POPULAR FORCES IN THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

Studies of the `popular forces’ in revolutionary France have produced a range of opinions and standpoints, in the nineteenth as well as the twentieth centuries. Michelet’s identification of the revolutionary crowds with the French `people’ contrasted radically with Taine’s understanding of popular movements in terms of `mob’ action. Both these views, of course, were anchored in divergent responses to specific historical circumstances: the former represented a celebration of the revolutionary conjuncture of the 1840s that culminated in the 1848 uprising, and the latter represented a horror produced by the experience of the Paris Commune. As historical research on this theme gained in sophistication in the twentieth century, the existing discourses were gradually transformed. Georges Lefebvre brought the French peasantry, hitherto virtually ignored, within the discursive frame of the `popular’, as agents with their own mentalities. Albert Soboul undertook a detailed study of sans-culottism, and the study of urban protest was refined further by Rúde and Cobb. Not entirely surprisingly, given the scope of this particular theme, the central work on popular protest has been undertaken by historians of Marxian or at least left-wing persuasion. However, this broad label conceals a range of varying and often conflictual positions, and what emerges from the immensity of historical research is not an unbroken narrative of united and unambiguous popular protest. Rather, a study of different popular movements discloses a confusing picture of shifting identities, cross-cutting and often contradictory solidarities, a range of motives, forms of action and demands, all bearing complicated and varying relationships to the `main line’ of revolutionary development.

Lefebvre’s categorization of the Revolution into `aristocratic’, `bourgeois’, `urban popular’ and `peasant’ movements helps break up uniform and unilineal narratives of a single revolutionary process. Yet, contrary to Lefebvre’s own approach, this schema has sometimes resulted in stereotypical understandings of the `popular masses’ as easily led creatures, bereft of any genuine agency. This is of very little help in clarifying the springs of popular discontent in any meaningful historical sense.

If this schema can be jettisoned momentarily, there emerge from the flood of historical research perhaps two dominant approaches to a complex history of popular action. The first, exemplified by Lefebvre’s The Coming Of The French Revolution, concentrates upon the `objective’ conditions that bred mass discontent. Drawing upon Labrousse’s price and income statistics for the 18th century, Lefebvre builds up a complicated narrative of relationships between urban and rural crises: the harvest failures of 1787-89, following upon the heels of a nine-year recession and coupled with the constant fear of grain exports, hit the subsistence needs of an overtaxed peasantry and depressed urban consumer demand. Agrarian crisis, in this narrative, was linked up with the twin blows of unemployment (as demand for products other than food grains fell) and high prices (especially of bread, the major urban consumer need) in the towns. As Lefebvre and Cobban, historians otherwise very different both methodologically and ideologically, point out, the poor were generally drawn together by economic crisis against the rich: identified as hoarders, speculators, merchants, and most commonly as aristocrates. At the level of lived and felt experience, then, `poor’ and `rich’ constituted very live and real social identities, however simplistic these may be as sociological categories.

The question of popular discontent, though, can also be approached from a different angle: that of consciousness. Earlier works do not rule this out: indeed, Lefebvre can be credited with the creation of the modern study of peasant mentalities. However, more recent work on pre-revolutionary and revolutionary France draw upon a more richly textured body of historical research, and are embedded in more sophisticated theoretical apparatuses.

Pioneering in this regard is the work of Robert Darnton on `Grub Street’ literature: the literature of the Parisian underground immediately prior to the Revolution. `Underground’ literature, in this context, refers to the circulation of radical ideas through a buoyant, diffuse and unofficial press. Key figures in the dissemination of such literature were philosophes like Restif de la Brétonne, who, infected in equal measure by the high Enlightenment and economic need, produced highly scatological and – to a greater degree – pornographic work, highly lurid and highly radical in its anti-monarchist, anti-aristocratic, and anti-clerical lampoons. Sarah Maza works out similar ideas in her study of scandals in prerevolutionary France, particularly the scandal of the Diamond Necklace Affair. It is through media like these that popular opinion was mobilized and politicized, and the relationship of ideas to historical change can be born out concretely through an appraisal of these processes, whereby the ideological was rendered material and vice versa.

