Women and French Revolution

Berghahn Books
Feminism, Women and the French Revolution

Author(s): R. B. Rose
Source: Historical Reflections / Réflexions Historiques, Vol. 21, No. 1 (Winter 1995), pp.
187-205
Published by: Berghahn Books
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/41299020
Accessed: 29-10-2019 06:43 UTC
REFERENCES
Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/41299020?seq=1&cid=pdf-reference#references_tab_contents
You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms
Berghahn Books is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to
Historical Reflections / Réflexions Historiques
This content downloaded from 117.240.50.232 on Tue, 29 Oct 2019 06:43:12 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Feminism, Women
and the
French Revolution*
R. B. Rose
I suppose the classic symbol of the involvement of women in

French Revolution is Madame Defarge, Charles Dickens' woman o
people from A Tale of Two Cities, who brought along her knitti
watch the guillotine at work, pausing only to cheer as an aristoc
head tumbled into the basket. Of this image we should note
Madame Defarge is above all here (though not elsewhere in the n
a passive spectator. All the action, all the interesting activity is car
out by men. It is a man who pulls the lever: women sit and watc
But of course the French Revolution was not altogether like that
practice. Another image of the women of the Revolutionary period
survives: the tough, militant women of Paris who marched ou
Versailles on October 5, 1789, armed with murderous pikes, club
cutlasses, to capture the King and Queen and drag them back to
thereby scotching the last-ditch royalist attempt at counterrevolution
firmly entrenching the Revolutionary victory of 1789.
The work of modern historians has emphasized and expanded
second image of the active, participating, revolutionary woman. In
George Rude, in The Crowd in the French Revolution, drew attention
prominence of women in the many crowd actions between 1789
1795, especially in food riots, or more exactly, the interventio
crowds in the market place to force the lowering of food prices eith
*R. B. Rose is an Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Tasmania at Hobart. This
originally appeared in a special issue of the Australian Journal of Politics and History, vo
no. 3 (1994), entitled Ideas and Ideologies: Essays in Memory of Eugene Kamenka. It a
with the permission of the editors of AJPH.
1995 HISTORICAL REFLECTIONS/REFLEXIONS HISTORIQUES, Vol. 21, No. 1
188 Historical Reflections/Reflexions Historiques
compelling the government to act, or by direct popular action.1 Many

historians have shown since that this kind of popular activism was not
new in 1789, but had a long tradition behind it in France.2 During the
Revolution itself such episodes as the food and grocery riots of February
1793 in Paris formed an essential part of the wider popular movement
of the sans-culottes that brought the Jacobins to power and compelled
them to adopt official policies of price controls and the repression of
food hoarding and profiteering.
In my own study of The Enrages I tried to show how the French
Revolution also marked the beginnings of the organised participation of
women in politics, particularly through the Society of Revolutionary
Republican Women of 1793, and that while especially concerned with
bread and butter questions-essentially the price of food-these women
militants were centrally involved in the mainstream movement for
political democracy and social equality, and had even begun to ask for
equal rights for women.3
The new emphasis on women's studies and the history of women
which began to burgeon in the 1970s inevitably drew many historians
to look again, more carefully, at the French Revolution period and to
write women back into human history there, as in so many other eras
and events. In 1975 appeared Jane Abray's study of "Feminism in the
French Revolution" in the American Historical Review , in 1976 Ruth
Graham's valuable survey of "Women in the French Revolution," part
of the wider collection Women in European History, edited by Renate
Bridenthal and Claudia Koonz.4 Meanwhile Olwen Hufton, beginning
with her article on "Women in Revolution" in Past and Present (1971) was
turning her attention to the deeper questions of social history and
women's role in the family and the workplace, and asking how far the
1. George Rud£, The Crowd in the French Revolution (Oxford, 1959).

2. R.B. Rose, "18th Century Price Riots, the French Revolution and the Jacobin
Maximum," International Review of Social History 3 (1959): 432-445; G. Rud£, The Crowd in
History (New York, 1964), esp. Part 1, chs. 1 and 3; S.L. Kaplan, Bread, Politics and Political
Economy in the Reign of Louis XV (The Hague, 1966), 2 vols.
3. R.B. Rose, The Enragis, Socialists of the French Revolution (Melbourne, 1965); see esp.
chs. 5 and 6.
4. J. Abray, "Feminism in the French Revolution," American Historical Review 80 (1975):

43-62; R. Bridenthal and C. Koonz, eds., Becoming Visible: Women in European History
(Boston, 1976), pp. 236-254.
Feminism , Women and the French Revolution 189
Revolution changed things for women, and in which directions.5 Along

