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PALAK DHINGRA

MS. MAYA JHON

HISTORY HONS. III YR

26 October 2017

WOMEN AND FRENCH REVOLUTION

BACKGROUND

Before we go on to analyze the role that they played in this uprising

it would be important to understand the role of the women in the French society prior to 1789.The

eighteenth century was the inheritor of a misogynistic tradition which had come down from the

ancient and medieval worlds and which affirmed their subordination. The occasional dissentient

female voice of a Christine de Pisan in the early fifteenth century or of a Marie Jars de Gournay in the

early seventeenth century struggled to be heard. Neither the intellectual changes associated with the

Renaissance, Reformation or Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century had contributed to any

substantial re-evaluation of women’s position.

For both Catholic and Protestant authorities of the period, the ideal woman was the pious and

submissive spouse who accepted her husband’s authority without question and spent the greater part

of her time in prayer and looking after family. Condition of women can be seen by attitude of people

toward the Queen -Marie Antoinette was the epitome of a woman. she became a rallying point for

male bonding against all outbreaks of women's exertion of power. The idea that the Queen used her

‘feminine wiles’ to acquire power and work against the people of France was reinforced over and

over again in the pornographic content that were published about her, connecting her to just about

every other influential male at that time in France, which included the King’s brother and his

grandfather. She was also accused of failing her ‘natural’ duty as a mother – for the ultimate crime
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that was attributed to her was that of committing incest with her son. While none of these stories

about her were true. While aspersions are cast on the Queen’s character and virtue, what is interesting

to note is that the King was never written about in the same light. The content that was written about

the King were quite tame compared to the consistent and vicious slandering of the Queen: he was

only ever depicted as a cuckold, or at most, a pig. (James,28)

Peter McPhee points out that Woman were present from the dawn of the Revolution, they acted

individually with men, for example in the assault on the Bastille; or else in groups, for instance when

they brought the king back to Paris on 5 October 1789. They participated in drafting the cahiers de

doléances, petitioned (Fauré 2006), established political clubs (Desan 1992), and claimed the title of

citizens (Godineau 1996), the rights to education, work, an equitable wage, divorce, and abolition of

the dowry (Devance 1977) and even the right to bear arms and join the war effort. They were present

in the assemblies either to applaud in support of the motions of the deputies – these were the

notorious tricoteuses (Godineau 1988) – or in order to overthrow the government, as on 1 Prairial III

(20 May 1795) (198).

WOMEN IN PUPLIC SPHERE

The salon, though still a private space, gave impetus to women’s participation. Developed into what

Jurgen Habermas has called an ‘authentic public space’, that is a forum in which criticism could be

voiced, even of the monarchy. No longer simply an outlet for civilized leisure, the salon was

transformed into a serious working environment where the business of the Enlightenment got done.

This Facilitated the diffusion of ideas by means of a unique form of feminine sociability.

Some male intellectuals, however, were uncomfortable with the high profile which women enjoyed in

the salons, For Rousseau, women had no business participating in the affairs of the world beyond the

home. he called the salon women as ‘loose women’ of the salons and the cities. Rousseau published

the most influential works on the subject of women's role in his novel La nouvelle Héloïse (1761) and
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Emile (1762) In his book Emile, he described his vision of an ideal education for women. Women

should take an active role in the family, Rousseau insisted, by breast-feeding and educating their

children, but they should not venture to take active positions outside the home. Rousseau's writings

on education electrified his audience, both male and female. He advocated greater independence and

autonomy for male children and emphasized the importance of mothers in bringing up children. But

many women objected to his insistence that women did not need serious intellectual preparation for

life He argued that women were responsible for the corruption of the nation’s morals, this did not go

entirely unanswered and stirred up the feminists. Rousseau’s model of femininity stirred many

women into a positive re-evaluation of their own role as wives and mothers.

On the eve of the French Revolution, Marie-Armande-Jeanne Gacon-Dufour published a pamphlet

which argued that women were more sinned against than sinning. Between 1759 and 1778, the

monthly Journal des Dames not only contested established institutions such as the academies, the

theatre and the state-sponsored press but also articulated specifically feminine grievances, including

its objections to statements about women on the part of prominent philosophers like Rousseau. First

woman editor Mme de Beaumer, who took control of the Journal in 1761 encouraged women to be

bold and to ‘prove that we can think, speak, study, and criticize as well as [men], (James,8)

Philosophers like Condorcet was acutely sensitive to the injustices under which women labored in the

Old Order. In particular, he objected to their lack of educational opportunities in 1787, he set out the

case for women’s political rights in his Lettres d’un bourgeois de New Haven à uncitoyen de

Virginie, and Essai sur la constitution et les fonctions des assembléesprovinciales, published in 1788

arguing that men could not be trusted to enact laws which reflected the interests of women and that as

taxpayers’ women should both vote and be entitled to stand for office. Women, he insisted, were

rational, and should not be debarred from citizenship.