These ideas draw extensively on, and extend, Júrgen Habermas’s charting of the emergence of a `bourgeois public sphere’ in 18th century Europe, where `privatized individuals’ came together informally to discuss and contest matters of `public’, often political, import. At a discursive level, in Habermas’ theory, this also involves private lives acquiring a public space, within which intimate details circulate and are discussed. Works like those of Darnton and, more outspokenly, Maza, accept the basic premises of Habermasian theory, but also extend it to non-bourgeois circles: thus, the public sphere in 18th century France was constituted as much in taverns and brothels as in more respectable salons.

To move back to the main line of the revolutionary narrative, one very significant aspect of socio-political turmoil in late 18th century France can be clearly linked to the notion of an emerging public sphere. This was the convocation of the Estates-General to solve the financial crisis of the monarchy. Limited in its goal, this development was to have unforeseeable consequences. This can be seen concretely in the drafting of cáhiers de doleances, or lists of grievances, drawn up before the constitution of the Estates-General: these, which mobilized a mass of public opinion between 1788 and 1789, disclose layers of socially differentiated protests, demands and suggestions for fundamental reforms. Symbolically and ideologically, the significance of the convocation of the Estates-General lies perhaps in the construction of an identity – that of the Estate (the three Estates being the clergy, the aristocracy and the rest of the population) – which was to acquire great discursive significance in the Revolution. Equally interesting is the fact that the Estates-General had not been convoked since 1614: thus, what was being created – or recreated – was a dead, fossilized institution, and an identity that had perhaps never had roots in concrete social reality, since the Third Estate was too massive, and too massively divided, to constitute a homogeneous bloc. However, this identity was to be a major rallying-call during the Revolution, appropriated and reconstituted time and again by groups with divergent, often conflictual, demands and ideologies.

Lefebvre points out that the cahiers of the Third Estate were generally moderate in their demands: the regulation of seigniorial rights, the conversion of tithes into a money payment, administrative unification, and the limitation of absolute monarchical authority. More important than the specific demands of social groups (harmonized in such a way that the Third Estate cahiers were eventually weighted heavily to the bourgeoisie), however, was the immense mobilization of popular enthusiasm for the Estates-General, an enthusiasm that, as events were to show, could rapidly turn militant. Discursively, the construction of new political identities was borne out most strikingly by the Abbé Sieyes’ pamphlet, Qu’est-ce-que le Tiers État? (What Is The Third Estate?), which identified the Third Estate, glossing over its multiple divisions, with the French nation. More precisely, Sieyes asserted that this group contained within itself all that was necessary to constitute a nation, and harangued the rich and the aristocratic for living off the labour and industry of the mass of people – bourgeois, peasants and urban workers – whose demands for representation and rights were founded on their toil. As William Sewell points out, this document marks out the beginnings of a new vocabulary of social and political ethics, whereby rightful, earned prosperity (and, by implication, political legitimacy) was founded on labour. This conception, however, implicitly subordinated the labour of the wage earning, politically, to the enterprise of the owner of capital, even though oppositional discourses were to emerge from this very doctrine. Finally, and in the short term most significantly, a vocabulary of revolutionary nationalism can be seen in the process of formation here. This ideology was to have far-reaching – and, from a certain point of view, regressive and even tragic, consequences for the Revolution.

Procedures of representation prior to the convocation of the Constituent Assembly thus helped arouse a vast and diffused body of public opinion that clamoured for major reforms, spurred on to militancy by the slowness of State responses to popular demands. Discontent was canalized through the Paris press, which, as Lefebvre pointed out, became a major force in late June and July 1789. Millenarian hopes were coupled with pronounced fears of an `aristocratic conspiracy’ to subvert the popular will, fears that took an explosive form with the dismissal of Necker. This provided the immediate context for the popular uprising of 12-14 July, which culminated in the storming of the Bastille, the first major journée of the Revolution. From Paris, revolutionary unrest spread to the provinces, as news of the Paris insurrection spread. One of Lefebvre’s central contributions to the study of the Revolution is his analysis of the dissemination of agitation through rumours – of aristocratic conspiracy, encirclement by royal troops, and so on, which turned the spread of unrest into a self-multiplying, self-generating process and speeded up radical change. As the municipal structure of the ancien régime caved in, decentralism became, temporarily, the defining feature of French administration, provinces making their own arrangements in chaotic form.

