Revolution and the Republic
Page 6
so much of French intellectual debate in the two centuries that followed the
Revolution. Linguistic diversity was a reflection of regional and territorial fragmen-
tation and this in turn had overlaid upon it a conflict between landed interests and
the emerging industrial wealth of France’s towns and cities. This powerful tension
was only further exacerbated by the efforts of political elites to forge a national
culture, especially when this entailed a challenge to the historically established
corporate privileges of the Church. At issue was the control of values and of
community norms, and this explains why one of the fundamental political ques-
tions of the age was all too frequently that of the control of education and of the
educational system. The broader point is that the nationalization of intellectual
life that occurred in France during the nineteenth century was a reflection of the
nationalization of politics itself.108
There is one further important structural dimension of French intellectual
life meriting our attention. Recent research has shown that the emergence of the
intellectual during the Dreyfus Affair at the end of the nineteenth century was
intimately bound up with the ideal of the hero and with the themes of honour,
103 De Staël, Considérations, 283. See Angelica Goodden, Madame de Staël: The Dangerous Exile
(Oxford, 2009).
104 Robb, Discovery of France, 50–70.
105 France in the Enlightenment (Cambridge, Mass., 1998), 240.
106 See Michel de Certeau, Dominique Julia, and Jacques Revel, Une politique de la langue: La
Révolution française et le patois (1975) and Rita Hermon-Belot, L’Abbé Grégoire: La Politique et la vérité
(2000), 322–57.
107 The personal and political dimensions of the issues surrounding linguistic diversity have
been explored in Mona Ozouf’s Composition française: Retour sur une enfance bretonne (2009).
108 See Jack Hayward, Fragmented France: Two Centuries of Disputed Identity (Oxford, 2007). See
Daniele Caramani, The Nationalization of Politics: The Formation of National Electorates and Party
Systems in Western Europe (Cambridge, 2004).
Introduction: Revolution and the Republic
23
masculinity, and manhood.109 For the anti-Dreyfusards, intellectuals were persis-
tently (and easily) depicted as being weak, ineffectual, and therefore feminine,
whilst those of the pro-Dreyfus cause were only too ready to portray themselves as
men of action (and also to cast doubt about the sexual preferences of their
opponents). On both sides, association with the feminine was part of a strategy
of delegitimation.
Nevertheless, the Dreyfus Affair marked something of a minor breakthrough for
women as intellectuals.110 Denied the right to vote, they were entitled to sign
petitions (as twenty-three did with the 1898 manifeste des intellectuels) whilst the
Dreyfusard Ligue des Droits de l’Homme opened up its membership to them. The
feminist journal La Fronde actively campaigned for the Dreyfusard camp, notwith-
standing that several popular women writers were prominent supporters of the
nationalist Ligue de la Patrie Française.111 More generally, the Belle Époque saw
women entering the literary establishment for the first time and taking advantage of
the new educational opportunities allowed them by the Third Republic.112
Yet, for all their presence in the imagery of the Republic, women were largely
denied a public voice and scarcely existed as intellectuals. This was a far cry from
the world of the eighteenth-century salon, where women played a leading role in the
shaping of political debate, or from the heady excitement created by what Carla
Hesse describes as ‘the unprecedented opportunities for women’ of the revolutionary
decade itself.113 Post-revolutionary France, as Madame de Staël recognized,
provided a far less favourable terrain for female involvement in political and
intellectual life. ‘[S]ince the Revolution’, she remarked, ‘men have thought it
politically and morally useful to reduce women to the most absurd mediocrity.’
It was the fate of women ‘who cultivated literature’, she concluded, to suffer
ridicule under monarchies and hate under republics.114
In post-revolutionary France access to education was restricted for women, as
was career choice. Women were discouraged from reading (on the grounds that it
was a dangerous and unfeminine activity) whilst those who did publish were largely
restricted to the writing of domestic manuals and needed the authorization of their
husbands to negotiate with a publisher. Women existed not as individuals but as
109 See Venita Datta, Birth of a National Icon: The Literary Avant-Garde and the Origins of the
Intellectual (New York, 1999); John Cerullo, ‘Living the Dreyfusard Life: Violence, Manhood and the
Intellectuals’, paper presented to the French Historical Studies Association, Boston, Mass., 1996; and
Christopher E. Forth, The Dreyfus Affair and the Crisis of French Manhood (Baltimore, 2004).
110 See Françoise Blum, ‘Itinéraires feministes à la lumière de l’Affaire’, in Michel Leymarie (ed.),
La Postérité de l’affaire Dreyfus (Lille, 1998), 93–101.
111 See Mary Louise Roberts, Disruptive Acts: The New Woman in Fin-de-Siècle France (Chicago,
2002), 107–64.
112 See Geraldi Leroy and Julie Bertrand-Sabiani, La Vie littéraire à la Belle Époque (1998). One
should also not lose sight of the fact that many non-French female writers came to Paris: see Shari
Benstock, Women of the Left Bank, Paris 1900–1940 (London, 1994).
