Recent Historiography on the French Revolution and Gender

Abstract

Madame de Xantrailles cross-dressed as a male soldier to serve in seven revolutionary and Napoleonic campaigns. When her claim for a veteran’s pension was refused in 1805, she protested, “I was a woman when I took up [arms] again against the Prussians. I was a woman when I saved the 11^th battalion . . . But it wasn’t as a woman that I made war; I made war as ‘un brave,’” as a courageous and good soldier.¹ With her intriguing words, she points toward questions at the heart of current approaches to gender in the revolutionary era. How did women and men conceptualize their gender identities in different arenas from the military to the marketplace? How did various groups of women enact or perform gender? Historians are also asking, how did individual women or subgroups of women demonstrate creativity, even as revolutionary elites often sought to reinforce the lines of male-female difference? In this essay, I will look at recent work on women and gender and examine the emerging field of masculinity during the Revolution.

The trajectory of gender history in the 1990s and early 2000s is well known. Around 1990, various scholars built a powerful paradigm: they argued that the Revolution excluded women from politics and created a private sphere of female domesticity. Public politics became a male domain. This interpretation of the Revolution gained conceptual backing from scholarship in political theory, which stressed the exclusionary aspects of liberalism more broadly.² However, feminist historians soon began to question this emphasis on political exclusion and domestication as the primary impact of the Revolution on women. New approaches acknowledged limitations on female citizenship but argued that the French Revolution destabilized gender dynamics in all sorts of ways and created multiple spaces for self-invention. Scholars like Carla Hesse, Jennifer Heuer, Anne Verjus, Denise Davidson, and myself rejected a simple public-private dichotomy and asked how women at times seized revolutionary openings to publish their writings, claim national citizenship, push for more power within families, and so on.³ While some scholars still foreground gender exclusion,⁴ the focal point seems to have altered. Here is an emblem of that shift: In France, Christine Fauré—who in the 1980s had written a book called Democracy without Women—by 2006, was calling for new attention to “la prise de parole des femmes.” Fauré’s special issue of the Annales historiques de la Révolution française featured a parade of vocal female journalists, salonnières, and authors.⁵

In the last decade or so, there has been an outpouring of empirical work on specific subgroups of women, sometimes discussed within an expanded framework of citizenship. What women? Female schoolteachers, prostitutes, Parisian market women, nuns who got married, cosmopolitan revolutionaries on the move, slave women seeking emancipation via marrying soldiers, cross-dressed female soldiers, food suppliers following the army, rural women in a single village.⁶ These studies on women as individuals and in subgroups highlight contingent varieties of experience. Although this scholarship continues to probe gender construction and limitations, it also frequently spotlights gender creativity as all kinds of women play with revolutionary ideology and gender norms and, in many of these interpretations, stake out new definitions of citizenship.

Why this move toward analyzing women as actors? On the most basic level, this young field, informed by much subtler thinking about gender as culturally constructed, is expanding its knowledge about understudied groups of women. In addition, researchers seek to put revolutionary scholarship in dialogue with other au courant fields, such as the history of sexuality, capitalism, or the culture of war. And as David Hopkin has argued, investigating the actions of atypical women, such as female soldiers, has intellectual appeal beyond the perennial human fascination with the exceptional or the picturesque. Unusual figures, from Marie-Antoinette to cross-dressed women, carried “a huge amount of cultural baggage”; so, analyzing marginal behavior produces understanding of mainstream gender norms and dynamics.⁷ Most broadly, this trend toward exploring subgroups in action mirrors the revolutionary field as a whole: cultural constructionist approaches now share the stage with greater focus on contingency, individual motivation, and close attention to the day-by-day, play-by-play dynamics of revolutionary politics. Consider, for example, recent analyses of the Terror by Timothy Tackett and Marissa Linton, or Haïm Burstin’s anthropological inquiry into revolutionary actors as “protagonists.”⁸

Focus on contingency and human action transcends the borders of France. Arguably, this tendency has been further encouraged by transnational historians who are working to humanize global or international dynamics and give them vibrant, personal texture.⁹ And in a thoughtful 2016 article on “Narrating the Age of Revolution,” Sarah Knott suggests that scholars of revolution across the Atlantic World have moved toward writing “situational narrative” that “privileges historical contingency.” Reactive behavior and particular circumstances, rather than ideology, shape the politics of individuals. Provocatively, Knott also claims that this “renewed empiricism” is “socially inclusive but politically quietist . . . history writing for neoliberal times” and for a “globalizing present.”¹⁰