with Professor Hufton's work probably the most important achievement
in the field in the 1970s was the collection of documents edited by
Darline Levy, Harriet Applewhite and Mary Johnson, Women in
Revolutionary Paris, 1789 to 1795 , which saw the light in 1979.6 I myself
added a bit more to that topic in my book on The Making of the Sans-
Culottes, in 1983. 7 I suppose the first thing we have learned from all
this is how much still remains to be done. Despite Michael Kennedy's
survey of provincial Jacobin clubs,8 there is nothing systematic yet on
the activity of women in the provinces, outside Paris, for example.
Again what happened in the history of women in France between 1795
and the 1830s? We have little idea.
The second thing we have learned is that we cannot always agree on
what exactly we are trying to study. Is it feminist history or the history
of women? For the two are not necessarily identical, as will become
evident in the rest of this paper, in which I propose to examine critically
some feminist interpretations of the French Revolution in the light of
what we know about the history of women in the Revolutionary period.
As a generalisation I think it fair to say that feminists have found the
history of the French Revolution profoundly dispiriting. Simone de
Beauvoir, the founding sister, in a sense, of modern Feminism, set the
tone in 1949 when she wrote in The Second Sex: "It might well have been
expected that the Revolution would change the lot of women. It did
nothing of the sort. That bourgeois revolution was respectful of
bourgeois institutions and values and it was accomplished almost
exclusively by men."9
Writing on France in 1974 in an American collection on "new
perspectives on the history of women," under the title Clio's
Consciousness Raised, Catherine Silver disposes of the French Revolution
in the following paragraph:
5. O. Hufton, "Women in Revolution, 1789-1796/' Past and Present 53 (1971): 90-108;

see also Hufton "Women and the Family Economy in Eighteenth-Century France/' French
Historical Studies (1975), pp. 1-22.
6. D.G. Levy, H.B. Applewhite, M.D. Johnson, Women in Revolutionary Paris 1789-1795
(Urbana, IL, 1979).
7. The Making of the Sans-culottes: Democratic Ideas and Institutions in Paris, 1789-92
(Manchester, 1983).
8. M.L. Kennedy, The Jacobin Clubs in the French Revolution: The First Years (Princeton,
1982), The Middle Years (Princeton, 1988).
9. S. de Beauvoir, Le Deuxibne Sexe, vol. I (Paris, 1949), p. 182.
190 Historical Reflections /Reflexions Historiques
During the great revolution of 1789-rhetorically dedicated to

abstract equality- the women of France rioted, demonstrated and
struggled in the cause. However. . .women received no substantial
benefit from the redistribution of rights after the destruction of
the aristocracy. Such a pattern has long characterised the situation
of women in France/
Jane Abray' s article on feminism in the Revolution mentioned earlier,

concludes equally gloomily:
Revolutionary feminism began in a burst of enthusiasm. Its

unpopularity, its own mistakes, and the blissful incomprehension
and dogmatism of its opponents combined to obliterate it. While
it lasted it was a very real phenomenon with a comprehensive
program of social change, perhaps the most far-reaching such
program of the Revolution. This very radicalism ensured that it
would remain a minority movement, almost the preserve of
crackpots--." For Abray this tragic failure stands only "as a
striking proof of the essential social conservatism of this political
upheaval"11- that is to say, of the French Revolution.
But even those who see themselves as historians of women before

they are feminists surprise us with their negative sentiments at times.
Thus Olwen Hufton' s central interest is the history of the struggling
poor and the working class, and she is forced to the conclusion that
from their point of view the French Revolution, with its famines, wars,
massacres, repressions and general disruption was an overwhelmingly
negative experience.
"When the cards were down and the scores chalked up," Hufton
writes, "what really was the experience of the working woman from
1789 to 1795? How else could she assess the Revolution except by
examining her wrecked household, by reference to children aborted or
born dead, by her own sterility... and what would her conclusion be
except that the price paid for putative liberty had been far too high?"12
In fact, with a few exceptions, the French Revolution has received a
generally bad press from feminist historians over the last twenty years,
10. C.B. Silver, "Salon, Foyer, Bureau: Women and the Professions in France," in
Clio's Consciousness Raised, M. Hartmann and C.W. Banner, eds. (New York and Toronto,
1974), pp. 72-85.
11. Abray, p. 62.
12. Hufton, "Women in Revolution," p. 108.
just at a time when it has suffered an overwhelming assault from

conservatives and revisionists.
The revisionist agenda, since the days of Alfred Cobban has been to
destroy the inspirational significance of the Revolution as a great
movement of human liberation and progress, and reduce it to a useless
and senseless bloodbath, which set back human civilisation by a
generation. For those of us who still struggle to defend the positive
message of the French Revolution, the defection of the feminists is the
unkindest cut of all, for we have always counted on support from that
quarter. To our perhaps simplistic minds the Revolution stood for
human freedom; women are human beings, and therefore the
Revolution stood for the freedom of women.
But of course the problem is not really as simple as that. If we look
at the French Revolution from the perspective of the end of the
adventure-the overthrow of Napoleon in 1815 - it is clear that the
Revolution, taken in its widest interpretation, did not in fact give much
to women. Indeed, as we shall see, there is once again a strong
conviction, particularly among Marxist feminists, that its effects were
wholly negative, that it was part of a general movement that made the
condition of women in Europe substantially worse. That general
movement is, of course, the "bourgeois revolution." There is a
consensus that its triumph meant the triumph of masculine power.
Indeed it is a kind of syllogism: the French Revolution was a bourgeois
revolution: the bourgeois revolution was a revolution for and by men:
therefore the French Revolution was a revolution against women. As
long ago as 1977 Margaret George, discussing the defeat of the most
determined Revolutionary thrust for political status by a woman's
organization in 1793, gave the French Revolution the Marxist thumbs
down in Science and Society, even in its Jacobin and democratic phase.
"Sans-culotte is a male word," George wrote, "as the Revolution, the
Convention, the Constitution and all positions of power were male....
Jacobin revolutionaries, self-conscious architects of an egalitarian society,
proudly engaged in remaking history towards the perfectibility of Man,
consigned Women to civil nothingness, to a position more clearly
inferior to that of the Catholic, feudal past, because now defined,
cloaked and justified by the bourgeois deities of Reason and the laws of
Nature."13
The most sophisticated and powerful assault along these lines comes
however from Joan Landes, a disciple of the Jiirgen Habermas variant
13. Margaret George, "The 'World Historical Defeat7 of the R6publicaines