WOMEN AND THE REVOLUTION

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1789-1991

When Louis XVI agreed to convoke a meeting of the Estates-General for May 1789 to discuss the

financial problems of the country. Feminist demands surfaced in at least some of the cahiers

dedoléances, the lists of grievances drawn up in the hope that they could be put to rights by the

Estates-General. Including the Pétition des femmes du Thiers Etat au Roi (1 January 1789) and the

Cahier des doléances et réclamations des femmes, written by a Norman woman, Mme B.B. The

former was addressed to the King, and identified better education as the most efficacious remedy for

the present plight of women. It did not demand political rights, though it expressed a degree of

hostility to the deputies who would deny such rights to women, and suggested that ‘in this communal

agitation’ women should be able to make their voices heard.

In August 1789 they issued their ‘Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen ‘The key concept

which would bind the nation together was citizenship. At no stage, however, did the revolutionaries

think of including women within their definitions of citizenship

In the first constitution, drawn up in 1791, a distinction was made between active and passive

citizens. Revolutionary legislators rendered women invisible in their constitutions: and all

constitution-makers in France would do likewise for the following 150 years. (James ,16)

A number of dissentient voices protested against the Revolution’s gender-specific definition of

citizenship. The most eloquent was that of Condorcet, who in his Essaisurl’admission des femmes au

dioit de cité (Essay on the admission of women to the rights of citizenship)

published in July 1790 argued the need to extend the sacred principles of the Declaration of the

Rights of Man to include the rights of women to civil and political equality. Natural rights applied to

all human beings, male and female, and in nature all persons were equal. Condorcet’s plea for female

citizenship is now celebrated as one of the founding

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texts of modern feminism.

In October 1789 the Revolution In the midst of a continuing shortage of bread, rumors circulated that

the royal guards at Versailles, the palace where the King and his family resided, had trampled on the

revolutionary colors (red, white, and blue) and plotted counterrevolution. In response, a crowd of

women in Paris gathered to march to Versailles to demand an accounting from the King. The crowd

grew more turbulent and eventually broke into the royal apartments, killing two of the King's

bodyguards. To prevent further bloodshed, the King agreed to move his family back to Paris. The

women brought back to the capital ‘the baker, the baker’s

wife and the baker’s little boy’. The very fact that the women turned to the National Guard and the

National Assembly for assistance is indicative of their appreciation of the new political context and

their identification with the Revolution.

Women's participation was not confined to rioting and demonstrating. Women began to attend

meetings of political clubs. In July 1790 a leading intellectual and aristocrat, Marie-Jean Caritat,

Marquis de Condorcet, published a newspaper article in support of full political rights for women. It

caused a sensation. In it he argued that France's millions of women should enjoy equal political rights

with men. A small band of proponents of women's rights soon took shape in the circles around

Condorcet. They met in a group called the Cercle Social (social circle), which launched a campaign

for women's rights in 1790–91. One of their most active members in the area of women's rights was

the Dutch woman Etta Palm d'Aelders who denounced the prejudices against women that denied them

equal rights in marriage and in education. In their newspapers and pamphlets, the Cercle Social,

whose members later became ardent republicans, argued for a liberal divorce law and reforms in

inheritance laws as well. Their associated political club set up a female section in March 1791 to

work specifically on women's issues, including civil equality in the areas of divorce and property.

The boldest statement for women's political rights came from Olympe de Gouges. An aspiring

playwright, Gouges bitterly attacked slavery and in September 1791 published the Declaration of the
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Rights of Woman , modeled on the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen she dedicated her

‘Declaration of the Rights of Women’ to Marie-Antoinette, looking to the Queen to take the lead in

defending the cause of women and restoring the morals of the nation—a courageous act at a time

when Marie-Antoinette De Gouges opened her Declaration of the Rights of Women by accusing the

revolutionaries of 1789 of appropriating all the benefits of the Revolution exclusively for the male

sex and oppressing women:

What was good for men was good also for women, who had it in their power to free themselves, if

only they wanted to. Women had to assert their rights, and in a direct adaptation of the language of

the Declaration of the Rights of Man she applied the doctrine of natural rights to woman and defined

the rights of women in seventeen articles. Joan Scott, has, however, argued that de Gouges talks of

universality but focuses only on issues and problems that confronted her class of women. Like many

of the other leading female activists, she eventually suffered persecution at the hands of the

government Gouges went to the guillotine in 1793.