But other politics are also at play. Within France itself, studying revolutionary women as collective actors fits in with the decades-long attempt—especially by historians associated with the Institut d’histoire de la Révolution française—to counter any leftover resonances of François Furet’s negative interpretation and prove the Revolution’s contemporary relevance as “a political laboratory” or a grassroots “apprenticeship in democracy”—older phrases but ongoing projects, invoked, for example, in the 2012 collection Pour quoi faire la Révolution.¹¹

In this vein, in a very recent historiographic essay on gender, the authors Clyde Marlo Plumauzille and Guillaume Mazeau call on historians to not simply seek out the “romantic illusions of a proto-feminism defended by a few heroines.” Instead, we should “pay attention to those millions of ordinary women, who using their discretion, readjusted gender relations [in everyday life] without having wished for it, or foreseen it.”¹² Along these lines, Plumauzille has just produced a rich archival study of Parisian prostitutes. She explores their social profile and analyzes the fluid, new popular sexual culture of revolutionary Paris. She also theorizes prostitutes’ interactions with the state as “diminished citizens.” When the Directory imprisoned prostitutes, they responded by tapping into official, judicial language to demand justice not as citizens with full political rights but rather as citoyennes with droits à la cité. As Plumauzille puts it, “The police categorization of prostitution never completely replaced the republican political category of citizens (citoyennes.)”¹³

Others share Plumauzille’s goal of broadening the category of citizenship and deepening its layers. The move seems to be: acknowledge limits on political citizenship but then ask what kind of citizenship claims women did wield. This approach to the Revolution seems very much in dialogue with current trends in gender historiography in France more broadly. The premier journal of gender history in France, Clio. Femmes, Genre, Histoire, dedicated a 2016 issue to “Citoyennetés” across the centuries and across the globe. The coeditors—Africanist Pascale Barthélémy and classicist Violaine Sebillotte-Cuchet—observe, “Today it is no longer a question of ONE citizenship but of citizenships in the plural, political but also social, economic, and cultural.” They suggest that “social citizenship” includes access to social rights but also refers to “engagements, mobilizations, forms of resistance, arts de faire.” Beyond its “juridical dimension,” social citizenship “should be understood as the ‘subjective experience of political engagements.’”¹⁴ In other words, like some gender historians of the Revolution, they broaden the analysis of “citizenship” as a concept by widening the lens beyond legal demarcations of citizenship from above and by asking how actors themselves define it from below in word and action.

Intriguingly, some of the historians producing the new work on subcategories of women have actually argued that gender identity does not matter as much as other means of claiming or conceptualizing citizenship. Katie Jarvis, for example, proposes that Parisian market women staked their citizenship claims not on the idea that women as women deserved rights but rather on the notion that as food-retailers they were performing useful work, enacting a form of “economic citizenship” on the road to capitalism. As citizen-workers, they pressured the state for access to market stalls or a fairer form of price controls. In her study of familialist thinking, Anne Verjus has argued that most French women thought of themselves according to family roles rather than envisioning their gender status as women as their primary identity.¹⁵

In a slightly different vein, work on women bearing arms has emphasized the malleability of identity and motivation and suggested that the same issue could hold different resonances for different actors. Jean-Clément Martin notes that counterrevolutionary women sometimes joined men on the battlefield without concealing their gender identity or perhaps even highlighting it. Several noblewomen led troops against the Republic and attained mythic status as “amazons.” And as Dominique Godineau has illustrated, individual female soldiers could have multiple motivations to join the army: to escape poverty or abuse, follow a husband into battle, express patriotism and win glory, and/or play with their gender identities. But for women like Pauline Léon or Théroigne de Mérciourt, who lobbied publicly for women’s right to bear arms, the rights of women as citoyennes (i.e., as women and citizens) inevitably held center stage, precisely because the Revolution linked citizenship to bearing arms. Male revolutionary leaders worked to police the lines of gender difference, albeit with uneven success. For Martin, professionalizing the army entailed masculinizing it. In April 1793, the French Republic passed a law that all “unnecessary women” should leave army camps within a week, but in the next two months, only three women left the army, and only one of these was discharged by the new law. As she documents how commanders and female soldiers most often ignored the decree, Godineau reflects, “The gap is often large between theories, practices, and the norms based on [gender] representations.”¹⁶ Analyzing that space and the interaction between gender ideology and on-the-ground practice stands at the heart of much recent work on women and gender in the revolutionary era.