R6volutionnaires," Science and Society 40 (1976-77): 410-437, 411.
of Marxism. In 1988 Landes published her Women in the Public Sphere in

the Age of the French Revolution .14 which has already gone through three
reprints. Thus it appears to respond to a widespread need by feminists
to re-evaluate the Revolution by an almost total rejection. The absolute
nature of that re-evaluation can be gauged by a few quotations. "The
Republic/' writes Landes, "was constructed against women, not just
without them."15 "At the very least, the post revolutionary
identification of masculine speech with truth, objectivity, and reason has
worked to devalue women's contribution to public life to a degree rarely
matched in earlier periods- the structures of modern republican politics
can be construed as part of an elaborate defense against women's power
and public presence."16 "Montesquieu's dream of the domestication of
women was enacted by the male leadership of the French Revolution,
and their post-revolutionary successors. Indeed the new symbolic order
of nineteenth-century bourgeois society was predicated on the silence of
public women."17 Finally Landes fiercely denounces what she calls the
Revolution's "phallic quality"- "a product of the way political legitimacy
and individual rights were predicated on the entitlement of men
alone."18
As a disciple of Habermas, Landes argues that cultural history is
central to interpretation of the past, and that what it is about is a
struggle for access to and domination of a phenomenon described as
"the public sphere." Before 1789, it seems, this "public sphere" was an
arena of conflict between the feudal classes and the rising bourgeoisie.
In this epoch some women had not inconsiderable access to the public
sphere. Noble and wealthy women could exert an influence on public
opinion, for example, through the salons or receptions over which they
presided, attended by the leading thinkers of the age; salons such as
those of Madame Du Deffand, Madame Geoffrin, the patroness of the
Encyclopedia, the Princesse de Conti and the Duchesse de Choiseul.
Madame de Pompadour, Louis XV's intellectually inclined mistress,
managed to have Voltaire appointed Royal Historian at Versailles;
prominent women frequently corresponded readily and effectively with
the philosophes. Noblewomen and nuns even had some "political
14. J.B. Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca
and London, 1988).
15. Ibid., p. 12.
16. Ibid., pp. 203-204.
17. Ibid., p. 38.
18. Ibid., p. 158.
space/' in the right to be represented, albeit by men, in the Estates