Another feminist propagandist in the first phase of the Revolution was the Dutch

woman, Etta Palm d’Aelders,Mmed’Aelders published a pamphlet entitled

Appel aux Françaises sur la régenération des moeursetnécessité de l’injluence des femmesdans un

gouvernementlibre, which insisted on the need for women to organise themselves into an effective

feminist lobby. Likewise, an enthusiastic supporter of women’s involvement in the club movement

was Théroigne de Méricourt Théroigne advocating arming women and forming them into a legion of

Amazons, or women warriors. Still more radical was Pauline Léon, by profession a chocolate-maker,

who was a member of the Sociétéfraternelle and also a frequenter of the Cordeliers club. On 6 March

1791 she petitioned the National Assembly for the right to set up a female militia so that women

could protect their homes from counter-revolutionary assaults.

With the nationalization of the Church in France (1990), the Catholic Church was almost completely

ruined. These women worked towards reclaiming their church from the revolutionaries. While most

revolutionary women came from the urban area, the counter revolutionaries came mostly from the
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peasantry, and were deeply religious. They defied the officials of the government, refusing to attend

the services led by priests who took the oath of loyalty to the Republic in 1790. Instead, they hid

nonjuring priests in their homes and attended Catholic mass in secret. They prevented officials from

desecrating their chapels and led anti-oath processions. Women became defenders of the faith, thus

feminizing. Because of the consistent opposition of the women, by 1795, the Thermidorean

government was willing to compromise on their religious policies, allowing people the freedom of

worship within certain boundaries.

In 1992 women benefitted from the changes in their legal status under the republic. Marriage and

divorce were now civil statuses, aristocratic custom of primogeniture was abrogated and equal

inheritance was assured for women, sons and illegitimate children. The republic softened their stigma

with illegitimate children. More ambitious program for women’s cicil and political right appeared in

the never implemented constitution of 1793.

1793–94

The process of politicization produced the Jacobin Republic, the militancy

of the sans-culottes and the Terror of 1793–94. The radical clubs, like the Jacobins and the

Cordeliers, did not admit women as members, allowed them to witness debates as spectators in the

galleries. Women of the people were among the most assiduous attenders, and were thus exposed to

the arguments in favor of the founding of a Republic of Virtue based on ‘universal’ suffrage. (James

20)

A small but vocal minority of women activists set up their own political clubs. The best known of

these was the Society of Revolutionary Republican Women established in Paris in May 1793. Its two

leading lights, Pauline Léon and Claire Lacombe, had a track-record of revolutionary activism. The

members hoped to gain political education for themselves and a platform for expressing their views to
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the political authorities. The society did not endorse full political rights for women; it devoted its

energies to advocating more stringent measures against hoarders and counterrevolutionaries and to

proposing ways for women to participate in the war effort. Accounts of the meetings demonstrate the

keen interest of women in political affairs, even when those accounts come from frankly hostile

critics of the women's activities.

Particular issue dear to the hearts of the Republican Women was that the law

should oblige all women to sport the tricolour cockade to advertise their loyalty

to the Republic, which was decreed by the Convention on 21 September. This measure was greatly

resented by the market-women, who already resented the idea of price-fixing.

A series of brawls between the market women and the Républicaines gave the Jacobin government

the excuse it needed to act against women who, from being useful allies, had become an

embarrassment and a nuisance, since they tended to highlight shortcomings in government policy.

(James,23)

On 3 November 1793, Olympe de Gouges, author of the Declaration of the Rights of Woman, was

put to death as a counterrevolutionary, condemned for having published a pamphlet suggesting that a

popular referendum should decide the future government of the country, not the National Convention.

On 30 October, the Jacobin authorities banned the Society of Revolutionary Republican Women and

all other women’s political clubs and associations.

Women not only formed clubs , rioted and petitioned but also assassinated .Charlotte

Corday assassinated Jacobin leader Jean-Paul Marat, who was in part responsible for the more

radical course the Revolution had taken through his role as a politician and journalist.

