost outside her door, going out to encour-
age their efforts and allowing her home to be used as a spy-post on
the troops. She protested that the testimonies against her had been supplied
by tenants who bore her grudges, but her former cleaning woman,
Josephine Brule, testified of Dard that 'she did nothing but talk about
hanging Napoleon'. Her husband was not political, and was described
as 'a man of no intelligence, sodden with drink'. Manuscripts of polit-
ical verses, acrostics spelling out names, and a pamphlet entitled Trahison
et Conspiration de Napoleon Bonaparte contre la Republique Fran~aise,
recovered from her flat seemed to point to guilt. 12 Adele Desmars,
archivist of the Societe des Menages, which met in her home in the
Rue Aumaire, had doubtless long been a suspect of the police. In
December 1851 she manufactured powder for shot; and her flat was
found to contain Fourierist and Icarian propaganda. She was alleged
also to have received visits from a man named Paoli, formerly a cap-
tain serving under Garibaldi. 13 Another woman whose home was a ren-
dezvous for left-wing subversives was Helena Gaussin, who had had a
chequered career as an actress 14 and kept a boarding house in the Rue
Meslay, which was searched by the police on 5 December 1851. A
visiting pharmacy student, Adolphe Sibille, was found to be in possession
of papers suggesting that he was an agent for socialist propaganda. 15
The building of barricades near the Place des Victoires, in the Rue
Pagevin, gave employment to a number of local women, including the
shoemaker Eugenie Clouard, who helped her husband build a barri-
cade on 4 December by bringing out a chest, footstool and bucket,
berating him as a faint-heart who should be taking part in the :fighting. 16
A domestic servant in the same street, Perrine Coquereau, was seen by
witnesses to take bottles to smash in the street, and to enter a local
cafe to ask for bottles. 17 Catherine Raudroff, an Alsatian-born dress-
maker, was seen by a lemonade-seller named Percheron, who ident-
ified her by her tartan shawl after her arrest, to be helping herself to
ladders and tools left by navvies in the Place des Victoires. 18
Among those who were involved in general incitement to rebellion
was the actress Maria Lopez, who had been observed caring for the
injured at the Palais-Royal in February 1848. The charge of incite-

ment against her remained unproven but may also demonstrate how
the testimony of well placed and influential friends might absolve the
accused, whether innocent or guilty. Maria Lopez had by 1851 already
acquired a dossier as a suspect agitator; in October 1850 she had been
imprisoned for 22 days at St Lazare as a presumed associate of the
secret society network known as La Nouvelle Montagne, organized by
her friend the lawyer Alphonse Gent. 19 Gent had been arrested, tried
and deported to the South Pacific when the network had been partially
exposed. On the afternoon of 4 December 1851 Lopez was allegedly
seen by Madame Desmoulins, the wife of a rentier, to be in the com-
pany of rebels who were firing at troops from the Rue de Paradis
Poissonniere. Her 'elegant' dress had marked her out and led the wit-
ness to enquire who she was. Other witnesses claimed that she spoke
to one of the insurgents, Alfred Milhaud, in excited tones, as if en-
couraging him, although Lopez claimed under interrogation that she
had sought to stop the fighting and implied that she wanted to work
as an ambulanciere, as she had in February 1848 - again underlining
the ambiguity of women's roles in the insurgency. She attributed her
arrest to the fact that she was a friend of Alphonse Gent. 20 She was
also found to have corresponded with Louis Blanc and George Sand.
Although sentenced to transportation, her friendship with the aide-de-
camp of General Carrelet, Commander of the First Military Division,
enabled her to escape that fate. The aide-de-camp, Ferri-Pisani, in a
letter of 23 December 1851, testified to her good character, securing
her acquittal in March 1852. 21
Despite the small number of women arrested in Paris in connection
with the abortive rebellion against the coup d'etat, enough evidence
survives to show that these female insurgents represented a cross-
section of bourgeoises, petites-bourgeoises and artisans, such as dress-
makers and shoemakers, as well as women in service occupations. The
absence of prostitutes is to be noted, though they had not usually played
much of a role in initiating rebellion, and the attempt in Paris in De-
cember 1851 scarcely progressed beyond that stage. The presence of
more middle-class women among those arrested in December 1851 than
in June 1848 may reflect the more random nature of the arrests (21
per cent, or 8 of 39); however it may also reflect the reluctance of
members of the artisan class to involve themselves in unrest after the
defeats of June 1848 and June 1849. There is no particular concentra-
tion of women arrested in any arrondissement of the capital; only one
woman was arrested from the eighth arrondissement, and one from the
twelfth, which had been the scenes of some of the bitterest fighting in
June 1848.
The rebellion against the coup d'etat found its most powerful ex-
pression in the provinces. In the central regions of France and the
Midi the rebellion drew in many hundreds of supporters, town halls
were captured and armed rebels marched in columns to link up and
capture whole districts. The remote character of many rural areas, as
yet not served by railways, and the weakness of the forces of order in
such localities, gave the rebellion time to become organized. Of five
women convicted among 19 known to have been arrested in the juris-
diction of the First Divisional Army Command all were from the de-
partment of the Loiret, suggesting the intensity of the rebellion there,
and the focus of official concern - although six departments in this
jurisdiction were affected by rebellion: the Allier, Aube, Oise, Seine-
et-Marne, Loiret and Yonne. The background to political discontent in
the Loiret was continued rural depression in the arrondissements affected
(Pithiviers and Montargis) caused by overproduction of cereals, with
low market prices and rural unemployment, as the studies of Christianne
Marcilhacy have shown. 22 Instead of manifesting itself in politically
archaic forms such as tax protests and market riots, political disaffec-
tion in the area was channelled into secret societies through the influ-
ence of democ-socs. The secret society based at Orleans, La Jeune
Montagne, aimed its propaganda at the rural regions of the Loiret,
while agents of La Nouvelle Montagne had penetrated the Nievre.Z 3
Of the five women convicted for rebellion in the Loiret, four played
primary roles of organization and two were ringleaders: Suzanne Jarreau,
wife of a farmer at Batilly (arrondissement of Pithiviers), and Victoire
Pascal at Bonny (arrondissement of Montargis). These women had an
established connection with the local democ-socs who organized the
rising. Suzanne Jarreau was a principal player in the revolt that broke
out at Batilly on 7 December. She was arrested after two months spent
in hiding, but witnesses had meanwhile described to the examining
magistrate of the court of Gien how Jarreau had carried a red flag in
the main square of Batilly; how, after her husband had led a crowdof
insurgents to force occupation of the town hall and burn the tax regis-
ters, she had advised the posting of sentries outside the mairie and
church, and had herself designated the men who would perform this
duty. 24 A .servant of the Mayor of Batilly named Alfroid described
how Jarreau had burst into the house, grabbed him by the arm, and
ordered him to cry: 'Vive la Republique, democratique et sociale.' The
town bellringer, Claude Ligier, was asked by her where his gun was,
and on his saying that he had left it at the local manor house where he
was employed, Jarreau snapped back: 'Go and get it, march!' 25 When
cross-examined after her arrest, Suzanne Jarreau did not deny the es-
sence of what she had done; she freely admitted that she had roused
men to defend the constitution - 'We want our rights' - and that she
had carried the red flag, which she had made by attaching the coun-
terpane of her bed to a pole. She further admitted to receiving the
radical newspaper Le Bien-Etre Universe/, which she had read aloud
at her house, and at the house of another local insurgent, Dr Alexis
Mabilat. 26 These admissions develop a portrait of a woman well versed
in left-wing politics, a ringleader who was prepared to fight and be
punished for her beliefs. In consequence the heaviest sentence - de-
portation to Cayenne - was meted out to her in March 1852, one of
only two such sentences dispensed to 556 arrested rebels in the Loiret, 27
though her sentence was later commuted to imprisonment at St Lazare. 28
The same organizational role was paralleled very closely at Bonny-
sur-Loire on 7 December. According to the diocesan archives of Orleans,
this village was almost wholly affected by a general spirit of social-
ism.29 Here Victoire Pascal, a viticultor, led a crowd who forced a
local draper to supply red cloth for a rebel flag, which Pascal later
admitted to having paraded to the town hall. She had gone from house
to house to force men to join the rising, threatening to put the head of
one of them on a pike. 30 A number of women were reported to have
borne arms, including a Rose Jardinand or Jardineau, wife of a social-
ist innkeeper, Etienne, known as 'Violet' Jardinand, who gave the first
signal for the rising in Bonny. 31 Rose Jardinand paraded a flag round
the streets, declaring, 'I want to be une Charlotte republicaine' - an
interesting insight into the fact that the 1789 Revolution supplied women
with their own role models and that the popular song of 1848 had
penetrated these rural areas - and led the procession to the gendarme-
rie with her daughter and a woman named Victoire Saugeot. 32
Some rebel leaders in the Loiret evidently had a history of radical
activity reaching back at least to 1848, such as the public health officer
at Ouzouer-sur-Tn!zee, a man named Jean-Pierre Rodon. A combatant
in the June Days of 1848, Rodon had served a sentence of transporta-
tion and secured appointment to this office at Ouzouer on his release. 33
An abortive rising took place in the village in December 1851, in which
his wife, Virginie, was reputed to be a ringleader. The Justice of the
Peace at Briare wrote to the local public prosecutor on 6 December to
say that families at Ouzouer felt threatened by demagogues, especially
by the:
fanaticism of several women who loudly demand to be led to the

pillage that they have been promised for such a long time ... the
wife of M. Rodon, the doctor, is named as the person who most
encourages disorder. Her words and deeds would be worthy of a
Teroigne [sic] de Mericourt. 34
The house of the Rodons had been a gathering place for local con-
spirators, and Virginie Rodon and her husband had received and dis-
tributed a paper called L'Almanach des Opprimes. 35
Why these particular women became politically active is not easily
explained; they were relatively isolated individuals but it is clear that
the left-wing agitation of some of them - or of their husbands - ex-
tended back several years previously. In the case of the Rodon couple,
there was the score of previous political victimization to settle. Madame
Jardinand had already been noted as a 'dangerous woman' in 1848, 36
and her husband had allowed his inn at Bonny to be used for radical
meetings and readings of La Constitution du Loiret. 37 Continued pol-
itical repression, economic uncertainty and a diet of democrate-socialiste
propaganda would have sustained the convictions of these long-term
dissidents and enabled them to win new supporters by meetings and
agitation.
The only other significant incidence of female insurgency for which
evidence survives is to be found in the department of the Var, and this
has received some attention from Maurice Agulhon. He describes how
women were reported to be involved, unusually, in socialist demon-
strations at La Garde-Freinet as early as March 1850, on the occasion
of the parliamentary by-election campaign. 38 The explanation for this
female presence is not easy to locate; in general terms, radical left-
wing ideas spread in the area because of the emergence of an ex-
ploitative class of entrepreneurs in the cork industry, and resistance
offered to them by the establishment of workers' producer coopera-
tives.39 Agulhon's comment that the proprietary attitude of bourgeois
conservatives led socialists 'almost as inevitably to feminism as the
feminists were led to socialism' 40 cannot of itself stand as an adequate
explanation. More persuasive is his suggestion that the local labour
force was of exceptional character, being a thorough blend of both
sexes; the cork industry employed women en masse, and enabled them
to gain wages equivalent to those of men. 41 Women had established a
mutual benefit society for themselves, called La Madeleine, in August
1849. Another source of solidarity in the region was anti-clericalism,
that flourished particularly in the neighbouring commune of Gonfaron,
on account of a dispute with the church over the enclosure of common

land. Here women rejected the catechism and religious services, sub-
stituting republican for religious ceremonies and tying red ribbons to
the hats of their children. 42 In La Garde-Freinet female demonstrations
and activism, tolerated by the local mayor, climaxed in December 1851,
when nearly all the workers of the village joined the marching column
of insurgents, egged on by women who assembled in a meadow, cry-
ing, 'Courage, citizens, bring us the bonne [Republique).' 43 Like Suzanne
Jarreau in the Loiret, the women of La Garde-Freinet stood sentry at
the town hall 'with pikes and sabres' to replace the absent men who
had marched off. 44 Not for nothing did a report on the rebellion in the
Var describe this commune as 'the most revolutionary of the depart-
ment of the Var'. 45
Others, like their counterparts in the Loiret, bore red standards. Virginie
Rouvier, a farmer's wife, bore the flag on the march from Salernes to
A ups, while Solange Lonjon, of an artisan family, carried a red flag
while leading afarandole (a community dance) on 4 December at Les
Maillons. 46 Most celebrated of the flag-bearers was Cesarine Ferrier,
the 21-year-old wife of the rebel mayor of Grimaud, described by the
chronicler of the revolt Eugene Tenot as a 'beautiful young woman
enthusiastic for liberty' .47 She marched at the head of a column of
rebels, dressed in a blue cloak lined with scarlet, a red Phrygian cap
on her head, and carrying the red flag aloft. Agulhon views her not as
a symbolic anti-christian 'Goddess of Reason', as her conservative
opponents did; instead he describes how Ferrier was persuaded by a
radical of La Garde-Freinet, Pierre Arambide, himself a disciple of
Flora Tristan, to wear a red scarf to rouse other women and create a
squadron of them. 48 Here again we find a tenuous link with self-con-
scious feminism. The idea that Ferrier should be a symbolic leveller,
with a red Phrygian cap, came only as the rebellion ended on 8 De-
cember.49 The report of the Court of Appeal of Aix on the Var rising
also noted that up to forty female victuallers were counted among the
6000 rebels of the Var contingent finally dispersed at Aups; and that
they had carefully prepared their costumes in advance so that 'the colour
red predominated . . . the sashes worn over their shoulders were red
and the pistols were attached to their belts with red cords. A few wore
the phrygian cap.' It may be that Arambide's battalion had by that
stage virtually come into being. 50
The anti-clericalism developing in certain localities before Decem-
ber 1851 bore fruit during the rising, the report of the Court of Appeal
of Aix referring to women rebels, 'or, to put it more accurately, these
furies', denouncing priests taken hostage on the march, declaring, 'We

don't want any more of these hucksters of fine words.' 51
Despite these striking manifestations, Agulhon is careful to stress
that such extensive female participation was peculiar to only one or
two localities in the Var, and was the product of unusual circumstances.
As in the Loiret with respect to women such as Jarreau, Pascal and
Rodon, women participants were often young wives who wished to
follow their militant husbands, but might take initiatives themselves.
Among the 16 female rebels condemned for rebellion in the Var we
find three farmers and three retailers, but also three dressmakers - a
mixture of bourgeois and working-class occupations as seen in Paris. 5 2
Outside the departments of the Loiret and Var, evidence of women
arrested for insurgency is very scattered and records mainly individual
instances of political defiance. But it reflects the same roles and ac-
tivities witnessed elsewhere in December 1851 and in previous insur-
rections. Women acted as firebrands of rebellion, or called for vengeance.
At Bedarieux (Herault), the scene of a notorious rising, a crowd of
women called on 4 December for revenge for the earlier persecution
of poachers, and particularly for vengeance against two gendarmes called
Liotard and Brugieres, who had accidentally shot an innocent youth.
Partly as a result of this incitement, the gendarmerie was burnt down
and Liotard and Brugieres were killed. 53 Anne Poujoulat, Femme Castaing,
organized a band of rebels at Le Mas (Lot-et-Garonne), roused the
inhabitants to revolt and collected weapons the night before the mairie
was seized. 54 Other women acted as scouts or spies for rebel bands. A
contingent of 3000 rebels who marched on Divajeu, south of Crest
(Drome), on the afternoon of 7 December were warned by a woman
that they were lost, as she had seen the artillery forces approach the
village. 55 In a few instances, women engaged in militant acts along-
side their menfolk. As Augustine Pean had fought on the barricades of
Paris and Victoire Pascal in the Loiret had borne arms and marched
alongside the men so Josephine Bras, a 43-year-old labourer at Bessan
(Herault) not only incited men to murder but herself attacked a local
police sergeant. She was sent after conviction to the Convent of Bon-
Pasteur at Constantine, in Algeria, to join Roland, Patey, Pean and
other women sentenced. 56 Eugenie Majoureau, a 54-year-old cook at
Bedarieux, suffered the same fate of transportation to Algeria. The wife
of a rebel who kept a tavern used as a rendezvous for the rebels, she
was described by the authorities as 'very fanatical' and organized bands
of armed men. 57 Women also attempted to keep radical propaganda
and activity alive when their menfolk became victims of political per-
secution. A printer of Blois named Groubental, who published a so-

cialist newspaper called Le Progres de Lair-et-Cher et d'1ndre-et-Loir,
fled from his native town on 4 or 5 December, having already suf-
fered legal prosecution. His wife, 'no less ardent than he in political
matters', arranged a meeting at her house with the principal democrate-
socialiste leaders of the locality, Benoit, Jean and Laforce, and sought
to continue the publication of the newspaper. 58
The women arrested in provincial areas in December 1851, like those
of Paris, represent a spectrum of social class, from labourers to the
wives of professionals and small landowners. The insurgency of De-
cember 1851 revealed how democ-soc propaganda had not merely in-
fluenced the artisan and peasant classes in the countryside, but also
dissident members of the bourgeoisie, who could be expected to give
leadership to resistance in distressed areas like the Loiret. Here women
like Jarreau, Pascal and Jardinand could command some status, or were
at the centre of social networks in their local communities. Of 16 women
arrested in the jurisdiction of the First Divisional Army command out-
side Paris and the Seine department, 12 had previous associations with
the radical left-wing movement. Of 21 women convicted in the entire
jurisdiction (Paris, the Seine and the provinces), seven had received or
distributed radical propaganda, joined secret societies or held secret
meetings of the radical left. For this reason, tavern keepers are a con-
stant element in the rebellion; women such as Rose Jardinand (Bonny)
or Stephanie Eloy and Marie Rose Dard in Paris kept taverns or wineshops
that became meeting places for radical left-wingers and hence centres
for the diffusion of political propaganda. Dard's home was described
as 'un rendezvous des demagogues', while Eloy was accused of har-
bouring insurgents at her tavern in the Boulevard de Ia Chapelle. 59 In
December 1851 Eloy was employing as bartender a piano carpenter
named Louis Gengembach, a secret society member accused of serv-
ing drinks to insurgents on the barricade of the Barriere de Ia Chapelle,
and also of having possibly been present at another barricade in the
Rue Lafayette. 60 Alongside the leadership given by these small land-
owners or small business-women, artisan women were also moved to
involve themselves as a result of poverty and trade grievances that
produced a hatred of those in authority. In the Var, the more compact
villages bred a stronger sense of community feeling that focused popu-
lar frustrations and caused entire villages such as La Garde-Freinet to
join the rebellion.
Of the women condemned some, as in 1848, freely admitted their
involvement in the rebellion, amongst them Jarreau, Pascal and Pean.
On this occasion the state left nothing to chance; women judged guilty
of lesser crimes in the rebellion were put under house arrest or made
to leave the country, but at least fifteen women judged to have been
ringleaders, or who had taken up arms, were sentenced to transporta-
tion in Algeria. Several of them refused to sign a petition for a re-
prieve, including Armandine Huet, Claudine Monniot, Suzanne Jarreau,
Augustine Pean and Pauline Roland. 61 At first the women sent to Al-
geria were made to reside at the Convent of Bon-Pasteur at Constantine,
in the hope of effecting their moral reform. 62 Some were not destined
to remain at the convent long; Pauline Roland, on whose behalf influ-
ential figures such as Beranger and George Sand interceded, was par-
doned in the autumn of 1852 as the result of pressure by her son Jean,
but already in precarious health, she died in Lyon in December 1852
on her journey back to Paris. 63 Josephine Bras, the labourer from the
Herault, who was wretchedly poor and the mother of three very young
children, also secured a pardon and release in September 1852 at the
request of the Mother Superior of Bon-Pasteur. 64 Helena Gaussin, the
actress, soon repented of her misbehaviour, made a strongly favourable
impression on the nuns with her ladylike ways, and was freed. 65 The
other women were destined to spend some years in Algeria, though
they were soon moved from the convent when it became apparent that
they were not attracted to the idea of their moral salvation. Armandine
Huet, who had accompanied her husband to Algeria, was not allowed
to stay with him but was sent to the casbah at Bone, where she re-
mained after her husband had returned to France. 66 Suzanne Jarreau,
sentenced to deportation to Guiana, did not suffer that lethal fate but
was, for reasons not made clear by Paul Emerit, kept imprisoned at St
Lazare. Though later released, her travails were not yet over, for after
the Orsini Bomb Plot of January 1858 she was re-arrested in a trawl
of political radicals and deported to Djidjelli in Algeria. 67 Anne Greppo,
who had been acquitted for lack of evidence, discreetly took up resi-
dence in England. 68 Louis-Napoleon assumed dictatorial powers with a
mission to save society by ending once and for all the democrate-
socialiste agitation that had for so long unnerved public officials and
wealthy property-owners; and in the immediate term he succeeded.
While seeking to procure the moral reform of the female rebels, the
authorities again spared no effort to represent their acts as the product
of social envy, criminality and moral delinquency. In the department
of Lot-et-Garonne, Madame Mathieu Camaroque, of Marmande, who
was deported to Algeria for incitement to murder and pillage, was
described as originally a member of a local family named Maubourguet,
which had been ruined by debauchery and had conceived 'a profound
hatred for all the conservative laws of society'. Madame Camaroque
had 'no hope of amending her hostile feelings towards society' .69 Helena
Gaussin was noted in the register of those deported to Algeria as be-
ing of a 'detestable morality' and as having twice been condemned to
a year's imprisonment for theft. 70 A Veuve Marie Santel, a labourer at
Beziers (Herault), who had incited her son to join the rebels, was sim-
ilarly noted as having been imprisoned for theft in 1831 and adultery
in 1849. 71 Despite the evidence that a number of these women had
left-wing antecedents of some years' standing, the official view was
not entirely mistaken; the determination to rebel might be the result of
local or random factors, such as the local feud with the police at Bedarieux
which led women to call for vengeance.
The Second French Republic thus ended in December 1851 with the
subversion of its democratic values and the hunting down and denunci-
ation of its most radical advocates. It was the first French experiment
in truly working democracy but was shortlived, and did not experi-
ence the breadth and depth of the popular militancy of the 1789 Rev-
olution; nor did it suffer the alarms over constant economic shortages
and the threat of foreign invasion that pushed that militancy to fever
pitch. After June 1848 the popular radical movement in Paris was largely
broken and the repression of the next three years inhibited the attempt
to mount a national insurrection against the coup d'etat. There seemed
to be no more likelihood that women would be granted political and
civil rights in the Second Republic than in the 1789 Revolution - ar-
guably even less likelihood, for in the latter, when women had en-
joyed a longer period of club activity and had obtained the right to
divorce. Even so the evidence reviewed for 1848 and 1851 suggests
that it would be premature to maintain that by the mid-nineteenth cen-
tury Frenchwomen were slipping out of active roles of public protest
into mere domesticity. In 1789, 1830, 1848 and 1851 their protest,
though always a minor part of the whole, and in its form and purpose
often specific to patterns of gender behaviour (though not always so),
remained constant. Diffidence and lack of education would hold back
all but the most courageous women. It has been easy for contemporary
writers and modern historians to relegate them to obscurity and suggest
that their role was purely symbolic. The republican journalist Eugene
Tenot, in his account of the provincial rebellion written some fifteen
years after 1851, only mentions in passing the presence of women in
the rebellion at Bonny-sur-Loire, where, he writes, the tricolour flag
of the commune was seized and carried by 'a young woman who was
a mother', this terse description almost itself suggesting the extraordi-

nary nature of her role. 72 Tenot later makes brief mention of Cesarine
Ferrier bearing the standard in the Var. In Marianne into Battle Maurice
Agulhon, as we have seen, dismisses the role of female militantes by
saying that they were few and far between, 73 although in his study of
the democrates-socialistes in the Var he is compelled to modify this
view slightly by paying tribute to the organizing strategies of women
in one or two villages before and during the rebellions of December
1851. Few though these women may have been there were neverthe-
less among them, in 1851 as on other occasions, some sufficiently
politicized or determined of character to break out of the constraints
of their traditional behaviour patterns when the occasion arose - seizing
the strategic initiative like Madame Jarreau, bearing arms and standing
sentry in the absence of their menfolk, and forming patrols. In June
1848 we have, for the first time since the 1789 Revolution, satisfactory
evidence that among the militantes there was a politically inspired
motivation. As in the 1789 Revolution, months of feverish unrest and
heightened political and economic expectations brought women onto
the streets when proof of treachery and intended reaction seemed to
emerge. There were female insurgents who saw the June Days as a
battle by the poor to overthrow the Republic of the rich and establish
a truly just one, led (they supposed) by left-wingers like Blanc and
Caussidiere; some were bold enough to publish their political and propa-
ganda affiliations, with hints of menace, in the streets; others were
astute enough to try to justify their activism by alleging that a royalist
rising was rumoured to have occurred on the Left Bank. Women such
as Marie Chassang and Catherine Depesne had, through their husbands,
a political background extending back some years; Marie Fran~oise
Perrin and Annette Defer were married to men who were club officials
or had helped to found them; Elisabeth Bruley and Augustine Falaise
had associated with the eccentric radical Abbe Chatel. Though para-
doxically the odds of a successful rising were even more hopeless in
December 1851 than in June 1848 insurgent women by the latter date
seem to have developed more sophisticated political awareness, as their
involvement with left-wing meetings and propaganda bears witness.
Three years of such underground activity clearly sustained women such
as Claudine Monniot and Rose Jardinand. Women such as Anne Greppo
and Suzanne Jarreau were in the forefront of initiating rebellion; others
like Eugenie Clouard pushed their menfolk on. But such cases must be
set against those of women who acted under the influence of their
menfolk, women who became involved on account of some personal
vendetta, and those possibly wrongfully arrested.
The assumption of Perrot, Tilly and others that the nineteenth cen-
tury saw a steady decline of involvement by Frenchwomen in public
and political protest movements is not necessarily supported by the
fact that the proportion of women arrested in Paris and its military
region in December 1851 was unquestionably inferior to that of June
1848 (1 per cent of the total, as opposed to 2.5 per cent). The rebel-
lion of December 1851 in Paris was a much smaller, more tentative
affair than that of June 1848. Had the power of the centralized state in
the Second Republic been as weak and hesitant as that of the French
state in the period 1789-93, it seems possible from the evidence that
the same type of evolving female politicization that Godineau, for
example, has charted could have revived. Though insurgency was ob-
literated and driven underground by repression and censorship through
much of the period of the Second Empire, it had a chance to re-emerge
with the advent of the revolutionary Commune in 1871, in which women
took their public profile one stage further by organizing a female bat-
talion that defended barricades on the Left Bank and the Place du
Chateau-d'Eau. 74 Peter Stearns may well be correct in asserting that
each new interlude of popular left-wing militancy in the nineteenth
century widened the forms and expression of such action by French
women. Whether the numbers of women participants were increasing
or declining, their activity was becoming more closely linked to politics.
Most of the insurgents were women of the working class and petite
bourgeoisie in 1848 and 1851; in this sense it exemplifies what Maurice
Agulhon has described as the 'descent of politics to the masses' .75
This enhanced involvement was not achieved with the blessing of
wide sections of society who, unused to observing women in the pub-
lic sphere except in one or two instances such as shopkeeping and
charitable work, looked on scandalized at the female insurgents. If
decorous bourgeois ladies such as Eugenie Niboyet became the butt of
satirical ridicule as soon as they organized a women's club76 then how
much greater must have been the animosity directed against women
who, by taking up the standard of rebellion, offended the strictures of
contemporary public morality. No longer content to be living- or dead
- symbols of martyred liberty by men, some of the women rebels of
June 1848 and December 1851 used the flag to create their own spon-
taneous symbolism of a more radical republic. Several women in June
1848 went to combat in men's clothes. Louise Cornier, a prostitute
who helped to disarm a Republican Guard, went to the conflict dressed
in her lover's shirt and trousers and wearing a red Phrygian cap. When
arrested at the Pont au Change she alleged that she had worn these
clothes because it was not safe for a woman to be out of doors. 77
Josephine Clabot, who roused her own quarter in Belleville, went out
dressed as a man on her own admission to avoid abuse or attack. 78
The delinquent image of these women was perhaps reinforced, in June
1848 at least, by the significant minority of prostitutes that we have
noted among them. Their involvement in rebellion would again be
apparent in the Commune of 1871.79 In July 1830 and February 1848
a small number of heroi"nes fought for liberty in revolutions that were
essentially a male affair. The heroines of July 1830 were praised in
popular art, appearing for example in a card-game inspired by that
revolution and serving as the subjects of Delaporte's lithographic series
Parisian Woman of 27, 28 and 29 July. 80 Such women were forgotten
when in June 1848 women assumed a higher political profile to help
push the republic in a more radical direction favoured by only a mi-
nority of French society. The unflattering epithets used to describe
the female rebels then and in 1851 suggest not only anger at their
defiance of convention but also deeper psychological fears. One re-
current metaphor used to describe insurgent women was 'furies' -not
a new term of abuse, as Godineau records that in 1795 the jeunesse
doree of the Thermidorean reaction set upon, whipped and indecently
assaulted women suspected of having been Jacobines or tricoteuses,
denouncing them as furies. 81 The description of women rebels in the
June Days, already referred to, 82 by the Scotsman John Palgrave Simpson,
doubtless with an ear to French expressions, continues this tradition:
'The Gardes Mobiles . . . are hideously massacred, in ways unmen-
tionable, by furies in the shape of women, more frantic in their intoxi-
cation of bloodshed than the men.' The examining magistrate who
considered the evidence against Marie Porcher described her as 'a
virago ... the violence that has been committed was largely due to
her incitement.' 83 Therese Calayon, who roused the quarter of the Rue
de Ia Harpe and fought on nearby barricades, was described as a 'big,
strong virago', a woman often in trouble for causing a commotion at
public dances; 84 the call to the barricades doubtless roused other women
of her type - large, awkward, tough and shunned as troublesome in
normal times, but who might come into their own, like the Marie Bonifas
of Jacques de Lacretelle's novel, in times of conflict. 85 A witness,
speaking of Elisa Parmentier, Femme Debeurgrave, declared, 'She was
like a madwoman', while another stated that she was 'more rabid than
the other insurgents'. 86 In December 1851 the epithets continue: the
official report into the insurrection of the Var describes the women of
La Garde-Freinet with their red insignia, as 'furies'; Virginie Rodon
was described as a new Theroigne de Mericourt; and the secret society
archivist Adele Desmars was branded a 'raging demagogue' by wit-

nesses.87 The extreme nature of these comments seems to point to deeply
held gender-based fears concerning women; among educated detrac-
tors, the Furies would have been known to be the Greek goddesses of
retribution, remembered principally for their ten-year torment of Orestes.
Paule-Marie Duhet has emphasized how, at least since the time of Diderot,
educated people had viewed the female body as particularly suscep-
tible to nervous impulses, and quotes Chateaubriand's description of the
tricoteuses at the guillotine from his Memoires de l'Outre-Tombe: 'They
all rose and cried out together, their breeches in their hands, foaming
at the mouth.' 88 Fascinated horror greeted the charges against Simone
Leblanc of decapitating Mobile Guardsmen. At her trial on 27 March
1849 the visitors' gallery was packed with spectators, including society
ladies in the front row, a Russian general, Belgian army officers and
well-born Englishmen. As the sentence was read out a lady collapsed
in a faint in the front row of the spectators' seats. 89
Women gathered together for public action might, it was thought
(and as the report of J-B. Amar to the Convention in 1793 testifies),
be roused to a hysteria that could produce a contagion of madness and
bring about the perpetration of unspeakable cruelties. Whether the crimes
perpetrated by women rebels were worse than those perpetrated by the
men is questionable, but the evidence of witnesses does suggest again
and again that the fever of battle roused the women to great states of
excitement (exaltation); and at least one women, Stephanie Gagneur,
was apprehended in the streets in a state of menstrual hysteria. The
spectacle of violent conflict and a world in disorder would also attract
the mentally unstable. The veteran militant Veuve Henry of Belleville
was described by a female neighbour of the same name as eccentric
and temperamental, frequently shouting and running about in the courtyard
of the house. 90
Though vocal condemnation was to be expected from conservative
spokesmen, or newspapers such as Le Constitutionnel, which, for in-
stance, reported the arrest of 'an old termagant' in the Rue Jacob who
had fired a pistol shot at a National Guard, 91 it was by no means
confined to the right of the political spectrum. The developing notion
of 'separate spheres' for men and women in the early nineteenth cen-
tury had been endowed with a sharp doctrinal prescription by the re-
publican ideology of the family that had evolved since the repression
of women's politics and public activity by the Jacobins in 1793. This
ideology was sustained in the early nineteenth century by major pro-
tagonists of republicanism such as Michelet and Comte, and, according
to Joan Landes, became so insidiously pervasive that it even influ-

enced the thinking of an emancipated feminist and socialist such as
Flora Tristan, who failed to reconcile her wish for women's complete
equality with her belief in the messianic importance of their domestic
role. 92 It is thus hardly surprising to discover left-wing revolutionaries
condemning women's public roles in 1848 and feminists, who in 1848
placed a new emphasis on the importance of motherhood and the fam-
ily to distance themselves from the free love ideas of the Saint-Simonians,
voicing hostility and caution. 93 The revolutionary thinker Pierre-Joseph
Proudhon was sufficiently angered by what he saw of female political
behaviour in 1848 to reassert and redefine what he believed to be the
correct republican ideological line on woman's place in society. Though
he was anti-state and anti-capitalist, Proudhon was very much a tradi-
tionalist with regard to family matters, as is strikingly evident from
the following comment that appeared in his newspaper Le Peuple in
December 1848.
Woman's role is not to be found in public life, the life of human
relations and agitation but truly in private life, that life of feeling
and peacefulness associated with the domestic hearth. Socialism ...
has come to rehabilitate the home, the sanctuary of the family and
symbol of the matrimonial bond. ' 94
To members of the wealthy bourgeoisie the woman insurgent, as an
activist for radical revolution, threatened not only public decency and
the family, but order and property. The spectacle of women demon-
strating in the streets could shock even women who professed feminist
ideas. Two examples reveal the thoughts of prosperous and educated
middle-class women - one of them hostile to contemporary feminist
ideas, the other sympathetic. The former woman, Florence Robinson,
shortly to become Baroness Bonde, was an Irish eyewitness of the
1848 Revolution in Paris. In a letter of 31 March 1848 she describes a
motley procession of people filing through the streets of the French
capital, demonstrating for reform. She writes
Nothing could be more disagreeable than the streets just now. A
little further a couple of thousand [sic] women march past, bearing
the tricolour with the inscription Vesuviennes and I believe it is better
not to inquire into the nature of their avocations. 95
The Vesuviennes, the small group of radical working-class feminists,
were parading in military style for complete equality with men. But
the middle-class Protestant feminist Eugenie Niboyet was equally per-
turbed by such demonstrations, as she makes clear in her short autobi-

ography in her apologia Le Vrai Livre des Femmes. In this she records
her alarm at the sight of women returning from a demonstration in
1848, and claims that this prompted her to undertake the task of luring
women away from public mischief by organizing a women's club, which
would provide them with education and honest work; as she declared
to a friend:
But supposing that a republic so wisely inaugurated were to have as
its counterpart the tricoteuses of former times? Women must be
gathered together and educated. An upright heart and true courage
could achieve this. 96
Yet Niboyet claimed that she was alarmed by the whole panoply of
reforms later proposed by enthusiastic members of her Societe de Ia
Voix des Femmes, and particularly by the call for divorce:
And what was my sorrow, when the question of divorce, which,
above all I had wished to avoid, was the issue raised! ... I wanted
particularly to concern myself with the lot of women workers for
whom so much still remains to be done. 97
These reprobatory attitudes towards popular female protest on the
part of two women with differing perspectives on the feminist question
both exemplify a nervous concern for outward public respectability,
and underline the difficulties that existed in building bridges between
middle-class feminists and women of the people. The female insur-
gents of the era of the Second Republic mostly belonged to the latter
category, and the surviving evidence shows very few links between
them and contemporary feminism. The quotations by women writers
cited above further illumine the relentless pressure of gender norms
and prejudices in nineteenth-century French society, that made female
insurgency a heroic if hopeless affair of a minority of women. Many
who assumed this role were persecuted and silenced; a handful per-
sisted to December 1851. These were often the women most strongly
imbued with the conviction that they, too, had a right to fight for
democracy, and they devised their own means of expressing that
conviction.
By the spring of 1852, however, the government of Louis-Napoleon
no longer had cause for alarm about them. Swift and thorough repres-
sion by the army and extraordinary courts had either brought the ar-
rest and imprisonment of leading female militants, their deportation or
even (in the case of Pauline Roland) their eventual death. The remnants
of the democ-soc movement were rendered impotent and driven under-