In addition to ferreting out more women’s voices and activism, recent historiography often identifies the later Revolution, and above all the Napoleonic age, as more important than the Jacobin era for crafting domesticity. Take as an example Lindsay Parker’s biography of a Jacobin wife, Rosalie Jullien. Rosalie was heavily engaged in revolutionary politics, strategizing with her husband and son, and attending the Convention galleries. But after the Terror, especially during the Napoleonic era, she withdrew into the family, traumatized by the twists and turns of revolutionary politics and violence. The domestic world emerges as a refuge from revolutionary confusion. Her move dovetailed with Napoleonic changes in family law that curtailed women’s civil rights and arguably forwarded the growth of domesticity.¹⁷

Although there does not seem to be much recent work on gender and the counterrevolution, Guillaume Mazeau has explored how the act of a single woman, Charlotte Corday, helped to polarize the Revolution by embodying and accentuating the opposition between “revolution” and “counterrevolution,” as imagined both in 1793 and later. Corday was a prorevolutionary Girondin who fantasized that she could save the Revolution by cleansing it of its most radical elements, especially Jean-Paul Marat. Mazeau teases out Corday’s own politics and self-fashioning, but above all, he demonstrates how she became a contested “lieu de mémoire”—repackaged and mediatized as a counterrevolutionary martyr, monster, or heroine, according to the changing needs and mentalities of different political groups across the next two centuries.¹⁸

New scholarship on masculinity—previously left largely to art historians and literary scholars—is now emerging as a distinct set of questions within revolutionary (and Napoleonic) history. Exciting new work so far seems to have two countervailing tendencies that are not always in sync: Some scholars situate masculinity within family dynamics. Others analyze homosocial worlds, especially in the army, in part due to the explosion of work on the cultural history of war. First, we look at the men-among-men approach. In the recently translated Histoire de la Virilité, revolutionary masculinity is represented primarily in the military. Jean-Paul Bertaud traces an evolution of the virile ideal among soldiers: the valiant, politicized citizen-soldier of the Revolution morphs into the honor-driven, glory-pursuing Napoleonic soldier—still a patriot but differently so. Historians disagree on the relationship between the military and male-on-male affinity or male sexuality. For Brian Joseph Martin, revolutionary fraternity paved the way for homosocial friendship and affection as a hallmark characteristic, even a military strategy, of the Napoleonic army. In contrast, Michael Hughes sees the Napoleonic military promoting an “aggressive heterosexuality.” Sex as a reward replaced the puritanical stance of the revolutionary army, which “discouraged its citizen-soldiers from surrendering to the pleasures of the flesh.”¹⁹

In a fascinating article called “Men without Women? Ideal Masculinity and Male Sociability in the French Revolution,” Sean Quinlan, casts a wider net as he examines “multiple, competing experiences of masculinity.” War produces what he colorfully calls a “Republic of muscles.” But after the Terror, even though the Directory promoted family ideals, “alienated men sought out fraternal associations, outside the family and state, to escape revolutionary chaos and anomie.” (43) His examples include the gangs of the jeunesse dorée, fraternal art studios, and the manly medical world of dissection laboratories. Although Quinlan makes occasional references to heterosocial spaces like family or festivals, he still privileges homosocial worlds as sites for articulating and experiencing masculinity.²⁰