113 Carla Hesse, The Other Enlightenment: How French Women Became Modern (Princeton, NJ,
2001), 42. See also Lucy Moore, Liberty: The Lives and Times of Six Women in Revolutionary France
(London, 2006).
114 Germaine de Staël, Politics, Literature and National Character (New Brunswick, NJ, 2000),
234–5.
24
Introduction: Revolution and the Republic
members of families and therefore economic independence was refused them
(including that enjoyed by men from an expanding cultural market in which
women had no right to intellectual property).115 As Hesse observes: ‘In legal
terms, the Old Regime thus ended for women of letters, not in 1789 or 1793,
nor even with the achievement of the suffrage in 1946, but in 1965 when they
finally achieved legal and financial independence within marriage.’116
There were exceptions to this picture of exclusion, but even someone with the
force of character of George Sand (née Aurore Dupin, baronne Dudevent) felt
oddly diffident and ill at ease in the world of politics.117 That world was a male
world, requiring the masculine qualities of reason and intelligence, the idea of the
‘public man’ being an object of honour and virtue, whilst that of a ‘public woman’
was an object of shame. The unstable crowd was feminine; women, when they
entered politics, were a source of disorder.118 Such a vision was easily deployed
by the many currents of anti-feminism that have littered France’s recent past,119
but it was also central to France’s dominant republican culture. As Michelle Perrot
has written: ‘the creation of a universalist and individualist citizenship has placed
than ever reduced to their bodies, fettered to a constraining femininity.’120 Only
as individuals, and not as women, could they make demands upon a system that
continues to be characterized by what Françoise Gaspard has described as ‘l’homo-
socialité politique masculine’.121
The argument that the subordination of women is integral to France’s revolu-
tionary and republican culture has most forcefully been advanced by American
historians, notably Joan Landes and Joan Scott.122 Here the view is that, if the
Revolution initially opened up possibilities for the involvement of women in
politics, these were quickly closed down, with women again being confined to a
purely domestic role. This, for Joan Scott, is exemplified in the treatment received
by Olympe de Gouges, authoress of the Déclaration des Droits de la Femme et de la
Citoyenne. In 1793, she writes, ‘de Gouge was read as an embodiment of the
danger of chaos and unlawfulness’, as a threat to ‘rational social order and for the
115 See Annie Prassoloff, ‘Le Statut juridique de la femme auteur’, Romantisme, 77 (1992), 9–14.
116 Hesse, The Other Enlightenment, 78.
117 See Michelle Perrot, Les Femmes ou les silences de l’histoire (1998).
118 See Michelle Perrot, Femmes politiques (1998). The exclusion of women from the public world
of politics was also mirrored in their progressive exclusion as economic actors in the market place: see
Victoria E. Thompson, The Virtuous Marketplace: Women and Men, Money and Politics in Paris, 1830–
1870 (Baltimore, 2000).
119 See Christine Bard (ed.), Un siècle d’antiféminisme (1998).
120 Perrot, Les Femmes, 276.
121 Françoise Gaspard, ‘L’Antiféminisme en politique’, in Bard, Un siècle , 340.
122 See Joan Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca, NY,
1988) and Visualising the Nation: Gender, Representation and the Revolution in Eighteenth-Century
France (Ithaca, NY, 2001); Joan Wallach Scott, Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights
of Man (Cambridge, Mass., 1996). See also Olwen Hufton, Women and the Limits of Citizenship in the
French Revolution (Toronto, 1992); Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution
(Berkeley, Calif., 1992), 151–91; and Dorinda Outram, The Body and the French Revolution: Sex,
Class, and Political Culture (New Haven, Conn., 1989).
Introduction: Revolution and the Republic
25
meanings of masculinity and femininity on which it had come to depend’. Arrested
in July of that year, she was subsequently executed. This was not simply the result
of her criticism of Robespierre and her support for the Girondin policy of federal-
ism. As Scott goes on to explain: ‘For the Jacobins, women’s entire social function
could be read literally from her body’s reproductive organs, and especially from her
breasts. . . . women as breast-nurturers but not creator. Man as citizen––the con-
queror of nature. The differences between women and men were taken to be
irreducible and fundamental.’123 Virtue was a male category: a woman who sought
to challenge that assumption could legitimately be subject to repression.
Scott’s analysis of the fate of Olympe de Gouges highlights another important
dimension to this question. Her overall point is that ‘in France, until 1944, the
common ground for individuality, as for citizenship, was masculinity’,124 but in this
particular case she wants to argue that the views put forward by de Gouges con-
stituted a direct challenge to ‘the Revolution’s continuing definition of women as
passive citizens’. At the heart of the Revolution was a debate about representation, a
debate that focused upon the definition of ‘those capable of self-representation and
those who could only be represented, those with and without autonomy’.125 Women
did not possess the capacity for autonomy.