ground. Louis-Napoleon could be forgiven for imagining in 1852 that
the task of restoring permanent social harmony to French civil society
would not be beyond him; that, in his own words, he could recon-
struct French society 'ruined by fifty years of revolution, in reconcil-
ing order with liberty, the rights of the people with the principles of
authority' .98 Yet in less than twenty years his regime had foundered,
yielding to invasion, military defeat and a new republic; and there
then followed a civil insurrection more bloody and terrible than any
seen in France since the 1790s: the Paris Commune of 1871. In this
rebellion women put forward their political and social demands more
vocally than at any other time during this century of subjection. But
the experience of the Commune was to be a brief one and would end
in a defeat so crushing as to terminate the pattern of insurrection in
nineteenth-century France. It is to this last episode of rebellion that
we must now turn.
7 The Commune of 1871:
the Great Venture in Female
Citizenship
Of all the rebellions and revolutions that occurred in nineteenth-century
Paris the Commune of 1871 saw the greatest and most recorded par-
ticipation of women, which brought both praise from the Communards
themselves and vituperative criticism from the enemies of the Com-
mune. 1 In a sense this higher participation is not surprising, for unlike
the troubles of July 1830, February and June 1848 and December 1851,
which were all over in a matter of a few days, the Commune lasted
nearly ten weeks. The Revolutions of July 1830 and February 1848
had quickly and successfully replaced one regime by another; the re-
bellions of June 1848 and December 1851 had failed in their attempts
to institute or defend the principle of a radical popular republic. The
Commune differed from all these previous insurrections: the initial
rebellion of 18 March 1871 did not rapidly founder in defeat, as had
the June Days and the rebellion of December 1851 against the coup
d'etat. It survived and developed long enough to establish its own rev-
olutionary governmental structures and propaganda, in an uneasy du-
alism with the legal Government of National Defence. But unlike the
Revolutions of July 1830 and February 1848 the Commune did not
ultimately effect a complete, permanent change of regime. Its effect
was largely limited to Paris and its short life before its ruthless sup-
pression by the army of the Government of National Defence was charac-
terized by an atmosphere of siege and emergency - a continuation and
intensification of a state of affairs that had arisen in September 1870
when the invading Prussian armies had laid siege to Paris. In this re-
spect the experience of the Commune resembled not so much that of
the other nineteenth-century rebellions or revolutions as that of 1789,
with its pattern of continuous economic slump, hunger and war emerg-
ency. There was also the same atmosphere of total, fevered mobiliza-
tion, and the resemblance was not lost on the Communards and was -
as we shall see - exploited in their propaganda. The tradition of rev-
olution in modern France as we have surveyed it suggests that the
more extreme the material problems involved the more likely would
be the emergence of some kind of female militancy.
105
Though we shall find that women were indeed active in the Com-
mune, their insurgent experience did not simply repeat that of 1830,
1848 and 1851 for the additional reason that the political awareness of
women activists had deepened and so, it would seem, had their self-
confidence. For the first time in the nineteenth century popular insur-
gency and feminist issues overlapped in France. A vowed feminists led
and organized their quarters for rebellion and took up guns to defend
the revolution against the forces sent from Versailles by the Govern-
ment of National Defence. This awareness cannot simply be accounted
for merely by the crises that emerged in 1870-1: the Franco-Prussian
War, siege of Paris and winter hardships that brought a breakdown of
trust between the legal government and much of the Parisian popula-
tion. Women would not have acted with unprecedented assertiveness
in so many areas of public activity had they not been prepared by a
revival of working-class politics and feminist propaganda in the late
1860s. With this revival came a new efflorescence of clubs, societies,
trade unions and, eventually, conspiracies and violent demonstrations.
This resurgence of left-wing radicalism was made possible by the
slow liberalization of the Second Empire in the 1860s. Until this time
of renewed political opposition the regime had maintained public order
firmly and had been troubled only by the occasional revelation of a
political plot or secret society activity, in which women again played
the accessory roles that we have noted in earlier periods of civil
tranquillity. Though republican organizations had been broken up in
1851-2 and their leaders gaoled or exiled, a republican underground
movement persisted, both in cities with radical traditions such as Paris
and Lyon and in the provinces. John Plamenatz refers to four real
political plots discovered in the first two years of Louis-Napoleon's
personal dictatorship. 2 In 1853 a Comite Revolutionnaire in Paris which
supported the movement of the London exiles Felix Pyat and Marc
Caussidiere was established by Andre Raynaud, a travelling salesman
in wines, and Pierre Biotere, a hairdresser. With a plan to assassinate
the Emperor, burn down the palace of St Cloud and proclaim a dicta-
torial republic, they hoped to profit from discontent in Paris caused
by a rise in rents and the dismissal of the National Guard. The infiltration
of the organization by police spies aborted the plot, known as the Complot
de !'Hippodrome, and brought the arrest, in June 1853, of the conspira-
tors, who included a number of women. Veuve Leopoldine Laporte,
whom we have already noted as keeping a tavern in Belleville that
was a place of rendezvous for the former rebels of June 1848, was
amongst those apprehended. Veuve Elisabeth Foubart, a burnisher, was
The Commune of 1871 107
condemned to one month's imprisonment and a 16-franc fine for dis-

tributing brochures of Pyat and Caussidiere. Guilty of the same of-
fence was Josephine Brun, Veuve Libersalle, a fruit merchant, who
had allowed the militants of the committee to meet in her house; she
was sentenced to six months' imprisonment and a 500-franc fine. 3
The facilitating of secret meetings and distribution of radical propa-
ganda on behalf of illegal organizations in the provinces was also on
occasion the responsibility of women. In the department of Deux-Sevres
the membership of a clandestine republican society, La Marianne, was
uncovered by the police following a riot in Brion in July 1856. This
riot had been provoked by secret society members, who blamed a rise
in the price of cereals on the machinations of government ministers.
Marie Billon, wife of a weaver of Brion, was sentenced to six weeks'
imprisonment for membership of La Marianne. One month's term of
imprisonment was imposed on Heloise Guillot, a farrier's wife, for the
same offence. 4 The same year brought arrests in the Jura, a department
noted since the 1830s for radical republican activity. There the flame
of socialism was quietly kept alive by such conspirators as Felicite
Legendre, a farmer's wife of Vauxy, near Arbois, who hosted socialist
meetings in 1855-6. She allegedly voiced her regret that the Emperor
had not been shot in the Crimean War, and made threats against the
rich. She and her husband Claude were arrested early in 1856 when
one of their meetings was raided by the police. 5 In nearby Poligny, a
woman named Combe allowed her house to be used in 1856 for a
socialist meeting, under the guise of a Protestant religious gathering. 6
In 1857 the republicans put up 100 candidates for legislative office,
and though they won only six seats they showed their mettle by suc-
cessfully contesting two of three by-elections held in the following
year. In 1859 an amnesty allowed exiles of the rebellion of December
1851 to return to France, and proved the prelude to a succession of
liberalizing measures in the 1860s which gave the radical left new
hope. In 1864 workers were permitted, for the first time in many years,
to form associations to negotiate with employers peacefully. In 1865 a
French branch of the International Workingmen's Association was set
up in the Rue des Gravilliers, and, assisted by a law of 1867, producer
and consumer cooperatives revived, so that by 1870 some forty such
cooperatives and mutual credit institutions existed in Paris. 7 In such
ventures male workers were predominant but a workers' cooperative
restaurant called La Marmite established in 1868 counted among its
organizers the bookbinder Nathalie Lemel (or Le Mel) and soon at-
tracted 8000 adherents. 8 Whether from imperial strength or weakness,
political concessions continued to flow: in 1868 the government officially

recognized trade unions; by 1870 fifty-four of them had affiliated in
Paris to a Chambre Federale des Societes Ouvrieres. 9 The French branch
of the International became more overtly political from 1868, suffered
government persecution, and reorganized itself into autonomous sec-
tions based on trade or neighbourhood, to promote worker associa-
tions and discussion groups. 10 While doing little to promote unity of
political outlook, this decentralized structure did much to encourage
neighbourhood loyalties and local initiatives during the episode of the
Commune.
Not only were workers thus free to organize again; by the late 1860s
they had much to protest about on economic grounds. The slump of
1866-7 gave rise to increased unemployment, and uncertainty concerning
future unemployment at a time when accelerating mechanization was
disrupting the patterns of artisan trades. Capitalist entrepreneurialism
degraded the status of the artisan by deskilling. 11 Women workers still
suffered from poorer job opportunities and lower wages in addition; in
1870 the average wage for a male worker was four francs a day but
for a female worker only two francs. Female salaries in general matched
those of unskilled male workers, and a survey taken of the salaries of
110 000 women workers indicated that barely I per cent of them earned
over four francs a day. 12 Victorine Brochon, a shoe-stitcher who left a
memoir of her life at this time, described women working 12-14 hours
a day, to the neglect of their children and aged relativesY Low wages
helped to create conditions in which upwards of 30 000 women worked
as unregistered prostitutes. 14
The salary of the female wage-earner was not only low and her job
opportunities still limited, but she had little chance of professional training
since professional schools for girls were still a novelty in the 1860s. A
few determined women sought to change this unpromising situation;
Louise Michel, a young, idealistic schoolteacher whose views were
moving to the radical left by the late 1860s, taught for a time in a
trade school run by the Protestant feminist Elisa Lemonnier. 15 Michel
subsequently opened a day school of her own in Montmartre with money
raised from her mother's estate. Such educated or self-educated women
were not only realizing the value of education for the betterment of
their own sex but offering a lay response to the growing influence of
the Catholic church over female education.
Such women, who also wished that the new working men's organ-
izations would fight on behalf of the rights of their sex, had a difficult
struggle against male prejudices. The concept of women's equality in
the workplace had been central to the abortive federation of workers'

associations founded by Jeanne Deroin, Pauline Roland and Joseph-
Louis Delbrouck in 1849. 16 Working men's leaders of Fourierist or
ex-Fourierist persuasion viewed the women's cause sympathetically,
but those with Proudhonist sympathies were greatly hostile; their in-
fluence on the French branch of the Workingmen's International caused
a majority of the French delegates at the congress of the International
at Geneva in 1866 to support a motion stating that women were not
intended to work, as their place was in the family home. 17 In 1867 the
Paris typographers, expressing the opinion that the male worker had
the right to a 'family wage' to keep his wife, protested against the
employment of women, for fear that their wages would be lowered. 18
But others, such as the socialists Benoit Malon and Gustave Lefran<rais,
were more supportive of the rights of women workers, Lefran<rais ex-
plaining this sympathy as the mature outcome of a generation of read-
ing, and reflection upon, the ideologies of St Simon, Fourier and Leroux. 19
In the last two years of the Second Empire the meetings of the French
branch of the International took more account of women's problems,
discussing such themes as women's place in contemporary society and
the structure of the family in the light of modern concepts of law and
morality. 2° From 1868 the ban on political meetings was lifted and
both working women and militantes of more bourgeois background
who would become rebel leaders in 1870-1 pressed their claims on
the International and were encouraged to join and participate. Victorine
Brochon attended meetings of the International and helped to organize
a cooperative bakery at La Chapelle. 21 Paule Minck, daughter of an
exiled Polish noble and army officer, who by the late 1860s had sep-
arated from her Polish husband and was living in Paris as a dressmaker
and language teacher, joined the International in 1869 and sought ac-
tively to recruit women to it. She stressed that women and the work-
ing class were the two pariahs of modern society, who must work to
free each other, and developed an anti-state, anti-capitalist outlook. 22
She went on speaking tours in Lyon and Normandy, putting into prac-
tice her tenet that woman was a natural agent of revolution. 23 By 1870
women's names appeared in the sporadic lists of members of the var-
ious Paris sections of the International that have survived, though far
more rarely in membership lists of provincial sections. The section of
the Rue Brantome, Faubourg St Denis (Section de l'Est) had female
names on its list in 1870 and the tailoress Octavie Tardif became sec-
retary of the section of the Pantheon and eleventh arrondissement. 24
The bourgeois militantes who embraced socialism went further,
however, and were among those women who sought to revive the move-
ment for women's emancipation, that likewise gained from the laws
liberalizing the press and public assembly in 1868. Proudhon's con-
temptuous rejection of feminism and the idea of women's equality in
his work De La justice dans la Revolution et dans l'eglise (1858) had
stung a number of women into making spirited replies: Juliette Lamber
(Madame Juliette Adam) wrote Idees anti-proudhoniennes sur ['amour,
la femme et le mariage in 1858, Jenny d'Hericourt La Femme affranchie
in 1860. 25 A young bourgeois republican journalist, Maria Deraismes,
was moved by the attacks of Barbey d' Aurevilly on bluestockings (Les
Bas-Bleus) to participate in Masonic conferences held in 1865, whence
she launched into speaking tours calling for female emancipation. In
1869 she published Les Femmes et les moeurs, calling for equal civil
rights. 26 A new generation of women emerged who addressed the prob-
lems of their sex in a series of speaking tours and writings. Leodile
Champseix, a journalist and widow of a disciple of Pierre Leroux, wrote
novels calling for equality in marriage and the restoration of divorce
under the pseudonym of Andre Leo (the first names of her twin sons). 27
She too spoke at meetings of the International, and became secretary
of its section at Batignolles. Women's groups are estimated to have
participated in 933 public meetings in the last years of the Empire.28
The evening classes held for women by republicans such as Jules Favre,
Jules Simon and Eugene Pelletan attracted young schoolteachers like
Louise Michel, who were avid for instruction, and influenced their
politics in a radical leftist direction. 29 An awareness of the material
and moral problems of women revived in the public consciousness;
from writing and public speaking the next step was to form organiza-
tions for women's emancipation. The most important of these was the
Association pour le Droit des Femmes, established in 1870 by the journal-
ist Leon Richer, with the assistance of Maria Deraismes, Paule Minck,
Andre Leo and Jules Simon and his wife. Despite the blending of
moderate republicans and socialists in the membership the stated aims
of the movement conformed to the requirements of the bourgeois-
dominated laissez-faire society of the time, with their assumptions of
a patriarchal economy and concern for the safeguarding of inherited
property. The Association was to fight to institute the perfect bour-
geois marriage, monogamous and self-sufficient, of educated republi-
can minds, where spouses would be affective and cooperating legal
equals. Prostitution would be eliminated, women were to be educated
and their legal rights were to be realized. The earlier Fourierist vision
of a society that would include and harmonize both monogamous and
promiscuous temperaments, was cast aside. The idea of economic or

emotional independence for women, on which socialists like Leo, Minck
and Michel placed emphasis, was played down. 30 The tensions between
such 'moderate' and 'radical' perceptions of feminism had dogged the
cause for decades already, and would surely have pulled this new as-
sociation apart within a few years had not the Commune accomplished
that destructive task in 1871. The bourgeois republican leadership of
the Association was not to follow the socialist feminists in their sup-
port of the Commune and equal status for women in all respectsY
The extent to which women of the working class were influenced by
feminist claims also remains questionable.
The revival of feminist and worker activism even so meant that women
were mobilized in the increasing agitation by sections of the radical
left that marked the last two years of the Empire. Admittedly the Inter-
national performed abysmally in Paris in the by-elections of 1869 -
only one socialist, the immensely popular political satirist Henri
Rochefort, winning a seat - and the plebiscite of May 1870 secured
overwhelming national approval for Emile Ollivier's liberalization of
the political system; 32 even so, a section of public opinion, especially
in Paris, remained irreconcilable and disposed to provoke the regime
through newspaper attacks, demonstrations, strikes and even attempted
coups. Women were active in the demonstration of 1 November 1868
at the graveside of the republican deputy Baudin, shot as a rebel on
the barricades of the Rue St Antoine in December 1851, and at the
demonstration following the assassination of the republican journalist
Victor Noir by Pierre Bonaparte Louise Michel was present dressed as
a manY Women became involved in a bitter, protracted strike at the
mines of the company Schneider, at Le Creusot (Saone-et-Loire), in
March and April 1870, a strike from whose discontents the Inter-
nationalists sought to draw profit. Giving expression to the strong com-
munity sense of the mining workforce, and their anger at worsening
material deprivation, women sought to block mineshafts and prevent
strikebreaking shifts from descending at the start of April. 34 Several
women were arrested, but their efforts drew support from women Inter-
nationalists in Lyon, led by Virginie Barbet, a drinks-seller and journalist,
who signed an address urging them to 'win over to the cause of the
oppressed the five thousand soldiers camped at Le Creusot' .35 The
imposition of a death sentence upon Blanqui, Eudes and Flourens fol-
lowing the failure of their coup attempt at La Villette on 14 August
1870 led Louise Michel, Andre Leo and Michel's friend the feminist
teacher and novelist Adele Esquiros, to decide to present a petition of
clemency to General Trochu, the Military Governor of Paris. By per-

sistent determination they gained admittance to the Governor's office
and compelled him to accept their written representation. 36
The Commune, viewed from this longer perspective, appears as not
merely a revolution made possible by the sudden collapse and with-
drawal of government in a military emergency, but also as the climax
of a previous period of political organization and agitation that might
have led nowhere but for the accident of the Franco-Prussian War.
The imperial government had declared war on Prussia and her allies in
the hope of quick victory; instead the war re-evoked defeat on the
scale of Waterloo for the first time in over 50 years. The surrender of
the Emperor and his army at Sedan on 1 September 1870 so demoral-
ized the forces of order in Paris that the indignation and fear of Parisian
crowds were easily channelled by radical agitators into demands for a
government of national defence. The Legislative Body was invaded on
4 September by a crowd which forced the proclamation of the Third
Republic, despite the alarmed calls for restraint on the part of Gambetta. 37
Once again, a republic arrived before the republican deputies were ready
for it and thereafter the pattern of political conflict followed that al-
ready noted after the February Revolution of 1848: a struggle between
moderate republicans and more radical forces for the political soul of
the mass public; but with the difference that, while moderate republi-
cans who in 1870 were deputies for the Seine moved strategically to
seize control of government (without even a token worker or socialist
in it) and 'prevent a shameful revolt', in the words of Favre, 38 radical
republicans and socialists would find a field of discontent to exploit
that was potentially much more fertile than in 1848. Hunger and un-
employment, disappointed hopes of early social and political reform
were all present in 1870-1 as in 1848, but in the former instance were
made more extensive by conditions of war and the long siege of the
capital by the Prussians, which began on 19 September.
The Revolution of 4 September 1870 thus brought to power a pro-
visional Government of National Defence, headed by moderate repub-
licans like Favre and Simon, and Thiers, who had rallied to republicanism
out of pragmatism. Freedom of the press and meeting were restored,
permitting radical clubs and propaganda to flourish even more widely
than in the Liberal Empire. As in 1848, arms were unconsciously put
in the hands of those who favoured a more radical republic by the
massive expansion of the National Guard to a force of almost 400 000
men, to meet the needs of the siege. Many of the new recruits were
unemployed workers who could rely on the salary of one franc fifty
centimes a day to keep themselves and their families. It gradually be-

came apparent to the increasingly desperate civilian population that
the war effort conducted by the provisional government was failing,
and that, by October, it was considering an armistice. The radical clubs
of the Blanquists and Internationalists gave themselves over to patriotic
propaganda and denounced the government as defeatist and neglectful
of the great sacrifices of the besieged Parisians. As early as 5 Septem-
ber the Paris branch of the International and trade union federations
had decided to form vigilance committees in each arrondissement to
watch over the war effort and provide food and shelter, each commit-
tee sending a delegate to a republican central committee. In Montmar-
tre (the eighteenth arrondissement) separate committees for men and
women were established, Louise Michel attending both. 39
The siege of Paris, accompanied by heavy bombardment and severe
privation, continued to the end of January 1871 and gave special ur-
gency to the provision of the basic necessities of life. The civil mobil-
ization of all the adult population became of primary importance and
the small nexus of feminist and working-class leaders that had emerged
before 1870 now found for itself an audience in the vigilance commit-
tees and political clubs and unprecedented chances for leadership. The
common subsistence problems imposed by the siege encouraged a sense
of female solidarity even before the crisis that produced the Commune. 40
The defence of the city required unanticipated numbers of victuallers
(cantinieres) and ambulance-women (ambulancieres), occupations eagerly
sought by unemployed women; Elisabeth Retiffe, a militante of the
barricades in the last days of the Commune, had taken a position as
a cantiniere during the siege, when she had been in a state of utter
deprivation.
Maitre Thiroux, the lawyer who defended Retiffe at her trial in 1871,
described how he had often seen poor women, blue with cold and with
haggard faces, who, for a few centimes, offered a little glass of eau-
de-vie with a trembling hand. 41 The start of heavy shelling of Paris on
5 January 1871 enhanced the need for ambulance staff: one shell killed
a schoolgirl on her way home near the Luxembourg Palace; six women
were killed standing in a food queue; the Salpetriere Hospital, housing
2000 aged women, was repeatedly bombarded. 42 The withdrawal of
many wealthy people from Paris before the siege and severe shortages
of food and raw materials, combined with one of the worst winters in
living memory, meant that canteens and work schemes were needed
for a desperate population. Bread rationing was introduced on 18 Jan-
uary 1871, with 150 grams allowed per day for infants under five, and
300 grams for everyone else. Horsemeat replaced mutton and beef, but
the meat of the elephants Castor and Pollux from the zoo of the Jardin
des Plantes was sold to the rich at 40-80 francs a kilo. 43 The coopera-
tive La Marmite fed hundreds of starving people, under the supervi-
sion of Nathalie.Lemel.44 By January 1871 women were attending the
clubs with their children to seek cost-free warmth; at the Club ferme
of the Rue de Charonne women complained of having to queue for
food for five hours. 45 Sophie Poirier, wife of the president of the male
vigilance committee of the eighteenth arrondissement, organized a work-
shop in which women could be employed to sew uniforms for the
National Guard. 46 The socialist Jules Allix, influenced by Fourierist
doctrine, established a female committee that met in the Rue d' Arras
to organize other such workshops, while Andre Leo formed a mutual
benefit society, La Solidarite, to draw up a list of those in need in the
seventeenth arrondissement, to whom daily allowances could be
distributed. 47
As victuallers and ambulance-women, the women of Paris followed
their menfolk in the National Guard, just as some had followed the
male rebels to battle in 1830 and 1848. Lissagaray noted how the women
urged on the men, carrying their food and clothing as they might have
carried it to their workshops. 48 From here it seemed a short step to a
female combatant role, but public opinion remained against this for
the time being. On 21 September 1870, at the Club Blanqui in the Rue
d' Arras, an ambulanciere was applauded when she declared that she
was ready to take up the gun rejected by trainees for the priesthood to
defend the fatherland, but Blanqui himself studiously ignored her of-
fer. 49 Soon after a journalist named Felix Belly, echoing the half-crazed
Daniel Borme of 1848, proposed in La Liberte on 3 October that a
battalion of 'Amazons' be established to defend the city. Describing
the black and orange uniforms that he proposed for them with great
care, Belly advocated that the Amazons be equipped with small arms
and prussic acid projectiles, and receive a daily stipend of one franc
fifty centimes. Women went at once to enlist for this proposed regi-
ment in the Rue de Turbigo but General Trochu refused to accept the
plan, and Andre Leo advised caution. 50
Though the idea of women under arms found little favour during
the Prussian siege women took the initiative in mounting demonstra-
tions, involved themselves in others, and also spoke in the clubs, for-
mulating their own agendas. Women of the Faubourg Poissonniere
demanded that the 'official companions' of National Guardsmen in
common-law marriages should be given the same rights as legal wives. 51
Louise Michel and Andre Leo led a group of women to the Hotel de
Ville on 18 September, calling for arms and support for the city of
Strasbourg, itself under siege - a venture that brought the temporary
arrest of these two leaders. 52 Demonstrations such as these increased
in tempo as Parisians came to suspect that the army and government
were quietly and insidiously abandoning them in favour of an armis-
tice. The surrender of Metz by Marshal Bazaine on 27 October was
followed by an abortive uprising by radically-minded National Guard
battalions in Paris, who tried to seize the Hotel de Ville and establish
a revolutionary municipal government, or Commune, which could rally
the patriotism of citizens and promote a popular mass army, as in 1793.
The concept of a Commune was reiterated in the text of the famous
'Red Poster' (Affiche Rouge) displayed on the walls of the capital on
7 January 1871, and by a second abortive uprising of National Guard
regiments on 22 January; this attempt involved only a minority of rev-
olutionaries but included Louise Michel, Sophie Poirier and Andre Leo. 53
Louise Michel, dressed as a National Guard and armed with a rifle,
called for war to the finish, and added, 'Vive Ia Commune!' The dem-
onstration was dispersed by shots fired by Breton marksmen placed at
the windows of the Hotel de Ville, but not without return fire, in which
Louise Michel first employed arms in the revolutionary cause. 54
Louise Michel, a natural rebel and the champion of the underdog all
her life, exulted in any challenge to the established order, 55 but the
majority of the National Guard were, in January 1871, still not pre-
pared to be led down any revolutionary path. By late March, however,
attitudes of political disaffection had spread to a dangerous extent among
Guardsmen following a series of apparent political challenges on the
part of the Government of National Defence and the newly elected
National Assembly. The first shock was the surrender of Paris on 28
January 1871 - the city had been bled white by the siege - and the
signing of an armistice by the Government of National Defence and
Emperor Wilhelm I of the newly united Germany. To many Parisians
the armistice seemed proof of government neglect and treachery, and
meant that their huge sacrifices had been in vain. This first shock was
soon followed by another in February, when the elections for a National
Constituent Assembly, which met first at Bordeaux outside the war
zone, returned a majority of royalist deputies. Paris found herself, again,
out of temper with provincial opinion at large, having returned a slate
of republicans. The extraordinary circumstances of war and occupa-
tion had produced this election result, in all probability a freak result,
not truly representative of national opinion. The brief electioneering
period had allowed the republicans little time to mount democratic

campaigning; Paris had been cut off from the more conservative prov-
inces; and royalists, astutely judging that the majority of electors had
had enough of war, represented themselves as the peace party and their
republican opponents as advocates of a suicidal war to the finish. 56
The scene was thus set for a repetition of the conflict between the
Constituent Assembly of 1848 and the radicals of Paris but it now
proceeded at a much more intensive pace. Adolphe Thiers, hated in
Paris because of his association with the massacre of insurgents in the
Rue Transnonain in 1834, was nominated as acting head of state, or
Chief of Executive Power. Alarmed at the mounting disorder promoted
by radicals in Paris, and the increasing disaffection of the National
Guard, the majority of the National Assembly proposed that the Guard
should be disarmed and order restored so that the seat of the legis-
lature might be moved back to the capital; political and economic con-
ditions would have to be normalized to placate the Germans and make
peace. With sublime disregard for the extent of poverty, debt and un-
employment in Paris, the provincial squires and landowners of the
Assembly ended the moratorium on rents and the payment of commer-
cial bills that had been applied during the siege. They also abolished
the daily pay of the National Guard, which was for many working
men and their families the only source of income. The death sentence
against Blanqui and Flourens was reimposed, and on 11 March Gen-
eral Vinoy, who had replaced Trochu as Military Governor of Paris
shortly before the surrender of the capital, suppressed a number of
clubs and newspapers. To the anger at the apparent treachery of the
government was now added alarm at what seemed portents of full-
scale political repression. The ill-considered actions of the Assembly
were unaccompanied by any negotiation or concession; the response
was a posture of general defiance by the National Guards of Paris,
who established their own federation and central committee on 24
February, to defend the Republic against royalist attack.
The duel between Parisian radicals and the National Assembly reached
its climax on 18 March, when Thiers travelled from Versailles (whither
the Assembly had removed) to Paris with army detachments to seize
the weapons of the National Guard and disarm the capital. The action
was hasty and ill-planned, the troops being too few and too undisci-
plined to contend with the danger of mass popular resistance. 57 It pro-
voked the military exchange between the rebellious National Guard
and citizens on the one hand, and Versailles troops on the other, which
marked the start of civil war; in this exchange Thiers and the Versailles
troops came off worsted, and Paris was left in the hands of the rebels.
The resistance that thwarted Thiers' attempt to disarm Paris was initi-
ated by women; it reaffirmed once again the importance of ordinary
women in shaping the first revolutionary postures, real or symbolic,
and recalled the actions of the Parisiennes who had marched on Ver-
sailles in October 1789 to bring the royal family back to Paris; and
the women killed on the streets, whose displayed bodies had roused
the indignation of the people against oppressive regimes in 1830 and
1848. In the words of the contemporary Communard, Prosper Lissagaray,
'as in our great days the women were the first to act.' 58 As the troops
of General Lecomte arrived at daybreak on the heights of Montmartre
to seize the cannons of the National Guard by stealth they attracted
the attention of women out to purchase milk. Mingling with the troops
and surrounding the cannons, which they covered with their bodies,
these women dared the troops to fire on the people. 59 Some troops
mutinied and turned over General Lecomte as a prisoner. Louise Michel,
alerted to the danger while nursing the National Guard sentry Turpin,
who had been shot by the Versailles troops, raised the alarm by run-
ning down the street crying 'Treason!' The women's demonstration
gave the National Guards time to beat the summons and assemble in
threatening numbers. In the face of further desertions and arrests, and
the executions of Generals Lecomte and Clement Thomas, the remain-
ing troops loyal to the government panicked and fled back to Versailles
with Thiers. By the end of the day Paris was left in the hands of the
Central Committee of the National Guard. 60
At the subsequent funeral of Turpin, Louise Michel and the Blanquist
Theophile Ferre urged that the National Guard march on Versailles to
oust the Government of National Defence and prepare for a truly national
revolution. 61 The chance was, however, passed over by a National Guard
too accustomed to operating legally; thus any opportunity to link up
with sympathetic provincial risings was lost and as the latter were ex-
tinguished usually after little fighting, Paris became isolated again.
The fate of the Commune was thus sealed, as Thiers and the Versailles
Assembly were determined not to negotiate with the Communards but
to take Paris by armed force. It is difficult to detect much female
militancy in the provincial risings though in certain instances women
had done their best to distribute propaganda and provide meeting places
or safe havens for the agents of the International who hoped to
stimulate provincial Communes. In the department of Seine-et-Marne
we catch a glimpse of women exploiting the railway system (and, as
on previous occasions of this type, the less obtrusive nature of their
sex) to spread Communard propaganda in the department. 62 In Chiitillon-

sur-Seine (Cote d'Or) Madame Veuve Tridon, mother of a Commune
member, pursued 'very active and determined propaganda' and made
her home a venue for local revolutionary agents. 63 There was a brief
flurry of insurrectionary agitation at Montargis (Loiret) on 1 and 2
May, that centred on attempts to run up a red flag on the roof of the
theatre in the Place du Patis. The conspirators, a group of local barge-
men and tilers, were assisted by Marguerite Berthier, Femme Raymond,
aged 37 and described as a politically minded labourer then employed
in the Cabaret du Petit Caporal, where the plan for the flag was hatched.
She arranged the purchase of the necessary material for a flag and
sewed it together. The rebellious attempt brought no more than a brief
skirmish and by the evening of 2 May order had been restored. When
the red flag was removed for the first time, Femme Raymond had
declared -that it was strange that 'the flag of the worker who seeks
work' was being taken down. 64 ,
These reported incidents amount to nothing spectacular, but at Le
Creusot (Saone-et-Loire) women seem to have been more in view in
the movement for a local Commune, perhaps on account of the earlier
industrial struggle at the Schneider enterprise, and the moral support it
received from the women Internationalists of Lyon. When clubs formed
in Le Creusot after 4 September it was reported that 'even women
attended them' .65 Six months later, on the arrival of news of the Paris
uprising of 18 March in the town, women active in the local clubs and
meetings joined an immense crowd that defied troops and seized the
town hall on 26 March. The red flag was run up, the women dis-
tinguishing themselves 'by their enthusiastic cries of Vive La Com-
mune' .66 Thanks to energetic action by the Prefect of Saone-et-Loire
the disorder was put down in 24 hours; Virginie Barbet, compromised
by her involvement, escaped to Switzerland and was condemned in
absentia. 67
The dissonance between Paris and the provinces was poignantly
symbolized by the fact that on the same day as the abortive uprising
in Le Creusot occurred, elections were held for a revolutionary muni--
cipal government in Paris, to be known as the Commune, reawakening
the tradition of the radical and populist Paris council of the First Re-
public. Eventually 81 men - and no women - sat on the Commune, a
timely reminder of the limits of male Communard feminism, though
recent scholars have emphasized the revolutionary quality of the ad-
mission of female advisers to the Commune. 68 Women were for the
first time sent out as emissaries of government: Paule Minck and Marie-
Leonie Maniere were dispatched to rouse the provinces. Other women

became municipal administrators, such as Citoyenne Murges at the town
hall of the ninth arrondissement. 69 For the first time a government
commission would be set up (for education), composed entirely of women.
But in general the outlets for female activism lay in other areas than
central government. Despite the absence of women in the Commune
itself, they were encouraged to take initiatives in public life by the
rebel government's identification with the radical left and the working
class.
The withdrawal from Paris or abstention from voting on the part of
the wealthy had produced an ideologically skewed result in the elec-
tions to the Commune: its representatives were strongly biased towards
the revolutionary movements of Proudhonism and Blanquism, towards
the Internationalists and extreme Jacobin republicans who rejected so-
cialism. But, as Jacques Rougerie argued, ideology meant less than a
general adherence to a broad programme: defence of Paris from pol-
itical reaction, decentralization of municipal government in France,
anticlericalism and secularization, and reforms to improve working
conditions and educational opportunities. 70 The novelty of the Com-
mune as a working government lay not so much in the propounding of
a clear ideology as in the fact that it included a proportion of workers,
mostly skilled artisans. 71 This gave the rebellion a working-class qual-
ity that made it rather more than the 'decentralizing reaction' to the
executive rule over local affairs that had characterized the Second Em-
pire, on which historians such as Roger Williams, Louis Greenberg
and Jeanne Gaillard lay stress. 72 It was precisely this quality that might
rally women of the popular classes to the defence of the Commune, if
they could be persuaded that their own interests were those of the
revolutionary government. This did occur because women, both revol-
utionaries eager for major social changes and ordinary workers des-
perate for jobs and security, kept up a barrage of pressure on the organs
of the Commune government to respond to their needs. They elicited
sufficient sympathy from certain Communards (notably Frankel, Malon,
Vaillant and Varlin) to win some tangible successes. At the same time,
women determined to press their own claims to active citizenship took
charge of their own sphere of work and education, with government
direction and encouragement. Thus in the final battle with the armies
of the Versailles government in the streets of Paris, from 21 to 28
May, 1871 (La Semaine sang/ante or 'Bloody Week'), women were
prepared to fight shoulder to shoulder with the men for their own vi-
sion of the Commune.
The nature and wider political significance of the reforms and insti-
tutions benefiting women in the Commune have been thoroughly ana-
lysed in recent years. 73 We need merely note here how the benevolent
disposition of the Commune government facilitated the creation of in-
stitutions that mobilized women collectively and taught them the values
of solidarity; created reforms that women considered worth defend-
ing; and gave women the confidence to engage in a 'dialogue' with
the Commune executive through the medium of popular clubs and
manifestos.
The largest and most influential institution for women created dur-
ing the Commune was the Union des Femmes pour Ia Defense de Paris
et les Soins aux Blesses, organized by a Russian aristocratic emigree
Elisabeth Dmitrieff, a friend of Marx and member of the International. 74
This involved women from all over the city, and was composed over-
whelmingly of working-class women; Schulkind identified 311 women
who were definitely members of the Union/ 5 and of 128 members
recorded for the sixteenth arrondissement, most of the 60 whose pro-
fession is known were representatives of skilled trades, such as dress-
making, bookbinding or metal burnishing.76 Though the Union functioned
through arrondissement committees to provide for urgent needs, once
the Versailles armies began their attacks on Paris at the start of April,
recruiting women for ambulance stations, field kitchens and barricade
work, it had a more long-term revolutionary ambition. Representing
the most advanced revolutionary organization for women yet seen in
France it combined working-class mobilization with feminist demands,
calling for equal work opportunities and wages in its Address; 77 it
employed socialist language and called for the abolition of the em-
ployer class. Nor did these aims remain pure rhetoric. Octavie Tardif,
a leading figure in the Union, urged Leo Frankel, Commissioner for
Labour and Exchange, to provide funds for women's employment in
cooperative workshops in each arrondissement; the only consequence
of her appeal was the establishment of a women's workshop to sew
uniforms for the National Guard. 78 This workshop had a gender-segre-
gated character and the proposed arrondissement workshops would have
been limited to traditional women's trades. 79 On the other hand, cer-
tain male trade union statutes became more explicit in providing for
the future enrolment of women: Schulkind cites the instance of the statutes
of the Association des Ouvriers Tailleurs, drafted in March 1871.80
The Union did not embrace all women activists in Paris, however.
Louise Michel and the women's vigilance committee of the eighteenth
arrondissement, that included the militantes Sophie Poirier and Beatrix
Excoffon, seem to have distanced themselves self-consciously from the