The deathblow to the ancien regime, however, was delivered by the Grande Peur or Great Fear, in the countryside between July 20 and August 6. The massive peasant uprising that spread in waves across France, wiping out seigniorial rights, appeared as a motive force – the motive force, as Hobsbawm asserts, in the process of accelerated social transformation. Significantly, the turbulence of the peasantry was an unexpected phenomenon, even for self-conscious revolutionaries, since the cahiers had, in their final form, virtually excluded the mass of the rural population from consideration. Yet, in late eighteenth-century France, the `peasant problem’ was very real and potentially very explosive.

Despite the dominance of nominal freeholding in the French countryside, the peasant population of France – especially its poorer sections – was crushed under multiple tax burdens. Peasants were the only section to pay the taille, they paid the poll tax and the hated gabelle (an indirect tax, on salt, a major source of discontent at parish level), and they paid tithes to the Church. In addition, they were frequently obliged to perform corvée or forced labour, and pushed into compulsory military service. A range of aristocratic privileges deepened this discontent: the levying of tolls, control of weights and measures, and feudal monopolies or banalites.

Further, the gradual development of capitalism in the French countryside produced a range of deeply felt insecurities. The enclosure of peasant property and the breaking up of common lands, much as in England, generated much anger. The cahiers at village level complain of encroachments, and – importantly – consistently raise the question of the legality of lordly rights and impositions. By no means a historically unique circumstance, this demonstrates one of the ways in which a discourse of hegemony – in this case, law – could turn into a discourse of resistance.

1789 was a turbulent year for the French peasantry. The public spheres mobilized by the convocation of the Estates-General and the cahiers raised enormous hopes, at the very least, of a substantial lightening of feudal burdens. At the same time, the problems caused by acute food shortages bred fears of an `aristocratic conspiracy’, much as they did in Paris and the provinces. Vagrancy and vagabondage were major sources of fear, and in the minds of peasants linked concretely to aristocratic plots. Partly, this fear of the unemployed and the destitute as agents of brutal violence was justified, but partly it also reflected an obsession with property that characterized the peasant smallholder.

Lefebvre points out that (as in England), the market represented a major outlet for the dissemination of unrest and resentment of the rich, and on market days (in rural as well as urban areas), the subsistence needs of consumers had to be met before merchants and retailers were to be supplied. This ritualized hierarchization of demands corresponded to real social needs in a way that the arguments of the Physiocrats for the liberation of the grain trade didn’t. The ascendancy of the latter, especially in the context of acute shortages, produced much popular resentment. Cobban draws attention to another element in peasant unrest: hostility to the perceived sacrifice of rural to urban interests, and to the drain of rural wealth to towns. In a later context, that of the uprising in the Vendée from 1793, the battle of country against town was to acquire great significance.

By the end of March, a spate of popular agitations had already begun to spread around upper Provence. Soon, systematic peasant protest had spread to the areas around Paris and Versailles. It was the storming of the Bastille, however, that really triggered the peasant revolution proper. The spread of rumours, as Lefebvre has exhaustively documented, fuelled local panics that combined in a chain reaction: the fear of royal troops, brigands and the `aristocratic conspiracy’ being linked in the peasant mentality. The peasant uprising, however, was far from an elemental, mindless brutality, and the number of actual murders was fairly low. Instead, the peasants attacked the building blocks of feudal privilege: they pillaged forests, attacked enclosures and tax-farmers, asserted their rights over common lands, and, most significantly, destroyed archives authorizing the collection of peasant dues. It appears from all this that, contrary to stereotypes of anarchic and spontaneous insurrection, the peasants had clearly defined targets, and operated in accordance with a fairly developed revolutionary rationality.

With the abolition of feudal dues on the dramatic night of August 4, the peasant revolution petered out fairly abruptly. The destruction of feudalism having been accomplished, and the onset of agrarian capitalism having been stalled, at least for the moment, a now predominantly smallholding peasantry rapidly turned `conservative’ (though generalizations, of course, have to be tentative). As the urban revolution took increasingly radical forms, the peasantry reacted by and large negatively: to de-Christianization campaigns, to the terror wreaked by the armées revolutionáires of the sans-culottes, and most of all to the centralization sought by Jacobin power. The imposition of heavy taxes, and conscription in the context of European war, stimulated intense peasant protest. This took various forms: monarchism, pro-clericalism, and anti-urban agitation being some of these.

