Study examines female political participation in the French Revolution

“They changed the center of gravity in the revolutionary process,” says the researcher.

By José Tadeu Arantes

Agência FAPESP – “Men stormed the Bastille, the women took the King”: with these words, French historian Jules Michelet (1798-1874) summed up the reach of the first political manifestation during the French Revolution – a manifestation that changed the dynamic of the revolutionary process and infused it with the impulse of crescent radicalization.

The act occurred in October 1789, when approximately 7,000 women – led by female fishmongers armed with butcher knives, rusty spears, machetes and two cannons – marched to Versailles (the headquarters of the Royal Court and the National Assembly) to protest the scarcity and high prices of bread, dragging soldiers from the National Guard and other men with them.

The next day, exasperated by both the supply crisis and Louis XVI's systematic veto of every revolutionary decree, the protestors pressured the King to abandon Versailles and escorted him to the capital.

“It was a sophisticated political initiative because, with power concentrated in Versailles, the King was distant from popular pressure and was more exposed to the influence of the queen and the court; thus, he freely utilized his right to veto, which he still held at the beginning of the Revolution, to prevent reform. By bringing Louis XVI to Paris, the women shifted the center of gravity in the revolutionary process and afforded the population of the capital a new protagonism,” comments Tania Machado Morin, author of the book Virtuosas e perigosas: as mulheres na Revolução Francesa [Virtuous and dangerous: the women of the French Revolution].

Originally presented as a Master’s dissertation in Universidade de São Paulo’s History Department, the book is now being published with funding from FAPESP. The book is organized into two main sections: the first discusses feminine political practices during the course of the revolution and their repercussions in society, and the second offers a detailed analysis of a set of images representing women that were produced during the revolutionary period.

Morin, who did the majority of her research in the Graphic Arts Office of Carnvalet Museum and the French National Library in Paris, employs facts and images to demonstrate how female participation evolved throughout the revolutionary process – frequently splitting into conflicting tendencies – and how the ever-hegemonic masculine perspective changed accordingly.

“When the activists were useful allies to revolutionary leaders, these leaders worked alongside female clubs and tolerated their manifestations in the Assembly and in the streets. However, the moment they became more than eccentric and boisterous personalities, i.e., the moment they became a political threat, the government sought to repress these women to the fullest extent of the law and through military force.”

“After banning female political clubs in October 1793, the government prohibited women, in May 1795, from attending the Assembly and from gathering in groups of more than five in any place, including the streets, under penalty of immediate detention,” she continues.

“The mothers of the Republic” and “the furies of hell”

As a result, public opinion coalesced around the contemporaneous dichotomy of the “virtuous versus the perilous”. Morin explains that the “virtuous” women were those idealized by the leaders of the revolution: the “mothers of the republic” who, in the acts of giving birth, breastfeeding and educating their children prepared the future generation of patriots. “Perilous” were “the militants, sometimes armed, who denounced the incompetence and the corruption of the government and demanded that the ‘traitors of the people’ were punished.”

The images examined by Morin translate these concepts through stereotypes. The “virtuous” figures were inspired by the matrons of Roman statues and the Christian Madonnas of renaissance paintings who offer their children the milk of morality and explicitly counter the “perilous” figures, the “veritable ‘furies of hell’, who knitted at the foot of the guillotine, delighting in the spectacle of death.”

It is notable that this negative view of militant women was endorsed at different times by different warring factions in the revolutionary process; thus, it was espoused not only by the monarchical counterpropagandists, as was to be expected, but also by the Girondists (representing mainly the moderate upper bourgeoisie), the Jacobins (representing mainly the lower radical bourgeoisie) and other political groups. Only more radical revolutionary factions, such as the so-called "enragés" (the enraged), supported feminine militancy throughout the period.

Nonetheless, the militants, whose main political organization was the Society of Revolutionary Republican Women, did not have their own feminist agenda.