Union, perhaps out of fear of excessive sectarianism; a notice appeared
in certain newspapers from the 'Volunteer Ambulance-women of the
Commune', bearing Michel's signature, and stating that 'The volun-
teer ambulance-women of the Commune declare that they do not be-
long to any association whatsoever. Their life is consecrated entirely
to the Revolution.' 81
Alongside the creation of organizations to provide employment, the
first measures were taken to try to provide more generous, and secu-
lar, education for girls in the final days of the Commune. Professional
training was urgently needed; Marie-Leonie Maniere, a member of the
Union and a widowed schoolteacher, organized a girls' vocational school
in the Rue de Turenne, 82 while a school of industrial design for girls
was opened on 12 May 1871 in the Rue Dupuytren to teach draughts-
manship, modelling and wood-carving. New lay schools for girls were
created and existing church schools were secularized. Paule Minck set
up a girls' school in the chapel of StPierre de Montmartre. 83 Marguerite
Tinayre, the first woman inspector of schools in French bureaucratic
history, 84 assisted in the secularization of schools in the district for
which she was responsible, the twelfth arrondissement. A decree of
21 May 1871 awarded equality of salaries to schoolteachers of both
sexes, and belatedly on the same day a commission for girls' educa-
tion was established to superintend all girls' schools. The commission
was composed entirely of female members, who included Andre Leo
and Anna Jaclard (like Dmitrieff, an emigree daughter of a Russian
officer).
Encouraged by these reforms, women voiced their demands in the
30-50 popular clubs in which they played a more assertive role than
ever before; in the words of Jones and Verges women 'moved from a
closed interior space to the open light of reclaimed public space'. 85 By
mid-May some clubs were reported to be overwhelmingly made up of
women, such as the Club de Ia Delivrance' in the Trinite church; the
Club Lambert of Vaugirard, in the fifteenth arrondissement; and the
club at the church of Notre-Dame-de-la-Croix at Belleville. 86 Louise
Michel presided over the Club de Ia Revolution in the church of St
Bernard de Ia Chapelle. Some women expressed anger against the rich
and employers, though, as in 1848, they did so more in traditional
than ideological terms. At the Club de Ia Delivrance on 19 May a
woman of about thirty, later a refugee in Switzerland, denounced the
oppression of the employing class 'who view the worker as a produc-
tion machine' and called for associations and the pooling of labour in
common. 87 There were demands for the recognition of unions libres or

common-law marriages, and hatred was expressed frequently for the
Catholic church and its sanctions. A victualler of the military brigade
Les Vengeurs du Peuple was much applauded at the Club des Libres-
Penseurs, which met in the church of St Germain-1' Auxerrois, when
she called for the restoration of divorce. 88 A woman at the Club St
Ambroise denounced marriage and declared that she would never allow
her 16-year-old daughter to marry, as she was living with a man quite
happily without the sacraments of the church. 89 The competition of
convent labour and the officious habits of the Societe de St Fran~ois
Regis, which had mingled charity with a zeal to convert unions libres
into marriages recognized by the Catholic church during the Second
Empire, may have been added causes of this anti-clerical feeling. Cases
of priestly immorality simply exasperated women further; Max Vuillaume
reported that as the priests who were to be massacred in the Rue Haxo
on 2 May were led through the Rue Puebla, a woman denounced them
as swine, and declared that they would no longer interfere with their
daughters. 90 As the siege of the Versailles forces closed in on the
Communards in May the anti-clerical cries became strident. Gabrielle,
the 17-year-old daughter of a prostitute of the Rue des Ciseaux, de-
manded the shooting of priests at the Club de St Sulpice, and offered
to set an example, 91 while at the Club de Ia Trinite an elderly woman
of extreme revolutionary opinions, nicknamed La Mere Duchene, ap-
pealed for the taking and shooting of hostages, as an example to the
Versailles armies. 92
In this way, women exercised an informal sovereignty as they had
in the 1789 Revolution, outside the constitutional ground rules of the
Commune government. Their demands were not without responses, both
positive and negative. A decree of the Commune of 10 April implicitly
recognized the equality of common-law marriages by providing that
common-law wives and the illegitimate children of men killed in the
defence of the Commune should be entitled to the same protection
from the state as legally married wives and legitimate children: 600
francs per annum for the wife and 350 for the child.93 The demands
for attacks on the Catholic church were realized through the appropri-
ation of parish churches for secular uses, the laicization of Catholic
schools and, in the last weeks of the Commune, the arrest and shoot-
ing of clerical hostages, including the Archbishop of Paris. The editor
of the newspaper Le Vengeur declared that he had seen three revolu-
tions but, for the first time, had seen 'women involve themselves in
one with resolution - women and children. It seems as if this revolu-
tion belongs precisely to them and that, in defending it they are de-
fending their own future.' 94
With the approach of the Versailles armies and the second siege of
Paris from the start of April, women began to call for a mass armed
levy, the pursuit of draft-dodgers, and for women to go to the front
too, as combatants. A few had distinguished themselves in this last
respect already, such as Louise Michel, who fought at Issy in the ranks
of the sixty-first battalion of the National Guard 'with remarkable com-
posure' .95 'Barbarian that I am,' Michel wrote later in her memoirs, 'I
love cannon, the smell of powder, machine-gun bullets in the air!' 96
Victorine Louvet, a friend of Michel, accompanied her husband to the
battlefront, leading troops to the ramparts on horseback, and firing a
rifle. 97 As soon as the siege of Paris recommenced on 2 April a crowd
of 300 women had marched up. the Champs-Elysees under a red flag,
demanding the right to fight against the enemy. 98 Three days later, at
three o'clock in the afternoon, a gathering of 20 women on the Boulevard
Richard Lenoir protested against men who hid rather than go to fight
at Neuilly. One speaker called for 700 women to march from the Place
de la Concorde to Versailles under a red flag. 99 However, these women
were stopped by the National Guard for fear that they would be ex-
posed completely to the firepower of the Versailles troops beyond the
fort of Issy. Nathalie Lemel declared at the Club de la Delivrance on
12 May: 'We are coming to the supreme moment when we must give
an example of how to die for the fatherland. No more backsliding, no
more doubts! All women to arms. All women to duty! Versailles must
be crushed.' 100
Whereas in June 1848 and December 1851 women combatants had
been few in number and had usually acted with individual spontaneity,
by May 1871 a collective spirit had developed; whole battalions of
women fought together, for example as a company attached to the twelfth
legion of the National Guard on 12 May, led by Colonel Adelaide
Valentin and Captain Louise Neckbecker, a widowed lacemaker who
had frequented the clubs of the seventeenth arrondissement. This bat-
talion was organized by Philippe, mayor of the thirteenth
arrondissement. 101 Women, it was noted, were often the last to leave
the war front or the barricades. Maxime du Camp, author of the work
hostile to the Commune, Les Convulsions de Paris, wrote of the women
Communards: 'In the last days all these bellicose viragos stood firm
behind the barricades longer than the men ... Many were arrested,
their hands black with powder, their shoulders bruised by the kick of
the guns, still in the grip of the hyperexcitement of battle.' 102 There is
abundant evidence of women's involvement in insurrection on a scale

not seen before.
As in June 1848, women organized their neighbourhoods for battle,
particularly during the final week of street warfare, building barri-
cades and firing from them; but in 1871 they fought in organized bat-
talions and flagrantly sported male uniforms. One of the most spectacular
defences mounted by women, the defence of the barricade of the Place
Blanche on 23 May, was provided by recruits from the Union des
Femmes pour la Defense de Paris. The order for battle seems to have
been given at the final meeting of the Union on 21 May; women had
left it wearing red belts, scarves and cockades, armed with guns, pro-
ceeding to the defence of barricades in northern Paris and ambulance
work. 103 Having held back the regular troops of General Clinchant for
several hours the women of the Place Blanche retreated to the Place
Pigalle, where Nathalie Lemel planted a red flag in a barricade and a
further three-hour delaying operation was fought. They then retreated
to the barricade of the Boulevard Magenta, where not one woman sur-
vived. 104 A similar fate overtook a women's battalion that assisted in
the defence of the Place du Cbateau-d'Eau, where Lissagaray noted a
young woman of about 19 among them, dressed in a marine's uni-
form, 'rosy and beautiful with her curling black hair', who fought all
day. 105 An English medical student saw the women's battalion prolong
the action by advancing at a run, crying 'Vive la Commune!' Armed
with Schneider carabine rifles and firing 'admirably' they were even-
tually surrounded, disarmed and 52 were shot. 106 Women were respon-
sible for erecting the barricades of the Place du Pantheon, which they
largely defended. 107 Among the defenders killed there was Simone
Leblanc, the varnisher convicted in 1849 of beheading Mobile Guards
in the June Days. After her conviction she had spent a period in the
Salpetriere mental hospital. Discharged in 1857 she had reappeared at
the Club de St Jacques-du-Haut during the Commune, Paul Fontoulieu
describing her as 'an old and horrible virago of extreme violence' . 108
Josephine Courtois, Veuve Delettra, a needlewoman who had been present
in the troubles of Lyon in 1848 and was nicknamed 'The Queen of the
Barricades', donned the municipal insignia of the red sash, armed her-
self with a rifle, and requisitioned barrels for a barricade on the cor-
ner of the Rue Doudeauville and Rue Stephenson. 109 A woman by the
name of Rocher distinguished herself at the batteries of Asnieres on 2
May by her courage and accurate firing, the newspaper La Sociale
urging that she be cited for bravery. 110 Hortense Aurore Machu, a 27-
year-old brushmaker, dressed in naval uniform, fired a cannon in the
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Place de Ia Concorde and, in recognition of her courage, was borne

aloft in triumph to the Hotel de Ville, an unconscious repetition of an
incident that we have noted in July 1830. 111 Women fighting in the
Rue du Pot-de-Fer (Faubourg St Marceau) in the final week impressed
the Communard Jean Allemane by their zeal. He compared them to
'she-wolves' who 'conducted a heroic assault with the artillerymen
and National Guards; they even sought to place themselves in the front
rank .. .' . 112 As barricade after barricade fell in the final 'Bloody Week'
it was sometimes a woman who had the last word in the exchange of
fire. One of the last to fall on the barricade of the Hotel de Ville on
Wednesday 24 May was a woman who defiantly waved a red flag at
the enemy. 113 As Communard troops fled from the barricade of the
Conservatoire des Arts et Metiers they left behind a loaded machine
gun. This was picked up by a woman who lingered behind, cocked a
snook at the approaching Versailles forces, and discharged the gun at
them. 114 There is some evidence that women took seriously the call of
the Union des Femmes pour Ia Defense de Paris 'To Citizenesses' to
take up guns and fight to the end: 'Neither we, nor our enemies, seek
clemency.' 115
Women who were combatants one minute assisted with ambulance
work the next. Louise Michel, who fought with the sixty-first bat-
talion of National Guards as far as one of the last redoubts of the
rebellion, the cemetery of Pere-Lachaise, 116 established a group of am-
bulance-women in the seventeenth and eighteenth arrondissements with
Anna Jaclard, Sophie Poirier, Adele Jary and a woman named Col-
let. 117 La Sociale had earlier reported how, after fighting Charette's
troops at Chatillon in the first week of April, Michel cared for the
injured, 'calm and firm in the midst of the volleys, gentle and chari-
table after the combat' . 118 The Union des Femmes pour Ia Defense de
Paris directed women to the ambulances in the last days of fighting;
Louise Drouhet (or Drouher), a 23-year-old seamstress who had joined
the Union at its first meeting, combined administrative work (enrolments
for the Union) at the town hall of the twentieth arrondissement with
nursing at the barricades to the very end of the rebellion. 119
Many women did not engage in combat but nonetheless turned out
after troops from Versailles broke into the city on 21 May to help
erect barricades and rouse their neighbourhoods. The marketwomen of
Les Hailes built a barricade 65 feet long at the intersection of the
Place St Jacques and Boulevard Sebastopol. 120 Eugenie Rousseau, Femme
Bruteau, a hairdresser, started a barricade at the corner of the Rue
Poissonniere and Rue Myrrha, on which she remained to the end of
the fighting. 121 The alleged incendiaries (petroleuses), the washerwoman

Leontine Suetens and dressmaker Eulalie Papavoine, subjected to a
sensational trial later on the grounds that they had set fire to public
buildings, assisted with the erection of barricades in the Rue de Lille. 122
The construction of neighbourhood defences, as we saw in June 1848,
went hand in hand with exploiting networks of sociability to denounce
and seek out men who would not go to battle. This tactic had been
practised during the first siege of Paris as well as the second so that
by May 1871, presumably exhausted and hysterical at the thought of
impending destruction, their tone became more intransigent and sadis-
tic than in the June Days. The Times correspondent in Paris, smuggled
by a female newsvendor into a women's club on the Boulevard d'Italie
(thirteenth arrondissement) at the start of May, heard a speaker, 'a
fine-looking woman', denounce the alleged cowardice of the National
Guards. She declared that the men were 'laches [cowards]', complain-
ing that 'they called themselves the masters of creation and are a set
of dolts. They complain of being made to fight, and are always grum-
bling over their woes. Let them go and join the craven band at Ver-
sailles and we will defend the city ourselves.' 123 As the danger of possible
defeat loomed, the cries against faint-hearts and deserters became shriller.
On 22 and 23 May witnesses heard the washerwoman Josephine Marchais,
dressed in a Tyrolean hat and carrying a gun, cry out, 'You cowardly
crew! Go and fight! If I'm killed it will be because I've done some
killing first!>~ 24 Jean Allemane, hearing angry voices in the Rue
Mouffetard, saw an artilleryman, 'G', who appeared to be running away
from battle. 'Hey there,' cried the women near him, 'this isn't the
moment to skip off but to fight!' To his mumbled protest that he wished
to embrace his wife and children, they replied, 'You've deserted your
men to go and hide!' They marched him back to the barricade, showed
him the cannon and declared, 'That's your place, and if you're con-
cerned that we shouldn't give you any more bother, do your duty.' 125
Blanche Lefebvre, a dressmaker and member of the Union who was to
perish on the Place des Dames in the women's engagements of 23
May in northern Paris, called for a close watch on men leaving on
passes for Versailles when she spoke at the Club de Ia Revolution.
Lefebvre was nicknamed La Blanchisseuse at the club and was de-
scribed by Fontoulieu as 'a fanatic of the Commune ... capable of
every devotion in the cause of defending the red flag, but also of
every excess.' She put her own style of summary justice into effect in
the Rue Dautencourt on 22 May, when a National Guard joked to her
that all was up and the Commune was finished. 'But you're a coward!'
she cried, drawing out her pistol and shooting him at point-blank range. 126
Only a minority of insurgent women were young, intrepid or zeal-
ous enough to take part in front-line work. More were probably active
behind the lines, collecting or manufacturing material for the barri-
cades; succouring the troops with food and drink, sheltering rebels,
and acting as scouts. In the last week of the Commune Lissagaray
discovered that the building of the former Legislative Body had be-
come a workshop where 1500 women sewed sandbags to stop up breaches
in the barricades under the supervision of 'a tall and very handsome
girl, Marthe', who wore around her waist 'the red scarf with silver
fringe given her by her comrades ... In the evening the wages are
paid, and the women receive the whole sum, eight centimes a sack .. .' 127
The church of St Pierre de Montmartre became in April a workshop
for the manufacture of military uniforms by some fifty women, who
also took their meals there. 128 As well as providing uniforms, assist-
ance was offered to the rebel fighters to reinforce their efforts. Louise
Noel, Femme Bonnefoy, a concierge, and Jeanne-Victorine Lagnier,
Femme Levieux, an umbrella-maker, both of the Faubourg St Martin,
offered the Communards of the barricade of the Rue du Chateau-d'Eau
the use of windows in their properties from which to fire, declaring,
'You know that our windows are at your disposal for firing on the
troops.' 129 Veuve Madeleine Corbion, a concierge in the Rue Daguerre
(fifteenth arrondissement), allowed the rebels to enter her house in
the final fighting of May, so that they could fire from the fourth floor,
for which she was sentenced to five years' solitary confinement. 130 A
journeywoman named Marguerite Fayon, who was a member of the
women's vigilance committee of Montmartre and was described as the
'terror of her quarter', was seen by neighbours to take cartridges to
the barricades to distribute to the National Guard. 131 Coffee was taken
night and day to the barricade fighters by Josephine Mimet, Femme
Bernard, a stocking-mender of the Rue de Charenton, who was seen
with a gun on 24 May, for which she suffered five years' detention
and five of police surveillance. 132 A restaurant-owner named Elodie
Duvert, Femme Richoux, an engineer's widow of the Rue St Honore-
Chevalier, plundered the bookshop of Repos, using his stock as build-
ing material for a barricade on the corner of the Rue St Honore-Chevalier
and Rue Bonaparte. She also took food and a mattress to the comba-
tants and assisted their escape from the vengeance of the Versailles
troops. 133 The washerwoman Marie Virginie Vrecq, Femme Bediet, who,
as the lover of Captain Vinot of the one hundred and seventieth bat-
talion of National Guards, was nicknamed 'Colonelle Vinot', went as
victualler to the company with Vinot to the barricade of St Ambroise

church in the eleventh arrondissement. When Vinot was wounded there
she helped him to evade the Versailles forces, and was later condemned
to deportation. 134
Women acted as scouts, making citizen's arrests and possibly in-
volving themselves in the murder of hostages. A labourer named
Alphonsine Blanchard, nicknamed La Paysanne and an inhabitant of
the Passage d'Orient (eighteenth arrondissement) was condemned to
five years' solitary confinement for having worked on the barricade
of the Rue de Lyon, and having instigated the arrest of a passing woman
who declined to join in the task. 135 The pattern of continual fighting
over months undoubtedly frayed the nerves and aroused the bloodlust
of women in ways not seen in previous rebellions; even so, exaggerated
stories and contradictory evidence make it hard to disentangle fact from
fiction in the matter of whether female Communards were accessory
to murder. Ambiguity surrounds the case of Marie Guinder, Femme
Lachaise, a victualler who, like Louise Michel, had fought on the plain
of Chatillon and had cared for the wounded there alone, without a
doctor. 136 On 24 May she had arrested the Comte de Beaufort, a cap-
tain of the sixty-sixth battalion, on suspicion of treachery and acts that
had helped to bring about military defeats outside Paris. A mob yelled
for his death. Lachaise supposedly remarked to the veteran War Com-
missioner Delescluze, who called for mercy, that she would shoot Beaufort
herself if need be. One witness claimed that she gloated over the news
of his execution; but another claimed that she had sought to delay it,
and began to cry when she saw the crowd leading him away to his
death. She later protested that she had not wanted the sixty-sixth bat-
talion involved in the execution of the Archbishop of Paris and other
hostages, but the tribunal sentenced her to deportation to Guiana. 137
Lise Pauline Seret, Femme Bourette, a carver's wife, who, during the
whole period of the insurrection was noted for her fanaticism, was
arrested in July 1872 and accused of inciting the murder of priests and
gendarmes killed in the Rue Haxo on 26 May 'by gestures and with
her voice', and was even alleged to have profaned the corpses of the
victims. 138 The evidence is clearer in the case of a ragpicker named
Marie Wolff, Femme Guyard, a distinctively slim, blonde figure. Dressed
as an ambulance nurse, she took part in the execution of priests who
attempted to escape from La Roquette prison on 27 May. A washer-
woman she knew slightly, Veuve Julie Beaucote, had recognized her
passing her home at the head of the execution procession, carrying a
red banner and wearing a belt with weapons stuck in it. She had upbraided
W olli' s threats to shoot the victims herself, and had later recognized
her in prison by her clothes. On the same day another witness saw
Wolff firing on the barricade of Pere-Lachaise. Wolff was condemned
to death, but had the sentence commuted to hard labour. 139
Women were so integrated into all aspects of the rebellion that they
effortlessly became living symbols of it, both staged and spontaneous.
The best example of the former was the performance given by the
popular singer Rosalie Bordas. She had become famous for her ren-
dering of political songs hostile to the Empire before 1870, and had
sung La Canaille (The Rabble), a song in praise of Parisian workers,
after the murder of Victor Noir. When the War of 1870 broke out, she
had sung the Marseillaise at the Scala Theatre. It was La Canaille that
she interpreted on 11 and 18 May 1871 in the Salle des Marechaux of
the Tuileries Palace, dressed in a short white skirt with a red sash
round her waist. She was a powerfully built woman of the people,
broad-chested, with muscular arms, her hair spread over her bare shoul-
ders, her mouth distorted and her gaze turned upwards as she sang, as
if caught up in some elemental ecstasy. As La Bordas sang, she envel-
oped herself in a red flag fringed with gold; the crowd acclaimed her
performance rapturously and to one onlooker, Max Vuillaume, it seemed
as if the singer symbolized 'the army of people in revolt, the army of
that heroic rabble who are fighting down there, beyond the ramparts.' 140
Whereas the Second Republic of 1848 had sought to invest republican
musical propaganda with an Establishment character by promoting the
singing of the Marseillaise in the Comedie Fran~aise theatre by dis-
tinguished actresses, the imagery of such propaganda in 1871 was
altogether more radical, populist and reminiscent of the music hall.
In the heat of battle women again made themselves living symbols
of defiance; like their forbears of 1848, Adele Guerre and Elisa
Debeurgrave, they perhaps consciously aped the popular imagery of
revolution they had seen illustrated, had read about or heard about. On
22 May, as the advance snipers of the Versailles forces advanced on a
barricade connecting the Rue Florentin with the Tuileries Gardens, 'a
young and apparently good-looking woman sprang on the barricade
with a red flag and waved it defiantly at the troops and was shot dead
at once.' 141 Red symbols emerged everywhere in the final fighting -
the red sashes fringed with gold that had been adopted as the munici-
pal insignia, red scarves, cockades and flags; unlike the rebel cause of
June 1848 the cause of the Commune was institutionalized and had
evolved more diverse symbolism than the red flag and a few repeated
slogans. Particularly flamboyant was the dress of Elisabeth Dmitrieff,
who always wore a black riding costume, a felt hat trimmed with feathers,
and a red or mauve silk shawl trimmed with gold. 142
What was the condition of the female insurgents of Paris in 1871?
The picture we can draw of their age and background can only be
impressionistic - even more so than with respect to June 1848, as the
women concerning whom we have details were those arrested in the
final 'Bloody Week' of fighting in May 1871, not those who may
have fought - and been killed, wounded or who withdrew - earlier in
this protracted episode of rebellion. The pattern of arrests was just as
arbitrary in May 1871 as in June 1848 - possibly more so, as the
majority of women arrested seem to have been acquitted. Because at
least 17 000 people - participants and innocent bystanders alike - were
massacred between 22 May and 15 June 143 some of the most important
protagonists will never be identified. The Versailles army, maddened
by the resistance of the Communards, made arrests in quite arbitrary
fashion. In common with women leaders such as Dmitrieff, Leo and
Jaclard some less well-known women rebels doubtless escaped arrest
in obscure and unidentifiable ways. Analyses have been made of the
1051 arrested women who appeared before the fourth conseil de guerre;
but arrested women appeared also before other such conseils, as well
as before civil and criminal courts; the records of the former are in-
complete, those of the latter were arbitrarily destroyed in 1895. 144 So
we cannot be sure even about the precise number of women finally
tried for offences involving the Commune. Over 1000 Communards
were also estimated to have died in prison. 145 One can but conclude
with Eugene Schulkind that any assumptions made on the basis of
statistical analysis of the social composition, age structure and other
characteristics of the accused women from surviving arrest records, or
more limited samples of them, would be 'fallacious' . 146 The details
drawn from the clemency appeals in the series BB 24 and BB 27 for the
Dictionnaire Biographique du Mouvement ouvrier franrais volumes
covering the period from 1864 to 1871 are too incomplete to permit a
thorough analysis of the condition, origin, domicile and possible motiv-
ation of the women Communards. Nevertheless, by surveying the data
prepared by Captain Briot, the deputy public prosecutor of the fourth
conseil de guerre, which tried many of the women arrested, 147 we can
gain some impression, however inadequate, of the class background
and origin of the women involved, which may echo the findings for
the period 1848-51. Surveys of these statistics by William Serman
and Edith Thomas have both concluded that the majority of arrested
women were working-class artisans, only a minority were from the
lower or other ranks of the middle class, and very few were
lumpenproletarian. 148 This pattern broadly corresponds to that found
for female insurgents arrested in June 1848 and December 1851. Jacques
Rougerie came to a similar conclusion by studying the estimates given
in the report of General Appert, which analysed the character of the
arrested and condemned, and was presented to the National Assembly
on 8 March 1875; but these statistics deal only with Communards tried
by court martial, and his study of the occupations, backgrounds and
ages of arrested rebels limits itself to men and excludes women. 149
Even so, Rougerie found the largest tranche of insurgents within the
age range of 36-40 ( 17.5 per cent). 150 Of 36 309 arrested, a quarter
gave their birthplace as the Seine, three-quarters the provinces. 151 Most
of the rebels were skilled workers, representing particularly the metal
and building trades, and the middle-class element of those arrested
appeared smaller than in December 1851 (27.4 per cent for December
1851; 15.6 per cent for the Commune). 152 Appert's list included 1054
women arrested and judged, a figure Rougerie dismisses as 'too few'
for consideration. 153
This last figure virtually matches the figure for Briot's list (of three
years previously) for women arrested and convicted by the fourth conseil
de guerre alone, which suggests further discrepancies. Of the I 051
women arrested in the Briot list 850, or 80 per cent, were acquitted
for lack of evidence (60 per cent of female rebels arrested after June
1848 were acquitted). The breakdown of the professions of women, as
given in the Briot list (see Table 7.1) embraces the spectrum of cloth-
ing, textiles, metal and service trades, unskilled labour and prostitu-
tion, with a minority of women of professional or petty bourgeois
background. Details of age and origin are not forthcoming in the analy-
sis, but as Serman states that in 1870 a majority of the population of
1.8 million of Paris were born in the provinces (58 per cent), and
most of these originated from north of the St Malo-Geneva line, 154
one might reasonably suppose that the same pattern applied to the fe-
male insurgents of 1871. What we can be certain about is the element
of foreigners arrested, who numbered only 19: 6 Belgians, 5 Prussians,
4 Poles, 2 Italians, I Spanish and I Swiss. Proportionally this com-
prises less than 2 per cent of the total, smaller than the 3 per cent ( 10
of 292 arrested) for June 1848, which gives the lie to the Commune as
the work of a foreign rabble. The largest occupational categories were
in service occupations (269) and clothing (250). The latter comprises
nearly a quarter of the total arrested, a figure close to that for June
1848 (just over a quarter). Women in the leather, jewellery and furni-
Table 7. 1 Professions of women tried before the Fourth Conseil de Guerre
Profession Number
Clothing 250 (45 milliners, 44 trousermakers, 38 waistcoatmakers,
37 corsetmakers, 31 shoe-stitchers, 29 glovemakers, 26 dressmakers)
Skilled Textiles 52 (39 needlewomen, 13 lace/fringe-makers)
artisans Jewellery/Metalwork 0
Other skilled trades 82 (49 mattressmakers, 22 artificial ftowermakers, 11 cardboardmakers)
;i
Service Washerwomen 57 "'
trades Victuallers 0 ~
Other service trades 212 (85 domestic servants, 56 charwomen, 45 ironingwomen, ~
16 nurses, 4 concierges, 3 midwives, 3 shop assistants) ~
::::
:::
Unskilled 78 "'
Retailing 54 (18 wine merchants, 16 fruitsellers, 11 'retailers and manufacturers', ~
5 newsagents, 4 costume dealers) .......
Oo
'l
Other Bourgeois 20 (10 hoteliers, 5 cafe-owners, 4 schoolteachers, 1 landlady) .......
No profession 246
Total 1051
(Statistics from the report of Captain Briot, deputy public prosecutor of the Fourth Conseil, Du Role des femmes pendant Ia
lutte de Ia Commune)
(By permission of the British Library. From Enquete parlementaire sur !'insurrection du 18 mars 1871 (Paris, 1872), 9231
m.l.)
.....
.....,
Note: Prostitutes are accounted for separately, to the number of 246, and probably overlap with figures for other occupations. .....,
ture trades are strangely absent, but the proportion of women arrested
in service occupations rises to slightly more than a quarter (as against
21 per cent in June 1848). 50 of 269 women arrested whose professions
were known in June 1848 were bourgeois, forming 19 per cent of the
total; in the Briot list they comprise 74 of 1051 or just over 7 per
cent, a figure reflecting Rougerie's contention that working-class in-
volvement tended to be higher than in December 1851. 246 women in
Briot's table were described as being 'under police regulation', that is,
registered prostitutes. Thomas considers the figure to be unduly high, 155
and no doubt a large number of such women were arrested as con-
forming to the army's image of a female Communard; but we shall
see shortly that there were cogent reasons for more open support of
the Commune by prostitutes than for previous rebellions.
Another statistic that conveys the importance of worker support for
the Commune is to be found in the proportion of delegates to the cen-
tral committee of the Union des Femmes pour Ia Defense de Paris; the
names of delegates of eighteen of the twenty arrondissements of Paris
are known. The professions of 15 delegates are known, and all are
working class: nine were in clothing, two in bookbinding, with the
addition of a sewing woman, a mechanic, a gold-polisher and a box-
maker.156 Schulkind has traced 111 female members of the Union for
whom an occupation was listed and found them to be 'overwhelm-
ingly' in manual trades, 69 being involved in clothing; most who were
not in manual trades were schoolteachers. In individual terms, how-
ever, the Commune rallied women from almost all backgrounds; among
the female leaders were women of bourgeois background like Andre
Leo and even women born aristocrats such as Elisabeth Dmitrieff and
Anna Jaclard. Individual reasons for supporting the Commune tran-
scended class affiliations. Dmitrieff and Leo, for instance, may have
been drawn to it by feminist convictions; for the woman worker it was
enough that the rebellion gave the oppressed a small voice, and pledged
better material conditions for them. With this incentive, and fear pro-
voked by the uncompromising hostility of the Versailles forces, women
were mobilized from the working class on a scale not seen before in
the nineteenth century.
Though there is no greater bias towards social deprivation among
these participants than in June 1848 overall, we are left with the ques-
tion of the raised profile of prostitutes. They had not been the first to
promote the rebellion; the Communard Gaston da Costa claimed that
they only came out after the resistance to the seizure of the cannons
on the heights of Montmartre, expressing their joy at the defeat of
authority, represented by the Prefect of Police and his spies. They then
helped to drag apprehended infantrymen away and uttered threats of
death against the prisoners. 157 Some Communards seem to have been
more benevolently disposed towards this downtrodden group than con-
ventionality allowed, their puritanical instincts being overridden by an
instinct that the woman of the streets was also to be counted among
the disinherited for whom the Commune fought, and was to be dis-
tinguished from the expensive courtesan of the Second Empire, the
type whom Lissagaray characterized as 'the unclean androgyne born
in the mire of the Empire, the madonna of the pornographers, the Dumas
fils and the Feydeaux' who had followed her master to Versailles or
had found employment with the Prussians. 158 The lower-class prosti-
tutes of the streets may have sensed a potential sympathy from a rev-
olutionary government that was prepared to give equal recognition to
legal and common-law marriages. We find prostitutes identifying them-
selves and speaking out in the popular clubs, Fontoulieu recording that
at the Club St Severin many spoke up and were listened to attent-
ively.159 One by the name of Amanda suggested that the Commune
should form special battalions of prostitutes, given that, in her estima-
tion, they numbered 25 000 in Paris. 160 Louise Michel supported the
right of prostitutes to join ambulances against men who desired that
only 'unsullied' women should tend the wounded, and brought prosti-
tutes under the patronage of the women's vigilance committee of the
eighteenth arrondissement. 161 Consequently prostitutes joined the many
other women who took part in the bitter weeks of fighting. Was this
simply an atavistic defence of home and family, or are there also signs
of a deeper political awareness?
Clearly the club activities had politicized some women, or revived
the militancy of radicals of long vintage, though radicalism tended to
be defined, as we have seen, more in terms of a populist hatred of the
rich and anti-clericalism than in specifically feminist or socialist terms.
However, a cosmetics seller of the Rue de 1' Arbre Sec called for the
complete emancipation of women at the Club des Libres-Penseurs in
the church of StGermain-I' Auxerrois, while a victualler of the Vengeurs
du Peuple was applauded for demanding the restoration of divorce. 162
Josephine Courtois, Veuve Delettra, the veteran of the Lyon insurrec-
tion of 1848, frequented the club of the eighteenth arrondissement before
fighting on the barricades in northern Paris, as seen. Other speakers
were notorious for stirring up rebellion in their neighbourhoods, such
as Blanche Lefebvre, the demagogic Blanchisseuse of the Club St Michel
at Batignolles, described as a fanatical Communard, who 'loved insur-
rection as others loved men' , 163 and whose death on the barricades
was welcome news to many in her quarter. 164 Other insurgents were
found to have radical literature in their homes, such as Marie Segaud,
a needlewoman who became known as La Mere Duchene in her lo-
cality on account of her rabid revolutionary views, and who also spoke
at the Club St Michel. A search of her home revealed Communard
newspapers, a red sash and a rough draft of a denunciation of Ver-
sailles agents. 165 Other combatants were known to have been involved
in the work of the women's vigilance committee of Montmartre. A
Veuve Cartier, a clothing-maker by profession, had been involved in
the propagandist activities of the committee, having been chosen as
the delegate to present a petition for professional schools and lay or-
phanages; on 25 May she had rolled empty barrels to the barricade
built on the corner of the Rues Doudeauville and Stephenson, in the
eighteenth arrondissement. 166
But other motives mingled with political ones, and may even have
been more important. Some women accompanied their menfolk every-
where, out of loyalty, as they had in previous insurrections. Marie
Schmitt, a former prostitute, followed her husband, a National Guards-
man called Gaspard, to the one hundred and first battalion and, herself
dressed in military uniform, fired a rifle at La Butte-aux-Cailles. 167
Martine Lefebvre, Femme Arnoult, a cook, wearing a red check-patterned
dress and carrying a rifle in a sling and revolver in her belt, followed
her husband, a tailor's cutter called Victor Arnoult, to battle in the
two hundred and thirty-ninth battalion, and defended the Place de Ia
Concorde and Rue Aumaire. 168 Some women seem to have led, or pushed,
their menfolk into battle. Josephine Marchais, later to be tried as one
of the five alleged petroleuses, appears to have led her lover, Jean
Guy, a butcher's boy, to the barricades. According to Adolphe Stelin,
a concierge of the Rue de Lille, she appeared on the street armed with
a carbine rifle on 22 May, declaring, 'My husband doesn't want to
fight, but I will drag him to the barricade. He may get smashed up
there but he'll go.' 169 A desire for personal vengeance motivated the
actions of Louise Noel, the concierge who incited the burning of the
arsenal of the Magasins du Tapis-Rouge as the Versailles troops ad-
vanced up the Faubourg St Martin on 25 May, crying, 'This nest of
reactionaries must be burnt.' It was stated at her trial that she bore a
grudge against the owner of the Magasins du Tapis-Rouge, J.E. Fleck.
She had served as a concierge in one of his properties before the
War of 1870 but conflict had arisen when Fleck had sought to dismiss
her and had been unable to do so. Noel was also accused of spreading
lies about his brother, whom she accused of having deserted to the
Versailles troops. 170 A Madame Rochebrune had earlier fought in the
suburbs to avenge the death of her husband, killed by the armies of
Versailles. 171
But other women, without strong convictions, may have felt pres-
surized or forced to take part in insurgency by the overzealous; in this
context ignorance or criminality may be the determining motives. Women
were acquitted at their trials of receiving goods stolen from churches
and private houses. A Femme Battou received two diamond rings sto-
len by her husband from the presbytery of the Abbe Deguerry, cure of
La Madeleine. When she warned her husband that they would be put
in an embarrassing position he replied that he was master in the house.
She confessed to pawning the rings 'in a moment of distress', and her
arrest followed an attempt by her lover, a tailor and medical officer to
the National Guard, to redeem one of the rings in June 1872. 172 The
two hundred and fifty-seventh battalion of the National Guard, finding
Neuilly abandoned in mid-May, pillaged various houses. The mistress
of a National Guard named Barre, Elise-Rosalie Corbet, took away a
sewing machine and was sentenced for this theft to two years'
imprisonment. 173
Such robbery may have been incidental but very different were the
motives of women who took part willingly in the activities of the
Commune for the material resources and social influence that they
could procure for themselves. A particularly notorious individual in
this respect was Marie-Alexandrine Spinoy, or Veuve Leroy, as she
chose to call herself. She was tried by court martial in September 1871
for alleged pillage and illegal usurpation of functions. Described by an
observer at her trial as a young, well-dressed blonde woman, tall, slim
with great blue eyes but with 'a hard and obstinate air', Veuve Leroy
had had a career of dissolute behaviour until the War of 1870, when
she forsook the world of the theatres for that of political clubs and
demonstrations and attached herself to the Blanquist Raoul Urbain, del-
egate for the seventh arrondissement, whom she met at the Club du
Pre-aux-Clercs. The prosecution statement declared that her aim in doing
so was mercenary, and there seems to be strong evidence that this was
so. 174 A young man named Huberty, engaged as a servant by the couple,
alleged that Leroy had stolen municipal funds for her own use,
while admitting that everyone was doing it. 175 She gained complete
ascendancy over her lover and was finally herself giving unauthorized
orders at the town hall of the seventh arrondissement. Witnesses re-
peatedly reported her assertions that Paris would be wilfully destroyed
if the Versailles government triumphed ('there will not be a pane of