In March 1793, the region of La Vendée in the Western Loire broke out in violent anti-government revolt, two months after the execution of Louis XVI. The revolt was sparked off by peasant conscription, and exacerbated by what was perceived as the atheistic tendencies of the revolutionary government. The incidence of villagers (especially women) shielding priests, and the growth of strongly religious anti-Montagnard feeling were striking features of this outburst. Charles Tilly has demonstrated that the juxtaposition of urban and rural settlements in the Vendée region led to the crystallization of specifically anti-urban discontent. Thus, by the middle of the revolutionary decade, the peasantry had turned full circle and come to represent the crucible of `counter-revolution’.

In a sense, the turbulence of the Vendée demonstrates the extreme instability of conceptions of `popular protest’ that, in much left-wing theorizing, are tied unproblematically to a main line of revolutionary development, counter-revolution running against the grain of the `popular’. The undoubtedly `popular’ nature of peasant resistance to the Revolution, as rooted in concrete social problems as the rural radicalism of 1789, forces us to rethink unilineal narratives of revolution, and perhaps to replace a unified, constant revolutionary telos with a more nuanced picture of shifting, competing and often conflictual visions of the French future, exemplified in the ambiguities of peasant protest.

The lasting images evoked by mention of the French revolution, however, are those associated with the turbulent urban uprisings of 1789-95, the years in which the modern myth of revolution was created. Subsequent revolutionary movements – the most striking example being Lenin and the Bolsheviks – consciously or unconsciously traced back their heritage to the experience of French Jacobinism, and most studies and analyses of revolution implicitly took this as their model. These years, also, were a time in which that much-studied formation, the `revolutionary crowd’, came into being as the principal channel of urban protest, developing in course of time a very complicated and ambiguous relationship with the revolutionary leadership, and terror as practiced by the Mountain.

The narrative of crowd behaviour, as expressed in the sequence of journées between 1789 and 1795, is detailed and complex. After the storming of the Bastille, Paris witnessed another major uprising in October 1789: the `march of the women’ from working-class and artisanal districts to Versailles, to bring the king back to Paris and to force down the price of bread, the latter being a constant thread in the revolutionary narrative. After an extended period of reconstruction and relative quiet, revolutionary agitation broke out again in 1791, following the flight of the king to Varennes. A series of anti-monarchical demonstrations culminated in the displacement of monarchical power by the Jacobin leadership in August 1792, the September massacres of aristocrats, and, in January 1793, the execution of the royal family. The crowd in Paris played a seminal role in the displacement of the Girondins by the Montagnards in the Convention in June 1793. Subsequently, as the revolution moved leftward under the Mountain and Robespierre, the popular movement commanded immense effective authority, which often brought them into conflict with the leadership. The zenith of the strength of the popular movement was the Maximum on prices, declared on 29 September 1793. However, tensions in the relationship between masses and leaders continued, and the Maximum on wages in July 1794 led to immense alienation. Robespierre and the Mountain were overthrown on 27-28 July (Thermidor), and a moderate bourgeois leadership recaptured power. From this point on, the popular movement began to give ground. The massive revolts of April and May 1795 (Germinal and Prairial), in a winter of rising prices, were defeated by the Convention. The wheel turned full circle in October (Vendémiaire), when the Convention called in the army to suppress the last organized popular uprising of the Revolution.

From this chaotic and ambiguous sequence of events, it is difficult to tease out any definite patterns. Some general questions, however, do suggest themselves, questions around which an appreciation of some of the basic features of urban popular protest in the Revolution can be organized. The first of these is the question of the composition of revolutionary crowds, a problem studied extensively by George Rúde, whose studies are predicated on a critique and a refusal of previous understandings of the popular movement in stereotypical, catch-all terms like `mob’ or `people’, terms that deny specificity. Thus, Rúde’s studies transformed the interpretation of popular protest both conceptually and methodologically.