General, the French national parliament.
The Revolution ushered in a period in which all that was lost. The
public sphere was henceforth exclusively dominated by men, and
women were relegated to a purely domestic role. The culprit was the
bourgeois revolution, a masculine thing for which consciously aware
women historians can hold no brief. "Following the Revolution," I quote
Landes again, "nearly three decades passed before feminists again
achieved a public outlet. Beginning in the 1830s women organised
collectively to demand redress from patriarchial institutions."19
However can we defend the French Revolution against such a
devastating attack? Of course it would be easiest to simply follow the
prevailing orthodoxy and declare that, whatever it was, the French
Revolution was not a bourgeois revolution, and that therefore whatever
it did for or to women had nothing to do with the rise of the bourgeoisie
or with the new hegemony of the bourgeoisie in the public sphere.
Landes' basic argument is thereby exploded even before it can be
developed. But there may be some of us with lingering doubts about
this "prevailing orthodoxy." Besides, even after throwing out the
"bourgeois revolution" as a sufficient explanation, we are still left with
so many uncomfortable facts to account for.
For there is a great deal of truth in the arguments of feminists like
Margaret George and Joan Landes. After all, the Revolution, taken en
bloc, and including the Napoleonic consolidation, did leave women
subordinated to a crushingly masculine state and society. And that
subordination had begun even before Napoleon's rule.
The French Revolutionary Constitution of 1791 made women citizens
of a kind, if only "passive" citizens, unable to vote or stand for public
office. The Jacobin Constitution of 1793 gave the vote to all men but to
no women. The Constitution of the year III (1795) took the vote away
from some of the men and dropped the earlier notion of passive
citizenship, and so women ceased to be citizens at all. Finally the
Napoleonic law code of 1804 proclaimed a uniform regime of patriarchy
which entrenched again most of the oppressive features of the chaotic
family law of the old regime. Wives must obey their husbands and live
where they direct. Husbands may have their wives imprisoned for
19. Ibid., p. 169. By an ironic contrast Simone de Beauvoir's original argument in 1949
was that, "It is important to underline that throughout all the Ancien Regime it was the
women of the working classes ( des classes travailleuses) who among their sex knew the most
freedom." he Deuxibne Sexe, vol. I, pp. 182-183.
adultery, but not vice versa. Fathers may imprison their children for
misconduct at will.
Control over women's property was placed squarely in masculine
hands, since wives were made incapable of making contracts or of
alienating or acquiring property or suing in the courts without the
formal consent of their husbands; all deliberately done, too, as one of
the framers of the code, Portalis, declared in introducing it: "There has
been no attempt to introduce dangerous novelties into the new
legislation. All has been preserved from the old laws which can be
reconciled with the present order of society; the stability of marriage has
been upheld; wise rules for the government of families have been
provided; the authority of fathers has been re-established; every way of
assuring the submission of children has been brought back."
But take careful note of the language. This is not the bourgeois
revolution speaking but the traditional French patriarchal society of the
old regime reasserting itself after a period of public and domestic
disorder. Which brings me to one of the first points the defence will
submit. Joan Landes appears to have fallen into the famous error
attributed to Edmund Burke: to have pitied the plumage and forgotten
the dying bird. It is true that for a few privileged women life before the
Revolution was freer and more satisfying. Yet even over the daughters
of the nobility there hung, until the age of 25, the threat of arranged and
indissoluble marriages, disinheritance through the rule of primogeniture,
and forced relegation to the convent. For most working women, peasant
women, and middle-class women the subordination codified by
Napoleon was nothing new. A glance at Olwen Hufton's humane
history of the Poor of Eighteenth-Century France11 is enough to dispose
of the notion of a vanished golden age for women destroyed by the
bourgeois (read French) revolution.
No one sums up better the ceaseless struggle for survival in an
economy of expedients punctuated by periodic dearth, war and
unemployment: "It needed only some everyday occurrence, a sickness
of the main earner, his death, the drying up of domestic industry, the
birth of a third or fourth child, to plunge the family into difficulties from
which recovery was impossible."22 It is in Hufton's own devastating
20. For a summary of the civil code see: H.A.L. Fisher, "The Codes/' in Cambridge
Modern History, vol. IX, pp. 148-179.
21. O. Hufton, The Poor of Eighteenth-Century France, 1750-1789 (Oxford, 1974).
22. Hufton, "Women and the Family Economy," p. 22; Hufton, "Life and Death
among the very Poor," in The Eighteenth Century: Europe in the Age of the Enlightenment, A.
Cobban, ed., (London, 1969), pp. 295-310; p. 300.
chapter on "Parent and Child" where we read that under the old regime
"A mother suffering from malnutrition often found it impossible to feed
her child," and that "In certain parts of Britanny impoverished mothers
did not even bother to toilet train their weaker children whose life span
was hardly likely to merit the trouble." The same chapter discusses "the
recourse to large doses of alcohol, sulphurous purgative and the rusty
handle of a kitchen ladle" to end unwanted pregnancies, and the fate of
the thousands of children of the poor who actually struggled into life:
a death rate in the foundling hospitals of 60 per cent a year . Elsewhere,
Hufton evokes a scene in which "the women of the Auvergne... during
the hard winter of 1786. . .hammered, cold and hungry on the door of the
depot de mendicite, and demanded to be arrested as beggars," simply to
avoid starvation.23
But to say that women's lot under the old regime was a harsh one
hardly amounts to a satisfying rebuttal of the charges laid against the
French Revolution. Instead, I intend to fall back on 'good intentions' as
a main line of defence: that the Revolutionary generation intended to
make women's lot better in a great many respects, and, indeed,
succeeded in a few.
Let me call my main witness for the defence. In 1980 James F. Traer
published his study of Marriage and the Family in Eighteenth-Century
France.2* Traer begins by painting a grim picture of something he calls
the "traditional" family of eighteenth-century France before the
Revolution. (He has idiosyncratic reasons for not calling it the
patriarchal family as most other historians do, but that is what he
means.)
Here is how it is defined:
In the traditional marriage the husband and father exercised both

legal and actual power over the person and property of his wife
and children. He enjoyed management of their property and of
the revenue it produced. The law permitted him to discipline his
wife and children either by physical punishment or by
confinement in a correctional institution. In short he was the ruler
of his own small realm, similar to the monarch in his
kingdom.25
23. Hufton, The Poor of Eighteenth-Century France , pp. 331, 342.
24. James F. Traer, Marriage and the Family in Eighteenth-Century France (Ithaca and
London, 1980).
25. Ibid., p. 15.
Note that this 'traditional' family has nothing to do with the

bourgeois revolution. In fact Traer does not notice any sign at all of a
bourgeois revolution in eighteenth-century France. What he does see,
instead, is a progressive cultural movement, the Enlightenment, in full
spate, changing conceptions of human happiness and human
relationships. Emerging from the matrix of the traditional family is a
new phenomenon: "a new and democratically organised modern family
whose members were equal to one another and united by freedom of
choice and love."26
In Traer's own words "In contrast to the 'traditional' marriage and
family, the 'modern' family developed out of the literature and criticism
of the French Enlightenment, translated into new laws and social
realities during a massive political achievement."27 And what massive
political achievement is this? The Revolution of 1789. "The coming of
the revolution in 1789 gave social critics and legislators the opportunity
to implement a vast body of Enlightenment criticism and theory -
Under the twin banners of liberty and equality they enacted legislation
that they believed would create and foster a new pattern of marriage
and family organisation."28
Well, so much for "phallic revolutions"; let's hear it for liberty and
equality! Especially since Traer brushes aside the Napoleonic code as a
less than serious hindrance to the irresistible advance of the new model
of marriage.29 His conclusion: "The ideals of liberty and equality,
together with romantic love and domesticity had created a modern
conception of marriage and family that would become the norm for
France, and indeed, for much of the Western world."30
One of the more serious criticisms that may be laid at the door of
Traer is that he nowhere provides the evidence for the growth of the
ideals of his "modern" family by reference to specific figures or
teachings of the Enlightenment.
On the other hand the concept of the transition from the patriarchal
to the modern family is no stranger to historians. Lawrence Stone, for
example, has coined the term "Affective Individualism" for the guiding
spirit of the "modern" family. With the growth of affective
individualism, to employ Professor McManners' summary, the
26. Ibid., p. 165.