glass left in the city'), and her remarks bearing witness to her loathing
of priests. 176 After an unexplained explosion at the Rapp cartridge works
on 17 May Leroy was complicit in the unauthorized arrest of a local
police inspector, Landau, and his wife, whom she accused of treason
without evidence, demanding of Madame Landau that she hand over
her rings to her. 177 Though Edith Thomas draws a veil over the full
sordid facts of the accusation against this woman, she has to admit
that it was Leroy who pressed Urbain to agree that hostages from the
Versailles forces should be shot within 24 hours on 5 April; 178 and
that, after her deportation to New Caledonia, Leroy was distrusted and
shunned even by her fellow exiles. 179
Theft and self-aggrandizement were, however, not the only reasons
for the involvement of the criminally minded; sheer hatred of the rich,
and a desire to seize a chance to retaliate by acts of violence and
destruction seem to have motivated such women as Anne-Marie Menand,
aged 26, a newspaper seller who worked in odd jobs as a victualler
and prostitute during the first siege of Paris and the Commune. She
seems to have had no association with the clubs or the Union des
Femmes pour Ia Defense de Paris but became caught up in the inva-
sion and pillage of churches and, later, the strategic clearing of build-
ings by fire to prevent the advance of Versailles snipers from house to
house. On 19 May the pious women of the district of the Madeleine
church ventured out in large numbers to prevent looters from damag-
ing it. Anne-Marie Menand denounced one of these women, a Madame
Bernard of the Rue Royale, as a member of 'Badinguet's [Louis-
Napoleon's] clique', and called for the women to be shot; as for the
church, 'we will chuck fire on it'. As the fighting spread to her own
quarter on the Avenue de Wagram Menand became involved in ambu-
lance work but also evacuated wealthy people from their properties on
the grounds that their buildings would be burnt. It is indeed possible
that she conspired to burn buildings, as witnesses heard her say that
the Communards would burn all the wealthy people's houses down. 180
The invasion of the Hotel de Bethune became an excuse for pillage as
well as strategic incendiarism. One witness, Marguerite Dislas, claimed
to have seen a victualler roll a barrel of petroleum into the Hotel de
Bethune and heard her say she had helped herself to 'a fine fur tippet'
to enable her to keep warm in winter. 181
From considering particular motivation, worthy or otherwise, we must
turn to the issue of the general appeal of the Commune. Why did it
attract more female supporters than ever before, and why was male
hostility, from the side of the Communards if not the Versaillais, more
muted than in previous insurrections when confronted with this scale
of female public participation? Why had women more latitude to speak
in clubs and bear arms, and why had so many women fought to the
end to defend the Commune? Why, too, did feminists of middle or
lower middle-class origin engage in street insurgency, when in 1848
and 1851 they had not done so?
At the most basic level was the question of survival. The most in-
tense pressures bore on all the Parisians - men, women and children -
by May 1871, after a six-month period that had seen two military sieges,
mass starvation, rampant disease and unemployment. The second siege
seemed to promise that these material horrors would persist, thanks to
the ill-judged policies of the Versailles Assembly. The instinct for self-
preservation became absolute and fostered an exceptional degree or
mobilization and commitment among the Commune's supporters. The
alternative to continued fighting was surrender to the dictates of the
Government of National Defence and, as in June 1848, this seemed
too dreadful to contemplate, especially when the Versailles troops be-
gan massacring Communard prisoners in April and May. From early
April exaggerated stories of these massacres were already in circula-
tion in the newspapers of the Commune. La Sociale reported on 4
April that Communard prisoners had been disembowelled and tied to
the tails of horses. In such a fevered atmosphere the community became
totally involved in resistance, and, as Louise Michel wrote in her memoirs,
distinctions of gender melt away. 182 There are instances of young boys
fighting alongside the adult soldiers of the Commune to try to break
the siege; 660 child combatants were captured by the Versailles forces,
and some gunners at the Porte Maillot were boys of 13 or 14. 183 Benoit
Malon observed bands of children processing through the streets in
the 'Bloody Week', bearing little red flags, singing the Marseillaise
and crying 'Vive la Commune!' Children assisted adults in building
barricades on the Left Bank in the Rues Gay-Lussac, St Michel and
Royer-Collard. 184 The total nature of the Commune's defence recalls
other such examples in recent history, such as that of Berlin in the
early months of 1945, when large numbers of women volunteers were
admitted to the anti-aircraft corps and the people's militia, the Volkssturm.
Even Hitler, the living embodiment of the most anti-feminist ideology
of modern times, apparently ordered that a women's battalion be called
up to defend Berlin at the height of the Soviet siege. 185
Apart from the sense of emergency that cast ideological and cus-
tomary scruples aside, there is evidence that by 1871 militant women
derived a sense of legitimacy from the fact that their political or mili-
tary action by now formed part of an accepted tradition in Paris. It
had been the habit of women to accompany their menfolk to the bar-
ricades since 1830, but more often women roused other women in 1871
by re-evoking memories of the Great Revolution of 1789, memories of
which they were deeply aware. Benoit Malon, the feminist-sympathiz-
ing lover of Andre Leo, wrote that the women's debut in Communard
politics led them to recall 'that the women of Paris had written one of
the finest pages of the Revolution of 1789, the 5 and 6 October.' 186
The address of 6 April issued by the Union des Femmes pour Ia Defense
de Paris, entitled Aux Citoyennes de Paris, declared that the 'nation
was in danger', as it had been in 1792, and invoked a slogan of the
sacred right of rebellion, the cry of the Lyon silkweavers who had
risen in 1831: Vivre libre en travaillant, ou mourir en combattant (Live
in liberty by working, or die fighting). The address appealed to Parisian
women, who were the 'descendants of the women of the Great Revol-
ution who, in the name of the people and of justice, marched on Versailles
and brought back Louis XVI as a captive ... ' 187 This sense of tra-
dition was not merely felt by the women leaders such as those who
drafted the address, but also by some of the working-class women who
frequented the clubs. The Times correspondent who in early May at-
tended the women's club meeting in the Boulevard d'Italie heard a
'tolerably respectable' woman, 'wearing a decent black gown and bonnet'
remind her listeners that they were 'not made of weaker stuff than
their grandmothers of '93'. She continued, 'Let us not cause their shades
to blush for us, but be up and doing, as they would be, if they were
living now.' Presently the speaker delved further back into history to
fetch up another instructive example - Jeanne Hachette, who saved
Beauvais in the fifteenth century, 'drawing a moral therefrom'. 188 Natu-
ral rebels and risk-takers such as Louise Michel needed no bidding to
go to war, as we have seen; nor did Elisabeth Dmitrieff, who was
wounded in the Faubourg St Antoine during the 'Bloody Week' and
afforded a touching image of the Amazon by bearing Leo Frankel,
also wounded, to safety . 189 However, other women such as Andre Leo
and Nathalie Lemel seem by temperament to have been averse to the
use of weapons, and confined their efforts to propaganda and ambu-
lance work.
The justification of history was seized upon eagerly by the new
generation of feminist women whom we have seen emerging in the
liberalizing atmosphere of the late 1860s, challenged by the provoca-
tions of men like Proudhon and Barbey d' Aurevilly and eager to avail
themselves of the now respectable notion that women should be pub-

licly educated. Louise Michel wrote of a positive thirst for knowledge
at the women's night-school classes before 1870. 190 Many of these women
were too young to remember the feminist failures of 1848 and the
horrors of the June Days - though we should bear in mind that even
the failures of 1848 had not deterred a few women veterans of the
Second Republic, such as Josephine Delettra, Simone Leblanc and also
Therese Calayon, the prostitute nicknamed the 'Amazon of the Insur-
rection' for her defence of the Faubourg StJacques in June 1848, who
reappeared as a speaker at the Club St Eloi in the Rue de Reuilly in
1871, disgusting Fontoulieu by her 'extreme violence'. 191 The accident
of the Commune rebellion carne earlier than any of the women eman-
cipators had expected; in the words of Louise Michel: 'We expected
to die for liberty. It was as if we had been borne aloft from the earth.' 192
The sudden victory of 18 March 1871, and the influence of Inter-
nationalist ideas in many nations led the women leaders of the Com-
mune to believe that portents on a European scale were foretelling the
imminent emancipation of all labouring women as well as men. The
address Aux Citoyennes de Paris declared, 'Citizenesses, the hour of
decision has come. The old world must be finished and done with!
We want to be free. And it is not only France that is rising in revolt;
all the civilized peoples have their gaze fixed on Paris, awaiting our
triumph in order to liberate themselves in their turn ... '. Germany had
had to lock up its leaders of the revolutionary left, Ireland and Poland
stirred with .new energy. A spirit of reform was even at work in the
reactionary empires of Austria and Russia, and a revolution in Spain
by republicans had deposed the corrupt Bourbon dynasty. Set in the
context of European agitation and change, the euphoria of thinking
Communard women becomes more comprehensible, even if it was over-
optirnistic.193 Thus, for the first time in the nineteenth century there is
an unequivocal overlap between feminist claims and insurgent women,
principally among leaders like Michel, Drnitrieff and Lemel, though to
what extent this is true for humble women of the people, who left few
or no records of their deeds, is impossible to determine. The joy at the
arrival of a revolutionary dawn, false though it proved, was compounded
by a perception of the Commune government's evident willingness to
make concessions to women in the areas of education, pay and pen-
sions - concessions of an unprecedented nature; and to entrust women
with official briefs, or to work in an official municipal capacity.
These reforms were accepted as the result of sympathies on the part
of Internationalist male Cornmunards such as Frankel and Varlin. In
1848 women's clubs and petitions had attracted almost universal ridi-
cule, against which the pro-feminist voices of men like Victor
Considerant, Ernest Legouve and Pierre Leroux could make little head-
way. Nevertheless a complete volte-face in male attitudes had not been
wrought by 1871, and sympathies for women's rights were probably
confined to a strategic minority. Lissagaray might (approvingly) de-
scribe Dmitrieff as 'the Theroigne de Mericourt of this revolution',
and write of Michel that though she was 'gentle and patient with the
little children, who adored her, in the cause of the people, the mother
became a lioness'; 194 but not all men shared his enthusiasm for female
militancy. Belly's scheme for a brigade of Amazones de Ia Seine was
stifled, and a woman who complained of the price of black pudding at
a club in November 1870 was laughed at and told to go back to her
kitchen stove. 195 The petition of the Union des Femmes for coopera-
tives administered by women themselves met with a slow response.
Schulkind finds evidence that the mayor and council of the fifth
arrondissement deliberately hesitated in providing accommodation for
the organization. 196 By May 1871 Andre Leo was expressing her doubts
about the goodwill of some male Communards towards their female
colleagues, especially those in search of work on the front line of bat-
tle. In an article entitled 'Adventures of Nine Ambulance-women', pub-
lished in La Sociale 197 Leo detailed the surly indifference and contempt
met with by a group of women of the seventeenth arrondissement who
offered their voluntary services to the ambulances of various National
Guard battalions on 2 May. She concluded that many male republi-
cans had become indignant at the love women were manifesting for
the republic; the hostility had been more intense on the part of officers
and surgeons than on the part of the ranks, one junior officer at the
Palais de l'Industrie addressing to the women a joke in bad taste, In
another article, Revolution without Women, published a few days later
in La Sociale, Leo concluded that for many republicans woman 'must
remain neutral and passive, under man's direction', as she had 'merely
changed the nature of her confessor' .198 But anger at the advance of
women's rights was not confined to men; Jean Allemane later recalled
how he had to rescue a newly appointed lay headmistress from attack
by a crowd of women retailers of the Marche des Carmes, who were
angry at the removal of nuns from Catholic schools. 199
Misgivings about the militant role of women in the Commune among
its own supporters were, however, relatively mute compared with the
veritable outburst of hysteria on the part of the Versailles government
and its supporters, which accompanied the arrest, massacre, trial and
deportation of the women Communards. The repression of the Com-

mune, a fully fledged insurrection that had kept legitimate authority at
bay for weeks, was inevitably even more savage than that of the June
Days. The evidence of innumerable eyewitnesses, not all of them well
disposed towards the Commune, makes it clear that the Versailles forces
engaged in tqe systematic massacre of prisoners they took from April
onwards. When the battle was transferred to the Paris streets from 21
May the slaughter became wholesale in a fevered atmosphere of death
and defiance. At least 17 000 Communards were probably killed, for
17 000 had their subsequent burial costs paid for by the municipal
council of Paris. 200 The slaughter was so intense, however, that dis-
posal of bodies became difficult and heaps of bodies in the Faubourg
St Antoine and elsewhere were doused with chloride of lime. 201 The
women combatants of the Place Blanche, once captured, were shot on
the spot. 202 Others were shot on suspicion; in the district of Les Epinettes
three women were shot for having a pair of National Guard's trousers
in their possession. 203 Gustave Lefran~ais noted that whereas in June
1848 massacres of prisoners had been conducted with a certain degree
of circumspection, for example at night in the Tuileries Gardens, dur-
ing the Commune massacres were conducted in broad daylight, for all
to see. 204 Some Communards adopted a suicidal posture, women and
children following their menfolk to the execution place, demanding to
die with them; women descended to the streets, struck the Versailles
officers and threw themselves against a wall to die; 'young women,
pretty of face, and dressed in silk dresses, came down in to the street
and, a revolver in their hands, fired at random and then said with
proud mien, elevated voice, eyes full of hatred: "Shoot me at once!"' 205
Edmond de Goncourt noted a convoy of over 400 rebel prisoners near
Passy station on 26 May, waiting to be taken to Versailles; it included
66 women, some in silk gowns, but also workers, housewives and pros-
titutes, none of whom showed the apathetic resignation of the men,
'only scorn and anger and even a gleam of madness' .206 Thus were
women prisoners, along with the men, led in chains to prisons at
Versailles, there to suffer the taunts and attacks of their political en-
emies. Clt!mentine Suger, a breadseller of the Quai de Ia Marne, who
had proposed to assassinate Thiers for a sum of 50 000 francs, refused
to walk in a convoy of prisoners to Versailles and was shot in the
road near the Pont de Sevres. 207 Eight hundred women were imprisoned
at the Gare de !'Ouest warehouses, where some had miscarriages. 208
Others went mad in the crowded cellars of the palace of Versailles. 209
From here, hardened cases like Michel, Lemel, Poirier and Excoffon
were transferred to Auberive, their political convictions still intact and

possibly hardened by adversity. Finally, in August 1873, they were
dispatched to New Caledonia. 210 A few lucky women escaped abroad;
Dmitrieff went to Switzerland, where she established a salon for refu-
gees, and later returned to Russia. She was sentenced to transportation
in absentia for incitement to civil war on 26 October 1872.21! Andre
Leo and Paule Minck also escaped to Switzerland, where they contin-
ued to issue revolutionary propaganda, such as Leo's lecture to the
Lausanne peace congress in September 1871, LaGuerre sociale, which
was in fact an apologia for the Commune. 212 Minck lived by selling
straw hats and giving French lessons, but continued her revolutionary
lectures and had meetings with Guesde and Bakunin. 213 Most of the
arrested women were not so fortunate, suffering periods of imprison-
ment, exile or deportation with hard labour. Though a few women
were condemned to death, including three of the five alleged petroleuses
tried in September 1871 and alleged assassins of hostages no death
sentences were carried out against women prisoners: instead, such sen-
tences were commuted to deportation. The alleged petroleuses Elisabeth
Retiffe and Leontine Suetens had their death sentences commuted to a
life of hard labour in the notoriously unhealthy penal colony of Guiana. 214
Six women were sent to a fortress in New Caledonia and thirteen others
to simple deportation to the lie des Pins. 215 Also in 1873, 69 wives of
prisoners went to New Caledonia. 216
Of the 1051 women who appeared before the fourth conseil de guerre
(which tried more women than any other tribunal) 850 were, as has
been noted, acquitted for lack of evidence, but there could be no ac-
quittal for women like Louise Michel and Nathalie Lemel, who braz-
enly (and very unusually) admitted to all the charges laid against them
and dared the court to pass severe sentences. Louise Michel declared
to the sixth conseil de guerre on 16 December 1871 that the social
revolution was 'the dearest of my desires. I belong entirely to the social
revolution and I declare that I will accept the responsibility of all my
actions.' She admitted to having started fires in Paris, having advo-
cated the seizure of church property, and having wished to murder
Thiers. Finally she called for the death sentence for herself, crying, 'If
you aren't cowards, kill me.' 217 But her sentence was deportation, not
death. Nathalie Lemel, who appeared before the fourth conseil de guerre
on lO September 1872, acknowledged that she had organized the Union
des Femmes and built barricades. She had launched a call to arms to
the women of Paris and planted a red flag on the barricade of the
Place Pigalle, though she denied that she had been armed. She was
sentenced to deportation to a fortified place, and refused to lodge an

appeal. 218 Another bold defendant, a serving woman named Marie Chiffon,
who in the Bloody Week had accompanied and even led on her hus-
band, a sub-lieutenant of the National Guard, to the barricades of the
Pont d' Austerlitz and Boulevard Mazas, also demanded severe punish-
ment. Not for nothing was she nicknamed La Capitaine, as she de-
clared that the tribunal that tried her was too cowardly to sentence her
to death; instead she was condemned to forced labour for 20 years. 219
But few women tried by the military courts had the intelligence and
ideological convictions to put up such a spirited defence. Marie Wolff,
accused of incitement to murder hostages, was noted at her trial in
April 1872 as having defended herself 'with a visible lack of convic-
tion; she did not even seek to justify the alibi she raised.' 220 Some
struggled to maintain an air of tranquil equanimity. Zelie GrandeI, accused
of receiving possessions stolen from hostages executed at La Roquette
on 24 May declared she took them to the room of her 'husband', in
fact her lover, a packer and a prison director appointed by the Com-
mune, Jean-Baptiste Fran\!ois. The government commissioner ironically
interposed to ask Grande} if she meant 'husband' 'in the fashion of
the Commune'. 'Yes, but my husband all the same,' she retorted. 221
Marguerite Fayon smiled unmoved through her trial, doubtless sure
that the charges of letting off bombs and denouncing a policeman's
wife that had been laid against her were exaggerated and unsustainable. 222
Veuve Marie Leroy burst into tears as witness after witness gave evi-
dence that built up a picture of her as an adventuress given to viol-
ence in word and deed. 223
The trial of the five women denounced as having set fire to public
buildings - Elisabeth Retiffe, Leontine Suetens, Eulalie Papavoine,
Josephine Marchais and Lucie Bocquin - was sensationalized by the
press and produced the same kind of distinguished and attentive audi-
ence that had waited on the trial of the notorious Simone Leblanc in
1849; the audience was a circus of fashionable ladies who had spared
no expense with their toilet. 224 Though this audience was shocked by
the features of the dressmaker Eulalie Papavoine, which were ravaged
by debauchery, 225 the five alleged petroleuses did not correspond to
any type, 226 but were commonplace in appearance. The trial, so keenly
anticipated, proved an anticlimax: no hard evidence was forthcoming
to demonstrate that any of the women concerned had set fire to pri-
vate or public buildings; they had no history of active politics or at-
tending clubs, and at most had borne weapons and - in the case of
Papavoine and Suetens - transported paving stones for the barricade
of the Rue de Lille, while Marchais and Suetens appeared to have

incited men to battle. Gustave Lefran~ais stressed that the worst charge
that could be made against them was that they had fired from
barricades. 227
As in June 1848, the harsh sentences were tempered by pleas for
mitigation made by republicans who had stood aside from the conflict.
Victor Hugo interceded for the three alleged petroleuses condemned
to death, calling for a remission of the sentence, which probably as-
sisted in saving their lives. 228 Once the convicted women were impris-
oned or deported other republicans who had opposed the Commune
salved their consciences by organizing aid committees. The feminist
Juliette Adam, who had written that the Commune was the work of
madmen who had turned fatally into criminals, worked to buy clothing
for the deportees in New Caledonia with money sent by Communard
refugees in London. 229 Eugenic Niboyet, the founder of the Societe de
Ia Voix des Femmes in I848, interceded in I875, 1877 and 1878 on
behalf of families of deported Communards who sought clemency. 230
The deported and imprisoned women were permitted to appeal for clem-
ency, or for a shortening of the term of their sentence, but there was
to be no general amnesty until the Third Republic had been securely
established, in a way that eliminated any fear of royalist challenges
and a further civil war. Only in I879 did amnesties permit the return
to France of Communards who had been deported, or had gone into
voluntary exile. Louise Michel refused to leave New Caledonia until a
total amnesty was granted by the French government, on II July I880. 231
Not only did the institution of the Commune impress itself on its
enemies as a criminal act, but the women participants had made their
mark all too visibly, in a way that created moral panic among the
partisans of the Versailles government and the judges who meted out
. sentences after the rebellion. Women had set up more extensive auton-
omous organizations than ever before, demanded power for themselves,
fought to the death on the barricades - in short, had repudiated all the
values of dependency, submission and domesticity demanded by the
nineteenth-century bourgeois moral code. Truly, the civilized world
had been turned upside down. In the words of Benoit Malon, the idea
of workers holding executive power and women as citizens in the public
sphere was for the royalists and moderate republicans 'the abomina-
tion of desolation'. 232 But why had so many women participated in the
Commune, even to the point of wielding weapons? The answer, for its
enemies, lay in a blend of social deviancy and depraved ideologies
that pandered to the worst human instincts. This conjunction of causes
was set out in the report of Captain Briot, deputy public prosecutor of
the fourth conseil de guerre, in response to the parliamentary enquiry
into the origins of the Commune. Having analysed the occupational
background and sentences of the 1051 women sentenced by this conseil,
Briot represented them as creatures deprived of any moral sense, re-
ferring to the relatively high proportion of the 1051 who at some stage
had been registered with the police as prostitutes (a quarter of the
total). One accused woman had been found to have registered as a
prostitute on the advice of her husband, while numerous others had
left their husbands to become prostitutes or 'live in sin'. Thieving came
naturally to them; past failure to regulate prostitution effectively and
the crowding in St Lazare prison of troublesome and delinquent wom-
en exacerbated the dangers. But, Briot continued, their vices - theft,
violence, free love - had been given sanction by the influence of the
International and, in particular, by the organizing bodies of the Union
des Femmes. It was almost as a passing thought, after this diatribe,
that Briot suggested that some women had been led to join the organ-
izations of the Commune without realizing their full implications, on
the promise of pay or food, or had followed their husbands to try to
restrain their rebellious activities. 233
Much the same kind of diagnosis was given by Captain Jouenne,
the ministerial representative at the trial of the five alleged pitroleuses
in September 1871, but his analysis ran deeper, giving perhaps the
fullest interpretation of Communard behaviour as perceived by their
political enemies, and one which, for the first time, consciously linked
their insurgency not only with crime and socialism, but with feminist
doctrines as well. For Jouenne the Commune was a 'horrible cam-
paign' against civilization itself. The women who took part had wil-
fully rejected the great and magnificent role of women in society, the
role of total devotion to family needs, he declared - echoing the ideas
of J-B. Amar and his Jacobin allies of the 1790s, who had first enun-
ciated the complete doctrine of la femme au foyer (woman as a house-
wife) in the 1789 Revolution. In her role as wife and mother, woman
socialized men and thereby exerted a happy influence on society. If
she abandoned this role, however, woman became 'a moral monstrosity',
not merely because she lapsed inevitably into evil conduct but because
she dragged men down with her; 'then woman is more dangerous than
the most dangerous man.' Social disintegration and crime would fol-
low naturally. Jouenne then proceeded to voice the fears expressed by
men about unleashing the demon that had lurked in women since the
1790s. We recall the alarm of Amar, Chateaubriand, Pages-Duport and
Bolingbroke St John when we read his reminder to the court that the
'knitting women of the clubs and the wretches deserving of the name
"Furies of the Guillotine'" had terrified the world. The women now
before them were 'the daughters of the viragos of 1793'. But at least
these humble petroleuses could plead ignorance; worse things were at
issue, for among the accused were schoolmistresses, who could not
pretend that notions of good and evil were unknown to them. They
had borrowed from the doctrines of dangerous utopians concerning the
emancipation of women, tempting low-born women with incredible
fantasies that the sex could be magistrates, deputies and - who knew?
- generals in the army. Churches had been profaned by the preaching
of evil, religious schools secularized. Jouenne singled out Louise Michel,
who had taught her pupils revolutionary songs and turned them away
from religious values. 234
But the masses could only respond to these new doctrines in crimi-
nal ways; it stood to reason, then, that the greed and social destruction
preached by the Communard leaders had a particular appeal for women
of the criminal type. During the trials, prosecutors were particularly
concerned to establish whether the accused women had previous con-
victions or a deviant background. 235 In the case of the alleged petroleuses
they were not to be disappointed; Elisabeth Retiffe had convictions for
assault and 'lived in concubinage' with a ganger for seven years, though
the relationship was clearly quasi-marital; Leontine Suetens had a con-
viction for theft; Josephine Marchais was clearly a morally dubious
case, from a broken home and criminal family in Blois, where her
mother had undergone a lengthy prison term for incitement to immor-
ality and her sister had served terms for repeated theft in a house of
correction and in prison. However, Eulalie Papavoine, though clearly
promiscuous, had no criminal record at all, and the fifth woman, Lucie
Bocquin, was described by the prosecution as a woman who had been
honest until her husband's absence on military duty abroad had led
her to commit adultery with a National Guardsman, abandoning her
child 'to follow a bandit'. For the prosecution that choice had been
the start of Bocquin's moral collapse, that ended with her involvement
in the Commune. 236 At another trial, it transpired that Marie Leroy
had been led to the Commune by her life as a femme galante before
the War of 1870, which made it natural for her to adopt the role of an
adventuress out to seek fame and fortune through wielding influence
over the men of the new political order. 237 The reports of the trials
stressed the physical anomalies or deformities of the women tried, as
if to suggest that these were loathesome outward signs of inner per-
version of character. Elisabeth Retiffe was described as having 'little

red eyes, full of malice' and a nose that suggested habitual drunken-
ness;238 Leontine Suetens had 'insolent, cynical eyes and a deep scar
under the left cheek'. 239 Yet the charges pressed against these women
could not be sustained by the evidence, and for every woman convicted
by the fourth conseil, four were acquitted, including individuals not in
any way criminal or dissolute. One such was Anna Denis, a 'young
and gentle person of nineteen years', who sold books for a living and
did not conform at all to the courts' perceptions of the accused as
female ruffians. Anna Denis had been made a lay schoolteacher at a
former religious school of the Rue Gracieuse; she could admit to noth-
ing more heinous than making a collection for the Union pour Ia
Propagande Republicaine and was sentenced to six days' imprisonment. 240
The legend of the 'Fury' unleashed by the revolutionary movement
of 1871 continued to grow and was embroidered by the lurid memoirs
of Maxime du Camp, Les Convulsions de Paris. For du Camp, the
entire episode could only be interpreted as an outbreak of hysterical
madness, the result of nervous tension induced by a prolonged period
of war, hunger, privation and uncertainty, but also, in wider terms, the
result of the prevalence of alcohol amongst the poor, and the oppor-
tunities it afforded for crime. 241 Du Camp believed that women were
crucial energizers of this madness, exerting an 'extraordinary influ-
ence' on the men. 242 The nervous energy of ,the women pushed them
on to acts of extravagant bravery that surpassed those of the men,
putting them to shame, but it was a 'morbid and factitious' energy
that could break down in the presence of death (though we have seen
instances to the contrary). In battle their 'furious intoxication' was
dreadful to see. Du Camp picks up the theme of Briot, that among the
women Communards was a strong element of prostitutes, spreading
'like leprosy' through the city. 243 Criminal instincts took hold of them
and their minds became possessed; they incited all the hostage mass-
acres and emulated men in murder, shooting those that they judged to
be cowards. 244 This reversal of gender roles traditionally accepted was
for du Camp, as for other critics of the Commune, the final expression
of a society both inverted and insane. Despite his furious denuncia-
tions, du Camp retained enough sense of fairness to repudiate the most
lurid image of Communard women, that of the petroleuses, gangs of
women who allegedly threw bottles of petrol into cellars and drains in
the last days of the Commune in order to destroy Paris by causing a
great conflagration. 245 Du Camp was not the only critic to do so;
Wickham Hoffman, the secretary of the American legation in Paris,
Figure 7.2 'Vive Ia Commune!'
spoke of rumours of petroleum fires becoming 'the madness of the

hour' in the final days of the Commune. 246 When the fighting was
most desperate, atrocity stories of this nature served, as in June 1848,
to maintain the morale of the forces fighting the rebellion. The Versailles
press spread hysterical tales not only of petroleuses but of vitrioleuses,
women seeking to disfigure the Versailles troops with vials of acid. 247
No doubt some credence was given to the charges because of the burning
of public buildings in the last days of the Commune. Some were pur-
Figure 7.3 A petroleuse at work
posely burnt as a strategic move, to flush out Versailles snipers; others

were set ablaze by the relentless shelling of the Versailles armies; but
certain others, such as the Tuileries Palace, were deliberately set on
fire for ideological reasons. In the burning down of the Tuileries it is
possible that a journeywoman nicknamed La Beige, Florence Wandeval,
had been involved. She had enlisted as an ambulance nurse in the siege,
denied she had started any fires and maintained at her trial that she
had simply looked after the wounded on 23 May, the night on which
the Tuileries burnt down. But her assertions were contradicted by wit-
nesses who all claimed that she had boasted of having set the palace
on fire, to prevent the return of kings and usher in the rule of the
people. Edith Thomas concedes that in this instance, a petroleuse may
have been fact, not fancy. 248
Out of these circumstances was born the legend expressing the ultimate
horror of a diseased and disordered rebellion, a legend that seemed to

justify the savage reprisals taken against the Communards. From the
tricoteuses of 1793, by way of the female butchers of the forces of
order in June 1848 to the petroleuses of 1871, a small corner of the
truth about militant women had been taken and exaggerated by counter-
revolutionaries to damn the idea of any conceivable change in the social
and economic order. This fear of a world turned upside down is subtly
depicted in a drawing published by the Illustrated London News on 28
May 1871, that shows a woman of the working class bearing a rifle
confidently while beside her a man carries a baby in subdued fash-
ion.249 But the Versailles government and army, in their panic, had
grasped one essential truth: although only a minority of Parisian women
were active in the Commune, the Commune was a new type of rebel-
lion in that never before had women enjoyed, albeit briefly, such power
of organization and expression in the public sphere. Their reward was
a hail of unparalleled abuse; du Camp, in discussing their actions in
Les Convulsions de Paris, successively uses the expressions femelle,
tricoteuse, virago, creature and goule. 250
With the victory of the Government of National Defence over the
Commune came the end of a long period of female political insur-
gency in French history. Why was this so? Quite obviously, the exemp-
lary repression meted out in May 1871, more extreme than any witnessed
in France since the 1790s, served as a dire warning to any future would-
be insurgents who presumed to think that a mass popular uprising against
a republic of property and middle-class values could be a successful
enterprise. Thiers proclaimed that the ground 'strewn with corpses'
afforded a dreadful sight that should 'serve as a lesson' .251 Death, ar-
rest and deportation wiped out the leadership of the radical left for
some years, the French branch of the International disintegrated and
martial law persisted in Paris, Lyon and elsewhere to 1876, the workers
in the large cities finding themselves under as repressive a regime as
the authoritarian Second Empire. 252 The women leaders were either in
New Caledonia or in exile in Switzerland. Until her death in 1905
Louise Michel did not lose her faith in the coming of a new popular
revolution in Paris; when it finally came, she believed, humanity would
be transformed and 'would no longer torture man or beast' .253 But other
European revolutionaries were more bleak in their appraisal of the
potential of neighbourhood insurgency to effect revolution in future.
Friedrich Engels in 1895 pointed out how the growth of technology
had favoured the regular forces of the state. Vast armies and railways,
breech-loading rifles and shells made resistance by National Guards
and civil militias hopeless; for success in future, it would be vital for
revolutionaries to subvert the regular army. 254 The power of the French
state, and the weapons at its disposal to preserve order did indeed
continue to grow. Railways, cannon, machine guns had shown in 1848
and 1871 that, if used with good logistical sense, they could confine,
fragment and break up insurrections de quartier. The sense of neigh-
bourhood identity in Paris, strong particularly among women, diminished
in the late nineteenth century, though it did not disappear, consequent
upon the ending of communal activities centred on the local washhouse
or parish pump, and, still later, the local market, and the advent of the
chain store and a rapid urban transport system.
The young Third Republic devoted much energy to rebuilding and
reforming the army, seeking to enhance civilian identification with
patriotic values by making military conscription almost universal in
1872. It also employed its police force with a heavy hand, for all its
rhetoric concerning individual liberties and the Rights of Man. Deten-
tion without trial or charge, brutal dispersal of strikes and demonstra-
tions using the police, employment of paid informers and confiscation
of mail were all hallmarks of the law and order policy of the Third
Republic. 255 The police attacked the first demonstration held to com-
memorate the Commune at the Mur des Federes in Pere-Lachaise cem-
etery on 23 May 1880. 256 The period 1906-8 alone saw 20 strikers
shot dead and 667 wounded in strikes. 257
Left-wing radicals were not merely marginalized by the extensive
repression of 1871 and after, and the reconsolidated power of the
Napoleonic state, but also by the secure foundation of a republican
regime, based on the sanctity of property and the patriarchal family,
for the first time in French history. The partisans of the Third Repub-
lic outplayed their royalist and Bonapartist challengers to create the
most durable regime France had known since 1789, drawing support
from small landed farmers and small entrepreneurs, as well as big busi-
ness.258 This made it harder for left-wing radicals to capture the wider
middle-class support which, as Andre Leo realized as early as 1871,
they would need for success. 259 The sufferings endured by the
Communards through repression and exile ensured that on their return
to politics in the 1880s the revolutionary tradition would remain lively
but it could not attract a large popular following at a time of relative
political and social stability and international peace. So France would
not witness again the type and scale of the insurgency that character-
ized the rebellions of the nineteenth century until after 1940, when
war, invasion and foreign occupation destroyed the Third Republic,
threatening civil breakdown on the scale seen in 1870-1.
At first, civil collapse was averted by the German occupation of
northern France while southern France was ruled by the authoritarian

