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Women and the French Revolution

(1789 - 1795)

Peasant and laboring-class French women had always been politically active in times of crises – they were responsible for putting bread on the table, and during times of hardship, such as famine, when bread was unavailable or expensive, women had traditionally marched to the civic center to beseech the local government to ameliorate their misery. During the French Revolution, this tradition would be followed with one exception: Parisian women no longer marched to the civic center to petition the local magistrates, but rather they marched first to the royal palace itself and sent their petitions directly to the king then, later, they marched to the national legislature.

Late in 1788 King Louis XVI called the French Estates General into session for first time in 175 years to deal with the kingdom's financial crisis. Elections were held and other preparations were made for the Estates General which was scheduled to begin on May 1, 1789. Rather than deal with the financial problems, the first issue the parlement dealt with was how voting was to take place: by orders or by head.

The old Estates General was divided into three estates: the nobility, the clergy, and the commoners. Each estate had one vote, and, often in the past, the clergy and the nobility had banded together to constantly defeat any proposals for reform from the commoners. The commoners were determined that that would not be so in the current assembly and pushed for the vote of each representative to be counted as a separate vote. Unable to agree on a voting method, the Third Estate (commoners) and lower clergy broke away from the Estates General and formed the National Assembly on June 17, 1789. Admitting defeat, on June 27, Louis XVI, first conciliatory then bellicose, ordered his nobles and the upper clergy to join the National Assembly which would remains in session until Sept 1791, effectively ending the Estates General after only 5 weeks (May 6 to June 17, 1789).

In mid-July, Louis once again tried to repress the elected assembly and crowds roamed the Paris streets seeking arms with which to defend the gains of the previous weeks. They came upon the Bastille, a fortress that was believed to contain arms as well as political prisoners. The crowd stormed their way in, and that symbol of oppression fell on July 14, 1789. Even today, the French celebrate Bastille Day much as Americans celebrate July 4, 1776.

The contagion spread to the countryside and peasants protested traditional feudal obligations. Fearing a full-scale revolt, on August 4 -5, secular and religious representatives of the First and Second Estates surrendered their feudal privileges; municipalities, provinces, and towns followed. By the end of the month, the National Assembly had promulgated the Declaration of the Rights of Man, a stirring document which outlines basic human rights and still today as revered by the French as Americans revere the Declaration of Independence.

As the political crisis deepened, civil authority broke down, the economic crises deepened, and bread prices rose in Paris and in the countryside. To have the king and the government closer to the people where the people could keep an eye on their activities, on October 5, 1789, the women of Paris marched to the royal palace of Versailles to return the king and his family to the city of Paris or, in the words of contemporary revolutionaries, to "bring back the baker, his wife, and the little apprentice" back to Paris. For any one who has never been to Versailles, I can only say, words fail to describe it; the ostentatious grandeur of both the buildings and the grounds which abounds there is almost unlimited. The front façade of the main building alone is almost a mile long; the magnificent, manicured grounds are, well, fit only for a King. The luxury in which the king, his family, and the nobility lived while the peasants slaved away for their absent owners vividly demonstrates the travesty of justice which was 18th century France.

After that outburst, the political scene was relatively calm, considering there was a revolution in process. But the revolution was orderly: people paraded, petitioned parlement, edited newspapers, debated the issues of the day, and took part in parliamentary activities, while the legislators went about the business of founding a new government, specifically writing a new constitution by which the French people would govern themselves. For almost 2 years, from Nov 1789 to the summer of 1791, the National Assembly drafted the Constitution of 1791, reorganized the nation into 83 departments, eliminated the nobility as a legally defined class, made the Catholic Church an agency of the state, appropriated church property to pay off the monarchy's debt, and extended full citizenship to Jews and other religious minorities.

While the National Assembly was debating the suffrage issue, Condorcet published his "On Giving Women the Right of Citizenship" in the Journal de la Societe of 1789, No. 5, July, 1790.