27. Ibid., p. 16.
28. Ibid., p. 19.
29. Ibid., pp. 184-193.
30. Ibid., p. 197
Feminism, Women and the French Revolution 197
individual is recognised as unique and independent, entitled to his own

ideas and to a degree of physical privacy; the child becomes the centre
of family affection and grows up with the right to choose a marriage
partner. The new "Closed Domesticated Nuclear" family is bound by
ties of affection between husband and wife, parents and children, and
recognises the rights of its members to their individual pursuit of
happiness. Stone is writing about the evolution of English society
between 1500 and 1800, but in a chapter on "Living, Loving and Dying"
in his book, Death and the Enlightenment, McManners specifically applies
the same analysis to France; focussing the change in attitudes on the
eighteenth century and discussing the positive influences of La Mettrie,
Morelly, Helv£tius and Holbach, Diderot, Rousseau, and of course
Condorcet, among others. Even Joan Landes' archvillain Montesquieu
presented Roxane with sympathy in the Persian Letters.31
Unlike Landes, Traer has not enjoyed multiple reprints; clearly there
are fewer people who want to know what he is saying. It will be obvious
that I myself have doubts about the positive influence of the later stages
of the French Revolution and of the Napoleonic Regime. But I do think
that what Traer has to say about the classic French Revolution, the
revolution of 1789-1794, is worth a closer examination. Let us therefore
call to the stand an expert witness: Jacques Godechot on the Institutions
of France under the Revolution and the Empire,32 and try to find out
some of the changes that the Revolution actually made in the life of
Frenchwomen. First, take the case of the inheritance of property. In
March 1790 the Constituent Assembly began by abolishing
primogeniture for formerly noble property, at the same time as it
abolished nobility itself. This meant that all the heirs of a property-
owner, including daughters, and not just the eldest son or other male
descendent, could inherit.33 Two years later, in March 1793, the
Convention extended equal inheritance rights to all kinds of property.
Moreover, this legislation was made retroactive to 1789, so that legally,
brothers had to hand back a share of their property to their sisters;
many women exercised their rights, to the confusion of the courts.34
31. J. McManners, Death and the Enlightenment (Oxford, 1981), pp. 444-465; see also R.
Mauzi, L'ldte du bonheur dans la literature et la penste frangaises au XVlIf siicle, (Paris,
1960) for a general account of the humanising influence of the Enlightenment.
32. J. Godechot, Les Institutions de la France sous la Rtoolution et YEmpire (Paris, 1951).
33. Ibid., p. 174 et seq.
34. Ibid., pp. 375-377.
Secondly, let us look at the institution of marriage. The Revolutionary

Constitution of 1791 began by recognising marriage as a civil contract
between consenting partners. Since one can dissolve as well as make
civil contracts, this opened the door to a tremendous upheaval in the
social order, divorce. In Catholic France marriage was a sacrament
and divorce impossible. The only possible way out of a bad marriage for
a woman was a legal separation. But there all the cards were stacked for
the husband. He retained control of the family property and of the
children, and in some cases could have a troublesome wife shut away
in a convent or even a prison. On 20 September 1792 the Legislative
Assembly made divorce legal on a number of special grounds such as
lunacy, desertion, injuries, condemnation as a criminal. But it also
sanctioned divorce by mutual consent, or on the grounds of
incompatibility, by the application of either one of the parties. It left the
younger girls with their mother and the boys with their father.36 Of
course divorce for women is a double-edged weapon, as was evidenced
when the Breton Municipality of Pont-Croix congratulated Citizen
Allain, who had divorced "a wife of sixty years of age, and had formed
a new relationship with a young female companion in order to increase
the number of defenders of liberty." The municipality solicited a decree
from the Convention to encourage the general spread of such patriotic
conduct.37
On the other hand Roderick Phillips, in a careful examination of
divorce statistics in the 1790s at Rouen in Normandy, shows that it was
overwhelmingly women who made use of the new laws. Women
petitioned for 71 per cent of unilateral divorces, and women were also
the driving force in most divorces decreed by mutual consent.38 As an
aside it ought to be remarked that the Revolutionary debate on divorce
reflected not despair at the breakdown of marriages, but an enthusiastic
hope that allowing men and women to remarry who had been legally
separated or mutually alienated would encourage the creation of new,
loving marriages and happier families.39
35. Ibid., pp. 209-212.