1994 onwards

After the fall of Robespierre in July 1794 the National Convention eliminated price controls, and

inflation and speculation soon resulted in long bread lines once again. Women were in the fore in the
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revolutionary crowd which demonstrated outside the Convention, demanding ‘Bread and the

Constitution’ Their pleas went unheeded, and as the famine deepened, women went on the rampage,

sacking shops, seizing grain and kidnapping officials, before launching the essentially female

uprising. They were confronted with intransigence and violence. The sight of women being rifle-

butted by troops galvanized their men folk into action and chased the deputies from their benches and

killed one and cut off his head.

The Convention now voted to exclude women from its meetings; in future they would be allowed to

watch only if they were accompanied by a man carrying a citizen’s card. Three days later the

Convention placed all Parisian women under a kind of house arrest. “All women are to return to their

domiciles unless otherwise ordered. Those found on the streets in groups of more than five one hour

after the posting of this order will be dispersed by force and then held under arrest until public

tranquility is restored in Paris. (Tony,19)

DIFFERENT CLASS DIFFERENT DEMANDS

Class in fact played a crucially important role in the revolution They may be divided into three

separate camps according to their class: women of the nobility, bourgeois feminists, and women of

the property less classes. (Tony,3)

Tony Cliff argues that, in general the noblewomen were passive throughout the revolution. Inferior

to the nobleman, unable effectively to exercise her husband’s rights and powers, since her distinct

function was to rear the heirs of the family name and fortune, the noblewoman nevertheless shared in

the privileges of the aristocracy, hence was a great supporter of the Old Regime. (3)

For the bourgeoisie class Bourgeois feminism had flourished. Active feminists like

Madame b. B, Olympe de Gouges, Dutch-born Etta Palm, van Aelder, Girondine

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Théroigne de Méricourt, among the principal advocates of bourgeois feminism was a

man, the Girondist Marquis de Condorcet, managed to get some reforms as a result of the

revolution. Inheritance laws were changed to guarantee male and female children equal

rights. New laws gave women a legal majority at the age of twenty-one. Women could

contract debts and be witnesses in civil acts. Other legislation changed the laws

concerning women’s property, giving them some voice in its administration, and

acknowledged the mother’s part in decisions affecting her children. Revolutionary

divorce legislation treated both sexes equally.

To women of the working class, the problems of inflation, unemployment and hunger were of much

greater urgency than the questions of divorce, education and legal status. women belonging to the

sans-culottes or peasantry suffered from problems of rising prices, low wages, unemployment, food

shortage and other such conditions that often resulted in an extremely miserable existence. It was

these women, who revolted during the revolutionary period when the economic crisis had become

intertwined with the political crisis with the hope that a change in the regime would lead to them

having a better existence. Working women were active not only in the bread riots. They were also

very involved in pursuing the revolutionary war against foreign opponents of the revolution who

would have restored the French monarchy. They contributed tons of household linen as bandages for

the wounded.

Hence, while women belonging to the more elitist or well-to-do sections of society were more

concerned about their democratic aspirations and securing political rights and some degree of equality

vis-à-vis men, the women belonging to the sans-culottes were more concerned about battling their

day-to-day problems, which naturally got precedence over political rights. This had become evident

when the list of grievances was being prepared for the Estates-General. Women belonging to the

sans-culottes had demanded greater control over prices; working women wanted equal pay for equal

work; and in particular checking the phenomenon of black marketing and hoarding, which always led
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to a rise in prices. Thus, it can be seen that their demands were economic in nature. It was the upper-

class women, who had political grievances.

WOMEN AND VISUALS

Even as the fortunes of women's political activism were rising and falling, women began playing

another kind of role, as symbols of revolutionary values. Most of the major revolutionary values—

liberty, equality, fraternity, reason, the Republic, regeneration—were represented by female figures,

usually in Roman dress (togas). The use of female figures from antiquity followed from standard

iconographic practice: artists had long used symbols or icons derived from Classical Roman or Greek

sources as a kind of textbook of artistic representation. French, like Latin, divided nouns by gender.

Most qualities such as liberty, equality, and reason were taken to be feminine (La Liberté, L'Egalité,

La Raison), so they seemed to require a feminine representation to make them concrete. This led to

one of the great paradoxes of the French Revolution: though the male revolutionaries refused to grant

women equal political rights, they put pictures of women on everything, from coins and bills and

letterheads to even swords and playing cards.