Meanwhile, women formed clubs in which they met together to learn how to become citizens of a great nation, rather than subjects of a king, and to press for specific legislation. According to Levy, et al, Revolutionary era women wanted equality of rights within marriage, the right to divorce, extended rights of widows over property and of widowed mothers over their minor children, publicly guaranteed educational opportunities for girls (including vocational training for poor girls), public training, licensing, and support for midwives in all provinces, guaranteed right to employment, and the exclusion of men from specific traditionally-female professions, like dress-making.

In June 1791, after the royal family attempted to flee France, was stopped near border, and was returned to Paris: the national mood became a bit uglier. Many now viewed the king as a traitor to his own country, a despot who would invite foreign armies into his own country to help him regain his lost power. The revolution continued with less support for the monarchy and louder calls for a republic. Conceived as a prologue to the still unwritten constitution, in August 1791 the Declaration of the Rights of Man was promulgated by the National Assembly. In September 1791, National Assembly was replaced by a newly elected body, the Legislative Assembly, a constitutional monarchy.

Only now did Olympe de Gouge write the Declaration of the Rights of Women and the Citizeness (1791), possibly the best known tract on the rights of women from the period, as a response to the Declaration to the Rights of Man and its silence regarding women.

Many reforms from this period were detrimental to the sans-culottes (the working and peasant classes): male suffrage was limited to men who paid at least 3 days worth of wages as taxes, disfranchising many men, and public aid was restricted even for able-bodied men and women who could not find employment (and employment was scarce because so many of the aristocracy had fled France). War against foreign forces who wanted to restore Louis's power, return of political instability and the resulting economic hardship, and their desires for sexual equality mobilized women once again to act collectively in their own behalf resulting in even more marches, more clubs, more petitions, and increased use of the taxation populaire.

The National Convention, which abolished the monarchy and established the French First Republic, sat from August 1792 to 1795. In the new elections, Girondins (moderate Republicans) came to power, but their laissez-faire economic policies did not ameliorate the condition of the lower classes. Louis XVI was tried on charges of treason and convicted; he was executed on January 21, 1793.

In 1793, the Society of Revolutionary Republican Women, created by sans-culotte women, lasted only six months before it was shut down by authorities. Advocating issues of interest to the radical middle-class and the Parisian poor, such as penal reform, occupational training for girls, public morality, and economic reforms and finding their petitions ignore by the moderate Girondins, the sans-culotte women allied with the Jacobins, tipping the balance of power in the Girondin / Jacobin struggle toward the Jacobins. Once the Jacobins consolidated their victory over the Girondins, the Jacobins moved to co-opt parts of the Républicaines-révolutionnaires agenda, to silence their leaders, and to disband their organization. As critical of the Jacobins for failing to implement their alleged economic policies as they had been critical of the Girondins for failing to adopt their economic polices, the Républicaines-révolutionnaires continued to press the Jacobins with their radical demands, demanding among other things that all women wear the Revolutionary dress and cockade. A law was duly passed to require all women to wear the proscribed articles and when the Républicaines-révolutionnaires tried to have the law enforced, market women rebelled and petitioned the Convention for the abolition of the Society. The Convention seized their opportunity, dissolved the Society, and outlawed all women's clubs and associations. Freed of its most powerful restraint, the Montagnards led by Robepierre proclaimed the Revolutionary Government on the next day, October 30, 1793. The Terror, which had been simmering below the surface, exploded in a violent cataclysm of human destruction. When the Terror was over, no women were left to speak out – Olympe de Gouges had been guillotined. Théroigne de Méricourt having been flogged in March, 1793, went mad and died in an insane asylum in 1817. Etta Palm d'Aelders returned to Holland. Claire Lacombe was arrested in April, 1794 and remained imprisoned until August 19, 1794. Gradually in the backlash which followed the Terror, the rights which the people had fought so hard to acquire slipped from their grasp. The people would not rise up again until 1830.