36. Ibid., pp. 212 et seq.
37. T. Rodis, "Marriage, Divorce, and the Status of Women during the Terror/' in
Bourgeois, Sans-Culottes and Other Frenchmen, Essays on the French Revolution in Honor of John
Hall Stewart, M. Slavin and A. Smith, eds., (Waterloo, ON, 1981), pp. 41-57; 55-56.
38. R. Phillips, "Women and Family Breakdown in Eighteenth-Century France: Rouen
1780-1800," Social History 2 (1976): 197-218; 205.
39. Traer, pp. 114-117.
This attitude was consistent with the law of 20 September 1792 which
lowered the age of parental consent for marriage to 21 from 30 for men
and 25 for women. The Legislative Assembly also abolished the age-old
right of parents to imprison their children for misconduct or
disobedience.40
I should like to tender here another piece of evidence from Godechot.
On 28 June 1793 the Convention took into account the problem of
unmarried mothers and ambitiously planned the provision of public
maternity homes to accommodate them in every administrative district
of France; on 4 July a network of orphanages to care for "the natural
children of the fatherland" up to the age of twelve was decreed, with
provision for apprenticing them afterwards.41 Unfortunately, the
Convention decreed a great many things that did not come to pass in a
crisis era of national and civil war. Another such decree was the
national provision of primary education for girls as well as boys.42 Bu
again, the least we can say is that they had good intentions.
I submit that Godechot's evidence on only the two counts o
inheritance and divorce is sufficient to vindicate Traer's general
argument and to refute Joan Landes. It is true that Napoleon m
divorce very much more difficult to obtain for women, and that t
restored Bourbon Monarchy abolished it altogether. It is also true that
Napoleon partly abandoned the principle of equal inheritance
allowing one favoured heir, albeit under strict rules, to receive a large
share than the others, but the right of daughters to inherit a substant
portion of the parental estate survived both Napoleon and t
Restoration.
What we have, in summation, therefore, is a Revolution inspired by
the ideals of the Enlightenment which set out to make a better world for
women, followed by a reaction, culminating in the Napoleonic Code
that sought to force them back into the old patriarchal mode. To
condemn the Revolution for the sins of the reaction seems to me to be
illogical and unreasonable, and a flagrant case of throwing the baby out
with the bathwater; a crime which, I regret to say, was almost as
harshly punished after 1789 as under the ancien regime. I have to admit
that I would have liked to have rounded out my argument by
40. Godechot, pp. 209-211.

41. Ibid., pp. 379-380.
42. Historical Dictionary of the French Revolution, S.F. Scott and B. Rothaus, eds.
(Westport, CT, 1985), p. 346.
demonstrating that the French revolutionaries took a more humanitarian

view of abortion and infanticide than the old regime.43
It now seems appropriate to turn to the much debated question of
the "abolition of feudalism7' and its impact on French peasant families.
The Constituent Assembly announced the "abolition of feudalism" on
4 August 1789, and shortly afterwards abolished church tithes also.
Indeed, these reforms have traditionally been ranked among the major
achievements of the Revolution in improving the living standards of the
peasantry. Like all such achievements they have been recently exposed
to critical scrutiny and their import has been downgraded. The most
important so-called feudal or seignieurial dues were not officially
abolished outright until 1793; in the meantime they had, legally, to be
redeemed by the peasantry or continued to be paid. Where land was
held on leasehold tenure the landlords were permitted to add the tithes
to the rent en bloc, while in the long run competition for tenancies made
possible higher rents which eroded gains resulting from the extinction
of seignieurial dues. The successful imposition of new land taxes
mopped up much of what remained.
However, millions of peasants who were not on leasehold but owned
their own land obtained potentially massive advantages. How massive
may be judged by the consideration of a few statistics. Labrousse
estimated that for France as a whole the combined burden of
seignieurial dues and tithes amounted to a tenth of a peasant's gross
harvest.44 But there were many parts of France where much more was
extracted from the peasants, as Peter Jones demonstrates in The
Peasantry in the French Revolution . Thus in the Limousin the seignieurial
dues amounted to a third and in Poitou to a quarter of the crop; the
tithe, usually about a twelfth, was often an eighth in Gascony and a
sixth in the Franche Comte. In 1780 the provincial assembly of Upper
Guyenne complained that out of a dozen sheaves of corn "the seigneur
takes three, the tithe-owner one, while taxes absorb two more," so that
the peasant saved only a half of his gross harvest, after a third had been
skimmed off by feudal exactions. Assuming an average grain yield
43. I am grateful to Dr. Alison Patrick for assuring me that the men of the Constituent
Assembly did relent to the extent of replacing the death penalty for criminal abortion by
twenty years in chains.
44. C.-E. Labrousse, "The Evolution of Peasant Society in France from the Eighteenth
Century to the Present/' in French Society and Culture since the Old Regime , E.M. Acomb and
M.L. Brown, Jr., eds. (New York, 1966), pp. 43-64; 57.
45. P.M. Jones, The Peasantry in the French Revolution (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 45-49.
of 5 or 6 to one (and it could be less),46 a further sixth needed to be