Drawing extensively on police records, Rúde sought to shatter a stereotypical picture of an urban revolution constituted primarily by bands of criminals, unemployed people and vagabonds who responded to slogans of revolution out of the greed for loot. Rude argues, instead, that urban protest was organized primarily around the older quarters of Paris, such as the Faubourgs St. Antoine and St. Marcel. These areas housed a `pétit-bourgeoisie’ of small shopkeepers, master craftsmen and artisans, who trod a delicate line between moderate bourgeois status and a descent into proletarianization. These people, it is argued, were desperately keen to preserve lower middle-class respectability, and a distance from the urban working groups. At the same time, the organization of urban workshops, studios and corporations implied that the lower bourgeoisie and the working classes were in close proximity to one another, eating, working, and often living together. Thus, social solidarities in the Revolution were a complicated matter. Essentially, Rúde’s argument is that the lower bourgeoisie of the older quarters of Paris provided leadership to the popular movement, and the working-class groupings clustered together as a militant force under their command.

Richard Cobb offers, implicitly, a striking methodological critique of this identification of the popular movement with `respectable’ petit-bourgeois initiatives. Cobb points out that police records, which are Rúde’s prime source, often tell us more about what the police expected to find in `disturbances’ (the categories into which `offenders’ could be fitted being very neatly defined and compartmentalized in the police imagination) than about the actual social composition of crowds. Thus, Cobb also raises, by implication, a concrete instance of the problem of the relationship between representation and reality, a problem that has come to occupy centre stage in critiques of `empiricist’ histories.

The motives of the Parisian revolutionary crowds are a matter of considerable ambiguity. The coincidence of pétit-bourgeois and what might be termed proto-proletarian interests cannot be assumed as a constant in this period. Shopkeepers would clearly not generally favour severe price regulations for their commodities, which might cut into their profits. Neither could workshop-masters be expected to support the demands for higher wages that labourers periodically made. What drew these sections together, despite the diversity of their interests, was (argue Soboul and Rúde), a situation of acute economic crisis and rising prices that hit both wage-earners and men of limited property: the sections linked by the term sans-culottes. They shared a generalized hatred of the rich, and a fear of untrammeled capitalism, which, as the more perceptive of contemporary observers noted, would throw large sections of the urban population into a state of general and permanent insecurity.

An offshoot of the problems posed by the question of motivation is a series of pronouncements on the `consciousness’ of revolutionary crowds, especially their wage-earning component (the other components often being somewhat unproblematically read off as `pétit-bourgeois’). Soboul and Rúde point to a difference between `political consciousness’, concerned with putting forward demands for rights, liberties and powers, and `economic consciousness’, grounded in the invariant logic of rising prices, shortages, and acute social misery. Rúde points out the unexpected fusion of these two forms of consciousness at certain conjunctures: as in the October 1789 March of the Women. As they marched, they chanted, `We are going to bring home the baker, the baker’s wife and the baker’s son.’ This demonstrates a fusion of the demand for price controls with anti-monarchist political sentiment. The demonstrators of 1795 proclaimed demands for `bread and the Constitution of 1793’, which shows a generalized concern with the political values of democracy. It seems that as the Revolution progressed, the ideology of the revolutionary crowds underwent considerable `politicization’.

Yet in a sense the conceptual cleavage between `economic’ and `political’ consciousness is highly problematic. It assumes an unchanging definition of the political that is rather ahistorical. As E.P Thompson’s studies of the `moral economy’ of the eighteenth-century English crowd demonstrate, what appear to have been basic bread-and-butter issues often were underpinned by complex ideological and moral preoccupations. William Sewell, extending Thompson’s insights to revolutionary France, delineates a certain `moral collectivism’ that informed much popular protest. Viewed in this light, demands for the control of the price of bread become not simply a spasmodic reaction to acute hunger – which they were, too, without doubt – but also the expression of certain conceptions of a just price, limited and regulated by the laws of social justice and human need. Popular protest in revolutionary France, then, can also be seen as an attempt to prevent the capitalist transformation of the French economy and its moral basis. Studying these struggles in their own right might involve rethinking teleological ideas about a smooth, inevitable unfolding of historical processes like the `rise of capitalism’. Insofar as these struggles, in a sense, contested precisely this process, studies of these might also necessitate recognition of the possibility that the `economic’ protests, at least in their implications, represented a more thoroughgoing and deeper critique of the status quo than `political’ protests. Finally, such studies make possible the realization that in concrete historical terms a neat disjuncture between `economic’ and `political’ demands is difficult, if not impossible, to keep up in the context of the French Revolution.

