UNIVERSITY OF DELHI

DYAL SINGH COLLEGE(M)

Core Paper: History of Modern Europe - I

Internal Assessment Assignment

Question: How far do you endorse the statement

that “Women and the poor played a major role in
the French Revolution but benefited the least
from it.”
 “Women and the poor played a major role in the French
Revolution but benefited the least from it.”

One cannot, but agree, with the above statement in the context of the
Revolution of 1789, especially in the light of recent studies. Upon
examination of the period of French Revolution after 200 years later, it
was observed that the social history of women since the Revolution is
till lacking. The celebration of the bicentennial of the ‘French
Revolution’ in 1989 drew historians' attention to the role which played
by women in the French Revolution. The histories written by men,
often hide women in dark folds, erase them, or are unaware of their
presence altogether. In recent studies and research, increasing number
of attempts have been made to provide women their rightful place in
History and to somewhat fill the void.
The notions of rights and freedom which born of the
revolutionary torment, somewhat triggered a mechanism of
self-perception, I.e., that the individual is a person belonging to a
gender. Consequently, women were seen as demanding the rights that
are specific to their individuals, to their functions and the places they
wanted to occupy in a new emerging society. Eventually, women
could serve as alibis, but later were accused of "abusing" freedom.
They became the true victims of the revolutionary tragedy, for they
won, then, lost all the rights as soon as they had been freed from the
bondage of the previous regime, under which they had nevertheless
made some gains. After that, they were put in a position of absolute
dependence and reliance on their husbands, who, having overthrown a
king, set up an even more restrictive atmosphere for women.
Who stormed the fort of Bastille? "The people, the whole
people," any scholar on French Revolution would reply. The majority
of this people, consisted of desperate women. It is quite remarkable
that, historically, the notion of crowds and masses has irrevocably
been associated with women, even though men were the ones who
fired the first shots on those days. Yet of who were the crowd that
marched on Versailles and overthrew the monarchy made up? One
might be surprised to find that it was mostly women. Who led them?
The women of the market district. On 20 June 1791, after the king's
flight, the women declared, "Women were the ones who brought the
king back to Paris and men were the ones who 1et him escape!". Were
women indeed the instrument of the revolutionary uprising of the
people? Yes! This is unquestionable.
Jules Michelet - one of the major French historian - , who
admired women and sometimes exalted their virtues or their courage,
understood their powerful motivations. "Women were in the forward
ranks of our revolution," he wrote. "We should not be surprised at this;
they suffered more. The greatest adversities are ferocious, they strike
the weak hardest; they mistreat children and women much more than
they do men." Despite this, fewer women are remembered by history,
although much was written about their roles in the Revolution and
their impassioned rages. While women ran salons, were fisher wife,
play writers,etc, they were also mothers and wives who suffered from
being a women under the ancien regime.
It is certain that women exacerbated the pens of the 19th
century historians to the confines of legend, to the point that, in
relegating women to the anecdotes of history, the historians turned
women into victims of the Revolution and victims of History in
alternation.
The Revolution, after giving women the right to speak, would
soon silence them. In 1793, there was only one vote against outlawing
women's clubs, which were considered to be dangerous for the
Republic. The deputies were asked three questions:
1. Should assemblies of women be allowed in Paris? ~
2. Should women be allowed to exercise political rights and take an
active part in the affairs of State?
3. Should they be allowed to deliberate in political associations or
popular societies?
Not surprisingly the Convention members replied with a resounding
"No”, thus sealing the "political death" of women as the Civil Code
was preparing their "civic death".
The women did not take long to react. Wearing their famous
red bonnets, delegation led by Claire Lecombe went before the Paris
Council. However, the Council president, Pierre Chaumette,
denounced them saying: "It is horrible--unnatural--for a woman to
want to become a man. Since when has it been decent for women to
abandon their pious household tasks and their children’s cradles to
meet up in public places yelling from the galleries?"