set aside for seed grain, leaving a net third of the gross harvest for
domestic needs.
Thus there were parts of France where, as a consequence of the
Revolution, the landowning peasant regained a third of his gross harvest
and doubled his net, while an increase of net income by a fifth was
fairly general. Consider the impact of such statistics on a family where
the holding, under the old regime, had been barely large enough to
sustain a family of two adults and three children. The inexorable logic
is that, accidents of foreign and civil war notwithstanding, "when the
cards were down and the scores were chalked up," by 1795 peasant
mothers could look back on an increase in the amount of food for
domestic consumption that meant an improvement in their own fertility
and the survival of an additional child or two whose early death would
have been almost a foregone conclusion before 1789. And all this does
not take into account peasant gains in the redistribution of land
following the sell-off of church and some noble land and the 1793 decree
permitting the dividing up of the commons. By this decree, incidentally,
women were permitted to take part as equal voters in the crucial
decision to partition, and they were allocated equal shares.47 Nor does
the assessment take into account a fairer distribution of taxes or
occasional 'tax holidays' when the collection mechanism broke down.
Thus far we have been looking, in a sense, only at the surface of
history, at the conscious activities of reformers and legislators. But there
are a number of more profound ways in which the Revolution benefitted
women in a lasting way.
For example, comparing the evolution of demographic statistics with
the dates of political events produces some surprising and significant
results. We have already been looking at divorce. Let us change tack
and look at marriages instead. After all, the vast majority of women
expected and sought marriage as a normal completion of their lives. In
1966 Marcel Reinhard, a French historian who had a special interest in
this field of studies, contributed an essay which summed up the
demographic impact of the Revolution in two apparently contradictory
conclusions.
46. R. Price, An Economic History of Modern France, 1730-1914 (London, 1981), p. 47.
47. Jones, p. 143.
He wrote in one instance:
The most striking trend is the marked increase in the marriage

rate. Comparing the annual mean with that of the two decades
preceding and following 1789 the increase is often from twenty to
twenty-five per cent, sometimes fifty and even sixty per cent or
more, both in the rural areas and the towns... To sum up, the
major effect of the Revolution was the increase in the number of
marriages.48
But only a couple of pages later, in his general conclusion, Reinhard

contradicts himself in a rather startling fashion:
The major demographic effect of the Revolution is certainly the

accentuation of the tendency to limit births. This is an
extraordinary factor" Reinhard continues, "as an increase in
fecundity is evident in Belgium and England at the same time.49
Let us forget the quibble about which was the really major
demographic effect. We are still left with two of them. The French
Revolution coincided with a significant turning point in the experience
of Frenchwomen: the marriage rate went up and the birth rate wen
down. Looking a bit further ahead we find these changes still operating
strongly during the first years of the nineteenth century, for Loui
Bergeron, the historian of the Napoleonic Empire tells us that while the
marriage rate continued higher than before 1789, and while th
population had grown by several millions, there were about ten per cen
fewer births between 1811 and 1815 than between 1781 and 1784.50
There is an obvious question that demands an answer here. Mor
women are getting married earlier, and yet women are bearin
significantly fewer children.
It is fashionable in some historical circles to jettison political history
as the froth on the surface, and to concentrate instead on the deepe
currents of social history, or "real" history. I suggest that the study of
the demographic impact of the French is an object lesson of the danger
of following this fashion too exclusively.
48. M. Reinhard, "Demography, the Economy and the French Revolution" in French
Society and Culture, pp. 20-42; 25.
49. Ibid., p. 28.
50. L. Bergeron, L'Episode napoUonien: Aspects intirieurs, 1799-1815 (Paris, 1972), pp.
120-121.
What then did the political event, the French Revolution, have to do
with those almost equally revolutionary demographic effects? The
question of the rising marriage rate is the easiest to resolve; Reinhard
answers it himself. In 1791 the Revolution abolished the guild system
under which the trade guilds had compelled apprentices to remain
bachelors throughout their training. Consequently, many men,
especially in the towns, became marriage prospects much earlier than
under the old regime. At the same time, as we have seen, the
revolutionaries lowered the age of parental consent for marriage. The
decline of the influence and power of the church was also of some
importance; the Catholic Church had forbidden marriages during Advent
and Lent. All these things played their part. But there was a final and
clinching factor: conscription. During the Revolutionary and Napoleonic
wars, whenever a major call-up threatened, a host of young men found
that their minds underwent a sudden and salutary clarification.
Bachelors were conscripted while married men were left at home; a
series of marriage booms was the result. 51There is less consensus on
the Revolutionary connections of the falling birth-rate, partly because
the beginnings of this trend were already in evidence in some parts of
France well before 1789. Nevertheless there is good reason to believe
that the French Revolution did play a significant role. "Birth control
became widespread in France earlier than in England and in other
countries, both Catholic and Protestant, of Western Europe," comments
the demographer, J.L. Flandrin. "This has long been considered to have
been an effect of the Revolution, with its dechristianising and egalitarian
tendencies. The Revolution probably did accelerate the process, by
liberating a part of the population of France from the prohibition the
church had hurled against contraception and because the Revolutionary
laws regarding succession-obliged couples to limit their offspring in a
draconian manner."52
Jacques Dupaquier is even more precise in his general survey of the
French population. "One thing that seems certain" he writes, "is that
the 'cultural revolution' of the years 1789 to 1794 created the appropriate
conditions for the diffusion of a new family morality. In this short lapse
of time millions of French people, pulled along by the dialectic of an
irresistible movement, stripped off the traditional cloak."53
51. Reinhard, pp. 25-26; c.f. Bergeron, table on p. 129.