Vichy regime of Marshal Petain. The 'New Order' in France became
increasingly unpopular and unworkable on its own terms. By the sum-
mer of 1944 political persecution, hunger, the incipient breakdown of
the Petain government and, above all, the anticipation of the Anglo-
American advance on Paris from Normandy conspired to revive the
insurgent tradition in the capital. A call went up, an 'Appeal to the
Barricades', issued by Colonel Rol of the Forces Fran\aises de l'Interieur
(FFI) on 22 August 1944. The appeal for trees to be cut down and
paving stones to be torn up recalled, as Adrien Dansette remarks, the
cry of 28 June 1830. 260 Barricades were erected in the traditional popu-
lar quarters of Paris, not the wealthy ones, the FFI being so structured
as to be suitable for a guerre de quarrier, but not a broad coordinated
offensive. 261 The French Resistance, despite its rhetoric of encouraging
women to imitate Joan of Arc or Louise Michel, was in fact keener to
see women in segregated support roles rather than in combat. 262 This
was particularly the case as Resistance fighters became organized into
properly mobilized army battalions by 1944. 263
In spite of this discouraging atmosphere there are instances of women
once again playing front-line as well as support roles in the week of
fighting from 19 August 1944. While in flats and shops young women
established emergency clinics Clara Bronte, wife of a Communist deputy,
and her daughter Marguerite set up a factory to make Molotov cock-
tails in the eleventh arrondissement, near the Place de la Republique,
and distributed them to the insurgents of the FFI on 21 August. 264 On
the Rue de la Huchette, opposite the Prefecture de Police building, a
woman named Colette Briant, wearing a Wehrmacht helmet, led the
work in building a barricade of sandbags, trees, mattresses, old furni-
ture and paving stones, passed hand to hand by women and children. 265
A young woman destroyed a German tank with a Molotov cocktail
near the Hotel de Ville on 22 August but paid for her bravado with
her life. Gunned down by another tank in the unit, she fell dead, her
skirt spreading 'like a tulip flicked from its stalk by a knife stroke' .266
Thus scenes familiar in revolutionary Paris to 1871 were briefly re;.
enacted over the period of a week in the summer of 1944. But the
liberation of Paris depended on the advance of the Allied forces from
Normandy; no longer could an improvised insurrection determine the
political fate of France. With the end of this conflict in happy victory
- unlike the disasters of June 1848, December 1851 and May 1871 -
through massive military force from outside the tradition of the insur-
gent woman in France came to an end.
8 Conclusion
For centuries the women of France resorted to violent demonstrations

in times of extreme material need. Usually their anger was directed
against the threat of famine, dear food or oppressive taxes, one of the
most characteristic forms of action being the bread riot. In the nine-
teenth century women continued to be mobilized most extensively at
times when the popular masses suffered great economic privation, whether
in terms of hunger, poverty or unemployment, and particularly when it
seemed that this adverse situation might suddenly deteriorate much
further. But from 1789 the form and expression of their protest, as this
book has sought to show, began slowly and tentatively to alter and
diversify. The cry was no longer simply for bread, and the spectre of
famine in peacetime France had disappeared by the 1850s, the tradi-
tional food riot vanishing with it. For at least some of the insurgent
leaders and their associates the message of protest in the nineteenth
century took on a more sophisticated character, and the means of ex-
pression a correspondingly more complex ritual and symbolism. This
evolution applied principally to Paris, the largest urban agglomeration
and the nerve centre of politics, education, news and ideas, and conse-
quently of political ideology and rumour.
This transformation of protest began initially because the hunger and
unemployment that were vital causes of popular mobilization in the
1789 Revolution returned repeatedly. The new elites, overwhelmed with
problems requiring urgent solutions, were unable to eradicate these
economic problems satisfactorily or establish a lasting and generally
accepted form of government. The insurgency that began in 1789 con-
sequently ran a course of several years, establishing in Paris a tradi-
tion of action involving women of the people as well as men. The
courage and determination of the women of Paris who marched on
Versailles in October 1789 to bring back the royal family to the capi-
tal was praised by the partisans of revolution and gave women a new
confidence in their own ability to force political change by collective
action. But they had also undertaken the march with male encourage-
ment and accompaniment, and subsequently republican sans-culottes
exploited women by bringing them on to the streets to emphasize the
'family' nature of revolutionary sovereignty (especially in 1792), and
possibly also to deter repressive violence. In this way women found
155
themselves adopting the slogans and insignia of revolution, and per-

forming political ceremonies. On various occasions, a few participated
in military operations, such as the attack on the Tuileries Palace of
August 1792. From that year, too, a few women disguised themselves
to seek military service against the foreign enemies of the revolution,
as women have done in many wars.
The few feminists seeking the emancipation of their sex were not
slow to demand that the Rights of Man be reinterpreted also as the
Rights of Woman, as well as being among those women who called
for a female civic militia. For a short period they sponsored political
clubs and petitions for the vote and civil rights until they fell foul of
the power and ideological preoccupations of the Jacobins. Ironically,
as the Jacobins destroyed any hope that female active citizenship would
become a reality in their republic they elevated the image of woman
as the passive, neutral embodiment of its virtues and defined her role
within the new state as the discreetly domesticated mother, provider
and civilizing force for its male citizens.
By the end of 1794 female insurgency had been crushed but by then
militante women of the lower classes had evolved their own patterns
of unofficial political action. They used their knowledge of neighbour-
hoods and community sociability to spread rumours of repression, to
seek out men for battle, harassing those who would not march; they
provided arms, rang the local steeple bell, and deployed symbols such
as the tricolour flag, the Phrygian cap and the sword to express their
own demands in ritualistic ways. For the majority of such women the
insurgent role was one of warning, mobilizing and hectoring, but a
minority took matters further, bore weapons in parades and accompanied
their menfolk to scenes of likely confrontation. It is very hard to de-
termine what moved one humble, illiterate woman worker to violence
while another shunned it. Accidents of temperament, life experience,
the degree to which individual women had suffered economic priva-
tion or bore a grudge against landlords, police and the state must have
had much to do with it. Wilfully excluded from national sovereignty
these women had nonetheless evolved means of expressing themselves
through an informal sovereignty, accompanied by a talent for street
drama that we cannot ignore, for it became one of the most essential
features of the revolutionary era in modern Paris. In the nineteenth
century the wearing or parading of the colour red, the planting of flags
or death-defying brandishing of them on barricades, the taste for ec-
centric costume (riding habits being repeatedly favoured), attempts to
establish impromptu popular courts and dispense revolutionary justice
Conclusion 157
and the singing of the Marseillaise are all instances of such theatrical
gestures referred to in the previous chapters.
The reaction of men to these new manifestations of female activism
was complex and not free from ambiguity. While heroines who fought
for liberty in the Revolutionary Wars could be praised and decorated
as a mere handful of brave, if eccentric, patriots there was a fright-
ened, mocking jealousy of women like Theroigne de Mericourt, branded
a whore and a madwoman - not least because her agenda embraced
feminist demands. The women who marched to Versailles in 1789 might
be declared heroines, but the association of women with rampant kill-
ing was much feared, especially in the context of radical politics; the
physiology of women, it was claimed, could communicate a dangerous
electricity of hysteria, whose consequence could only be wholesale chaos
and mayhem. The principal concrete expression of this fear in the 1789
Revolution was the knitting woman of the guillotine. Woman might
assist in pursuing the ethical causes of political man but in no way
must they gloat over his destruction, in a symbolic reversal of gender
roles. Both the royalists and moderate republicans of the nineteenth
century, who recalled the Reign of Terror as a nightmarish perver-
sion of the cause of liberty, were quick to invoke the metaphor of
the tricoteuse should the threat of autonomous female violence be un-
leashed, and particularly if such violence appeared to attack the pillars
of the liberal constitutional order, the sanctity of property and econ-
omic contract, based on patriarchal heredity and a male-dominated family
structure.
This attitude explains the paradox that we have noted in reviewing
the positive response of chroniclers and witnesses to the women insur-
gents of July 1830 and February 1848 on the one hand, and the nega-
tive response to those of June 1848, December 1851 and the Commune
on the other. Women involved in a widely supported Parisian battle to
'normalize' public liberties against real or presumed oppression in July
1830 could be dubbed heroines and celebrated in anecdotal histories,
paintings and even on the face of playing cards. They were perceived
as redemptresses, modern Joans of Arc. By contrast, women arrested
in rebellions whose aim was feared to be the destruction of the liberal
order in favour of a socialist one were portrayed as destructive psy-
chopaths, any antecedent criminal records or abnormalities of behav-
iour or physique being seized upon by their male prosecutors as proof
of their unnatural characters. We should therefore beware of presum-
ing that the response of men (and some women also) to the intrusion
of women into the sphere of insurrectionary behaviour would be invariably
one of simple hostility towards a breach of nineteenth-century social

ethics.
Even so, the presence on occasion of avowed feminists among the
insurgents could provide an added source of anxiety. This was less of
a problem in the period 1848-51 for by 1848 the revived feminist
movement of the 1830s had spent itself in questionable excess and
had been smothered by mockery and repression, vitiating the efforts of
more serious and circumspect women to promote a new campaign in
1848. The sense of caution manifested by the feminists of 1848 pre-
cluded any association by them (most certainly by their leaders, at all
events) in radical insurgency in June 1848 and December 1851, in
contradistinction to such involvement in the 1790s and 1871. By the
latter date the feminist cause had reappeared again, thanks to a hand-
ful of women of a new generation, eager to take advantage of new
educational opportunities and an atmosphere where they could now
win support from a minority of male radicals who had been nourished
on a generation of St Simonian and Fourierist ideas. After the fall of
the Commune, Captain Jouenne reserved his harshest attacks in the
fourth conseil de guerre not for the ordinary women of the people,
driven by privation or led on by others, but for the educated woman,
of whom Louise Michel the schoolteacher was a prime example, who
had not only fought on the barricades but had filled the heads of ignor-
ant, susceptible women and girls with noxious precepts that under-
mined the sanctity of property, the family, social convention and religious
precepts.
The insurrections of June 1848 and December 1851, as well as lacking
a feminist dimension, were quick spontaneous reactions in which women
were unable to express themselves through their own previously estab-
lished institutions. Even so, exasperation at economic deprivation, fear
of imminent political repression and - in a few instances - a more
sophisticated appraisal of what a people's republic could mean, drove
women to fight in ways reminiscent of the 1789 Revolution, but with
the additional imperatives of offence and defence created by the barri-
cade, that great instrument of rebellion that had emerged for the first
time in July 1830. Now the tasks of women extended from those of
rousing neighbourhoods, forcing out the men who shirked their duty
and ringing steeple bells to collecting material for barricades, provid-
ing shelter for snipers who covered the defence of them from win-
dows, collecting weapons and weapon material, spying or allowing their
homes to be used as spyposts, and, in a few cases, themselves fighting
on the barricades or organizing the neighbourhood defence in areas
Conclusion 159
like the Marais and Faubourg St Denis. Yet even those who fought
often cared for the wounded as well; roles overlapped and the spirit of
humanity was not lost. Women called for the administration of revolu-
tionary justice (as in the case of General Brea); with a sense of zest
they recalled the feats of their ancestors, such as the Reveillon Rict,
or the catchphrases of the 1789 Revolution (aristo, blancs) and songs
that evoked its deeds (Charlotte republicaine). By 1848 there is evi-
dence that, far from being content to be the passive symbols of revol-
ution or martyred liberty manipulated by men, they self-consciously
were adopting symbolic roles and poses for themselves; they demand-
ed red flags, sought to be standard bearers and, like the associates of
Adele Guerre at the barricade of the Porte St Denis, died in the at-
tempt. Nor were the continuities lost on their enemies, who denounced
them as furies reminiscent of the knitting women of the guillotine, or
as new Theroignes de Mericourt. They were accused of sadistic atroc-
ities and indeed in June 1848 (as in 1871) there was sufficient slight
evidence to supply the needs of an elaborate legend. Traditions of rev-
olutionary self-justification and counter-revolutionary paranoia evolved
side by side.
Though the insurrection of December 1851 reflected a more purely
political context we find militantes active again; women like Anne
Greppo and Armandine Huet roused the radical leaders of Paris to
resist the coup d'etat and sought to effect a quick mobilization; other
women provided material for barricades; female tavern-keepers pro-
vided centres of liaison and support. But the fighting in Paris proved
very shortlived, and there are few instances of female combatants. In
certain provincial areas, notably the Loiret and the Var, particular is-
sues of local significance brought together women who assumed lead-
ership roles and tried to encourage collective military resistance to the
coup d'etat. Suzanne Jarreau was outstanding for her record of leader-
ship in the Loiret though in certain villages of the Var women en-
gaged in a more collective response that probably reflected the stronger
sense of village community of the Midi and the previous association
of such women to combat economic problems.
Despite the ultimate failure of the Second Republic, its political
experience caused the radical left ideas to 'descend to the masses' in
an irrevocable and unprecedented way. The full fruits of this trend
were reaped in the Commune of 1871, which was truly the climax of
female insurgency in Paris. A period of revival of radical organiza-
tions and propaganda before 1870, followed by the exceptional priva-
tions of the war of 1870 and the siege of Paris, to which the Provisional
Government and National Assembly responded in even more insensi-

tive fashion than in 1848, provoked the largest rebellion in the history
of nineteenth-century Paris. The Commune survived long enough to
set up its own organizations of government and impart a sense of pol-
itical legitimacy to its activists. Never before had so many women
been involved in public bodies coexisting with official institutions, nor
had they been so rewarded with public duties or reforms that ben-
efited them. To the observer of the late twentieth century these con-
cessions may seem modest, yet they reinforced the sense of shared
revolutionary citizenship of Parisian women and were a contributory
factor to the suicidal devotion of many of them to the Communard
cause; in the end more fought and died for it than in any previous
revolution; the extreme sense of emergency in May 1871 made real
the proposal of Felix Belly that a regiment of Amazones be established
in the previous autumn. For the first time in a French rebellion, women
fought in a military battalion with male approval. On this occasion
they could reveal their true identity and did not feel obliged, as in
1830 and 1848, to dress as men.
When the essential needs of life seemed most at risk, as in June
1848 or May 1871 - tenancy, livelihood, family security - women
were visible. They seem to have been less visible in the Revolutions
of July 1830 and February 1848, as far as we can tell from the inad-
equate and largely anecdotal records that survive; these upheavals re-
sulted from crises more obviously political in character that were a
male preoccupation (though a current of economic discontent was present
as well). In the flurry of unrest of 13 June 1849 that arose out of the
protest over the Roman Expedition women seem scarcely to have been
present at all.
So far we have summarized their activity in the intermittent epi-
sodes of insurrection in nineteenth-century France. In the years that
intervened between these episodes, women, some of whom had already
played active roles as rebels, or would do so in the future, were not
idle. They provided shelter for male radicals on the run from the police,
assisted in political plots and escapes from prison, stored weapons and
disseminated propaganda material. These actions constituted a watch-
ing brief for revolutionary opportunities and help us to understand why
women moved quickly to exploit situations that promised to become
politically explosive in 1848, 1851 and 1871. In each of these three
rebellions we find examples of women activists who do not simply
rail against the rich and well fed, but have a familiar acquaintance
with radical clubs and newspapers. Evidence for continuity of radical
Conclusion 161
opmwn accounts also in some instances for the reappearance of the

same women in successive insurrections, as living embodiments of a
tradition that was passed on. Research for this book traced a few of
these, though there may have been more. In this connection we may
recall the names of Louise Bretagne, Veuve Henry, Claudine Monniot,
Therese Calayon, Veuve Delettra, Rose Jardinand and Simone Leblanc.
In all the insurrections of nineteenth-century France the majority of
female protagonists came from skilled artisan or service occupations,
though they might be joined by unskilled labourers and others leading
a marginal existence. The constant intervention of prostitutes from 1848
is probably linked to the intensification of a harsh regime of policing,
and their desire to retaliate against it, the influence of the men they
lived with, or criminal motives such as theft. Among women arrested
and convicted there appear repeatedly washerwomen, concierges and
housecleaners, women who were at the centre of neighbourhood net-
works and gossip. Small traders or tavern-keepers, women of the lower
middle class who occupied a similar social niche, also recur. They
were brought to rebel by economic adversity, personal affiliations or
neighbourhood solidarity, but middle-class participants in the broad
sense were only ever a small minority. We find actresses and school-
teachers, women who through impoverished upbringing or adversity
had rebelled against their background, become declassee and adopted
a revolutionary perspective: Louise Michel is the supreme example.
Ladies of respectable and wealthy middle-class background, however,
looked askance at women who demonstrated, and the street violence
so alien to their own culture, and some, such as the Protestant fem-
inist, reformer and barrister's wife, Eugenie Niboyet, strove to detach
women of the working class from such activities.
The female insurgency that we have discussed was not merely a
working-class matter but also above all a Parisian phenomenon. This
should not be surprising. The 1789 Revolution and First Empire ef-
fected a greater centralization of political and administrative power on
the capital than had been known before. Paris was the stage on which
a succession of nineteenth-century political regimes were made and
broken; in 1830, 1848 and 1870 successive regimes that lost control
of Paris lost control of France. With the gradual emergence of better
schooling facilities and a newspaper-reading public in the early nine-
teenth century, Paris increasingly attracted talented young individuals
from the provinces, giving rise to a body of discontented young men,
unemployed graduates, elderly student agitators, recruits for radical
journalism, who became the incendiary material for political insurrection. 1
Thus revolutionary ideas spread most widely and quickly in Paris, as-
sisted by the impact of street posters, pamphlets and newspapers that
could be read aloud to illiterate workers in cafes and workshops. Over-
population in some provincial areas and stagnation or decline of tradi-
tional rural occupations brought an unprecedented influx of the lower
classes into Paris in the early nineteenth century; the number of work-
ers and marginaux grew rapidly, and poverty, unstable employment
patterns and crime grew in addition. The rapid growth of the Parisian
population to over one million by 1848 enhanced the likelihood that
once a crowd of demonstrators had assembled from a densely inhabi-
ted working-class area, it could swell very quickly. Even workers in
settled, skilled trades were not immune from the effects of cyclical
economic prosperity and depression that characterized this period. Most
of the women arrested for rebellion in the June Days and the com-
mune were natives of the provinces, and unemployment had been a
frequent experience with many of them.
Though certain other French cities, notably Lyon, Rouen and Limoges,
experienced a milder version of the insurrectionary violence that af-
fected Paris, this did not happen with the same frequency. Research
suggests that the role of women in the violence of these provincial
cities was sporadic. Perhaps this passivity is associated with the fact
that they did not have a continuous tradition of female insurgency dating
from 1789. The provinces also lagged behind the capital in politicization,
and looked naturally to Paris for the cue for rebellion. Also relevant
may be the fact that, with the exception of certain troubles in Lyon in
the 1830s and 1840s, provincial rebellions were always more quickly
and easily suppressed than their sprawling, amorphous counterparts in
Paris.
There seems to be an adequate body of evidence to support the view
that a distinct pattern of female insurgency did emerge in the French
capital after 1789, which, while finding its roots in traditional causes
related to hunger and unemployment, became increasingly linked to
politicized forms of action and symbols. With each phase of rebellion
in the nineteenth century, the nature of female participation deepened
and diversified. It does seem likely, as Stearns and Thomas assert,
that more women were involved in June 1848 than in July 1830, and
certainly the Commune attracted the greatest and most articulate number.
Women came to demand citizenship alongside men and expressed it in
their own ways related to their gender role. The more frequent the
occasions on which women were roused to such action the more con-
fidence on the part of some militantes in their actions would increase.
Conclusion 163
Rose Jardinand, compromised with the rest of her family in the rising
at Bonny-sur-Loire in 1851, spoke publicly at the Club de l'Ecole de
Medecine in 1871, and built barricades in the Rue Jacob and Rue
Bonaparte. Reproachful interrogation by a court martial after her ar-
rest in the Commune did not move her; she declared quite simply, 'I
had the right to do it.' 2 Women of such firm convictions could mobi-
lize others more preoccupied with daily cares to exercise an informal
sovereignty in defiance of a society that consistently denied them pol-
itical and civil rights. In so doing they ensured a continuous female
presence in the turbulence of nearly a century in which France strug-
gled to achieve a settled form of political modernity.
Abbreviations used in the Notes
and Bibliography
Am Hist R American Historical Review
Eur Stu R European Studies Review
F Hist French History
F Hist Stu French Historical Studies
Hist Eur Ideas History of European Ideas
Hist J Historical Journal
JAm Hist Journal of American History
J Mod Hist Journal of Modern History
Mouv Soc Le Mouvement Social
Past and P Past and Present
Rev Hist Revue Historique
Rev Hist Econ Soc Revue d'Histoire Economique et Sociale
Rev Hist Mod Cont Revue d'Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine
164
Notes
CHAPTER 1 THE LEGACY OF THE 1789 REVOLUTION: DEFINING

THE ISSUES
1. J. Michelet, Histoire de France au moyen age. Jeanne d'Arc (Paris,

Calmann-Levy, undated), p. 290. He remarks in the same work (p. 165)
that it was not rare to see women take up arms at this time, and refers
to 30 women wounded in a battle at Amiens, and to Jeanne Hachette.
2. It is perhaps worth noting that while England, too, had her medieval
women saviours, such as Aethelfiaed, the 'Lady of the Mercians', who
fought against Danish invaders, and Queen Philippa of Hainault, who
led an English army to victory against the Scots at Neville's Cross,
they do not rank so significantly in national iconography.
3. See, for example, the approving comment on Joan of Arc as a national
heroine by the republican Ernest Lavisse in a history primer published
for state elementary schools in 1876. He quotes her as having died for
France and of having provided a finer historical story than that of any
other country. SeeR. Girardet (ed.), Le nationalisme franrais. Anthologie
1871-1914 (Paris, 1983), pp. 80-l.
4. 0. Hufton, 'Women in revolution, 1789-96', French society and the
Revolution, ed. D. Johnson (Cambridge, 1976), pp. 151-2.
5. P. McPhee, A social history of France, 1780-1880 (London, New York,
1992), p. 24; also S.P. Conner, 'Women and Politics', French women
and the age of Enlightenment, ed. S.l. Spencer (Bloomington, Indiana,
1984), p. 51 for the debate on whether such disorder had political
overtones.
6. G. Rude, The crowd in the French Revolution (Oxford, 1960), pp. 24,
249, Appendix V.
7. Ibid, p. 184.
8. D. Godineau, 'Masculine and feminine political practice during the French
Revolution, 1793-Year III', Women and politics in the age of the demo-
cratic revolution, ed. H.B. Applewhite and D.G. Levy (Ann Arbor, Michi-
gan, 1990), pp. 69-76.
9. Rude, Crowd, pp. 37, 39, 230, 249, Appendix V.
10. Ibid, pp. 58-9.
11. For the background to the March on Versailles of 5 October 1789 see
D.M.G. Sutherland, France 1789-1815. Revolution and counter-revolu-
tion (London, 1985), pp. 83-5.
12. J. Michelet, Revolutionfranraise, i, La prise de La Bastille (Paris, 1928),
p. 386.
13. Ibid, p. 388.
14. D. Godineau, Citoyennes tricoteuses. Les femmes du peuple a Paris
pendant La Revolution franraise (Aix-en-Provence, 1988), pp. ll 0-11.
15. Michelet, Revolution, i, p. 389.
165
166 Notes
16. Rude, Crowd, pp. 232-5.

17. Rude, Crowd, pp. 178-84; Godineau, Masculine, p. 82.
18. Godineau, Masculine, p. 64.
19. Michelet, Revolution, i. p. 389.
20. Godineau, Tricoteuses, p. 23.
21. Ibid, p. 94.
22. Ibid, p. 68.
23. Michele!, Revolution, i, p. 389.
26. Sutherland, France 1789-1815, p. 140; Rude, Crowd, pp. 96-7, 183.
28. ibid, pp. 235, 368-9.
29. Ibid, pp. 235, 366.
30. Ibid, pp. 231-2.
31. Hufton, Women, p. 159 footnote.
34. Rude, Crowd, p. 73.
35. Ibid, p. 98.
36. Godineau, Tricoteuses, pp. 133-4.
37. D.G. Levy and H. Applewhite, 'Women, radicalization and the fall of
the French monarchy', Women and politics, ed. Applewhite and Levy,
p. 101.
38. Levy and Applewhite, Women, radicalization, pp. 96-8; Rude, Crowd,
pp. 98-101.
40. Ibid, p. 105.
41. Levy and Applewhite, Women, radicalization, p. 89; Godineau, Tricoteuses,
p. ll9.
42. E. Roudinesco, Madness and revolution. The lives and legends of
Theroigne de Mericourt, trans. M. Thorn (London, 1991), pp. 3-13.
43. La Gazette des Femmes, 19 June 1841, 'Femmes-soldats de la Revolution'.
44. A. Laserre, La participation collective des femmes a la Revolution
franraise (Paris, 1906), p. 281, quoted in Hufton, Women, p. 158 foot-
note; P-M. Duhet, Les femmes et la Revolution 1789-94 (Paris, 1971),
pp. 114-21 discusses women who enlisted in the armed forces.
45. J. Landes, Women and the public sphere in the age of the French Rev-
olution (Ithaca and London, 1988), p. 139.
46. C.G. Moses, French feminism in the nineteenth century (Albany, New
York, 1984), pp. 9-10.
47. Ibid, p. 13.
48. Sutherland, France 1789-1815, p. 198.
49. Landes, Women and the public sphere, pp. 140-1.
50. D. Godineau, 'Daughters of liberty and revolutionary citizens', trans.
A. Goldhammer, A History of women in the West, iv, Emerging femi-
nism from revolution to world war, ed. G. Fraisse and M. Perrot (Cam-
bridge, Massachusetts, and London, 1993), pp. 19-20.
51. J. Abray, 'Feminism in the French Revolution', Am Hist R, 80 (1975),
60-1.
Notes 167
52. Abray, Feminism, pp. 56-7; Duhet, Les femmes, pp. 150-7, 205-7, 218-
20; F. Eaubonne, Histoire et actualite du feminisme (Paris, 1972), p. 109.
53. Duhet, Les femmes, pp. 150-7; Godineau, Masculine, p. 71.
54. Hufton, Women, p. 160.
57. Ibid, pp. 66, 68, 76; Rude, Crowd, p. 152.
58. Godineau, Daughters of Liberty, p. 16.
59. Levy and Applewhite, Women, radicalization, p. 96.
60. L. Hunt, Politics, culture and class in the French Revolution (Berkeley,
1984), pp. 88-9.
61. M. Warner, Monuments and maidens. The allegory of the female form
(London, 1985), p. 31.
62. M. Agulhon, Marianne into battle. Republican imagery and symbolism
in France, 1789-1880, trans. J. Lloyd (Cambridge, 1981), pp. 27, 30.
63. Hunt, Politics, culture, pp. 61-2.
64. Ibid, pp. 64-5.
65. Agulhon, Marianne, p. 65.
66. Roudinesco, Madness and revolution, pp. 29-32.
67. L. Strumingher, 'Looking back: women of 1848 and the revolutionary
heritage of 1789', Women and politics, ed. Applewhite and Levy, p.
267.
68. M. du Camp, Souvenirs de l'annee 1848 par M. du Camp. La Revolution
de jevrier, le 15 mai, ['Insurrection de juin (Paris, 1876), pp. 122-3.
69. M. Perrot, 'La femme populaire rebelle', L'histoire sans qualites ed.
C. Dufrancatel et al. (Paris, 1979), p. 133.
70. Ibid, p. 135.
71. J. Maitron, Dictionnaire biographique du mouvement ouvrier franrais,
premiere partie, 1789-1864 (Vo1s I-III, Paris, 1964-6), ii, 487.
72. Ibid, iii, 58, 408.
73. T. Margadant, French peasants in revolt. The insurrection of eighteen
fifty one (Princeton, New Jersey, 1979), pp. 85-6.
74. Perrot, La femme, pp. 139-40.
75. P. Amann, Revolution and mass democracy. The Paris club movement
in 1848 (Princeton, New Jersey, 1975), p. 7.
76. R. Price, A social history of nineteenth century France (London, 1987),
p. 215.
77. L.A. Achard, Souvenirs personnels d'emeutes et de revolutions (Paris,
1872), p. 104.
78. Perrot, La femme, pp. 136-7; Godineau, Masculine, p. 74.
79. C. Tilly et al., The rebellious century 1830-1930 (London, 1975),
p. 61; also confirmed in C. Tilly, The contentious French. Four centu-
ries of popular struggle (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1986), pp. 270-1.
Even so, as we shall see below, individual cases of women who tried
to organize strikes and lead worker resistance were not unknown.
80. G. Weill, Histoire du parti republicain en France, 1814-70 (Paris, 1928),
p. 73.
81. Perrot, La femme, pp. 146, 152-3.
82. See, for example, P. Robertson, An experience of women. Pattern and
change in nineteenth-century Europe (Philadelphia, 1982), pp. 143-6;
168 Notes
B.G. Smith, Ladies of the leisure class: the bourgeoises of northern

France in the nineteenth century (Princeton, New Jersey, 1981 ), pp.
66-92.
83. M. Agulhon, Marianne into battle, p. 66.
84. J. Rendall, The origins of modern feminism. Women in Britain, France
and the United States, I780-1860 (London, 1985), pp. 232-3.
85. P. Stearns, The revolutions of I848 (London, 1974), pp. 178-9.
86. E. Thomas, Les femmes de I848 (Paris, 1948), p. 56.
87. E. Thomas, Les petroleuses (Paris, 1963), pp. 8, 9.
88. Schulkind, 'Socialist women in the 1871 Paris Commune', Past and P,
106 (1985), 126 footnote 4;128.
89. Ibid, pp. 123, 156, 162-3.
90. L.A. Tilly and J.W. Scott, Women, work and family (New York, 1978),
pp. 140-1.
91. La Voix des femmes, no. 1, 20 March 1848, quoted in Thomas, Les
femmes, p. 51.
92. T. McBride, The domestic revolution. The modernization of household
service in England and France, I820-I920 (New York, 1978), p. 55.
93. Ibid, p. 59; R. Price, A social history, p. 208.
94. A. de Tocqueville, Recollections, ed. J.P. Mayer and A.P. Kerr, trans.
G. Lawrence (New York, 1971), pp. 177-8.
95. E. Sullerot, Histoire et sociologie du travail feminin (Paris, 1968), pp.
106-7.
96. R. Gossez, Les ouvriers de Paris, Livre premier, L'organisation, I848-
5I (Societe d'histoire de 1a Revolution de 1848, tome 24, La Roche-
sur-Yon, 1967), p. 170.
97. Sullerot, Histoire et sociologie, pp. 92-6.
98. A. Husson, Les consommations de Paris (Paris, 1856), p. 59.
99. A.J-B. Parent-Duchatelet, La prostitution ii Paris (Paris, 1900), p. 22.
100. P. Leroy-Beaulieu, Le travail des femmes au dix-neuvieme siecle (Par-
is, 1873), p. 150, quoted in M. Albistur and D. Armogathe, Histoire du
feminisme fran~ais du moyen age ii nos jours (Paris, 1977), p. 312.
101. M~r F. Dupanloup, M. Duruy et /'education des filles, lettre de Mgr
l'Eveque d'Orleans ii un de ses coltegues, quoted in J. Rabaut, Histoire
des feminismes fran~ais (Paris, 1978), p. 150.
CHAPTER 2 THE REVOLUTION OF 1830 AND THE JULY

MONARCHY: THE HEROINES OF LIBERTY
1. P. Pilbeam, The I830 Revolution in France (London, 1991), p. 62.

2. C. Church, Europe in I830. Revolution and political change (London,
1983), p. 159.
3. P. Pilbeam, 'The growth of liberalism and the crisis of the Bourbon Res-
toration 1827-30', Hist J, 25 (1982), 366; J.P. Gonnet, 'Esquisse de la
crise economique en France de 1827-32', Rev Hist Econ Soc, 33 (1955),
249; Pilbeam, I830 Revolution, pp. 63-4 stresses the significance of econ-
omic motives.
4. Archives Nationales (subsequently AN) F7 6772, quoted in L. Chevalier,
Notes 169
Labouring classes and dangerous classes in Paris during the first half
of the nineteenth century, trans. F. Jellinek (London, 1973), p. 266.
5. Church, Europe in 1830, p. 72.
6. E. Suddaby and P.J. Yarrow (eds), Lady Morgan in France (Newcastle
upon Tyne, 1971), pp. 297-8.
7. Pilbeam, The growth, 361-3.
8. Motivation for the violence is discussed in D.H. Pinkney, The French
Revolution of 1830 (Princeton, New Jersey, 1972), p. 258 et seq.
9. Pinkney, French Revolution, p. 256; confirmed by Pilbeam, 1830 Revol-
ution, p. 62, who declares that 'women figured prominently in building
barricades and in the more traditional roles of feeding and tending the
combatants.'
10. D.H. Pinkney, 'The crowd in the French Revolution of 1830', Am Hist
R, 70 (1964), 6.
11. Bibliotheque Nationale (subsequently BN) Lb 49 1467 Actions heroi"ques
des parisiens pendant les journees des 27, 28 et 29 juillet 1830 (anon,
Paris, 1830), p. 97.
12. BN Lb 49 1444 Histoire de Ia revolution des quatre-vingt-seize heures,
par M. Aug. lmbert (Paris, 1830), p. 98.
13. Archives de Ia Prefecture de Police de Paris (subsequently APP) Aa 392
Recompenses nationales H-Hi, dossier Veuve Harmand.
14. Memoirs of the Comtesse de Boigne 1820-30, ed. C. Nicoullaud (3 vols,
London, 1908), iii, 248.
15. BN Lb 49 1469 Les heroi"nes parisiennes, ou actions glorieuses des dames,
leurs traits d'esprit et d'humanite. Quelques victimes parmi elles, pendant
les trois journees memorables de juillet 1830 (Paris, no date), p. 21.
16. Ibid, p. 37.
17. Ibid, p. 48.
18. Histoire de Ia revolution ... par M. Aug. Imbert, p. 72.
19. AN F 1 d III 50 Recompenses honorifiques. Combattants et blesses de
juillet 1830, Cl-Cor, dossier Femme Coiffier, nee Marie Preaux, letter of
Marie Coiffier to the Minister of the Interior, 23 July 1841.
20. Actions heroi"ques des parisiens, pp. 135-6.
juillet 1830, Mas-Mey, dossier Mercier, Josephine, letter of President de
Ia commission des recompenses to the Chef de division des beaux-arts,
14 March 1831.
22. BN Lb 51 530 Bravoure, devouement et heroisme d'une jeune fille pen-
dant les journees des 27, 28 et 29 juillet 1830 (anon, Agen, undated),
pp. 2-4.
23. Rapport de M. Sensier, ancien notaire commissaire du deuxieme
arrondissement, charge de constater le nombre des victimes et les faits
memorables des glorieuses journees des 27, 28 et 29 juillet 1830 (Paris,
1830), pp. 29, 39-40.
24. Les heroi"nes parisiennes, pp. 44, 53.
25. Agulhon, Marianne into battle, pp. 27-30. Agulhon argues that the live
figure in the Notre-Dame ceremony was, according to contemporary records,
a 'goddess of liberty', not a 'goddess of reason'; Warner, Monuments
and maidens, pp. 286-7.
170 Notes
26. See, for example, BN Lb 49 1465 Tablettes populaires. Recueil des traits
de courage et de patriotisme qui ont signale les journees des 27, 28 et
29 juillet 1830; publie par AM (Paris, 1830), p. 5; also Lb49 1441 Revolution
memorable des journees des 27, 28 et 29 juillet 1830; contenant les details
des combats soutenus par Ia population parisienne par Cousin d'Avalon
(Paris, 1830), pp. 5-6.
27. Rapport de M. Sensier, p. 45; Les heroi"nes parisiennes, p. 52.
28. J-L. Bory, La revolution de juillet. 29 juillet 1830 (Paris, 1972), pp. 400,
383.
29. Actions heroi"ques des parisiens, p. 172.
30. T.J. Clark, The absolute bourgeois. Artists and politics in France 1848-
51 (London, 1982), pp. 17-18, claims that Delacroix was inspired by a
working woman called Marie Deschamps, who fought on the barricades
and was decorated; no record of a woman of this name is to be found in
the series AN F 1 d III 42-78 Recompenses honorifiques. But Jean-Louis
Bory, in La revolution de juillet, p. 417, declares that Marie Deschamps
picked up the gun of a dead man and used it in the fighting on the Place
de Greve on 28 July. Bory does not indicate his source. Another view is
given by Marcia Pointon, who refers to a laundress, Anne-Charlotte D,
as the source of inspiration, describing how, on finding her brother dead
in the streets, she swore to kill ten Swiss Guards and was herself killed
as she was about to shoot the tenth. M. Pointon, 'Liberty on the barri-
cades. Women, politics and sexuality in Delacroix', Women, state and
revolution. Essays on power and gender in Europe since 1789, ed. S
Reynolds (Brighton, 1986), p. 29.
31. N.Z. Davis, 'Women on top: symbolic sexual inversion and political dis-
order in early modern Europe', The reversible world. Symbolic inversion
in art and society, ed. B.A. Babcock (Ithaca, New York, 1978), pp.
147-90, esp. pp. 182-3.
32. Actions heroi"ques des parisiens, p. 172.
33. Revolution memorable, p. 86.
34. BN Lb51 4481 Revolution defevrier 1848. Relation historique et authentique
des evenements des 22, 23 et 24 par MM. T.L. et H. C., temoins oculaires
actifs (Paris, 1848), p. 15.
35. Arsene Houssaye, in an article in L'Artiste, quoted by C. Robin, Histoire
de La revolution fran~aise de 1848 (2 vols, Paris, 1850), i, 328-9.
36. Pilbeam, 1830 Revolution, p. 84.
37. Pointon, Liberty on the barricades, p. 42.
38. Clark, Absolute bourgeois, p. 19.
39. Warner, Monuments and maidens, pp. 272-3.
40. Histoire de Ia revolution ... par M. Aug. 1mbert, p. 150.
41. Pinkney, French Revolution, p. 268.
42. Ibid, p. 271.
43. Bravoure, devouement, pp. 1-2.
juillet 1830, Br-Bu, dossier Bretagne, Louise, Femme Boindon, letter of
the Minister of the Interior to the Directeur des dons et secours de Ia
presidence, 2 Oct. 1852.
45. La Gazette des Tribunaux, 28 Nov. 1832, p. 91.
Notes 171
46. AN F 1 d III 47, dossier Bretagne, Louise, letter of the Prefect of Police
to the Minister of the. Interior, 16 Aug. 1836; AAP Aa 421 Evenements
divers 1831-3, 81, letter of the Minister of the Interior to the Prefect of
Police, 2 Feb. 1833; 82, Extrait des minutes de Ia greffe de Ia Cour
royale de Paris (undated).
47. APP Aa 422 Evenements divers 1834, 141, report of the Prefect of Police
to the Chief Public Prosecutor, 19 April and I Aug. 1837; J. Maitron,
Dictionnaire biographique, ii, 40.
48. Sullerot, Histoire et sociologie, p. 106.
49. APP Aa 422 Evenements divers 1834, 166, report of the Prefect of Police
to the Chief Public Prosecutor, 28 April 1834.
50. R. Bezucha, The Lyon uprising of 1834. Social and political conflict in
the early July Monarchy (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1974), pp. 165-6,
160, 168.
51. APP Aa 423 Evenements divers 1835 et 1836, 35, report of the Prefect
of Police, 25 Aug. 1835.
52. APP Aa 425 Affaires de mai 1839, 539, report of the Prefect of Police to
the Chief Public Prosecutor, 4 Nov. 1839; Aa 426 Evenements de 1840-
7, 192, letter of Police Superintendant Gouin to the Directeur du depot
de Ia Prefecture, 4 May 1842.
53. APP Aa 426 Evenements de 1840-7, 47, 'Dossier collectif des individus
arretes par suite de I' attentat du 13 septembre 1841 '.
54. Maitron, Dictionnaire biographique, ii. 307; Weill, Histoire du parti
republicain, p. 59.
55. For the debate on whether such protest is 'political' or 'pre-political' see
P. McPhee, The politics of rural life. Mobilization in the French coun-
tryside 1846-52 (Oxford, 1992), pp. 66-7, 69-71.
56. R. Price, 'Popular disturbances in the French provinces after the July
Revolution of 1830', Eur Stu R, 1 (1971), 334.
57. G. Bourgin, 'La crise ouvriere a Paris dans Ia seconde moitie de 1830',
Rev hist, 198 (1947), 213.
58. Price, Popular disturbances, p. 332.
59. Pilbeam, 1830 Revolution, pp. 174-5.
60. J. Merriman, The red city. Limoges and the French nineteenth century
(New York, Oxford, 1985), pp. 61, 63.
61. G. Dupeux, 'Aspects agricoles de Ia crise: le departement de Loir-et-
Cher', Aspects de Ia crise et de Ia depression de l'economie fran~aise
au milieu du dix-neuvieme siecle, 1846-51. Etudes sous Ia direction d'E.
Labrousse (Bibliotheque de Ia Revolution de 1848, 19, La Roche-sur-
Yon, 1956), p. 86.
62. P. Deyon, 'Aspects industriels de Ia crise: Rouen', Aspects de Ia crise,
p. 147.
63. R. Price, The Modernization of rural France. Communications networks
and agricultural market structures in nineteenth-century France (Lon-
don, 1983), p. 183.
64. T. Margadant, 'Proto-urban development and political modernization during
the Second Republic', French cities in the nineteenth century, ed. J.M.
Merriman (London, 1982), p. 114. ,
65. R. Gossez, 'La resistance a l'impot: les quarante-cinq centimes', Etudes
172 Notes
de P. Augrand, G. Bourgin, et cetera (Bibliotheque de Ia Revolution de