I I I
How do these points relating to the structural dimensions of French intellectual life
bear upon the issues raised by our discussion of the French Revolution? First, the
emphasis upon the political history of the Revolution is not incompatible with an
awareness of the importance of cultural and social practices. This was an argument
made forcefully by Pierre Rosanvallon in his 2002 Leçon inaugurale to the Collège
de France.126 Political ideas and events, Rosanvallon stated, cannot be studied in
isolation from the complex phenomena which make up a political culture. If this
was true in general, it was especially the case in France where, according to
Rosanvallon, politics ‘does not only have as its function the guaranteeing of liberties
and the regulation of collective life, as is the case in England and the United States’.
From the Revolution onwards, on this view, politics has been intimately entwined
with the social and the cultural, with the latter deriving much of their meaning and
shape from the former. The political (le politique) denotes far more than the activity
of politics narrowly defined (la politique).
Second, the Revolution, and the Republic it produced, gave birth to a prolonged
and immensely sophisticated debate about what it meant to be a member of a
political community and how that political community was to be organized. It was
a debate about the very fundamentals of politics. In this lies what might be regarded
as its endless fascination and richness. Here again arguments developed by
123 Scott, Only Paradoxes, 49–50.
124 Ibid. 10.
125 Ibid. 35.
126 Pierre Rosanvallon, Leçon inaugurale (2002). See ‘Inaugural Lecture, Collège de France’ in
Samuel Moyn (ed.), Pierre Rosanvallon: Democracy Past and Future (New York, 2006), 31–58.
26
Introduction: Revolution and the Republic
Rosanvallon provide enlightenment. At the heart of the issues raised by political
modernity, he contends, is the ‘indeterminate’ character of democracy. Who or
what is the subject of that democracy? Which has the superior claim, the political
equality embodied in universal suffrage or the demands of rational governance?
How can the sovereignty of the people be given a satisfactory institutional struc-
ture? Should emancipation within a democracy take the form of greater individual
autonomy or social participation? Such questions, he argues, demonstrate that,
as both a concept and a practice, democracy is marked by ‘tensions’ and ‘equivoca-
tion’. Yet, as Rosanvallon has further argued, what occurred specifically in France
during and after the Revolution was a failure properly to conceptualize the nature of
representative democracy.127 The far from uncontroversial charge is that the
aspiration towards social unity combined with the principle of equality born with
the Revolution produced what he terms a ‘democracy of integration’ which has
been unresponsive to the demands of pluralism.128
Moreover, Rosanvallon continues, the ‘central question’ which came to preoc-
cupy the ‘French political imagination’ remained that of who held power rather
than what form that power should take, ‘the dynamic of sovereignty’ pushing
France
between the opposites of absolute monarchy and a radical republic, with no
thought to sovereignty’s limitation. It has been, Rosanvallon writes, ‘the kings of
war and the kings of glory who [the French] admire’. Their ideal has been only to
‘democratise absolutism’, a secret aspiration given flesh in the ‘republican monar-
chism’ of General de Gaulle’s Fifth Republic.129 ‘If the French in 1789’, Rosan-
vallon writes, ‘invented equality, they subsequently established a catalogue of the
diseases and problems of modern democracy rather than their solutions. It is a
specific form of universalism that is put forward by French democracy: far from
constituting a model it is better seen as an inventory of the profound difficulties
associated with political modernity.’130 From this perspective, the Revolution of
1789 and the Republic that followed set out principles of political sovereignty and
representation that were fundamentally flawed, and whose consequences were to be
played out in French politics over the next two hundred years.
This is by no means a view shared by all. It would not be endorsed by those
contemporary advocates of republicanism who still remain deeply hostile towards
the claims of a pluralist democracy. Nor would this view secure the support of all
the historians working in the field. For example, 1998 saw the publication of
Patrice Higonnet’s Goodness beyond Virtue: Jacobins during the French Revolution.131
127 This is the subject matter of three volumes: Le Sacre du citoyen: Histoire du suffrage universel en
France (1992); Le Peuple introuvable: Histoire de la représentation démocratique en France (1998); La
Démocratie inachevée: Histoire de la souveraineté du peuple en France (2000).
128 See Pierre Rosanvallon, Le Modèle politique français: La Société civile contre le jacobinisme de 1789
à nos jours (2004). Rosanvallon’s subject here is what he terms ‘la culture politique de la généralité’.
129 See Pierre Rosanvallon, La Monarchie impossible: Les Chartes de 1814 et 1830 (1994), 149–81.
130 Pierre Rosanvallon, Le Sacre du citoyen: Histoire du suffrage universel en France (1992), 455.
131 (Princeton, NJ, 1998). See also Anne Sa’adah, The Shaping of Liberal Politics in Revolutionary
France: A Comparative Perspective (Princeton, NJ, 1990). Whilst recognizing that it would be