Download Women and the French Revolution

Women
and the
French Revolution
The French Revolution and the
Political Aspirations of Women
The Enlightenment, as a social and intellectual
movement, impacted many segments of
society, including women in the elite and
common classes during the revolutions of the
18th and 19th centuries.
• Wealthy French women
participated in the
Enlightenment movement
by making their homes
centers of debate,
intellectual speculation and
free inquiry.
• Women were powerfully
affected by their
participation in
revolutionary politics, which
in part resulted from
Enlightenment thinking.
A Reading in the Salon of Madame Geoffrin, 1755
Women as a
public revolutionary force
• Women were a public revolutionary force in the first
months of 1789, although they could not vote nor
seek seats in the National Assembly.
• Women participated in the attack on the Bastille and
street demonstrations.
• Their most impressive demonstration of numbers was
the 7,000 women seeking cheaper bread who walked
to Versailles in October 1789 and forced the king and
the National Assembly to return to Paris.
The Women’s March
• European women had a long
tradition of rioting when they
suspected speculators of
hoarding food to drive up
prices. Authorities seldom
arrested the women rioters.
• Frenchwomen’s food riots,
called taxation populaire,
typically involved crowds
seizing merchandise from
shopkeepers and grocers,
distributing it equally to the
crowd at what they determined
was a just price, and then
returning proceeds to the
merchants.
A symbol of the power of the
Revolution
• Women’s success in
organizing demonstrations
against high food prices
gained them political
influence.
• Eventually, the new French
Republic was personified as
a woman, “Marianne” – an
allegory of liberty and
reason.
Women’s political clubs
• The most significant female
participation in the French
Revolution came with the
advent of the women’s
political club.
• Political clubs provided
members with intellectual
stimulation and a way to
exert political pressure on
the National Assembly, but
none admitted women until
January 1790, when Le
Confederation des amis de
la verité (The Confederation
of the Friends of the Truth)
was founded.
The Women’s Patriotic Club
The disenfranchisement of women
Declaration of Rights of Man and Citizen
Niquet the Younger (1789)
Female Citizens?
“It is altogether astonishing that, having gone so far
along the path of reforms, and having cut down . . . a
large part of the forest of prejudices, you would leave
standing the oldest and most general of abuses, the
one which excludes the most beautiful and lovable
half of the inhabitants of this vast kingdom from
positions, dignities, honors, and especially from the
right to sit amongst you.”
From the Women's Petition to the National Assembly, October 1789
• The failure of the Declaration of the Rights of Men
and Citizens to include women was intentional and
not a sentiment shared by all.
• The Marquis de Condorcet published in 1790 the
essay “On Giving Women the Right of Citizenship”:
– Responded to every objection posed to women’s political
equality including: pregnancy, lack of educational
brilliance, emotionalism, dependence on husbands, and the
social problem society would face if women abandoned
their domestic responsibilities to rule
– Logical and systematic response in the spirit of the
Enlightenment
A Declaration of Rights of Woman
• Olympe de Gouges, a French
playwright and political activist,
wrote her famous Declaration
shortly after the passing of the
French constitution of 1791.
• She challenged the practice of
male authority and the notion of
male-female inequality.
“Woman has the right to
mount the scaffold; she must
equally have the right to mount
the rostrum.”
- Article X, Declaration of Rights of Woman
and Citizenness
The disenfranchisement of Women
(Continued)
• As the political institutions in revolutionary France came more
under the control of the popular classes, women were able to
increase their political power – although their influence was at
first exercised through male relatives.
• Middle-class radicals pressured authorities for legislation to
remove inequalities in women’s lives.
• The persuasion of the radicals and the power of women were
temporarily successful in enacting reform legislation until
1793; the summer of this year being the high point in women’s
political influence in France.
• By the fall of 1793, the revolutionary government, under the
pressure of civil war and rural reaction against restrictions
imposed on the Catholic Church, began a retreat that
eventually eliminated women’s participation in politics.
From protectors of the Republic to
personification of extreme violence
A revolutionary heroine defends her home,
her family, and her political allegiance
A terrible mother who
recklessly fires a gun
near her children
• During the Reign of Terror, women activists
were arrested.
• The Jacobins outlawed their clubs, believing
that women belonged in the private sphere of
the home, not in the public sphere of men.
• Among the many who lost their heads to the
guillotine was Olympe de Gouges, accused of
“attacking the sovereignty of the French
people.”
Subordinating women for the sake of
political stability
• By 1804, women were
as powerless and
submissive as they had
been before they
marched to Versailles in
1789.
• The instrument that
marked their fall was
the Napoleonic Code of
1804.
A conservative reaction against revolution
• The Napoleonic Code symbolized for women the conservative
reaction against revolution.
• Under the Code:
- married women returned to the status of permanent legal
dependents of men
- women acquired the nationality of their husbands upon
marriage
- women could not participate in lawsuits or serve as witnesses
in court
- men were no longer responsible for the support of illegitimate
children
- female adultery was punished by imprisonment (men did not
suffer such sanctions!)
- the space women could occupy in the new regime was defined
as marital, maternal, and domestic
- women did not have control over property, and their wages
went to their husbands
Women and the Revolution
• The Enlightenment impacted women of both the elite and the
poorer classes.
• Women of the elite participated in the debates and
dissemination of Enlightenment thought, whereas poor women
took Enlightenment inspiration to organize protests and
boycotts.
• Unfortunately, their interest and participation were not
recognized by the new French government in the aftermath of
the revolution. Both elite and common women remained
disenfranchised until the twentieth century.
• Although neither in law nor practice did women achieve real
equality during the Revolution, their participation was of great
symbolic importance in underscoring the universal claims of
revolutionaries.