“What they had was, in fact, a ‘terrorist’ agenda. Thus, they supported ‘revolutionary terror’ as a form of government: they sought to depose aristocrats from all public positions and from leadership in the army; they favored adopting “maximums” for, or the regulation of, the pricing of basic goods; they advocated for the strict vigilance of counterrevolutionaries and monopolists of merchandise with imprisonment, judgment and execution of traitors; and they pursued various other radical measures,” affirms Morin.

These positions did not differ substantively from those of the sans-culottes, the urban masses that consisted of salaried artisans and small merchants who were particularly active in Paris. The sans-culottes were so named because this broad social segment did not wear culottes (the silk knickers worn by aristocrats and wealthy bourgeoisie that fastened below the knee and were worn over long hose) but instead preferred rustic pants that fully covered their legs.

Pauline Léon and Claire Lacombe, founders of the Society of Revolutionary Republican Women, were educated women that wrote well and debated with eloquence. Born in Paris, Léon originally worked as a chocolatier and retailer, a business she inherited from her parents. Born in Pamiers to a family of merchants, Lacombe first worked as an actress in the theaters of Marseilles, Lyon and Toulon before moving to Paris and dedicating herself entirely to the revolution.

The other militants were generally street merchants or artisans, many of whom were illiterate. The sources Morin cites offer different figures for the exact number of members of the Society, but Morin estimates that there were approximately 100 members. The Society's leaders claimed to have had the support of thousands, however.

“During the revolution, there were several food crises. And the women responsible for feeding families who faced the bread line, among other things, took to the streets to demand government control of supply and prices and to punish the monopolists of basic goods. Many were driven to militancy for these reasons,” continues Morin.

Against the “tyranny” of men

Olympe de Gouges was entirely different and might be considered an avant la lettre (before the letter) feminist. Registered as the daughter of a Languedoc butcher, but rumored to be the illegitimate daughter of a marquis, Olympe was politically close to the Girondists.

She was horrified by the September 1792 massacres in Paris prisons that were perpetrated in the name of the revolution. On this occasion, terrified by the advance of foreign troops toward the French capital and by rumors that jailed aristocrats were plotting revenge, the infuriated masses invaded the prisons and savagely killed prisoners, many of whom were simply common delinquents without any connection to the aristocratic plot. “The blood of innocents, especially when spilled with cruelty and in abundance, indelibly stains the revolution,” said De Gouges, according to Morin’s book.

Self-taught, de Gouges was a notable playwright and political writer. “She denounced the ‘tyranny that men exert over women’ and defended the reform of marriage, which she believed should last only as long as there were mutual inclinations,” notes Morin.

“At the same time, she condemned slavery in the colonies, demanded workshops for unemployed workers, shelters for orphans and social assistance for the poor,” adds Morin.

“After the National Assembly promulgated the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen in August of 1789 without including any of the specific demands made by women, De Gouges published the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Citizen the following month in which she demand equality among the sexes,” the author explains.

On the other end of the social and political spectrum, the Society of Revolutionary Republican Women was founded in 1793 at the height of the revolutionary radicalization process that followed the invasion of France by Austrian and Prussian troops, the proclamation of the republic and the execution of the king (who was accused of treason after documents were discovered that revealed secret negotiations with enemy powers), and the peasant uprising that was instigated by the counterrevolutionary clergy and aristocrats aiming to return to power.

The survival of the revolution hung by a thread. Robespierre, Saint-Just, Marat, Danton, Desmoulins and other political representatives of the small radical bourgeoisie class who were united as a heterogeneous group known as the Montagnards (or mountain people – so named because they sat at the highest benches in the Assembly) sought an alliance with the masses to save the revolution.

In this critical moment, the militants of the Society of Revolutionary Republican Women played an important role in the Montagnards’ fight against the Girondists, whose deputies – who were hegemonic in the Assembly until this point – favored the interest of the bourgeoisie to the detriment of the sans-culottes.  

• Virtuosas e perigosas: as mulheres na Revolução Francesa [Virtuous and dangerous: the women of French Revolution]
  Author:  Tania Machado Morin
  Release: January 2014
  Price: to be defined
  Pages: 370
  More information: www.alamedaeditorial.com.br.