52. J.L. Flandrin, Families in Former Times: Kinship, Household and Sexuality , trans. R.
Southern (Cambridge, 1979), p. 238.
53. J. Dupfiquier, La population frangaise au XVIF et XVllf sibcles, Que Sais-Je? (Paris,
1979), p. 124.
We are dealing here with two delicate matters-what went on in the

bedroom and what went on in the confessional~so we must tread
carefully. First let us be clear that contraception in 1789 did not m
the use of chemical or mechanical devices. Condoms were certainly
by wealthy rakes to prevent disease, and prostitutes used c
tampons to prevent conception. But for the majority of French fam
the experts conclude, family limitation was achieved by the practic
coitus interruptus, with abortion as a back-stop in case of accidents
Needless to say both these practices were fiercely condemned by
church and policed by the confessional. It is thus not without relev
that the French Revolution was marked by a general turning away f
the church and by the collapse of the parochial system, and alth
Napoleon restored the Catholic Church in 1801, large parts of F
remained, and remain to this day, dechristianised.
The next and significant question is: to what extent did women g
control over their own fertility as a consequence of the Fr
Revolution? Olwen Hufton depicts the Revolutionary generati
women returning to the church almost en masse, scrubbing ou
sanctuaries defiled by revolutionary vandalism.55 But did they retu
as enthusiastically to obedience to all the Church's moral teachings?
so, how are we to explain the fact that while the population of count
as different as England and Russia virtually tripled in the ninet
century, France's population increased by only about thirty per cen
Of course, one possible answer is that it was men, not women, w
gained control over family fertility. This certainly squares with a ce
literary tradition of the France of peasants, small shopkeepers and p
bourgeois generally: the men commit the sin, and the women go to
priest to confess it. The men are staunchly anticlerical, while the wo
are "priest-ridden."56
54. A. Mc Laren, "Abortion in France: Women and the Regulation of Family Size 1
1914 ," French Historical Studies 10 (1978): 461-486; 461-463. See also H. Le Bras,
interrompu, contrainte morale et heritage pr£f£rentiel," Communications (Paris) 44
47-70, for a work that draws attention to the intimate connection between regio
traditional equal inheritance, regions of dechristianisation, and regions where conce
control became widespread.
55. Hufton, "Women in Revolution," pp. 107-108.
56. One thinks, for example, of Emile Zola, La Conquite de Plassans (1874), Pot Bo
(1882), La Terre (1887), and, in the twentieth century, of Gabriel Chevallier, Clochem
(1936). A.-J.-B. Parent-Duchatelet, in his study of nineteenth-century prostitution,
Prostitution dans la ville de Paris (four editions, 1836-1900), also discusses the
consequences of the three-way conflict of husband, wife and priest.
My own guess in the face of a bedroom revolution so massive and

continued is that a substantial mass of French women were just as
wicked as French men. Indeed, Flandrin is convinced that at least in the
eighteenth century it was the women who took the initiative and who
persuaded the men to adopt conception control practices.57 The fact
remains that one of the lasting legacies of the French Revolution to
women was fewer pregnancies and smaller families. Many feminists, I
imagine, would regard that as a major if unexpected improvement in
women's conditions of existence. Ironically, it was one of the very last
things that the men of the Revolutionary generation publicly advocated,
planned or anticipated.
57. Flandrin, p. 223.

Women and French Revolution

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Women and French Revolution

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Description:

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Women and French Revolution

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

How did women participate in the French Revolution?

How did women participate in the French Revolution?

What were common birth control practices before the French Revolution and how did they change afterwards?

What were common birth control practices before the French Revolution and how did they change afterwards?

Berghahn Books

Feminism, Women and the French Revolution

I suppose the classic symbol of the involvement of women in

1995 HISTORICAL REFLECTIONS/REFLEXIONS HISTORIQUES, Vol. 21, No. 1

compelling the government to act, or by direct popular action.1 Many

1. George Rud£, The Crowd in the French Revolution (Oxford, 1959).

4. J. Abray, "Feminism in the French Revolution," American Historical Review 80 (1975):

Revolution changed things for women, and in which directions.5 Along

5. O. Hufton, "Women in Revolution, 1789-1796/' Past and Present 53 (1971): 90-108;

During the great revolution of 1789-rhetorically dedicated to

Jane Abray' s article on feminism in the Revolution mentioned earlier,

Revolutionary feminism began in a burst of enthusiasm. Its

But even those who see themselves as historians of women before

just at a time when it has suffered an overwhelming assault from

13. Margaret George, "The 'World Historical Defeat7 of the R6publicaines

of Marxism. In 1988 Landes published her Women in the Public Sphere in

space/' in the right to be represented, albeit by men, in the Estates

In the traditional marriage the husband and father exercised both

23. Hufton, The Poor of Eighteenth-Century France , pp. 331, 342.

Note that this 'traditional' family has nothing to do with the

26. Ibid., p. 165.

individual is recognised as unique and independent, entitled to his own

Secondly, let us look at the institution of marriage. The Revolutionary

35. Ibid., pp. 209-212.

40. Godechot, pp. 209-211.

demonstrating that the French revolutionaries took a more humanitarian

of 5 or 6 to one (and it could be less),46 a further sixth needed to be

He wrote in one instance:

The most striking trend is the marked increase in the marriage

But only a couple of pages later, in his general conclusion, Reinhard

The major demographic effect of the Revolution is certainly the

51. Reinhard, pp. 25-26; c.f. Bergeron, table on p. 129.

We are dealing here with two delicate matters-what went on in the

My own guess in the face of a bedroom revolution so massive and

57. Flandrin, p. 223.

You might also like