Counterbalancing and complementing these analyses of homosocial worlds has been an upsurge of work that analyzes manhood within the family—a move that makes sense as scholars have reacted against conceptualizing the Revolution’s gender dynamics in terms of separate spheres. This scholarship often encompasses both the revolutionary and Napoleonic eras. In her current project on “Love and War in the Age of Napoleon,” Jennifer Heuer explicitly explores the nexus between the male military and the family. For the revolutionary era, she ascertains that when soldiers (or their relatives) petitioned for emancipation from military service, they posited that men could fill their masculine duties as citizens in nonmilitary ways: “civic usefulness, familial responsibility and sensitivity to others’ suffering” could be just as important as soldiering. ²¹ Other works have demonstrated that republican marriage played a pivotal role in defining manhood and male citizenship, notably Claire Cage’s book on married priests and Anne Verjus’s work on how discourse and family law positioned the family as the fundamental structure for imagining and enacting politics. For Verjus, new family ideals of conjugalism and a softer form of paternalism redefined the male paterfamilias as a gentler but still potent force within the couple, the household, society, and state. In a coauthored book, she and Denise Davidson use family letters to ask how this conjugal dynamic operated in practice and to probe what Mazeau and Plumauzille highlighted: revolutionary challenges to the gender dynamics of couples that no one especially sought out or anticipated. Verjus and Davidson reveal husbands and wives developing a striking amount of team work.²²

Similar questions have arisen in gender scholarship on Saint-Domingue. Elizabeth Colwill argues that family and marriage were “a primary field for the operations of power in the post-emancipatory state” of Saint-Domingue after 1793. She illustrates how both French republican leaders and Toussaint Louverture sought to promote marriage among former slaves to undergird a moral order and a gendered division of work in the coercive labor regimes of the mid-to-late 1790s. In the summer of 1793, a male slave could achieve emancipation and manhood via joining the Republican army, but a woman had to marry to win her freedom. In 1793, some female slaves married recently freed men to win emancipation. But by and large, they were more interested in using the new civil records to guarantee the legal status of their children than in following these new marriage models. Likewise, in Freedom Papers, Rebecca Scott and Jean M. Hébrard follow the ex-slave Citoyenne Rosalie as she forges an unofficial family and negotiates “the world of power and paper”—not to marry but to document her own emancipation and her children’s. In her book on race and intimacy among mixed race families in Old Regime La Rochelle and Saint-Domingue, Jennifer Palmer shows how the family could become a site for contesting racial hierarchy or reshaping it in surprising ways, especially in the metropole. Her epilogue on the revolutionary era suggests that these possibilities declined sharply in the 1790s with the hardening and politicizing of racial categories. At the same time, her methodology and her Old Regime analysis suggest a direction for future work on mixed race, transatlantic families during the French and Haitian revolutions.²³

Beyond Saint-Domingue, transnational approaches to the revolutionary era have not focused much attention on gender issues, in part because the global turn—for revolutionary France—has prioritized questions about large-scale causes and crises, such as geopolitical competition for empire, international trade and finance, or revolutionary expansionism and the creation of sister republics. Gender historiography has yet to be fully integrated into our thinking about these questions, especially when they are conceptualized as large tectonic forces rather than local experiences.²⁴ A few transnational historians have posed questions about gender dynamics in conjunction with investigating traveling revolutionaries, the international circulation of ideas, and the entangled genealogies of gender and race. Denise Davidson, for example, has situated and examined the writings of gender theorists, such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Olympe de Gouges, and the Marquis de Condorcet, within a larger international dialogue and shown how feminism and abolitionism were linked in France.²⁵

This brief survey of recent work reveals multiple arenas for investigating and conceptualizing gender in the revolutionary era. It seems crucial to continue to put gender history and the transnational turn into greater dialogue with one another by building on the approaches mentioned above and fashioning new zones of study. Although the colonies are currently receiving more attention, there is ample room to further explore how gendered ideas, practices, and identities informed transnational exchanges and conflicts within revolutionary Europe as well. In addition, the field of revolutionary masculinity in general remains wide open. And, on this issue of exploring masculine and feminine ideals in tandem, the complex social politics of Thermidor and the Directory seem to be crying out for synthetic analysis. Existing scholarship has often focused on the family, or on artistic and literary approaches to the incroyables,²⁶ but it is striking that new work on the political dynamics and legacy of these periods, as discussed by Paul Hanson in this forum, has by and large not made gender analysis integral to its debates. Finally, in the field as a whole, we have an upsurge of work in the history of emotions and a renewed attention to individual psychology and the revolutionary self.²⁷ How can we more successfully incorporate thinking about gender into these approaches? Working in these domains and others should help us to understand how gender dynamics informed and influenced the French Revolution.

Footnotes