Throughout the entire period women took an active part on both sides of the revolution, from organizing solons and marches to writing monarchist or revolutionary tracts. Some yielded the pen, others, the sword. Women debated, petitioned, marched, lectured, and ran schools for the new citizens. Today's excerpt comes from early in the period; nothing is known about the author or authors, not even their names, or about the context in which the document was produced. Somehow it seems fitting that the authors should be anonymous as were most of the women written about today. Entitled Requéte des Dames a l'Assemblée National (The Ladies' Request to the National Assembly), the proposal precedes both Concorcet's On Giving and de Gouge's 'Declaration of the Rights of Women and the Citizeness'. Despite its early date, the petition is among the most radical petitions of the era, seeking not only suffrage for women, but the right of women to be elected as deputies to the federal parlement and to be appointed as magistrates. The excerpts are taken from Karen Offen, European Feminisms 1700 – 1795: A Political History, pp. 54 – 55.

First, from the Prologue

It is altogether astonishing that, having gone so far along the path of reforms, and having cut down (as the illustrious d'Alembert once put it) a very large part of the forest of prejudices, you would leave standing the oldest and most general of all abuses, the one which excludes the most beautiful and most lovable half of the inhabitants of this vast kingdom from positions, dignities, honors, and especially from the right to sit among you. . . .

You have broken the scepter of despotism; you have pronounced the beautiful axiom. . . the French are a free people. Yet still you allow thirteen million slaves shamefully to wear the irons of thirteen million despots! You have divined the true equality of rights – and you still unjustly withhold them from the sweetest and most interesting half among you!

Finally, you have decreed that the path to dignities and honors should be open without prejudice to all talents; yet you continue to throw up insurmountable barriers to our own! Do you think, then, that nature, this mother who is so generous to all her children, has been stingy to us, and that she grants her graces and favors only to our pitiless tyrants? Open the great book of the past and see what illustrious women have done in all ages, the honor of their provinces, the glory of our sex, and judge what we would be capable of, if your blind presumption, your masculine aristocracy, did not incessantly chain down our courage, our wisdom, and our talents.

From the Proposal for a Decree

The National Assembly, wishing to reform the greatest and most universal of abuses, and to repair the wrongs of a six-thousand-year-long injustice, has decreed and decrees as follows:

1. All the privileges of the male sex are entirely and irrevocably abolished throughout France;
2. The feminine sex will always enjoy the same liberty, advantages, rights, and honors as does the masculine sex;
3. The masculine gender [gendre masculine] will no longer be regarded, even grammatically, as the more noble gender, given that all genders, all sexes, and all beings should be and are equally noble;
4. That no one will henceforth insert in acts, contracts, obligations, etc., this clause, so common but so insulting for women: That the wife is authorized by her husband before those present, because in the household both parties should enjoy the same power and authority;
5. That wearing pants [la culotte] will no longer be the exclusive prerogative of the male sex, but each sex will have the right to wear them in turn;
6. When a soldier has, out of cowardice, compromised French honor, he will no longer be degraded as is the present custom, by making him wear women's clothing; but as the two sexes are and must be equally honorable in the eyes of humanity, he will henceforth be punished by declaring his gender to be neuter;
7. All persons of the feminine sex must be admitted without exception to the district and departmental assemblies, elevated to municipal responsibilities and even as deputies to the National Assembly, when they fulfill the requirements set forth in the electoral laws. They will have both consultative and deliberative voices. . . .;
8. They can also be appointed as magistrates: there is no better way to reconcile the public with the courts of justice than to seat beauty and to see the graces presiding there;
9. The same applies to all positions, compensations, and military dignities. . . .

Footnotes:

References:

Karen Offen, European Feminisms 1700 – 1795: A Political History [Stanford, Ca: Stanford University Press, 2000]

Darlene Gay Levy, Harriet Branson Applewhite and Mary Durham Johnson, Women in Revolutionary Paris 1789 - 1795: Selected Documents Translated with Notes and Commentary [Chicago, Il: University of Illinois Press, 1980]

Microsoft® Encarta® Reference Library 2002. © 1993-2001 Microsoft Corporation topic: France, History

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last updated February 2003