One explanation reflects upon the language and themes used to represent the revolution on their own

merits. Themes such as democracy, liberty and equality (in French, démocratie, liberté, and égalité

respectively) When observing the relationship between female symbolism and the Revolution, the

most direct link would seem to be that all three of these themes are feminine nouns in French. By this

reasoning it would make sense that a word which when spoken and written is considered to be

feminine, would be depicted to the average French citizen as a woman (Ashley,3)

In previous works, women were occasionally portrayed as maternal and nurturing figures in art, if

they were portrayed at all. there was a continuation of the same ideas of femininity, consisting mainly

of maternal love and a nurturing nature is usually projected on to the female monuments of the State.
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This trend is demonstrated in The Fountain of Regeneration and Republican France Offering Her

Breast to All Frenchmen.

The most popular figure was Liberty, who became, in effect, the preferred symbol of the French

Revolution. Called Marianne by Eugène Delacroix to signal that she was nothing but a common

woman .Liberty nonetheless became indelibly associated with the French Revolution, so much so that

she still appears prominently on French money and in patriotic paintings and statuary. Liberty usually

appeared in Roman dress, often in a toga, holding a pike, the people's instrument for taking back their

liberty, with a red liberty cap perched on its tip (the liberty cap too came from Roman times—it was

supposedly worn by recently freed slaves).

Despite representing revolutionary ideals in a legitimate way, nakedness was also used to eroticize

the new democracy in France. The print La Liberté In a highly eroticize image, show liberty is

epitomized as a striking and graceful woman dressed in a Greco-Roman inspired sheath that only

covers her from the waist down. This trend was followed by other contemporary painters too.

CONCLUSION

For at least some French women, the Revolution stirred a new sense of feminist

consciousness. In that sense, the Revolution, with the Enlightenment, gave birth to

modern feminism in addition, the Revolution gave rise to new forms of feminine political action. the

gains were short-lived. Women participated in virtually every aspect of the French Revolution. Jane

Abray’s article on Feminism in the French Revolution looks at the various demands that they made in

pamphlets they wrote, which included the right to vote, higher pay, equality in marriage and the right

to education. Their participation took various forms: some demonstrated or even rioted over the price

of food; some joined clubs organized by women; others took part in movements against the

Revolution, ranging from individual acts of assassination to joining in the massive rebellion in the

west of France against the revolutionary government Most women acted in more collective, less
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individually striking fashion. First and foremost, they endeavored to guarantee food for their families.

Concern over the price of food led to riots in February 1792 and again in February 1793. In

these disturbances, which often began at the door of shops, women usually played a prominent role.

Unfortunately for 19th century women, when Napoleon took over France in 1799, most of the

progress they had made in terms of gaining rights and being recognized as politically equal would be

reversed. Napoleon has even been quoted as saying “the husband must possess the absolute power

and right to say to his wife: Madame, you shall not go out, you shall not go to the theater, you shall

not visit such and such a person: for the children you bear, they shall be mine. “However, if the short-

term effect on women’s rights had failed, the long-term effect was certainly the opposite. Many of the

rights women in North America, Europe, and other parts of the world enjoy today match up perfectly

with the rights Olympe de Gouges espoused in her pamphlet—including equality with men, freedom

of speech and opinion, and the right to own property. Women in America in the 1920s fought for the

right to vote, a right first brought up by the Marquis de Condorcet during the Revolution. And finally,

the sense of entitlement that women today feel about the rights we have and the fact that they should

be equal to men dates back to the pamphlets spread during the French Revolution. (Kelsey,5)

Bibliography

Books

❖ Abray, Feminism in the French Revolution, in American History Review, February 1975.

❖ Landes, Joan: – “women and the public sphere in the French revolution” Cornell university

Press, 1993

Page -138
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❖ McMillan, James: “France and Women 1789–1914 Gender, Society and Politics” Taylor &

Francis group, 2002

Page number -28,8.16,20, 23

❖ McPhee, Peter McPhee “A Companion to the French Revolution” A John Wiley &

Sons,2013

Page number -198

Online sites

❖ chnm.gmu.edu/revolution/chap5a, Accessed on 29 September 2017

Articles

❖ Cliff, Tony:” class struggle and women’s liberation”

Page -5,12,7

❖ Flower, hgKelsey: “The French Revolution’s Influence on Women’s Rights”

Page -5

❖ Palin, Ashley Palin: “Women, Art and Revolution: Feminine Symbolism and Democracy in
Revolution Era France”
Page -3