1848, 15, Nancy, 1953), p. 106.
66. Price, A social history, p. 238, for example, records only 15 cases of
machine-breaking and 15 more attempts between 1815 and 1847.
67. Maitron, Dictionnaire biographique, i, 275.
68. P. Stearns, 'Patterns of industrial strike activity in France during the July
Monarchy', Am Hist R, 70 (1965), 373.
69. Ibid, pp. 373-5.
70. Maitron, Dictionnaire biographique, ii, 200.
71. Ibid, iii, 225.
72. H.A.C. Collingham, The July Monarchy. A political history of France,
1830-48 (London and New York, 1988), pp. 385-415 gives a good ac-
count of the crisis leading to the February Revolution of 1848.
CHAPTER 3 THE FEBRUARY REVOLUTION OF 1848 AND ITS

AFTERMATH: THE CALL FOR THE 'DEMOCRATIC AND SOCIAL
REPUBLIC'
I. C. Tilly and L.H. Lees, 'The people of June 1848', Revolution and reac-
tion. 1848 and the Second French Republic, ed. R. Price (London, 1975),
pp. 177-8.
fevrier et juin 1848, B, dossier Bettrette, Adelaide, 'lettres des voisins et
amis' to the Minister of the Interior, dated 13 April, 30 July and 6 Aug.
1848.
3. P. Dominique, Les journees de quarante-huit (Paris, 1948), p. 37.
4. N. Castera, Histoire Ia plus complete, Ia plus exacte, Ia plus detailtee de
Ia revolution des 22, 23 et 24 fevrier 1848 (Paris, 1848), p. 184.
5. See above, chapter 2 note 34.
6. Castera, Histoire Ia plus complete, p. 105.
7. See above, chapter 2, note 35.
8. Memoirs of Sir Edward Blount KCB, ed. S.J. Reid (London, 1902),
p. 116.
fevrier et juin 1848, C, dossier Chiron, Fran~oise, Veuve Royer, letter of
F. Chiron to the National Assembly, 18 May 1848.
10. P. Bolingbroke St John, French Revolution in 1848. The three days of
February 1848 (New York, 1848), p. 123.
II. AN BB 30 296 Instruction judiciaire sur les journees de fevrier 1848. Cour
d'appel de Paris: deposition des temoins, 13 May 1848.
12. L. Menard, Prologue d'une revolution, fevrier-juin 1848 (Paris, 1849),
p. 19. Mark Traugott, attempting an impressionistic survey of the class
structure of the crowd from the records of the Commission de Recompense
(AN F 1 d III 83-98) and reports of arrondissement mayors on the fight-
ing (BB 30 296-8), finds that the typical rebel of February 1848 was male,
aged 35, married, likely to be of provincial origin, of a skilled trade and
rudimentary education; 98.9 per cent of rebels recorded were male, a
slightly greater proportion than that discovered by Tilly and Lees among
Notes 173
the insurgents of June 1848 (97 .6 per cent); and that, as in 1830 and
1871, skilled workers and a small proportion of the middle classes made
up the crowd, not marginal elements [M. Traugott, 'The Crowd in the
French Revolution of February 1848', JAm Hist, 93 (1988), 644, 645,
652].
fevrier et juin 1848, F, dossier Fargant, Aurelia, letter of A. Fargant to
the President de Ia Commission des recompenses nationales, 18 Sept.
1848.
14. D. Stern, Histoire de Ia revolution de 1848 (3 vols, Paris, 1850-3), i,
185 footnote; also Castera, Histoire Ia plus complete, p. 184. Maria Lopez
had made her debut in Paris at the Comedie Fran~aise in July 1844,
performing in Regnard's Le Legataire universe/ (Le Charivari, 7 July
1844).
15. Archives de I' Armee de Terre, Vincennes (subsequently AA), Justice
militaire 1848, Insurrection de juin 1848, dossiers 11 626; 12 261; 12 262
Femme Leblanc, Augustine, interrogation of 27 Aug. 1848.
16. AN F 1 d III 84 Recompenses honorifiques ... dossier Bettrette, Adelaide,
Jetter of ? January 1850 from Prefecture of Police to the Minister of the
Interior.
17. Stern, Histoire de Ia revolution, i, 140-1.
18. BN Lb 51 4481 Revolution de fevrier 1848, p. 14.
19. Tilly and Lees, 'The people', p. 177.
20. AN C 930 Assemblee Nationale, Commission d'enquete, 2° vol, ve dos-
sier, Ateliers nationaux, 624 pieces divers, bruits de ville.
21. AA Justice militaire 1848, Insurrection de juin 1848, dossiers 4703; 4497
Femme Debeurgrave, Elisa, testimonies of Jeanne Nelle, Marie Pichard,
Maria Varin and Fran~oise Petit, all 11 Sept. 1848.
22. J. Merriman, The margins of city life. Explorations on the French urban
frontier 1815-51 (New York, 1991), p. 43.
23. P. Amann, Revolution and mass democracy. The Paris club movement in
1848 (Princeton, New Jersey, 1975), p. 17.
24. A. Daumard, La bourgeoisie parisienne 1815-48 (Paris, 1963), p. 182,
quoted in Amann, Revolution, p. 16.
25. L. Chevalier, Labouring classes, p. 86.
26. AN F 1 d III Recompenses honorifiques ... dossier Bretagne, Louise, Femme
Boindon, letters of Louise Bretagne to the Minister of the Interior, 20
Dec. 1837, 16 Dec. 1843; letter of the Prefect of Police to the Minister
of the Interior, ll Aug. 1838; Note of 20 May 1842; Report of the Pre-
fect of Police, June 1850.
27. R. Price, 'Poor relief and social crisis in mid-nineteenth century France',
Eur Stu R, 13 (1983), 434.
28. Gossez, Les ouvriers de Paris, i, 170-l.
29. Le Volcan, Parle citoyen sans peur, no 2, 18-22 June 1848; quoted in
Thomas, Les femmes de 1848, p. 55.
30. Le National, 8 May 1848.
31. I. Marvel (D.G. Mitchell), The battle summer; being transcripts from
personal observations in Paris during the year 1848 (New York, 1850),
p. 273.
174 Notes
32. AA Justice militaire 1848, Insurrection de juin 1848, dossier 6752 Femme
Lecaufette, Genevieve, interrogation of the accused, 7 July 1848.
33. La Voix des Femmes, no 26, 18 April 1848, 'Les deleguees des ouvrieres
de Paris' (Desiree Gay).
34. AN C 934 Assemblee Nationale, VIlle dossier, Renseignements divers,
2771, Releve des petitions addressees par les ouvriers de toutes les in-
dustries de France a Ia commission de gouvernement pour I' organisation
du travail'. See also Gossez, Les ouvriers de Paris, i, 170.
35. Thomas, Les femmes, pp. 52-3.
36. Ibid.
37. La Voix des Femmes, no 14, 3 April 1848, 'Societe de Ia voix des femmes.
Co mite central organisateur. Seance publique du dimanche 2 avril 1848'.
38. Gossez, Les ouvriers de Paris, i, p. 170.
39. Amann, Revolution, p. 33.
40. Ibid, pp. 326-8.
41. D.B. Weiner, Franfois-Vincent Raspail, scientist and reformer, 1794-
1878 (Columbia, New York, 1968), p. 205.
42. Thomas, Les femmes, p. 47 refers to only one or two instances of a
woman speaking in favour of women's rights at a club; at the Club Lyonnais
an anonymous working woman called for political rights and a living
wage for women; at the Club de !'Emancipation des Peuples 'Jeanne
Marie', a feminist spokeswoman, called for female education.
43. Amann, Revolution, pp. 63-4.
44. Election statistics from G.W. Fasel, 'The French election of April 23,
1848: suggestions for a revision', F Hist Stu, 5 (1968), 285-98, esp.
289-90.
45. Amann, Revolution, p. 97.
46. Ibid, pp. 176-7.
47. Stern, Histoire de la revolution, ii, 223-4.
48. Achard, Souvenirs personnels, p. 113.
49. Marvel, The battle summer, p. 171.
50. Ibid.
51. M. Traugott, Armies of the poor. Determinants of working-class partici-
. pation in the Parisian insurrection of June 1848 (Princeton, New Jersey,
1985), pp. 136-42.
52. AN C 934 Assemblee Nationale, VIIIe dossier, Renseignements divers,
2692, Etat des principales arrestations politiques du 15 mai au 22 juin
1848.
53. AN C 930 Assemblee Nationale. Commission d'enquete, vol 2, VIe dos-
sier, Rapports de Ia police generale, 695, 19 June 1848.
54. La Gazette des Tribunaux, 12 July 1848, p. 882.
55. L'Observateur franfais, 17 June 1848; La Voix des Femmes, no 44, 13-
16 June 1848.
56. Leonard Gallois, describing the July Revolution in La derniere semaine
de juillet 1830 (Paris, 1830), BN Lb 49 1413, speaks of the faubourg as
having a reputation that was 'redoutable' and 'jadis si terrible' (p. 9).
Auguste Luchet wrote in 1830, in Paris, esquisses dediees au peuple parisien,
that the Faubourg St Antoine was the most turbulent and formidable dis-
trict when roused [quoted in L. Chevalier, Labouring classes, p. 209].
Notes 175
57. AN C 934 Assemblee Nationale. Commission d'enquete, m• dossier,

Rapports sur les journees de juin, 3427, letter of Thumeloup, architect-
engineer at the Ecole centrale de Saintonge, 6 July 1848.
58. Le National, 23 June 1848.
59. See Amann, Revolution, pp. 301-6 for a description of the mobilization
of the June rebels; also R. Price, The French Second Republic. A social
history (London, 1972), pp. 177-86.
60. AN C 930 Assemblee Nationale. Commission d'enquete, vo1 2, VI• dos-
sier, Rapports de Ia police generate, 698, 22 June 1848, 9 o'clock in the
evening.
61. This is the estimate of Tilly and Lees, The people, p. 186.
62. Ibid, pp. 170-82 discusses this issue.
CHAPTER 4 DEFENDING LIVELIHOODS AND NEIGHBOURHOODS:

THE JUNE DAYS OF 1848
1. Amann, Revolution, pp. 303-6, 309.

2. AN F7 2585 Liste generate par ordre alphabetique des inculpes compris
dans Ia procedure instruite a !'occasion de !'insurrection de juin 1848.
Another such list, F7 2586, exists at the Archives Nationales, but in a
damaged condition, and communication of it to readers is forbidden.
3. Reports of pensions in the series AN F 1 d III 42-78 (for July 1830);
83-98 (for February 1848); municipal reports of the February insurrec-
tion in the arrondissements in AN BB 30 296-8.
4. Tocqueville, Recollections, p. 170.
5. Stern, Histoire de La revolution, iii, 224.
6. Lord Normanby, Journal of a year of revolution (2 vols, London, 1857),
ii, 43, footnote.
7. L-R. Villerme, Tableau de l'etat physique et moral des ouvriers employes
dans les manufactures de eaton, de Laine et de soie (2 vols, Paris, 1840)
contains warnings for example in ii, 292, 373; E. Buret, De La misere
des classes laborieuses en Angleterre et en France (2 vols, Paris, 1840)
has similar warnings in ii, 475, 480-1, 485.
8. Buret, De La misere, i, 14.
9. Ibid, ii, 481.
10. Ibid, i, 399-400.
11. See Chevalier, Labouring classes, pp. 2, 86, 102 for contemporary views;
also Merriman, The margins, pp. 14-16, 62.
12. V. Hugo, Chases vues (Paris, 1972), p. 346.
13. See, for instance, the description in Le Constitutionnel, 24 June 1848.
14. Recit complet des evenements des 23, 24, 25 et 26 et des jours suivants
par M.A. Pages-Duport, avocat a LaCour d'appel de Paris (Paris, 1848),
p. 27.
15. For instance, by Karl Marx. See K. Marx, Surveys from exile (ed. D.
Fernbach, Harmondsworth, 1977), pp. 52-3. Marx argued that the 'riff
raff' joined the Mobile Guard and fought for order in June.
16. Price, The French Second Republic, p. 166; Tilly and Lees, The people,
pp. 187-98, esp. p. 198.
176 Notes
17. Tilly and Lees, The people, p. 190.

18. It is unclear whether Tilly and Lees distinguish between women actu-
ally arrested and those for whom warrants were issued but who escaped
justice. This study includes both categories.
19. For example, see Stern, Histoire de Ia revolution, iii, 172-3; Hugo,
Chases vues, op. cit.
21. Ibid, p. 190.
22. Ibid, p. 207, note 47. The great incidence of arrested women in the
clothing trade is a reflection of the importance of female labour in
textiles and clothing. According to the Statistique de l'industrie a Paris,
resultant de l' enquete fait par la Chambre de commerce pour les annees
1847-8 (Paris, 1851 ), two-thirds of all employed Parisian women worked
in two sectors, 'Thread and Textiles' and 'Clothing and Shoes', in which
they constituted 66.5 per cent and 64.2 per cent of the workforce re-
spectively. Figures from Traugott, Armies of the poor, p. 217, note 54.
23. The problems of the evidence are indicated by Tilly and Lees, The people,
p. 187.
24. AA Justice militaire 1848, Insurrection de juin 1848, dossiers 11 452;
11 635 Femme Comeau, Charlotte, testimonies of Abbe Louis Gaudreau,
cure of St Antoine, 28 July 1848 and Remy Fleury, 29 Aug. 1848.
25. This rumour was to be found in contemporary accounts, such as J.P.
Simpson, Pictures from revolutionary Paris sketched during the first
phase of the Revolution of 1848 (2 vo1s, Edinburgh, 1849), ii, 282.
26. AA Justice militaire 1848, Insurrection de juin 1848, dossier 691 Veuve
Genreau, Marie, interrogation of the accused, 28 June 1848.
27. Ibid, dossier 1334 Femme Fraissinet, Stephanie, arrest report, undated;
certificate of Dr Lemercier, 29 June 1848; certificate of Edouard Fraissinet,
undated.
28. APP Aa 430 Evenements de 1848, journees de juin, 737-58 dossiers
Host, Catherine, Femme Leclerc and Chignon, Simone, Femme Leblanc.
29. C. Schmidt, Les journees de juin (Paris, 1926), p. 59.
30. Dominique, Les journees de quarante-huit, p. 206. The dossiers on Veuve
Henry at the Archives de l'Armee de Terre (JM 1848, 1051; 7960) are
missing.
31. La Gazette des Tribunaux, 27 Oct. 1848, p. 1259; 28 Oct., p. 1262; 29
Oct., p. 1267.
32. AN pi d III 89 Recompenses honorifiques. Combattants et blesses de
fevrier et juin 1848, Gue-Gui, dossier Guibal, Elisabeth, testimony of
Dr Eugene Palmier, 14 April 1848; letter of E. Guibal to the Mayor of
Paris, 23 May 1848; report of the Prefect of Police, Nov 1851.
33. AA Justice militaire 1848, Insurrection de juin 1848, dossiers 3511;
8024; 9260 Pille Guibal, Elisabeth, testimony of Adrien Legrand, 10
Aug. 1848.
34. Ibid, dossier 6818 Femme Jeanjean, Rose, testimonies of Charles Hamoy,
12 July 1848, Pierre Plisson, 29 Aug. 1848.
35. Ibid, dossiers 11 334; 12 013 Pille Falaise, Augustine, testimonies of
Cyrille Borius, 18 Aug. 1848 and Amelie Guignace, 17 Aug. 1848.
36. AN pi d III 47 Recompenses honorifiques. Combattants et blesses de
Notes 177
juillet 1830, Br-Bu, dossier Bretagne, Louise, Femme Boindon, letter

of the Prefect of Police, dated June 1850.
37. H. d' Almeras, La vie parisienne sous Ia republique de 1848 (Paris, 1921),
p. 462.
38. Le National, 26 June 1848.
39. AA Justice militaire 1848, Insurrection de juin 1848, dossiers 11 334; 12 013
Fille Falaise, Augustine, testimony of Amelie Guignace, 17 Aug. 1848.
40. Ibid, testimonies of Marc-Antoine Dulcenay, 17 Aug. 1848, Amelie
Guignace, 17 Aug. 1848, Augustine Humann, 16 Aug. 1848.
41. AN C 934 Assemblee Nationale: Commission d'enquete, IV• dossier
Mairies, correspondance, 2896, report of Moreau, mayor of the eighth
arrondissement, 28 June 1848.
42. AA Justice militaire 1848, Insurrection de juin 1848, dossier 12 521
Femme Lepage, Elisabeth, interrogation of the accused, 28 July 1848;
second interrogation, 4 Aug. 1848.
43. Ibid, dossiers 4703; 4497 Femme Debeurgrave, Elisa, testimonies of
Jeanne Nelle, Marie Pichard, Maria Varin and Fran~oise Petit, all 11
Sept. 1848.
44. Ibid, dossiers 9096; 9787 Veuve Dufour, Josephine, testimonies of Femme
Huet, 19 Aug. 1848, Edme Noireau, 21 Aug. 1848.
45. Ibid, dossier 9791 Fille Lucas, Louise, testimony of Frederic Henricet,
5 Aug. 1848.
46. Ibid, dossier 10 612 Femme Guillaume, Marie-Fran~oise, testimony of
Jean-Pierre Beausse, 19 Aug. 1848.
4 7. Ibid, dossiers 12 114; 12 115 Femme Clabot, Josephine, report of Police
Superintendent Legros, Belleville, 31 July 1848; testimony of Pierre
Leroy, undated; interrogation of the accused, 2 Aug. 1848; interroga-
tion of Charles Clabot, 2 Aug. 1848.
48. Ibid, dossier 10 179 Fille Calayon, Therese, police note lO July 1848,
interrogation of the accused, 16 July 1848.
49. Ibid, dossiers 9096; 9786 Veuve Dufour, Josephine, testimony of Femme
Huet, 14 Aug. 1848.
50. Ibid, dossiers 12 303; 12 304 Femme Boulanger, Genevieve, testimo-
nies of Fran~ois Ritry, Andre Prugneaud, Achille Jacobs, 7 Aug. 1848,
12 Aug. 1848.
51. Ibid, dossier 11 181 Femme Lachaux, Adele, arrest report 15 July 1848;
testimony of Claude Berthoz, 7 Aug. 1848.
52. Ibid, dossiers 9782; 9985; 10 745 Femme Porcher, Marie Euphrasie,
report of the Prefect of Police, 17 Aug. 1848; Note of the Police Sta-
tion of the twelfth arrondissement, II July 1848.
53. Ibid, dossiers 11 851; 11 917 Femme Falotte, Josephine, testimony of
Isidore Parere, 5 Aug. 1848; report of the Police Station of Belleville,
undated.
54. Ibid, dossier 8293 Femme Debureau, testimonies of Celestine Callot,
Theodore Huraut, Jules Mesnard, all 22 July 1848.
55. Ibid, dossiers 11 796; 12 009 Femme Cheron, Marie-Madeleine, report
of Police Superintendent Pascalis, 27 July 1848.
56. Ibid, dossier 12 379 Fille Bade, Florentine, letter of the Prefect of Police
to the President of the Military Commission, 7 Aug. 1848.
178 Notes
57. Ibid, dossier 4986 Pille Bouffiet, Adolphine, note of her arrest, un-
dated; interrogation of the accused, 7 July 1848.
58. Ibid, dossiers 10 250; 10 999; II 389 Femme Gaudion, Jeanne, interro-
gation of the Gaudion couple, and confrontation with Leopold Delmas,
31 July 1848.
59. Ibid, dossier 7025 Pille Marie, Marianne, testimony of Femme Noireau,
3 Aug. 1848; report of Police Superintendent Moulnier of the Quartier
du Temple, 4 Aug. 1848.
60. Ibid, dossiers 10 014; 10 015 Pille Croquet, Louise, testimonies of Jacques
Masson, Pierre Lemoine, both 3 Aug. 1848.
61. Ibid, dossiers 7140; 10637 Femme Lesueur, Prudence, testimony of Pierre
Saultier, 16 Aug. 1848.
62. Ibid, dossiers 11 447; 12 281 Pille Macaire, Sylvie, interrogation of the
accused, 24 July 1848; testimony of Jean-Baptiste Clachet, 22 July 1848.
63. Le Siecle, 25 June 1848.
64. Simpson, Pictures from revolutionary Paris, ii, 287.
65. Menard, Prologue d'une revolution, pp. 227, 240; Dominique, Les Journees
de quarante-huit, p. 257.
66. Menard, Prologue d'une revolution, p. 241.
Cormery, Louise, testimonies of Claude Guichart, Fran~ois Seguin, both
12 July 1848.
68. Ibid, dossier 6818 Femme Jeanjean, Rose, testimonies of Charles Hamoy,
12 July 1848, Claude Dardelin, Mayor of Gentilly, 29 Aug. 1848.
69. Ibid, dossier 7992 Pille Bourgeois, Marie Adele, extract of a collective
letter, undated; testimony of Auguste Labinville, 7 Sept. 1848.
70. The Reveillon Riot is discussed in Chapter 1 of this volume.
11 158 Veuve Goussery, Anne, arrest report, 15 July 1848, testimony
of Claude Bouvray, 18 Aug. 1848.
testimony of Catherine Kuntz, 21 Aug. 1848; report of Police Superin-
tendent Blavier, 17 Aug. 1848.
73. La Gazette des Tribunaux, 28 March 1849, pp. 547-8.
74. For example, in Histoire des journees de juin (anon, Paris, 1848), p. 9,
piece 598 in APP Aa 428 Evenements de 1848.
75. AA Justice militaire 1848, Insurrection de juin 1848, dossier 8829 Pille
Guerre, Adele, interrogation of the accused, 7 July 1848; testimony of
Clemence Briard, 10 July 1848.
76. Ibid, dossier 11 784 Femme Benoist, Jeanne-Marie, dite Noirteint, testi-
mony of Jean-Pierre Menard, 2 Sept. 1848.
77. Ibid, dossiers II 334; 12 013 Pille Falaise, Augustine, testimony of
Augustine Humann, 16 Aug. 1848.
78. The engraving appeared in the Illustrated London News, vol. XII, no
323, I July 1848, p. 426.
79. See above, note 16.
80. Tilly and Lees, The people, p. 207, note 47.
81. Ibid.
82. Ibid, p. 189, Table 2.
Notes 179
83. Ibid, p. 194.

84. Price, The French Second Republic, p. 175.
86. Ibid.
87. Ibid, p. 194.
Femme Eustache, Marie Heloise, interrogation of the accused, 29 June
1848.
89. Traugott, Armies of the poor, pp. 185-90.
Guebart, Marguerite, report of Sergeant Gramier of third company of
52nd grenadiers, 30 June 1848; testimonies of Josephine Pernelle, un-
dated, Marie Cassassa, 4 Sept. 1848.
91. Ibid, dossiers 1820; 10 559 Femme Goy on, Marie, arrest report, 2617
June 1848; search report, 28 June 1848; interrogation of the accused,
13 July 1848; letter of A. Goyon, 2 July 1848.
92. Ibid, dossier 7759 Femme Perrin, Marie-Fran~oise, testimonies of Henri
Delbeude, 12 July 1848, Louis Jacquard, 16 Aug. 1848.
93. Ibid, dossier 2922 Femme Mitouftet, Julie, arrest report, 6 July 1848;
interrogation of Charles Mitouftet, 14 July 1848; letters of the Public
Prosecutor of Chateaudun, 2 and 4 July 1848.
94. Ibid, dossier 3304 Fille Goden, Victoire, arrest report, 29 June 1848;
testimonies of Jean Giraldau, 27 July 1848, of Fran~ois Menet and Marie
Thirlon, both 28 July 1848; interrogation of A. Leclerc, 3 Aug. 1848.
95. La Gazette des Tribunaux, 4 Jan. 1849, p. 217.
Defer, Annette, testimony of Vincent Fremont, undated.
97. Ibid, dossiers 1192; 4763; 12 280 Femme Chassang, Marie, extract of
the arrest report, 25 June 1848; interrogation of Antoine Chassang, 5
July 1848; of the accused, 25 June 1848. See also Maitron, Dictionnaire
biographique, i, 396.
3058 Femme Depesne, Catherine, interrogation of the accused, undated.
See also Maitron, Dictionnaire biographique, ii, 62.
99. E. de Mirecourt, L'Abbe Chatel (Les Contemporains. Portraits et Sil-
houettes au XIXe Siecle, no 138, Paris, 1871), p. 53.
100. Maitron, Dictionnaire biographique, i, 311-12; the dossier on Elisabeth
Bruley is missing at the Archives de 1' Armee de Terre.
101. AA Justice militaire 1848, dossiers 11 334; 12 013 Fille Falaise, Augustine,
testimony of Hercule Blazy, 17 Aug. 1848; letter of Nicolas Toussaint
to the Chief of Executive Power, 30 Sept. 1848.
102. La Voix des Femmes no 3, 22 March 1848, 'Participation des femmes
au mouvement social'; no 7, 27 March 1848, 'Correspondance'- address
of Jeanne Deroin 'aux citoyens fran~ais'.
103. Ibid, no 19, 10 April 1848, 'A ceux qui nous meconnaissent' (Jeanne
Deroin).
11 641; 12 000 Femme Miollane, Catherine, arrest report, 25 July 1848;
180 Notes
105. Ibid, dossier 10 017 Fille Berton, Marie, interrogation of the accused,
16 July 1848.
106. Ibid, dossier 6752 Femme Lecaufette, Genevieve, letter of the accused,
undated.
107. Ibid, dossiers 11 447; 12 281 Fille Macaire, Sylvie, interrogation of the
accused, 24 July 1848.
108. Ibid, dossier 489 Femme Barre, Josephine, interrogation of the accused,
28 June 1848; decision of second military commission, 8 Sept. 1848;
Ibid, dossier 2042 Fille Collaen, Henriette, interrogation of the accused,
28 June 1848; decision of the sixth military commission, 5 Sept. 1848.
109. Ibid, dossiers 11 462; 11 925; 12 230 Femme Fortin, Eugenie, testimonies
of Anne and Pierre Bernard, Joseph Soulie, all 7 Aug. 1848.
110. Ibid, dossier 7256 Femme Bichet, Barbe, testimony of Mederic Dreyfous,
7 Aug. 1848.
111. J. Harsin, Policing prostitution in nineteenth-century Paris (Princeton,
New Jersey, 1985), pp. 32, 45, 138.
112. A. Corbin, 'La Prostituee', Miserable et glorieuse. La femme du dix-
neuvieme siecle, ed. J.P. Aron (Paris, 1980), pp. 42-6; for a broader
survey of the problem, Harsin, Policing prostitution, pp. 1-55, 131-
204. Harsin does not study the link between prostitutes' violence and
political rebellion.
113. AA Justice militaire 1848, Insurrection de juin 1848, dossier 9791 Fille
Lucas, Louise, testimony of Frederic Henricet, 5 Aug. 1848; Ibid, dos-
sier 12 521 Femme Lepage, Elisabeth, see above, note 42.
114. Ibid, dossiers 12 303; 12 304 Femme Boulanger, Genevieve, testimony
of Andre Prugneaud, 12 Aug. 1848.
115. Ibid, dossier 6818 Femme Cormery, Louise, extract from the testimony
of Claude Guichart, 12 July 1848.
116. Ibid, dossiers 12 430; 12 431 Fille Couchot, Louise, report of Police
Superintendent Legros of Belleville, 13 Aug. 1848.
117. Ibid, dossiers 1192; 4763; 12 280 Femme Chassang, Marie, interroga-
tion of the accused, 25 June 1848. Dossier 9380 Femme Defer, Annette,
118. Ibid, dossier 9783 Femme Pittet, Marie, testimony of Catherine Leroy,
22 Aug. 1848.
119. Ibid, dossiers 990; 4494 Fille Poivre, Marie Rosalie, report of the Prefec-
ture of Police, 4 Sept. 1848; testimony of Andre Guinot, 18 Aug. 1848.
120. Ibid, dossier 11 852 Veuve Daix, Marguerite, note of the Belleville police
station, 23 July 1848.
121. Ibid, dossier 8416 Fille Garnier, Marie-Louise, testimony of Andre
Cerceau, 2 Sept. 1848.
122. Ibid, dossiers 2658; 3583; 5247 Femme Brousse, Fran9oise, interroga-
tion of the accused, 4 July 1848; testimonies of Alfred Blum, Guillaume
Guilbois, both 25 Aug. 1848.
123. Ibid, dossier 7792 Femme Lecerf, Rosalie, arrest report, 7 July 1848.
124. Ibid, dossier 11 668 Femme Gautier, testimony of Pierre Gascoin, 25
July 1848.
125. Ibid, dossiers 10013; 10020 Femme Beaulieu, Fran9oise, arrest report,
15 July 1848; interrogation of the accused, 16 July 1848.
Notes 181
126. Ibid, dossier 2461 Fille Baroux, Julie, interrogation of the accused, 4
July 1848.
127. Ibid, dossiers 12 004; 12 013 Femme Libra, Anna, letter of Augustin
Libra to the Chief of Executive Power, 25 Sept. 1848. Dossiers 11 334;
12 013 Fille Falaise, Augustine, letter of Augustin Libra to President
Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, 21 Aug. 1849.
128. Ibid, dossiers 10 013; 10 020 Femme Beaulieu, Fran~oise, arrest report,
15 July 1848.
testimony of Fran~ois Decle, 21 Aug. 1848; note of the examining magis-
trate, undated.
130. Ibid, dossier 8403 Femme Duclos, Marie-Anne, testimony of Paul-Fran~ois
Colin, Director of the Hopital de Bon Secours, 27 June 1848.
131. Menard, Prologue d'une revolution, p. 262.
132. Ibid, pp. 263, 265.
133. AN C 934 Assemblee Nationale: Commission d'enquete, me dossier,
Rapports sur les journees de juin, 3293 Report on the Commune of
Montmartre, ? July 1848, unsigned.
134. La Liberte, Journal de Lyon, 3 July 1848; also A. Viollet, Recit jidete
et complet des journees de juin 1848 (Paris, 1848), p. 75.
135. La Gazette des Tribunaux, 20 Aug. 1848, p. 1021; Menard, Prologue
d'une revolution, p. 270.
Mitouflet, Julie, letter of Julie Mitouflet to the Minister of the Interior,
undated, 1849.
137. Ibid, dossier 11 852 Veuve Daix, Marguerite, interrogation of the ac-
cused, 31 July 1848.
138. Ibid, dossiers 11 851; 11 917 Femme Falotte, Josephine, report of the
Police Station of Belleville, undated; interrogation of the accused, 23
July 1848.
139. Ibid, dossier 7992 Fille Bourgeois, Marie Adele, interrogation of the
accused, 10 July 1848.
140. Ibid, dossier 6818 Femme Jeanjean, Rose, interrogations of the accused,
8 and 11 July 1848.
141. Ibid, dossiers 1488; 4427; 4428; 7331 Veuve Lechallier, Antoinette,
interrogation of the accused, 30 June 1848; testimony of Bouyer, 16
Aug. 1848; second interrogation of the accused, 17 Aug. 1848.
142. F. de Luna, The French Republic under Cavaignac 1848 (Princeton,
New Jersey, 1969), pp. 219, 221.
9985 Femme Porcher, Marie Euphrasie, letter of Marie Porcher to Mme
Cormenin, 7 Nov. 1848.
144. Ibid, dossier 7792 Femme Lecerf, Rosalie, petition of female prisoners
at St Lazare, 24 Jan. 1849, to President Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte.
145. Ibid, dossiers 11 631; 12 011 Fille Kerisvin, Marie, letter of the Sec-
retary General of the Ministry of the Interior to President Louis-Napoleon
Bonaparte, 3 Oct. 1849.
146. Ibid, dossier 8403 Femme Duclos, Marie-Anne, letter of Julie Guichard
to General Bertrand, 24 Sept. 1848.
182 Notes
147. Ibid, dossiers 1192; 4763; 12 280, letter to Cormenin from Freres Fob1ant,
Rue des Postes, 34, 10 Feb. 1849.
148. AN C 934 Assemblee Nationale. Commission d'enquete IVe dossier,
Mairies, correspondance sur les journees de juin, 2874, letter of the
deputy mayor of the sixth arrondissement to Odilon Barrot, 7 July 1848.
149. Ibid, 3354, anonymous letter to the commission, dated 7 July 1848.
151. Ibid, 14 July 1848, p. 889.
152. AN BB 18 1465 A Insurrection du 23 juin a Paris. Pieces diverses, 34,
letter of the Prefect of Police to the Minister of Justice, 5 Aug. 1848.
CHAPTER 5 THE RED REPUBLICAN INTERLUDE, 1849-51
I. M. Agulhon, The republican experiment, 1848-52, trans. J. Lloyd (Cam-

bridge, 1983), pp. 70, 85.
2. A.R. Caiman, Ledru-Rollin and the Second French Republic (New York,
Reprint, 1980), pp. 376, 394, argues that some participants may have
desired to make the demonstration the occasion for a coup but there was
no organized plan for one - merely a blundering attempt to establish a
provisional government at the last moment; B.H. Moss, 'June 13, 1849.
The abortive uprising of French radicalism', F Hist Stu, 13 (1984), 391-
414, asserts that the democ-socs did have a plan for rebellion on that
day.
3. La Gazette des tribunaux, 19 Oct. 1849, p. 1270.
4. Caiman, Ledru-Rollin, p. 378.
5. La Gazette des tribunaux, 7 Nov. 1849, p. 18.
6. Ibid.
7. M.L. Stewart-McDougall, The artisan republic. Revolution, reaction and
resistance in Lyon 1848-5I (Gloucester, 1984), pp. 128-34.
8. L. Strumingher, Women and the making of the working class: Lyon 1830-
1870 (St Albans, Vermont, 1979), p. 35.
9. Ibid, p. 36.
10. La Gazette des tribunaux, 9 Nov. 1849, p. 26; 30 Nov. 1849, pp. 99,
101-3.
II. Ibid, 30 Nov. 1849, p. 99; 2 Dec. 1849, pp. 105-7; 8 Dec. 1849, p. 127.
12. Ibid, 30 Nov. 1849, pp. 101-2.
13. APP Aa 432 Evenements de 1849-50, 424, 'Note sur Ia propagande de
1849 [anon]' sent by the Prefect of Police to the Chief Public Pros-
ecutor, 16 April 1849.
14. J. Merriman, The agony of the republic. The repression of the Left in
revolutionary France, 1848-51 (New Haven, Connecticut, 1978), pp. 25-50.
15. Price, A social history, p. 189.
16. It should be noted that in some instances the live allegorical figure in a
procession or carnival, whether a figure of Liberty or the Republic, was
impersonated by a young man. For examples see R. Bezucha, 'Masks of
revolution: a study of popular culture during the Second French Repub-
lic', Revolution and reaction, ed. R. Price, pp. 236, 238, 243, 247.
Notes 183
17. P. McPhee, The politics of rural life. Political mobilization in the French
countryside 1846-52 (Oxford, 1992), p. 188.
18. Ibid, p. 212.
19. Ibid, pp. 205-6.
20. BB 30 395 Cabinet du Ministre de la Justice. Evenements de decembre
1851. Rapports et correspondance des procureurs generaux des diverses
cours d'appel. Metz a Toulouse; Cour d'Orleans, 172, report of the Pub-
lic Prosecutor of Orleans to the Minister of Justice, 15 Dec. 1851.
21. Maitron, Dictionnaire biographique, ii, 75, 175; iii, 174-5. Also AA Justice
militaire 1851, Insurrection de decembre 1851, dossier 1928 Femme
Desmars, Adele, report of the chief secretary of the Prefect of Police,
entitled 'Societe des Menages', 26 Feb. 1852.
22. Ibid, dossier 1247 Femme Dard, Marie-Rose, interrogation of the accused,
24 Dec. 1851.
23. T. Margadant, French peasants in revolt, p. 117.
25. E. Thomas, Pauline Roland. Socialisme et feminisme au dix-neuvieme
siecle (Paris, 1956), p. 170.
26. AA Justice militaire 1851, Insurrection de decembre 1851, dossier 1783
Femme Jarreau, Suzanne, interrogation of the accused, 5 Feb. 1852.
27. BB 30 398 Decisions des commissions mixtes, Cour d' Agen: Departement
de Lot-et-Garonne. Insurrection de decembre 1851, Etat nominatif de tous
les individus arretes ou fugitifs sur lesquels la commission superieure a
statue (dated 5 March 1852, Agen), no. 694 Poujalet, Anne.
CHAPTER 6 THE REBELLION OF DECEMBER 1851: THE DEATH-

THROES OF THE RED REPUBLICAN CAUSE
1. Price, The French Second Republic, pp. 286-7.