It is not just mere chance that the first enthusiasm for Émile;
or, On Education ( J. J. Rousseau) was contemporary with the birth
and childhood of the heroes of the revolution: Robespierre, Danton
and others. The Social contract was also read by their mothers and
Rousseau had thus shown the disdain for maternity, demonstrated
throughout the 18th century. They instilled in their children the love
of liberty and equality,"All men are born free. Renouncing man's
liberty is tantamount to renouncing his humanity, and even his duties...
" These pages of Rousseau, like the writings of Voltaire, were even
closer to the souls of women because they carried the seeds of a
reform in their condition, even though Voltaire and Montesquieu were
not particularly feminist and their influence should not be exaggerated
in the context. Even though the term "feminism" was created in 1837,
and did not exist at the time, we shall use it here with its current
meaning.
In the second half of 17th century, a distinction between public
and private sphere was observed. The popular stereotypes concerning
women and men were put in question. The employment scenario was
put to light. Were the men more suited for the outside world? Were the
lives of women better suited in the private spheres?
In the 18th century, a lot of important questions regarding
women were asked. Women’s right to vote, education, property, work,
age of marriage, among others. The act of marriage, as well
established, was often perceived as an economic preposition between a
man and a woman. The husband was the means to money for a woman.
She lost her money, property to her husband the moment they got
married, even their children were the property of the husband, not wife.
The latter notion regarding marriage was something that continued till
the 19th century, if not more. But in 18th century, there were many
women during the revolution who were raising voices for their rights.
Women did not get the voting right during the French Revolution, but
they did benefit from many of the changes that occurred in matters of
marriage, divorce, inheritance, and the legal status of unwed mothers
and their children.
In revolutionary Paris, the political identity of women as
citoyennes was made problematic, by the constitutional definition as
well as by gendered political language. The problem of women
citizenship, not only in revolutionary France but also in the West in the
age of democratic revolutions, has been a subject of literature.The
Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen held out the
promise of a political coming of age for all humanity. However, the
Declaration left indeterminate the question of whether universal rights
of man were rights of woman and whether, or in what sense, woman
was a citoyenne. The constitutions of 1791 and 1793 and the debates
surrounding their acceptance presumably resolved the issue. Women
were denied political rights of "active citizenship" (1791) and
democratic citizenship (1793). In revolutionary journées, women
repeatedly applied insurrectionary force to test the legitimacy of
executive and legislative power under successive regimes. In formally
stated demands for equal political and civil rights, Etta Palm
d'Aelders, Condorcet, and Olympe de Gouges in Les Droits de la
Femme with its ringing declaration "The law must be the expression of
the general will; all female and male citizens must contribute either
personally or through their representatives to its formation…" -all
forced radical expansions in the conceptualization of citizenship to
realize the promise of universality encoded in the Declaration of the
Rights of Man.1

“If all men are born free, how is it that all women are born
slaves?” these are the words of Mary Astell, an English feminist
writer, whose advocacy of equal educational opportunities for women
earned her the title, “the first English Feminist”. She went on to write,
“if all human beings have rationality and therefore, are deserving of
freedom of choice and autonomy, then how come women are denied
this freedom?” this was a clear jab in the direction of the basis of
emancipation of women and stating, that women are no lesser than
men.
Louis de Jaucourt, a French scholar, crtised the traditional
roles associated with women and stressed on the fact that it is difficult
to demonstrate scientifically that women are weaker than men. Men do
not have more strength or wisdom than women. He examined the
statement that women when given opportunity, have proven
themselves as qualified leaders, if not, better; by quoting the examples
of two Queens from history: Queen Elizabeth I of England and
Catherine the Great of Russia.
Women sometimes enjoyed place in the intellectual society of
france. One among them was Sophie de Condorcet. Essentially a
Gerondin sympathiser, she translated the works of Adam Smith and
Thomas Paine from French to English. Her spouse, Nicholas de
Condorcet, advocated women suffrage and drafted many legislative
bills for National Assembly. What Condorcet termed, in a 1790 essay
by that name, “the admission of women to the rights of citizenship”
was widely opposed on the grounds that women possessed distinctive
1
Maza, Sarah, and Sarah E. Melzer. "Rebel Daughters: Women and the French Revolution." The Journal of
Interdisciplinary History, vol. 25, no. 2, 1994, p. 303+. Gale Academic OneFile, . Accessed 4 Nov. 2020.
natures, which perfectly suited them to the fulfillment of their
domestic duties. Women were deemed unqualified for the realm of
public affairs because of their alleged greater susceptibility to
sensations, flawed rationality, and weaker sense of justice.
Like many female activists, the Dutch woman Etta Palm
D’Aelders did not explicitly articulate a program for equal political
rights for women, though that would no doubt have been her ultimate
aim. Instead she worked to bring about a change in morals and
customs that would in turn foster a more egalitarian atmosphere for
women. She gave an address titled, "Discourse on the Injustice of the
Laws in Favor of Men, at the Expense of Women" at a meeting of
the Confederation of the Friends of Truth, the first political club to
admit women as full members, where she stressed upon facts taht one
gender was given the rights and privileges while the other gender was
devoid of the same rights. She stated that the revolutionary laws
brought within, certainly, only favoured men. She stressed on the need
of women organising themselves into political clubs exclusive to them.
Pauline Léon was a chocolate maker in France who belonged
to the artisan class or third estate. On March 6, 1792, amid the French
Revolution, she appeared before the Legislative Assembly of France
and read a petition with more than three hundred signatures arguing
that women must be allowed to bear arms not only to participate in the
revolutionary struggle but also to protect themselves against assault as
chaos continued to reign in Paris. Léon address is a remarkably bold
attempt to capture the discourse on militant citizenship and redefine
and expand its parameters to include the military and political rights
and responsibilities of women. Claire Lacombe (1765-?), an
actress, and Pauline Leon (1768-1838), a chocolate maker, founded
The Society of Revolutionary Republican Women in May 1793, until
it was dissolved as “dangerous” by the revolutionary National
Assembly.
Regarding this, Joan Landes is of the opinion that all the
revolutionary women in the context of France were mostly of
aristocratic or bourgeois background and thus their focus was not
limited to political rights but rather the demands were multifaceted as
there was demands for economic rights by the Sans Culotte women
such as guarantee of minimum wage, pay parity and price control.
It is non-viable to not mention Olympe de Gouges,the French
playwriter in the count of revolutionary women of France. She
advocated ‘Universal Adult Suffrage’, I.e., coting rights to all human
beings despite property and gender bias. She also spoke for career
based on virtue and talent, i.e., meritocracy. “ If woman has the right
to mount the scaffold; then she must equally have the right to mount
the rostrum” wrote Olympe de Gouges in 1791 in the best known of
her writings The Rights of Woman (often referenced as The
Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen), two
years before she would be the third woman beheaded during France’s
Reign of Terror. The only woman executed for her political writings
during the French Revolution, she refused to toe the revolutionary
party line in France that was calling for Louis XVI’s death. She
dedicated her article to Marie Antoinette, the Queen of France, as she
was perhaps the most ‘detested’ of women in France. Simon Schama
carried the opinion that women active in public life are often thought
as promiscuous and draws attention towards to the charges put forward
regarding the execution of Queen and King of France where Louis
XVI was charged with treason. What is interesting to note, as pointed
by Schama, is the charge regarding Marie Antoinette. She was charged
with sexual abuse or incest with her 7-8 year old son. And Simon
Schama is right to call Marie Antoinette as the victim of ‘sexual
politics’.
The writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) were a
major influence on the French Revolution, as was the then-recent
success of the American Revolution (1776). Among the three
principles of Revolution: Liberty, Equality and Fraternity; Gouges
focus on the Equality aspect. She drafts a response to the Social
Contract theory by Rousseau titled, ‘Contract Social’. Written on the
institution of marriage, she proposes revisioning of marital structure
and marital laws. Her use of ‘Social Contract’ in the postscript to the
Declaration is direct appropriation of Rousseau. She proclaims that the
right in marriage to equal property and parental and inheritance rights
is the only way to built a society of ‘perfect harmony’.
In 1793, another essay is published by Gouges, ‘The Three
Urns’, demanding plebiscite,i.e, referendum to achieve three potential
forms of government: (i) Federalist government in case of America; (ii)
Constitutional Monarchy in case of Britain and (iii) Invisible
Republic in case of France, which is a satire and critique of
Robespierre. She was put to guillotine for this.