2. AA Justice militaire 1851, Insurrection de decembre 1851 has a register
of the arrested entitled 'Premiere division militaire. Liste generate par
ordre alphabetique des individus poursuivis dans l'etendue de Ia premiere
division militaire a !'occasion de !'insurrection de decembre 1851', which
contains the statistical details.
3. E. Thomas, Pauline Roland, pp. 184-94. Thomas states as false the charge
that Roland put up proclamations defying those of Louis-Napoleon
(p. 188). The dossier on Pauline Roland is missing in the Archives de
l'Armee de Terre.
4. For a discussion of the categories of punishment applied to the rebels of
December 1851 see Margadant, French peasants in revolt, pp. 319-35;
also T. Forstenzer, French provincial police and the Second Republic.
Social fear and counter revolution (Princeton, New Jersey, 1981 ), pp.
231-2.
5. Maitron, Dictionnaire biographique, ii, 299-300; AA Justice militaire
1851, Insurrection de decembre 1851, dossier 1522 Femme Greppo, Anne,
interrogation of the accused, 10 Jan. 1852.
6. Maitron, Dictionnaire biographique, ii, 355. The dossier of Armandine
Huet at the Archives de I' Armee de Terre is missing.
184 Notes
7. Ibid, iii, 113. The dossier of Claudine Monniot at the Archives de I' Armee
de Terre is missing.
Fille Pean, Augustine, interrogation of the accused, 10 Dec. 1851.
9. C. Beslay, 1830-1848-1870. Mes souvenirs (Paris, 1873), p. 242.
10. Merriman, The agony of the republic, pp. 96-7.
Fille Burck, Marie-Louise, testimonies of Benjamin Camus, Pierre Lavialle,
both 27 Dec. 1851; testimony of Jean-Louis Rossignol, 29 Dec. 1851;
interrogation of the accused, report of 20 Dec. 1851.
12. Ibid, dossier 1247 Femme Dard, Marie Rose, interrogation of the ac-
cused, 24 Dec. 1851; testimonies of Josephine Brule, Jean-Baptiste Blanchet,
both 27 Dec. 1851; search report of Police Superintendent Gronfier, 22
Dec. 1851.
13. Ibid, dossier 1928 Femme Desmars, Adele, testimonies of F. and V. Decugis,
24 Feb. 1852; report of the chief secretary of the Prefect of Police en-
titled 'Societe des Menages', 26 Feb. 1852.
14. M. Emerit, Pauline Roland et les deportees d'Afrique (Algiers, 1945),
pp. 19-22.
Femme Patey, Helena (Helena Gaussin), arrest report, 5 Dec. 1851; in-
terrogation of the accused, 20 Dec. 1851.
16. Ibid, dossier 141 Clouard, Louis Julien, report of the interrogation of the
accused by Police Superintendent Marquis, 7 Dec. 1851.
17. Ibid, dossier 141 Fille Coquereau, Perrine, report of the interrogation of
the accused by Police Superintendent Marquis, 7 Dec. 1851.
18. Ibid, dossier 141 Fille Raudroff, Catherine, report of the interrogation of
the accused by Police Superintendent Marquis, 11 Dec. 1851; testimony
of Percheron, 29 Dec. 1851.
19. Bibliotheque de Ia Comedie Franr,:aise, dossier 16801189 Lopez, Maria,
letter of the Prefect of Police Cartier to Arsene Houssaye, Director of
the Comedie Franr,:aise, 17 Dec. 1850.
Fille Lopez, Adele Maria, arrest report, 18 Dec. 1851; report of the tes-
timony of Femme Jean Joseph Desmoulins, 17 Dec. 1851. See also Maitron,
Dictionnaire biographique, ii, 524.
21. Ibid, letter of Ferri-Pisani, 23 Dec. 1851.
22. C. Marcilhacy, 'Les caracteres de Ia crise sociale et politique de 1846 a
1852 dans le departement du Loiret', Rev Hist Mod Cant, 6 (1959), 45,
57.
23. AN BB 30 396 Evenements de decembre 1851, Cour d'appel de Paris:
152 Rapport sur les evenements politiques accomplis depuis le 2 decembre
1851 dans le ressort de Ia Cour d'appel de Paris, 21 janvier 1852, premiere
partie, Societes secretes: Yonne.
Femme Jarreau, Suzanne, testimony of Jacques Biolet, 2 Jan. 1852. (The
relevant records of the departmental archives of the Loiret were destroyed
by bombardment in 1940.)
25. Ibid, testimonies of Auguste Alfroid, Claude Ligier, both 24 Jan. 1852.
Notes 185
26. Ibid, interrogation of the accused, 5 Feb. 1852.

27. Marcilhacy, Les caracteres de la crise, p. 58.
28. Emerit, Pauline Roland, p. 15.
29. Marcilhacy, Les caracteres de la crise, p. 47.
Femme Pascal, Victoire, testimonies of Catherine Brenod, 9 Dec. 1851;
Henriette Bernaudez, 30 Dec. 1851; interrogation of the accused, 15 Dec.
1851.
32. AN BB 30 402 Evenements de decembre 1851: Cour d'appel de Paris,
note sur 61 inculpes de Bonny-sur-Loire, undated.
33. Maitron, Dictionnaire biographique, iii, 332.
Femme Rodon, Virginie, letter of Justice of Peace of Briare to the Pub-
lic Prosecutor of Gien, 6 Dec. 1851.
35. Ibid, interrogation of the accused, 22 Dec. 1851.
36. Maitron, op. cit.
37. AN F7 2587 Insurrection de decembre 1851, Liste des condamnes a Algerie,
decembre 1851, no. 3249 Jardineaud (or Jardinand) Etienne Violet, mo-
tifs de decision.
38. M. Agulhon, La republique au village. Les populations du Var de Ia
revolution a Ia deuxieme republique (Paris, 1979), p. 321.
39. Ibid, pp. 332-40.
40. Ibid, p. 321.
41. Ibid, p. 322.
42. Ibid, p. 327.
43. Archives departementales du Var IV M20-3, dossier des insurges de Ia
Garde-Freinet; 9uoted in Agulhon, op. cit., p. 325.
44. AN BB 30 396 Evenements de decembre 1851: Cour d'appel d'Aix, 19,
'Observations generales sur les insurges des Basses-Alpes et du Var:
insurges inscrits sur les Iistes du jury, resume historique' (undated).
45. Ibid.
46. Agulhon, La republique, pp. 461-2.
47. E. Tenot, La province en decembre I85I (Paris, 1868), pp. 204-5.
48. Agulhon, La republique, p. 463.
49. Ibid, pp. 459-60.
50. AN BB 30 396 Cour d'appel d' Aix, 19 'Observations generales .. .'.
51. Ibid.
52. 16 AD Var IV M24, cited in Agulhon, La republique, p. 460.
53. Margadant, French peasants in revolt, p. 280.
54. BB 30 398 Cour d' Agen: Departement de Lot-et-Garonne, Insurrection de
decembre 1851. Etat nominatif de tous les individus arretes ou fugitifs
sur lesquels Ia commission superieure a statue (5 March 1852, Agen) no.
694 Poujoulat, Anne.
55. Margadant, French peasants in revolt, p. 299.
56. AN F7 2587 Insurrection de decembre 1851. Liste des condamnes a Algerie,
decembre 1851, no. 1020 Femme Bras, Josephine, motifs de decision.
57. Ibid, no 3885 Femme Majoureau, Eugenie, motifs de decision.
58. AN BB 30 396 Evenements de decembre 1851: Cour d'appel d'Orleans,
186 Notes
letters of Public Prosecutor of Orleans to Minister of Justice, dated 21

and 30 Dec. 1851.
59. AA Justice militaire 1851, Liste generale par ordre alphabetique ... no
1845 Femme Eloy, Stephanie, note on 'causes principales de !'inculpation'.
61. Thomas, Pauline Roland, p. 187.
62. Emerit, Pauline Roland, p. 10. However, on p. 28 he indicates confusion
in the register of the convent, which suggests that the number of de-
ported women there could have been as high as 17. B. Gastineau, Les
suites du coup d'etat. Dossier du deux dicembre. Les transportes de
decembre 1851 (Paris, 1869), p. 31, speaks of some 30 women being
deported to Algeria.
63. Thomas, Pauline Roland, pp. 201-5.
64. Emerit, Pauline Roland, pp. 22-3.
65. Ibid, p. 19.
66. Gastineau, Les suites du coup d'etat, p. 34.
67. Emerit, Pauline Roland, p. 90.
68. Thomas, Pauline Roland, p. 187.
69. BB 30 398 Cour d' Agen: Departement de Lot-et-Garonne. Etat nominatif
de tous les individus ... (5 March 1852, Agen) no. 596 Maubourguet
alnee, Femme Camaroque.
70. AN F7 2587 Insurrection de decembre 1851. Liste des condamnes a Algerie,
decembre 1851, no. 4573 Femme Patey, Helena Gaussin, motifs de decision.
71. Ibid, no. 8463 Veuve Sante!, nee Marie Bessieres, motifs de decision.
72. Tenot, La province, p. 12.
74. Thomas, Les petroleuses, pp . 163-6, 167-9, 178-9.
75. Agulhon, La republique, p. 259 uses this expression as the title for chapter
six of the work.
76. Thomas, Les femmes, pp. 48-9.
Fille Cornier, Louise, interrogation of the accused, 1 July 1848.
78. Ibid, dossiers 12 114; 12 115 Femme Clabot, Josephine, interrogation of
the accused, 2 Aug. 1848.
79. Thomas, Les petroleuses, pp. 69-70, 263-4.
80. M. Marrinan, Painting politics for Louis-Philippe. Art and ideology in
Orleanist France, 1830--48 (New Haven, Connecticut, and London, 1988),
p. 70.
83. AA Justice militaire 1848, Insurrection de juin 1848, dossiers 9782; 9985;
10 745 Femme Porcher, Marie Euphrasie, note of the examining magis-
trate, undated.
84. La Gazette des Tribunaux, !6 July 1848, p. 897.
85. J. de Lacretelle, La Bonifas (Paris, 1925, 359pp.).
86. AA Justice militaire 1848. Insurrection de juin 1848, dossiers 4497; 4703
Femme Debeurgrave, Elisa, testimony of Fran~oise Petit, 11 Sept. 1848.
Femme Desmars, Adele, testimonies of F. and V. Decugis, 24 Feb. 1852.
Notes 187
88. Duhet, Les femmes et La Revolution, pp. 218-20; quotation, p. 219.

89. La Gazette des Tribunaux, 28 March 1849, p. 547.
90. Ibid, 29 Oct. 1848, p. 1267.
91. Le Constitutionnel, 28 June 1848. Ironically, the same paper on the same
day noted 'with emotion' the arrival of the 'heroine' of July 1830, Marie
Boucot, with bandages for the wounded.
92. J. Landes, Women and the public sphere, pp. 170-2, 173-88, 193-8.
93. Moses, French feminism, pp. 133-4.
94. Le Peuple, 27 Dec. 1848, quoted in Thomas, Les femmes, pp. 60-1.
95. Baroness (H.E.) Florence Bonde, Paris in 1848. Letters from a resident
describing the events of the revolution, ed. C.E. Warr (London, 1903),
p. 71.
96. E. Niboyet, Le vrai livre des femmes (Paris, 1863), pp. 233-4.
97. Ibid, p. 236.
98. T.A.B. Corley, Democratic despot. A life of Napoleon Ill (London, 1961),
pp. ll0-11.
CHAPTER 7 THE COMMUNE OF 1871: THE GREAT VENTURE IN

FEMALE CITIZENSHIP
1. Thomas, Les petroleuses, pp. 9-10 gives examples of these reactions.

2. J. Plamenatz, The revolutionary movement in France 1815-71 (Lon-
don, 1952), p. 117.
3. APP Aa 434, quoted in Maitron, Dictionnaire biographique, i, 231-2
(Biotere); ii, 202 (Foubart); 437 (Laporte); 516 (Libersalle); iii, 287
(Raynaud).
4. Ibid, i, 11-12 (Arnault); 229-30 (Billon, L. & M.); ii, 323 (Guillot,
H.).
5. Ibid, ii, 479 (Legendre, C. and F.).
6. Ibid, i, 444 (Combe).
7. W. Serman, La Commune de Paris (Paris, 1986), pp. 55-8.
8. Ibid, p. 44.
9. Ibid, p. 59.
10. P. Lissagaray, The history of the Commune of 1871. Translated from
the French of Lissagaray by Eleanor Marx Aveling (orig. 1886, reprint
New York, 1967), p. 10.
11. R. Magraw, France 1815-1914. The bourgeois century (Oxford, 1983),
p. 184.
12. Serman, La Commune, p. 35.
13. V.B ... , Souvenirs d'une morte vivante (Lausanne, 1909), pp 62-3, quoted
in Thomas, Les petroleuses, p. 20.
15. Moses, French feminism, p. 192.
16. Thomas, Pauline Roland, pp. 141-8.
17. La premiere Internationale, recueil de documents (ed. J. Freymond,
Geneva, 1962), quoted in Schu1kind, Socialist women, p. 142 and foot-
note 37.
18. Ibid.
188 Notes
19. G. Lefran~ais, Etude sur le mouvement communaliste a Paris en I87I

(Neuchatel, 1871), p. 39.
20. Ibid, p. 45.
21. V.B ... , Souvenirs, p. 71, quoted in Thomas, Les phroleuses, p. 22.
22. A. Dalotel, Paule Minck, communarde et feministe (1839-1901) (Paris,
1981), pp. 12-13, 17.
23. Ibid, p. 17.
24. J. Maitron, Dictionnaire biographique du mouvement ouvrier franrais,
deuxieme partie, I864-7I (Vols IV-IX, Paris 1967-71), iv, 52, 55, 59.
The volume that lists the female members of the sections of the French
branch of the International includes only one recognizable woman's name
in the provincial lists for 1870 - that of Virginie Barbet in the depart-
ment of Saone-et-Loire (ibid, p. 39).
25. Moses, French feminism, pp. 162-72.
26. Thomas, Les petroleuses, pp. 40, 43.
27. Ibid, pp. 41-3.
28. Dalotel, Paule Minck, p. 14.
29. X. de la Fourniere, Louise Michel, matricule 2I82 (Paris, 1986), p. 42.
30. Moses, French feminism, pp. 173-4, 187-9.
31. On this distinction see the article by D. Shafer, 'Plus que des
ambulancieres: women in articulation and defence of their ideals dur-
ing the Paris Commune (1871)', F Hist, 7 (1993), 90; also J.P. McMillan,
Housewife or harlot. The place of women in French society I870-I940
(Brighton, 1981), pp. 86-7.
32. Serman, La Commune, pp. 97-8.
33. Thomas, Les petroleuses, pp. 46-7.
34. F. L'huillier, La lutte ouvriere a Ia fin du second empire (Paris, 1957),
pp. 49, 51.
35. 0. Testut, L'lnternationale. Son origine, son but, son caractere ... Tableau
de Ia situation actuelle de 1'/nternationale en France, en Europe et en
Amerique (Paris, Versailles, 1871), pp. 92-4.
36. The Red Virgin. Memoirs of Louise Michel, ed. and trans. B. Lowry
and E.E. Gunter (University, Alabama, 1981), p. 57.
37. Lissagaray, The history of the Commune, p. 12.
38. Magraw, France /8I5-I914, p. 197.
39. The Red Virgin, p. 58.
40. Schulkind, Socialist women, p. 135.
41. Le proces de Ia Commune devant les conseils de guerre. Compte rendu
complet des debats, deuxieme serie (Paris, 1871), p. 23, sitting of 5
Sept. 1871.
42. A. Horne, The fall of Paris. The siege and the Commune I870-I (Lon-
don, 1965), pp. 212-13.
44. Thomas, Les petroleuses, p. 52.
45. G. Molinari, Les clubs rouges pendant le siege de Paris (Paris, 1874),
p. 238.
46. Moses, French feminism, p. 190.
47. Thomas, Les petroleuses, p. 53 et seq.
Notes 189
49. Molinari, Les clubs rouges, p. 30.

50. S. Edwards, The Paris Commune I871 (London, 1971), p. 92; see also
Andre Leo's article Toutes avec tous in La Sociale, 2 April 1871.
51. Molinari, Les clubs rouges, pp. 74-5.
53. Serman, La Commune, p. 167; Lissagaray, The history of the Commune,
pp. 38-9.
54. Fourniere, Louise Michel, p. 69.
55. Ibid, pp. 10, 17, 41.
56. The reasons for the royalists' electoral victory in February 1871 are
discussed in J. Gouault, Comment La France est devenue republicaine.
Les elections generales et partielles a l'Assemblee Nationale I870-I875
(Paris, 1954), pp. 55-64.
58. Ibid, p. 79.
60. Edwards, The Paris Commune, pp. 138-40.
62. Enquete parlementaire sur /'insurrection du I8 mars I871 (Paris, 1872),
pp. 151-2, Rapport de M. le Prefet de Seine-et-Marne, Melun, 21 July
1872.
63. Ibid, pp. 166-7, Rapport de M. le chef de la 24e legion, undated.
65. Enquete parlementaire, p. 167, Departement de Saone-et-Loire.
66. B. Malon, La troisieme defaite du protetariatfranr;ais (Neuchatel, 1871),
pp. 189-91.
67. Maitron, Dictionnaire biographique, deuxieme partie, iv, 184.
68. See for example La Commune de I87I, so us La direction de J. Bruhat,
J. Dautry et E. Tersen (Paris, 1960), pp. 180-1; Schulkind, Socialist
women, p. 136.
69. Bruhat, Dautry, Tersen, La Commune de I87I, pp. 180-1.
70. J. Rougerie, Proces des communards, presentes par Jacques Rougerie
(Paris, 1964), pp. 239-41.
71. E. Schulkind, The Paris Commune of I87I (The Historical Association
G. 78, London, 1971), pp. 20-1.
72. R.L. Williams, The French Revolution of I870-I87I (London, 1969),
p. 152; L.M. Greenberg, Sisters of liberty: Marseille, Lyon, Paris and
the reaction to a centralized state I868-7I (Cambridge, Massachusetts,
1971), pp. 3-5, 340-1; J. Gaillard, Communes de province, communes
de Paris I870-I871 (Paris, 1971), pp. 164-6.
73. K.B. Jones and F. Verges, 'Aux citoyennes: women, politics and the
Paris Commune of 1871 ', Hist Eur Ideas, 13, 1991, 711-32; Shafer,
Plus que des ambulancieres, pp. 85-101; Schulkind, Socialist women,
pp. 124-63; Thomas, Les petroleuses, pp. 79-140.
74. Schulkind, Socialist women, pp. 136, 138-40, 147-52; Thomas, Les
petroleuses, pp. 85-9.
75. Schulkind, Socialist women, pp. 85-6.
77. Schulkind, Socialist women, pp. 139-40.
190 Notes

79. Shafer, Plus que des ambulancieres, p. 98.
80. Schulkind, Socialist women, p. 137, footnote 25.
81. Malon, La troisieme defaite, p. 279.
83. P. Fontoulieu, Les eglises de Paris sous Ia Commune (Paris, 1873), pp.
49-50.
84. Bruhat, Dautry, Tersen, La Commune de I87I, p. 175.
85. Jones and Verges, Aux citoyennes, p. 712.
86. Serman, La commune, p. 294.
87. Fontoulieu, Les eglises, p. 272.
88. Ibid, p. 294.
89. Ibid, p. 128.
90. M. Vuillaume, Mes cahiers rouges au temps de Ia Commune (Paris,
1910), p. 128.
92. Ibid, pp. 273-4.
93. Text of the decree reproduced in Lefran9ais, Etude sur le mouvement
communaliste, p. 244.
94. Le Vengeur, 24 May 1871.
95. La Sociale, 8 April 1871, 'La journee d'hier'.
99. La Sociale, 6 April 1871.
100. Fontoulieu, Les eglises, pp. 274-5.
101. Malon, La troisieme defaite, p. 279; Maitron, Dictionnaire biographique,
deuxieme partie, viii, 36.
102. M. du Camp, Les convulsions de Paris. Episodes de Ia Commune
(4 vols, Paris, 1878-80), ii, 89.
103. La Gazette des tribunaux, 11 Sept. 1872, p. 894, 'Affaire Lemel'.
104. Ibid; Thomas, Les petroleuses, p. 178; Lissagaray, The history of the
Commune, p. 324 footnote 1.
107. A. Blanchecotte, Tablettes d'une femme pendant Ia Commune (Paris,
1872), pp. 257-8.
108. Fontoulieu, Les eglises, pp. 105-6.
110. La Sociale, 3 May 1871, 'La journee d' hier'.
111. Thomas, Les petroleuses, p. 205; La Gazette des Tribunaux, 18 April
1872, p. 389.
112. J. Allemane, Memoires d'un Communard. Des barricades au bagne (Paris,
undated ?1906), p. 130.
113. W. Hoffman, Camp, court and siege. A narrative of personal adventure
and observation during the two wars I86I-5, I870-I (New York, 1877),
p. 279.
114. Lissagaray, The history of the Commune, pp. 359-60.
115. Quoted in Malon, La troisieme defaite, p. 278.
Notes 191

118. La Sociale, 8 April 1871, 'La journee d'hier'.
122. Le proces de Ia Commune devant les conseils de guerre, deuxieme serie,
p. 13, sitting of 4 Sept. 1871.
123. The Times, 6 May 1871, 'The French siege of Paris'.
124. Le dossier de Ia Commune devant les conseils de guerre (Paris, 1871 ),
p. 159.
125. Allemane, Memoires d'un Communard, p. 131.
126. Fontoulieu, Les eglises, pp. 224-6. Edith Thomas is silent on this charge
of assassination against Blanche Lefebvre.
129. Le proces de Ia commune devant les conseils de guerre, deuxieme serie,
130. Maitron, Dictionnaire biographique, deuxieme partie, v, 169.
131. La Gazette des Tribunaux, 16-17 Oct. 1871, p. 652.
135. Ibid, iv, 313.
136. Lissagaray, The history of the Commune, p. 208; Vuillaume, Mes cahiers
rouges, p. 65.
137. La Gazette des Tribunaux, 8-9 Jan., 18, 19 Jan. 1872, pp. 21-2, 58,
63; Thomas, Les petroleuses, pp. 215-17.
139. La Gazette des Tribunaux, 21, 23 April 1872, pp. 400, 408.
140. Vuillaume, Mes cahiers rouges, pp. 282-3.
141. Hoffman, Camp, court and siege, p. 279.
143. Ibid, p. 524.
144. Schulkind, Socialist women, p. 126, footnote 3.
147. This data is listed in Enquete parlementaire sur !'insurrection du 18
mars, p. 548.
148. Serman, La Commune, p. 287; Thomas, Les petroleuses, pp. 264-5.
149. Rougerie, Proces des communards, p. 125-8; also Rougerie, 'Composi-
tion d'une population insurgee. L'exemple de Ia Commune', Mouv Soc,
July-Sept. 1964, 31-47.
150. Rougerie, Proces des communards, p. 125.
151. Ibid, p. 126.
152. Ibid, pp. 127-8.
153. Ibid, pp. 20, 126.
155. Thomas, loc. cit.
192 Notes

157. G. da Costa, La Commune vecue, 18 mars- 28 mai 1871 (3 vols, Paris,
1903-8), i, 21-5.
160. Ibid.
161. E. Thomas, Louise Michel, trans. P. Williams (Montreal, 1980), p. 89.
163. Ibid, p. 224.
164. Ibid, p. 226.
170. Ibid, pp. 182-3, 190, sitting of 30 Sept. 1871.
171. La Commune, 12-13 April 1871.
172. La Gazette des Tribunaux, 10 and 11-12 Nov. 1872, pp. 1098, 1101-2.
173. Ibid, 16, 17 May 1872, pp. 480-1, 485.
175. Ibid, p. 123.
176. Ibid, p. 124.
177. Ibid, p. 125.
179. Ibid, p. 262. Though E. Thomas declares (ibid, p. 12) that the cause of
justice 'is not defended by choristers', she seems reluctant to stress, in
rounded fashion, the role of the demonic alongside the role of the
angelic.
180. Fontoulieu, Les eglises, p. 349; Thomas, Les pitroleuses, pp. 207-9.
181. Le proces de fa Commune devant les conseils de guerre, deuxieme serie,
184. Malon, La troisieme defaite, pp. 336, 416.
185. A. Reed and D. Fisher, The Fall of Berlin (London, 1993), pp. 244,
387.
187. Ibid, pp. 276-9 for the full text.
188. The Times, 6 May 1871, 'The French siege of Paris'.
195. Molinari, Les clubs rouges, p. 66.
Notes 193
197. La Sociale, 6 May 1871, 'Aventures de neuf ambulancieres a Ia recher-

che d'un poste de devouement'.
198. Ibid, 8 May 1871, 'La Revolution sans Ia femme'.
199. Allemane, Memoires d'un Communard, p. 74.
200. Schu1kind, The Paris Commune, p. 34.
203. V. d'Esboeufs, La verite sur le Gouvernement de La Defense nationale.
La commune et les Versaillais, par V. d'Esboeufs, temoin oculaire (Ge-
neva, 1871), p. 14.
204. Lefrancais, Etude sur le mouvement communaliste, p. 349.
205. Le Gaulois, 13 June 1871 (Francisque Sarcey), quoted in Lissagaray,
The history of the Commune, p. 491.
206. Pages from the Goncourt Journal, ed. and trans. R. Baldick
(Harmondsworth, 1984), p. 191.
208. Lissagaray, The history of the Commune, pp. 11-12.
209. Malon, La troisieme defaite, pp. 424-5.
210. Thomas, Louise Michel, pp. 130-44.
212. Ibid, p. 230; A. Leo, La guerre sociale. Discours prononce au congres
de la paix a Lausanne ( 1871) par Madame Andre Leo (Neuchatel ?
1871' 39pp.).
213. Dalote1, Paule Minck, p. 20.
214. La Gazette des Tribunaux, 15 Dec. 1871, p. 854.
216. Ibid, p. 449.
218. Ibid, 11 Sept. 1872, p. 894.
220. La Gazette des Tribunaux, 21 April 1872, p. 400.
221. Ibid, 10 Jan. 1872, p. 31.
222. Ibid, 16-17 Oct. 1871, p. 652.
223. Le proces de la Commune devant les conseils de guerre, deuxieme serie,
224. Ibid, deuxieme serie, p. 10, sitting of 4 Sept. 1871.
225. Ibid, p. 13.
226. Ibid, p. 9.
227. Lefrancais, Etude sur le mouvement communaliste, p. 358.
228. Actes et paroles. Depuis l'exil par Victor Hugo. Tome premier 1870-6
(Paris, Nelson editeurs, undated), p. 245.
229. J. Adam (J. Lamber), Mes angoisses et nos luttes 1871-1873 (Paris,
1907), p. 95; Thomas, Louise Michel, p. 158.
230. Maitron, Dictionnaire biographique, iii, 151.
231. Thomas, Louise Michel, p. 164.
233. Enquete parlementaire, p. 549.
234. Le dossier de Ia Commune, pp. 164-6.
235. Jones and Verges, Aux citoyennes, p. 725.
194 Notes
236. Le dossier de Ia Commune, pp. 157-61.

238. Ibid, deuxieme serie, p. 10, sitting of 4 Sept. 1871.
239. Ibid, p. 11, sitting of 4 Sept. 1871.
242. Du Camp, Les convulsions de Paris, i, 300.
243. Ibid, ii, 89.
244. Ibid, iv, 209-11.
245. Ibid, ii, 402-3.
246. Hoffman, Camp, court and siege, p. 282.
247. Thomas, Les pitroleuses, p. 187.
248. Ibid, p. 206.
249. Shafer, Plus que des ambulancieres, p. 85.
250. Du Camp, Les convulsions de Paris, i, 300, ii, 88-9; iii, 113-14.
251. Quoted in J.P.T. Bury and R. Tombs, Thiers 1797-1877. A political
life (London, 1986), p. 207.
252. Edwards, The Paris Commune, p. 351.
254. D. Caute, The Left in Europe since 1789 (London, 1966), p. 194.
255. T. Zeldin, France 1848-1945 (2 vo1s, Oxford, 1973-7), i, 573.
256. Edwards, The Paris Commune, p. 350.
257. Magraw, France 1815-1914, p. 311.
258. Ibid, pp. 209-24 for a good account of this political process.
259. Leo, La guerre sociale, pp. 31-2.
260. A.Dansette, Histoire de Ia liberation de Paris (Paris, 1946), p. 274.
261. Ibid, pp. 278, 268.
262. P. Schwartz, 'Partisanes and gender politics in Vichy France', F Hist
Stu, 16, 1989, 142-3.
263. Ibid, pp. 145-7.
264. L. Collins and D. Lapierre, Is Paris burning? (Harmondsworth, 1966),
pp. 158, 183.
265. Ibid, p. 170.
266. Ibid, p. 201.
CHAPTER 8 CONCLUSION
1. L. O'Boy1e, 'The problem of an excess of educated men in Western Europe

1830-50', J Mod Hist, 42, 1970, 471-95.
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402 Evenements de decembre 1851. Commissions mixtes de 1852 (Cours
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930 Assemblee nationale. Commission d'enquete (evidence of the Com-
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933) Assemblie nationale. Commission d'enquete
934)
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42-78 Recompenses honorifiques. Combattants et blesses de juillet 1830
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F7 Police generate
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421 Evenements divers 1831-3
422 Evenements divers 1834
423 Evenements divers 1835 et 1836
425 Ajfaires de mai 1839
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INDEX
Actresses 9, 14, 24, 37, 70, 88-9, 96, Barre, Josephine 68
97, 161 Barrot, Odilon 75, 77, 78
Agulhon, Maurice 17, 48, 92, 93, 94, Les Bas-Bleus 110
98 Bastille, Fall of 4
Ajain (Creuse) 32 Batilly (Loiret) 83, 90
Algeria 86, 87, 94, 96, 97 Battou, Femme 137
Allemane, Jean 126, 127, 142 Baudin, Dr Antoine Ill
Allier, department of 90 Bazaine, Marshal Fran9ois 115
Allix, Jules 114 Beaucote, Veuve Julie 129-30
Almanach des Opprimes 92 Beaulieu, Fran9oise 71
Amanda, prostitute 135 Beauvais (Oise) I, 27, 140
Amann, Peter 42 Bedarieux (Herault) 94, 97
Amar, Jean-Baptiste Andre 11-12, Bediet, Femme, Marie-Virginie
101, 147 Vrecq 128-9
Ambulance-women 25, 37, 60, 88-9, Belleville 51, 54, 60, 64, 66, 70, 72,
113, 114, 120, 121, 126, 129, 140, 75, 100, 101, 106, 121
142, 151 Belly, Felix 114, 142
Angouleme, Duchesse d' 23 Benoist, Jeanne-Marie 60
Appert, General Felix-Antoine 132 Beranger, Pierre de 96
Applewhite, Harriet viii, 8 Bereaux, Femme 29
Arago, Etienne 78 Bergeron, Louise 54
Arago, Fran9ois 67 Berlin 139
Arambide, Pierre 93 Bernard, Femme, Josephine Mimet 128
Arbois (Jura) 107 Bernard, Mme 138
Aristocrats 120, 134 Berry, Duchesse de 23
Arnoult, Victor 136 Bertin, Femme, Marie-Jeanne
Asnieres (Seine) 124 Trumeau 3
Association libre pour !'Education du Berton, Marie 68
Peuple 30 Beslay, Charles 87
Association pour /e Droit des Bessan (Herault) 94
Femmes ll0-11 Bettrette, Adelaide 35, 38, 51
Attila I Beziers (Herault) 97
Aube, department of 90 Bichet, Barbe 69
Auberive (Haute-Marne) 144 Bien-Etre Universe/ 83, 91
Audu, Louise-Reine 9 Billon, Marie 107
Aumiile, Henri, Due d' 30 Biotere, Pierre I 06
Aups (Var) 93 Blanc, Louis 40, 41, 42, 89, 98
Aurevilly, Jules-Amedee Barbey d' Blanchard, Alphonsine 129
110, 140 Blanqui, Auguste 42, 43, 66, 69, Ill,
Austria 141 114, 116
Blois (Loir-et-Cher) 95, 148
Babeuf, Gracchus 7 'Bloody Week' (May 1871) 119,
Bacle, Florentine 56 123-31, 140, 143, 145
Bakunin, Michael 144 Blount, Edward 36
Barbaut, Femme, Fran9oise Dupont 7 Bocquin, Lucie 145, 148
Barbes, Armand 42, 67 Boigne, Comtesse de 24
Barbet, Virginie Ill, 118 Bonaparte, Pierre Ill
Baroux, Julie 71 Bonde, Baroness, Aorence Robinson 102
204
Index 205
La Bonifas 100 Chabry, Madeleine 5

Bonnefoy, Femme Louise Noel 128, Chalabre (Aude) 32
136-7 Chambord, Henri, Comte de 45
Bonny-sur-Loire (Loiret) 90, 91, 92, Chambre Fiderale des Societes
95, 97, 163 Ouvrieres 108
Bookbinders 6, 107, 120, 134 Changarnier, General Nicolas 78
Bordas, Rosalie 130 Charles X 23, 24, 28
Bordeaux 115 Chassang, Marie 67, 69, 70, 75, 98
Borme, Daniel 44, 114 Chateaubriand, Rene de 101, 147
Boucot, Marie 25, 28 Chatel, Abbe Ferdinand 67-8, 98
Boudray, Femme 7 Chiitillon-sur-Seine (Cote d'Or) 118
Bouffiet, Adolphine 56 Chaumette, Pierre 12
Bouichou, Marianne 32 Cheron, Marie-Madeleine 56
Bouillon, Rose 9-10 Chevalier, Louis 39
Boulanger, Genevieve 55, 69 Chiffon, Marie 145
Bourbon Restoration 23-4, 28, 66 Chiron (or Chirou), Barbe 36
Bourette, Femme, Lise Seret 129 Church, Clive 23
Bourgeois, Marie 57, 73 Civil Code of 1804 15
Bourges (Cher) 31 Clabot, Josephine 54, 73, 100
Bourgin, Georges 31 Cleaning-women 39, 60, 68, 88, 133,
Bras, Josephine 94, 96 161
Brea, General Jean-Baptiste de 52, 57, Clermont sur I'Oise (Oise) 51, 65
73, 159 Clinchamp (Haute-Marne) 15
Bretagne, Louise 28, 29, 39, 52, 161 Clinchant, General Justin 124
Briant, Colette 154 Clouard, Eugenie 88, 98
Briare (Loiret) 91 Club Blanqui (1870-1) 114
Brion (Deux-Sevres) 107 Club de Ia Delivrance 121, 123
Briot, Captain 131, 132, 133, 134, Club de Ia Revolution (1848) 42
147, 149 Club de Ia Revolution (1870-1) 121,
Brochon, Victorine 108, 109 127
Bronte, Clara 154 Club de Ia Trinite 122
Brousse, Fran~oise 70 Club de /'Ecole de Medecine 163
Brugieres, gendarme 94 Club de St Jacques-du-Haut 124
Brule, Josephine 88 Club de St Sulpice 122
Bruley, Elisabeth 67-8, 98 Club des Clubs 75
Bruteau, Femme, Eugenie Club des Libres-Penseurs 122
Rousseau 126-7 Club des Quinze- Vingts 67
Burck, Marie-Louise 87-8 Club du Pre-aux-Clercs 137
Buret, Eugene 48-9 Club ferme 114
Club Lambert 121
Cabet, Etienne 42 Club St Ambroise 122
Caen (Calvados) 10 Club St Eloi 141
Calayon, Therese 54-5, 73, 100, 141, Club St Michel 136
161 Club St Severin 135
Camaroque, Mme Mathieu 96-7 Coiffier, Marie 25
Camp, Maxime du 14, 123, 149 Collaen, Henriette 68
Canaille 66 Collet, Femme 126
Carre, Adelaide 54 Collioure (Pyrenees-Orientales) 82
Carrelet, General Gilbert 89 Combe, Femme 107
Cartier, Veuve 136 Comite de Secours aux Families des
Caussidiere, Mme Jean 29-30 Detenus Politiques 83, 87
Caussidiere, Marc 66, 98, 106, 107 Comite Revolutionnaire (of 1853) 106
Cavaignac, General Eugene 47, 66, 73 Commission des Recompenses
Cayenne (French Guiana) 91 Nationales 24, 52
206 Index
Commission of Inquiry (into 15 May Delettra, Veuve, Josephine

1848 and 'June Days') 75 Courtois 124, 135, 141, 161
Commune of 1871 viii, ix, x, 8, 13, Democrate-Socialiste movement 77,
15, 18, 21, 47, 99, 100, 104-54, 80-4, 87, 89, 90-4, 95, 96, 98,
157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162-3 103-4
Complot de /'Hippodrome 106-7 Demonstration of 15 May, 1848 43-4
Cornie, Auguste 101 Demonstration of 13 June, 1849
Concierges 20, 60, 66, 83, 128, 133, (Paris) 77, 78-9, 80, 81
136-7, 161 Denis, Anna 149
Considerant, Victor 142 Depesne, Catherine 67, 98
Constantine (Algeria) 94, 96 Deraismes, Maria 110
Constitution du Loiret 92 Deroin, Jeanne 68, 109
Constitutionnel 66, 101 Desmars, Adele 83, 88, 100-1
Les Convulsions de Paris 123, 149 Desmoulins, Mme 89
Cooks 6, 36, 94, 136 Deux-Sevres, department of 107
Coquereau, Perrine 88 Diderot, Denis 101
Corbet, Elise-Rosalie 137 Divajeu (Drome) 94
Corbion, Veuve Madeleine 128 Djidjelli (Algeria) 96
Corday, Charlotte 10, 14, 91 Dmitrieff, Elisabeth 120, 121, 131,
Cormenin, Louis-Marie de Lahaye, 134, 14~ 141, 14~ 144
Vicomte de 74 Domestic Servants 6, 19, 87, 88, 133
Cormenin, Mme 74 Dominique, Pierre 51
Cormery, Louise 57, 69 Dressmakers 6, 19, 20, 29, 30, 35, 40,
Comeau, Marie-Charlotte 50 51, 54-5, 57, 60, 66, 68, 78, 88,
Cornier, Louise 99 109, 120, 127-8, 133, 145
Costa, Gaston da 134 Droit national faction 82
Cote-d'Or, department of 64 Drouher (or Drouhet), Louise 126
Couchot, Louise 70 Duclos, Femme, Marie-Anne
Coup d'etat of 2 December 1851 84, Lecuyer 72, 74-5
85, 89, 90, 97, 105, 159 Dufour, Heloise 54, 55, 71
Courtade, Femme 82 Dufour, Veuve Josephine 54, 71
Crest (Drome) 94 Duhet, Paule-Marie 101
Le Creusot (Saone-et-Loire) 111, 118 Dupanloup, Mgr Felix, Bishop of
Croquet, Louise 56 Orleans 19-20
Duruy, Victor 19
Daix, Veuve Marguerite 70, 72 Dutron, Jeannette 29
Dalotel, Alain ix
Dansette, Adrien 154 Eloy, Stephanie 95
Darboy, Mgr Georges, Archbishop of Embroiderers 41
Paris 129 Engels, Friedrich 152
Dard, Marie-Rose 83, 88, 95 Enghien (Seine-et-Oise) 70
Debeurgrave, Femme, Elisa England 49, 96
Parmentier 39, 53, 60, 100, 130 Esquiros, Adele Ill
Debureau, Femme 55-6 Estates-General of 1789 3-4, I 0
Declaration des droits de Ia femme et Eudes, Emile Ill
de Ia citoyenne (1789) 10 Eustache, Marie 65
Defer, Annette 67, 70, 73, 98 Excoffon, Beatrix 120-1, 143-4
Delacroix, Catherine 29
Delacroix, Eugene 26 Falaise, Augustine 52, 68, 71, 98
De Ia justice dans Ia revolution et dans Falotte, Josephine 55, 72-3
[' eglise 110 Fargant, Aurelia 37
Delbrouck, Joseph-Louis 109 Faubourg du Temple 13, 56, 59, 67, 73
Delcasso, Femme 82 Faubourg Poissonniere 24, 59, 66, 78,
Dclescluze, Charles 129 114
Index 207
Faubourg St Antoine 3, 8, 12, 13, 23, Gent, Alphonse 78, 89

30, 35, 39, 45, 46, 52, 54, 64, 67, Gentilly (Seine) 52
72, 75, 86, 140, 143 Gerbal, Barbe 80, 81, 82
Faubourg St Denis 4, 13, 71, 109, 159 Germany 115, 141
Faubourg St Honore 24 Gery, Fran~oise 31
Faubourg St Jacques 7, 13, 24, 54, Gien (Loiret) 90
141 Girondins 8, I 0, II, 14, 36
Faubourg St Marceau 4, 7, 8, 13, 39, Goden, Victoire 66-7
57, 64, 67, 71, 75, 126 Godineau, Dominique viii, 6, 13, 55, 99
Faubourg St Martin 13, 41, 50, 83, Goncourt, Edmond de 143
88, 128, 136 Gonfaron (Var) 92-3
Favre, Jules 110, 112 Gouges, Olympe de 10
Fayon, Marguerite 128, 145 Goussery, Veuve Anne 59
February Revolution of 1848 x, 14, Government of National Defence
15, 16, 17, 32-3, 35-8, 47, 48, 51, (1871) 105, 106, 112-13, 115,
52, 67, 89, 100, 105, 112, 160 139, 159-60
La Femme a.ffranchie 110 Goyon, Marie 66
La Femme et les moeurs 110 La Grand-Combe (Gard) 82
Ferre, Theophile 117 Grande!, Zelie 145
Ferrier Cesarine 93, 98 Greenberg, Louis 119
Ferri-Pisani 89 Greppo, Anne 83, 86-7, 96, 98, 159
Fete des Boulangers 15 Greppo, Louis 83
First Empire 15, 28, 161 Grimaud (Var) 93
First Republic 5, 6, 14, 15 Groubental, printer 95
Flourens, Gustave Ill, 116 Groubental, Mme 95
'Flour War' of Paris 2 Grouvelle, Laure 30
Fontoulieu, Paul 124, 127, 135, 141 Guebart, Marguerite 66
Fonvielle, Wilfrid de 79 Gueret (Creuse) 32
Forces Franraises de 1'/nterieur 154 Guerre, Adele 59-60, 130, 159
Forge, Femme 32 Guesde, Jules 144
Fortin, Eugenie 69 Guiana, French 86, 91, 96, 129, 144
Foubart, Veuve Elisabeth 106-7 Guibal, Elisabeth 51-2, 71
Fourierist Movement 88, 109, 110, Guichard, Julie 74-5
114, 158 Guillaume, Marie-Fran~oise 54
Fourniere, Xavier de Ia ix Guillot, Heloise 107
Four Ordinances of St Cloud 24 Guizot, Fran~;ois 32, 33, 35
Franco-Prussian War 105, 106, 112-15, Guyard, Femme, Marie Wolff 129-30,
136, 137, 159 145
Frankel, Leo 119, 120, 140, 141
Furniture-makers 39, 53, 59, 60, 134 Hachette, Jeanne (Jeanne Laisne) I,
27, 140
Gabrielle, Mile 122 Haguenau (Bas-Rhin) 51
Gagneur, Stephanie 50, 101 Harmand, Josephine 24
Gaillard, Jeanne 119 Hatmakers 19, 29, 42, 87
Gambetta, Leon 112 Hauserne, Femme, Marie
La Garde-Freinet (Var) 92-3, 95, 100 Charpentier 4
Garnier, Marie-Louise 70 Haute-Saone, department of 10, 64
Gaudion, Jeanne 56 Hawarden, Femme 45
Gaussin, Helena 88, 96, 97 Henry, Veuve Anne-Marie 51, 101,
Gautier, Marie-Anne 71 161
Gay, Desiree 41 Hericourt, Jenny d' 110
Gazette des Femmes 9 Histoire des Girondins 14, 36
Gazette des Tribunaux 67, 75 Hitler, Adolf 139
Genreau, Veuve Marie 50 Hoffman, Wickham 149-50
208 Index
Houssaye, Arsene 27, 36 Labourers 62, 71, 94, 96, 118, 129,
Huber, Aloysius 30, 43 151, 161
Huet, Armandine 87, 96, 159 Lachaise, Femme, Marie Guinder 129
Hugo, Victor 49, 146 La Chapelle 109
Husson, Armand 39 Lachaux, Femme, Adele Jarlet 55
Lacollonge, Leon 53
Idees anti-proudhoniennes sur /'amour, Lacombe, Claire (Rose) 9, 10, 12
Ia femme et le mariage 110 Lacretelle, Jacques de 100
Illustrated London News 60, 152 La Ferte-St Aignan (Loir-et-Cher) 31
Industrial protest 6, 15-16, 19, 23, 32, Lamartine, Alphonse de 14, 35, 70
79-80, 92-3, 95, 107-9, lll, Lamber, Juliette (Juliette Adam) 110, 146
121-2, 153 Landes, Joan 102
Innkeepers 20, 62, 72, 74-5, 80, 91, Laporte, Veuve Leopoldine 75, 106
94, 95, 106, 159, 161 Laroche, editor of Le Pere Duchesne
International Workingmen's Association (1848) 75
(French branch) 107, 108, 109, Ill, Laurent, Amelie 28, 70
113, 117, 118, ll9, 120, 141, 147, Leblanc, Augustine 37-8
152 Leblanc, Simone 51, 59, 72, 101, 124,
Ireland 141 141, 145, 161
Issoudun (lndre) 31 Lecaufette, Genevieve 41, 68
Issy-les-Moulineaux (Seine) 123 Lecerf, Rosalie 70-1
Lechallier, Veuve, Antoinette
Jaclard, Anna 121, 126, 131, 134 Contois 73
Jacobins 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 14, 17, Leclerc, Catherine 51, 67
100, 101, 147, 156 Lecomte, General Claude 117
Jardinand, Rose 91, 92, 95, 98, 161, Ledru-Rollin, Alexandre 43, 60, 78
163 Lees, Lynn ix, 49, 50, 60, 62, 64, 65
Jarreau, Suzanne 83-4, 90-1, 93, 94, Lefebvre, Blanche 127-8, 135-6
95, 96, 98, 159 Lefran~ais, Gustave 109, 143, 146
Jary, Adele 126 Legendre, Felicite I 07
Jeanjean, Rose 52, 57, 73 Legitimism 45, 70, 82
Jeune Montagne (Orleans) 81-2, 90 Legouve, Ernest 142
Joan of Arc I, 27, 36, 78, 154, 157 Lemble, Fran~oise 15
Johnson, Martin ix Lemel, Nathalie 107, 114, 123, 124,
Joinville, Fran~ois, Prince de 45 140, 141, 143, 144-5
Jones, Kathleen ix, 121 Lemoine, Anne 44-5
Jouenne, Captain 147-8, 158 Lemonnier, Elisa 108
July Monarchy 16, 29, 32, 33, 38, 40, Leo, Andre 110, 111, 114, 115, 121,
66 131, 134, 140, 142, 144, 153
July Revolution of 1830 ix, x, 12, 14, Leon, Pauline 8, 9, 10
23, 24-8, 51. 52, 59, 67, 97, 100, Leroux, Pierre 109, 110, 142
105, 126, 154, 157, 160, 161, 162 Leroy, Marie 53, 69
'June Days' 1848 ix, x, 8, 13, 17, 18, Leroy, Veuve, Marie-Alexandrine
19, 21, 27, 37-8, 42, 43, 45-76, Spinoy 137-8, 145, 148
85, 86, 87, 89, 91, 97, 98, 99, 100, Lesueur, Prudence 56
105, 123, 127, 130, 131, 132, 134, Levieux, Clara 26
139, 141, 143, 146, 152, 154, 157, Levieux, Femme, Jeanne-Victorine
158, 159, 160, 162 Lagnier 128
Jura, department of 107 Levy, Darline viii, 8
Libersalle, Veuve, Josephine Brun 107
Kareski, Jean-Baptiste 30 Liberti 114
Kerisvin, Marie 74 Liberty Guiding the People 26-8
Krug, Adele 30 Libra, Anna 52-3, 60, 68, 71
Index 209
Limoges (Haute-Vienne) 31, 162 Marmande (Lot-et-Garonne) 96

Liotard, gendarme 94 La Marmite 101, 114
Lissagaray, Prosper 117, 124, 128, Marrast, Armand 70
135, 142 Marx, Karl 65, 120
Loi Falloux 19 Le Mas (Lot-et-Garonne) 84, 94
Loiret, department of 90-2, 93, 94, Memoires de l'Outre-Tombe 101
95, 159 Menand, Marie-Anne 138
Lair-et-Cher, department of 31 Menilmontant 67, 75
London 78 Merard, Opportune 30
Lonjon, Solange 93 Mercier, Josephine 25, 51
Lons-le-Saulnier (Jura) 10 Mericourt, Theroigne de 9, 14, 92,
Lopez, Maria 37, 88-9 100, 142, 157, 159
Lorient (Morbihan) 31 Metal and Jewellery Workers 6, 60,
Lot-et-Garonne, department of 96 61, 63, 70, 71, 83, 106, 120, 133,
Louis XVI 3, 4, 5, 8-9, 10, II, 14, 134
140 Metz 30, 115
Louis XVIII 28 Michel, Louise ix, 108, Ill, 113, 115,
Louis-Napoleon (Napoleon III) 45, 74, 117, 120, 121, 123, 126, 135, 140,
77, 84, 85, 86, 88, 96, 103-4, 106, 141, 142, 143-4, 146, 148, 152,
107, 112, 138 154, 158, 161
Louis-Philippe 30, 37, 38, 67 Michelet, Jules I, 4, 101
Louvet, Victorine 123 Millen, Mme 24
Lucas, Louise 54, 69 Minck, Paule ix, 109, IIO, Ill,
Luddism 32 118-19, 121, 144
Lumpenproletarians 5, 48-9, 62, 69, Miollane, Catherine 68
132, 162 Mitouflet, Julie 66, 72
Luxembourg Commission 41-2, 43 Monniot, Claudine 87, 96, 98, 161
Lyon 29-30, 79-80, 83, 96, 109, Ill, Montagnards de Belleville 47, 70
118, 124, 135, 152, 162 Montargis (Loiret) 90
(arrondissement), 118 (town)
Mabilat, Dr Alexis 83-4, 91 Montmartre 66, 75, 108, 113, 117,
Macaire, Sylvie 56-7, 68, 71 135, 136
Machu, Hortense Aurore 124, 126 Morgan, Lady, Sydney Owenson 23
Macon (Saone-et-Loire) 10 Moutardier, Hortense 25
McPhee, Peter 2, 82 Mulhouse 15
La Madeleine 92 Mur des Federes 153
Les Maillons (Var) 93 Murges, Femme 119
Majoureau, Eugenie 94
Malardier, Pierre 86 Napoleon I 15
Mallet, Femme, Euphemie Soret 30 Napoleon III, see Louis-Napoleon
Malon, Benoit 109, ll9, 140, 146 National 40
Maniere, Marie-Leonie 119, 121 National Workshops 40-1, 44, 45-6,
Le Marais 55, 69, 159 47, 59, 65, 67, 68, 79
Marat, Jean-Paul 10, 14 Neckbecker, Louise 123
Marchais, Josephine 127, 136, 145-6, Necker, Jacques 4
148 Nelle, Mile 39
Marcilhacy, Christianne 90 Neufchateau (Vosges) 15
Marcourt (Belgium) 9 Neuilly (Seine) 123, 137
Marechal, Veuve 80 New Caledonia 138, 144, 146, 152
La Marianne 101 Niboyet, Eugenie 99, 102-3, 146, 161
Marie-Antoinette 5 Nievre, department of 90
Marie, Marianne 56 Noir, Victor Ill, 130
Marketwomen 3, 6, 7, 8, II, 23, 37, Normanby, Lord 48, 56
126 Nouvelle Montagne 89, 90
210 Index
Oise, department of 90 Price, Roger 49, 62

Ollivier, Emile Ill Progres de Loir-et-Cher et d'Indre-et-
Orleanism 44-5, 77 Loir 95
Orleans I, 20, 82, 90, 91 Propagande Politique et Sociale 81
Orsini Bomb Plot 96 Prostitutes 6, 19, 48, 49, 53, 54-5, 56,
Ory, Renee 30 61, 62, 63, 66-7, 69, 70, 79, 89,
Ouzouer-sur-Trezee (Loiret) 91 99, 108, 110, 122, 132, 133,
134-5, 136, 138, 141, 143, 147,
Pages-Duport, M.A. 49, 147 148, 149, 161
Palm d' Aelders, Etta 10 Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph 102, llO, 140
Papavoine, Eulalie 127, 145-6, 148 Proudhonist Movement 109, 119
Parent-Duchiitelet, A.J-B. 19 Provisional Government (of Second
Paris 12-13, 15-16, 19, 20-1, 23, Republic) 39, 40, 41, 43, 159-60
38-9, 64, 107-8, 132, 153, 154, Prussia 112
155, 161-2 Pujol, Louis 45-6
Paris, Louis-Philippe, Comte de 45 Pyat, Felix 107
Pascal, Victoire 90, 91, 94, 95
Pean, Augustine 87, 94, 95, 96 Ragpickers 39, 52, 62, 73, 129
Pelletan, Eugene II 0 Raguisard, rebel of June 1848 57
?ere Duchesne (1848) 66, 75 Raspail, Fran<;:ois 28, 42
Periot, Femme 7 Raudroff, Catherine 88
Perpignan (Pyn!nees-Orientales) 80-1 Raymond, Femme, Marguerite
Perrin, Marie-Fran<roise 66, 98 Berthier 118
Perrot, Michelle viii, 99 Raynaud, Andre 106
Petain, Marshal Philippe 154 Rebellion of April 1834 (Lyon), 29-30
Petit, Jeanne 31 (Paris) 29
Petitjean, Josephine 52-3, 68, 71 Rebellion of August 1944 (Paris) 154
Petit-Jean, Madeleine 10 Rebellion of December 1851 ix, x, 27,
Petroleuses 127, 136, 138, 144, 47, 83, 84, 85-99, 105, 154, 157,
145-6, 147, 148-51, 152 158, 159, 160, 163
Peuple 102 Rebellion of June 1832 29, 39, 52
Peuple Souverain (Lyon) 79 Rebellion of June 1848 see 'June
Picard, Marie 30 Days' 1848
Pilbeam, Pamela xi Rebellion of June 1849 (Lyon) 79-80
Pillant, Femme 32 Rebellion of Prairial 1795 12, 16
Pinkney, David 24, 28 Rebellion of November 1831
Pithiviers, arrondissement of 90 (Lyon) 140
Pittet, Marie 70 Reforme 19
Pius IX 77 Reign of Terror 5, 7, 11-12, 157
Plamenatz, John 106 Rendall, Jane 17, 48
Painton, Marcia 27 Rent conflicts 16, 39, 53, 71
Poirier, Sophie 114, 115, 120-1, 126, Republicain (Lyon) 79
143-4 Republique Rouge 66
Poitiers (Vienne) 31 Resistance (World War II) 154
Poivre, Marie 70 Retailers 6, 20, 29, 30, 54, 55, 59, 61,
Poland 43, 141 62, 63, 67, 69, 71, 73, 75, 87, 107,
Polignac, Jules de 23 111, 133, 135, 143, 161
Poligny (Jura) 83, 107 Retiffe, Elisabeth 113, 144, 145-6,
Porcher, Marie 55, 59, 69, 71-2, 74, 100 148-9
Porte St Denis 49, 58, 59, 87, 159 Reveillon Riot 3, 59, 159
Porte St Martin 52 Revolution of 1789 viii, x, 3-14, 15,
Porters 6, 30, 70 18, 20, 26, 46, 59, 91, 97, 98, 117,
Port-Vendres (Pyrenees-Orientales) 80 122, 140, 148, 152, 155-6, 157,
Poujalet, Anne 84, 94 158, 159, 161
Index 211
Revolution of 1830 see July Revolution Simmonot, Marguerite 15

of 1830 Simon, Jules 110, 112
Revolution of 1848 see February Simpson, John Palgrave 57, 100
Revolution of 1848 Sociale 124, 126, 139, 142
Revolution of September 1870 I 12 Societe Chapeliere de Ste Marie 42
Richer, Leon I 10 Societe de Ia Montagne (1848) 66, 68
Richoux, Femme, Elodie Duvert 128 Societe de Ia Voix des Femmes 42,
Robespierre, Maximilien 7, 12 103, 146
Rochebrune, Mme 137 Societe de St Franrois-Regis 122
Rochefort, Henri I I 1 Societe des Amis du Peuple
Rocher, Femme 124 (1830s) 28, (1848) 42
Rodon, Virginie 91-2, 94, 100 Societe des Droits de /'Homme
Rol, Colonel Henri-Georges 154 (1830s) 29, (1848) 66, 67, 75
Roland, Pauline 83, 86, 87, 94, 96, Societe des Menages 83, 88
103, 109 Societe des Republicaines-
Roman Expedition 77-8, 160 Revolutionnaires 8, I 0, II
Rosny, Marie 45 Societe Fraternelle Centrale 42
Rouen 31, 162 Societe Fraternelle des Deux Sexes 7
Rougerie, Jacques 119, 132, 134 Societe Patriotique et de Bienfaisance
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques I I des Amies de Ia Write JO
Rouvier, Virginie 93 Societe Republicaine Centrale 42, 66
Rude, George viii, 5 Solidarite 114
Russia 141, 144 Spain 141
Spinners (wool) 32, 70
Saint-Simonian Movement 68, 102, Stearns, Peter 17, 32, 99, 162
109, 158 Stern, Daniel (Comtesse Marie
Sainte Genevieve I d' Agoult) 37, 44, 48, 56
St John, Percy B. 36, 147-8 Strasbourg 115
Salernes (Var) 93 Subsistence Riots 2-3, 4-5, 6, 7-8,
Sand, George 89, 96 12, 15, 23, 30-1, 35, 155
Sante!, Veuve Marie 97 Suetens, Leontine 127, 144, 145, 146,
Saone-et-Loire, department of 118 148-9
Saugeot, Victoire 91 Suger, Clementine 143
Schmitt, Marie 136 Switzerland 118, 121, 144, 152
Schoolteachers 108, II 0, Ill, 121,
133, 134, 142, 148, 149, 158, 161 Tardif, Octavie 109, 120
Schulkind, Eugene viii-ix, 18, 120, Tenot, Eugene 93, 97-8
131, 134, 142 Thiers, Adolphe 112, 116, 117, 143,
Second Empire 99, 106, 110, 111, 144, 152
112, 119, 122, 130, 135, 152 Third Republic 112, 146, 153
Second Republic xi, 35, 36, 37, 38, Thomas, General Clement 117
44, 45, 66, 77, 78, 82, 84, 97, 98, Thomas, Edith viii, ix, 17-18, 138,
99, 103, 130, 141, !59 151, 162
Sedan, Battle of I 12 Thomas, Emile 44
Segaud, Marie 136 Thore, Tbeophile 66
Seine, department of 61, 63, 64, 95, 132 Tillac (Gers) 31
Seine-et-Marne, department of 90, Tilly, Charles ix, 16, 49, 50, 60, 62,
I 17-18 64, 65, 99
Serman, William 131 Times 127, 140
Sewing women 40, 41, 55, 56, 60, Tinayre, Marguerite 121
109, 124, 126, 133, 134, 136 Tocqueville, Alexis de 19, 48
Shafer, David ix Traugott, Mark 65
Shoemakers 37, 60, 66, 68, 88, 108, 133 Tricoteuses 57, 100, 101, 148, 152,
Silkweavers 79, 80, 140 157, 159
212 Index
Tridon, Veuve 118 anticlericalism 14, 23, 92-108,

Tristan, Flora 93, I 02 121-2, 129, 138, 142, 144, 148,
Trochu, General Jules 112, 114, 116 158
archivists 75, 83, 88, 100-1
Union des Femmes pour la Defense de armed insurgents ix, 4-5, 9-10, 17,
Paris 18, 120-1, 124, 126, 134, 21, 25-9, 47, 49, 51-6, 66, 68,
138, 140, 142, 144, 147 70-1, 72, 87, 91, 93, 94, 98,
Union pour la Propagande 114-15, 119, 123-6, 127-8,
Republicaine 149 129-30, 131, 135-6, 139, 140,
Urbain, Raoul 137, 138 142, 143, 145-6, 149, 152, 154,
156, 158, 160
Vaillant, Edouard 119 cafes and taverns 6, 20, 62, 70, 73,
Valentin, Adelaide 123 74-5, 80, 88, 91, 92, 94, 95,
Var, department of 92-4, 95, 98, 100, 106, 107, 114, 118, 128, 159,
159 161, 162
Varlin, Eugene 119, 141 clubs, secret societies 6, 7, 8,
Vauxy (Jura) 107 10-12, 14, 28-9, 30, 42, 66-8,
Vendee, department of 10 75, 80, 82-3, 87, 88, 89, 90, 92,
Vengeur (newspaper 1870-1) 122 95, 98, 102-3, 106-7, 112, 113,
Vengeur (secret society, 1848) 87 114, 118, 120, 121-2, 123, 124,
Vengeurs du Peuple 122, 135 126, 127, 135-6, 137, 138, 140,
Verges, Fran~oise ix, 121 141, 142, 144, 145, 147, 148,
Versailles 116, 117, 123, 126, 127, 143 149, 156, 160, 163
Versailles, Army of (1871) 119, 120, criminality 53, 69, 94, 96-7, 101,
122, 123, 126, 129, 130, 131, 136, 137-8, 146-7, 148-9, 159
137, 138, 139, 143, 150, 151, 152 cross-dressing 9-10, 25, 27, 45, 53,
Versailles, Women's March to 54, 65, 66, 99-100, Ill, 124,
(1789) viii, 4-5, 6, 8, 13, 117, 136, 156, 160
140, 155, 157 education 19-20, 108, 110, 119,
Vesuviennes 44, 102 121, 122, 136, 142, 144
Vichy Regime 154 feminism 6, 8, 9-12, 18, 41, 42, 43,
Victuallers 50, 55, 56-7, 60, 61, 63, 67-8, 86, 92-3, 99, 102-3, 106,
67, 68, 113, 114, 122, 128-9, 133, 108-11, 114, 118-19, 120-3,
135, 138 135, 139, 140-2, 146-8, 152,
Vieux-Moulin (Nievre) 31 156, 157, 158, 161, 162-3
Villerme, Dr Louis-Rene 48-9 'firebrands' 3, 4, 6-8, 16, 20, 29,
La Villette 16, 39, 65, Ill 30, 31-2, 51-6, 58-9, 66, 67,
Vinoy, General Joseph 116 69, 71-2, 86-7, 88, 90-1, 92,
Virgin Mary I 93, 94, 122, 127-8, 129, 135-6,
Voilquin, Suzanne 68 136-7, 138, 149, 145, 156, 158
Voix des Femmes 41, 42 hostility to women's insurgency x,
Voraces 80 11-12, 15, 27-8, 36, 53-4, 57, 69,
Le Vrai Livre des Femmes 103 71-2, 92, 96-7, 99-101, 102-3,
Vraie Republique 66 114, 123-4, 144-52, 156-9
Vuillaume, Max 122, 130 neighbourhood networks x, 20, 24,
47, 62, 95, 108, 127, 153, 161
Wandeval, Florence 151 political conspiracies 7, 28-30, 75,
Washerwomen 4, 6, 7, 19, 39, 41-2, 80-1,82-4,92, 106-7, 118, 160
52, 54, 60, 61, 62, 63, 70, 71, 75, praise of women's insurgency ix-x,
127, 128-9, 133, 135-6, 161 I, 4, 14, 25, 26-7, 30, 36, 93,
Weavers 6, 83 100, 126, 128, 130, 142, 157
Wilhelm I, Emperor of Germany 115 'revolutionary justice' viii, 7, 57,
Williams, Roger 119 59, 70-1, 94, 122-3, 127-8,
Women 129-30, 138, 151, 159
Index 213
ringleaders of rebellion ix, 3, 29, 4, 9, 13-15, 17, 25-8, 36, 38,

35, 39, 51-6, 66-7, 69, 86-7, 59-60, 78-9, 82, 87, 90, 91, 93,
90-2, 94, 95, 98, 117, 123, 128, 98, 99, 118, 124, 130-1, 156, 159
135-6, 137-8, 141, 142, 143-4, tradition of revolution 13-15, 26-7,
145, 152, 158-9 38, 44, 46, 59, 67, 69, 75, 82,
scouts 56-7, 94, 128, 158 87, 89-90, 91-2, 97-9, 105, 114,
separate spheres, doctrine of 16-17, 117, 124, 139-40, 141, 152,
101-3, 109, 110-11, 147-8, 152, 156-7, 159, 160-1, 162-3
156, 157-8 Woodworkers 5, 51-2, 59-60
subsistence, see Subsistence Riots
symbolism and symbolic figures I, Yonne, department of 64, 90

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WOMEN AND POLITICAL INSURGENCY

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First published in the United States of America 1996 by

List of Figures Vlll

The Legacy of the 1789 Revolution: Defining the Issues

Recent years have seen the publication of numerous studies concern-

1985, stressed the innovative and revolutionary nature of the Union

1830 and February 1848, visceral condemnation in June 1848 and

within the prism of Parisian activity; it must be admitted, however,

'The saviour of France had to be a woman', wrote the republican his-

a political or military purpose. 7 While women might incite their men-

argument. The king, however, proved obstinate in his response, dis-

armed and accompanied by many men. 14 A direct protest to the king,

with some small businesspeople and wage-earning labourers. 16 While

1789 Pauline Leon, a chocolate-maker destined to become a leading

named Rose Bouillon, a native of the Haute-Saone, entrusted her two

1789 Revolution left a legacy of popular political rebellion and neigh-

1iberty.61 The figure of a woman became not merely an allegorical

against prison and convent silk manufacture, a cheap form of produc-

media as newspapers, household manuals and school education, which

Dupanloup, the Bishop of Orleans, the opinion that girls were to be

Figure 2.1 The departments

against the government by aristocratic and bourgeois liberals, through

bearer of liberty, whether of her own spontaneous volition or as a

the role of victorious warrior or leader of a carnival constitutes a sym-

of the July Monarchy to provide more public assistance at a time of

made cartridges at home, while the common-law wife of a man named

the avocat general of Poitiers (Vienne) noted on 29 September 1830

paying the 45-centime tax, an armed gathering of four to five thou-

cal change. The final banquet of a series was scheduled to be held in

Figure 3.1 The streets o f Paris in 1848

Despite the slump and consequent unemployment of the mid-1840s,

inclusion of women in armed processions in 1792-3. This claim was

Unemployment had direct implications for rents and tenancies, many

to consider reforms that might alter the existing structure of society or

tion turned up regularly in the Morgue in the spring of 1848_31 Others

working day by two hours. 36 Attempts by Blanc and other reformers

Radical anger at the failure of the Provisional Government to decree

was invaded by a crowd of several thousand, producing tumult and an

a brochure entitled Rejfexions d'une femme de cinquante-huit ans sur

the Place du Luxembourg and Place de Ia Bastille, and urged them

The basic organizational framework of the insurgent struggle of June

neighbourhood social networks. 21 Tilly and Lees distinguish between

initially into custody at the Prefecture de Police. They were cross-

the Faubourg St Antoine, who had been wounded in the shooting on

on 24 June, 'They never stop firing, those scoundrels of National

could be seen in the Faubourg St Antoine in thoroughfares such as the

communication, rang the steeple bell of St Severin to rouse the rebels,

through a heavy thunderstorm that occurred on the afternoon of 23

insurgents of the Place du Pantheon on 23 June and incited them to

with a long memory, Veuve Anne Goussery, a 64-year-old costermonger

bearing a flag, with the inscription 'Cent quarante-unieme brigade'. A

ragpicking and machine-minding. Another idiosyncrasy of the female

accounted for by the greater importance of a solidarity based on neigh-

Table 4.3 Statistics of domicile of convicted women in Paris

by previous indoctrination. A few of the women appear to have at-

I'Echaude, and loaded guns on the barricade of the Faubourg du Tem-

des Femmes, where he spoke in favour of legalizing divorce. 99 Bruley's

militantes were small-business people, or people with steady employ-

in her neighbourhood.' 129 Marie-Anne Lecuyer, Femme Duclos, an inn-

Paris, and only circles of Assembly representatives on the Left interested

the spirit of left-wing opposition refused to admit defeat, and might

The insurrectionary pressure to transform the moderate republic founded