Another notable women is Madame Roland, a Gerondin

sympathiser who ran a salon (which were discussion forums or society,
often mediated by elite intellectual women/hostess) at Hotel
Britannique, which was also attended by Jacobbin members. She was
arrested during Terror and put to death in 1793, with her last words
being, “O Liberty! What crimes are committed in thy name!”.
Memories de Madame Roland a posthumous publication in 1795
came out, which the collection of her letters.

Perhaps the most controversial Radical women of France was

Charlotte Corday. She came to be known as political assassin who
stabbed Jacobbin leader Jean Paul Marat in his bath. She regarded him
as unholy enemy of France. On July 13, she gained an audience with
Marat by promising to betray the Caen Girondists. Marat, who had a
persistent skin disease, was working as usual in his bath when Corday
pulled a knife from her bodice and stabbed him in his chest. He died
almost immediately, and Corday waited calmly for the police to come
and arrest her. She was guillotined four days later.

Mary Wollstonecraft was an English writer and a passionate

advocate of educational and social equality for women. She called for
the betterment of women’s status through such political change as the
radical reform of national educational systems. Such change, she
concluded, would benefit all society. A Vindication of the Rights of
Woman is one of the trailblazing works of feminism. Published in
1792, Wollstonecraft’s work argued that the educational system of her
time deliberately trained women to be frivolous and incapable. She
posited that an educational system that allowed girls the same
advantages as boys would result in women who would be not only
exceptional wives and mothers but also capable workers in many
professions. Other early feminists had made similar pleas for improved
education for women, but Wollstonecraft’s work was unique in
suggesting that the betterment of women’s status be effected through
such political change as the radical reform of national educational
systems.

Mary argues that nature does not discriminate between men and women
and that gender is nothing but a ‘societal construct’ rather than a
biological factor. She bashes the ‘conduct books’ meant for women
which outlines the Dos and Don’ts. She also criticizes Industrial
Revolution that it fails to provide any jobs to women and that the job that
it does provide was wagon puller which was extremely hazardous in
nature. It created gender divide due to low wages.