If in any sense the concept of `politicization’ is valid in studying revolutionary protest in France, it has to do less, perhaps, with ideology than with the ways in which revolutionary activity was organized. Rúde has systematically set out the various forms of revolutionary organization and mobilization in his study of the Parisian crowd during the Revolution. These forms grew out of a climate of intense discussion and debate, centred in all the major urban public spaces: taverns, wine shops, markets, and so on. Mediated through the printed word – in various journals – these took a more formalized shape in various institutions that came into being at this time and espoused radical ideas: clubs like the Cordelier and Jacobin Club, the societés populaires, and the Sections, agencies of direct democracy. The Commune in Paris played a major role in stimulating revolutionary activity, witnessing a progressive radicalization as the Revolution grew in scope.

A major pattern that can be deduced from the urban revolution is the constant tension in the relationship between leaders and masses. This is particularly evident in the case of the Mountain, which both implemented some of the most radical demands of the masses – like the Maximum on prices – and cut down ruthlessly on popular democracy, all the while speaking an intensely democratic language. Soboul points to inner class contradictions between the middle-class radicals who constituted the Mountain and the sans-culottes the `led’. These tensions, according to him, crippled the movement. While this may at a basic level be true, Cobb sets forth a somewhat different and perhaps more nuanced analysis. The principal contradiction in the popular movement, according to him, lay less in class tensions than in a conflict between two differing conceptions of the exercise of revolutionary power: granted autonomy, the movement may have achieved a `glorious anarchy’, cutting through all bonds of power and creating a destabilizing but also potentially creative chaos. The opposite pull in the movement led in the direction of dictatorship, and was exemplified by Montagnard terror. However, this does not exhaust the tensions within the urban revolution. The leadership and the sans-culottes developed an ambiguous relationship: the latter frequently sought extensive government control (over prices and working conditions, against aristocrats and `traitors’), even as they sought to develop practices of direct democracy, and the former ended up betraying democratic principles even as they affirmed them, as (for instance) the rights of man and citizen were predicated on the principle of revolutionary patriotism, `loyalty to the nation’, defined in absolute terms, transgression of which signified death – here, perhaps, are the foundation of the pathological dimension of modern popular nationalism. Further, Robespierre and the Mountain delegated revolutionary terror to the crowd and the popular movement, which became an important agent in this process. The Terror, however, eventually turned on ordinary citizens, and thus also became a reason for popular discontent.

William Sewell examines the implications of the French Revolution – both as event and as extended process – for social relations in France, and particularly for labour. The revolutionary discourse of unity, privileging the interests of the organic whole of society over its constituent parts – an idea that is in a sense Rousseauist – implied a complicated breakdown of the corporate structures of the Old Regime. Sectional interests, in this discourse, could only be harmful to society and the nation. This had a twofold impact: it broke down the old feudal privileges, but it also destroyed old corporate solidarities within the working population. This was exemplified by the Le Chapelier law of 1791, which abolished trade corporations, and was thus a major source of discontent for artisans and craftsmen. Sewell also points out a developing dialectic in the sans-culotte mentality between direct democracy on the one hand – which as a principle the sans-culottes championed fiercely, and an obsession with unanimity in decision-making on the other, dissent being suspect as a mark of treachery to the revolutionary cause. Thus, seemingly paradoxically, extreme democratic practices were coupled with an almost fundamentalist intolerance.

 

There exists another dimension to the history of the popular movement in revolutionary France, but it is one, which seems to pose immense problems, no matter what the chosen approach is. This is the relationship of women to the French Revolution. The central problem is perhaps that of the identity to be assigned to women as a social group. With other agents in the revolutionary movement, one could, at a certain basic level, speak of solidarities based on social differentiation – put in simple terms, the poor against the rich. While such a view is reductive, it does point to the felt experience of (absolute and relative) poverty, which certainly was a prime catalyst in protest. In the case of women, the questions of identity and solidarity are more complicated. At one level, women, being the marginalized gender, shared an implicit solidarity cutting across class lines, and can so be spoken of as a bloc. At another level, however, the social experience of women was certainly not homogeneous, and divided sharply by class. Thus, women – as so often in history – frequently shared with men the burdens of social oppression, but suffered also the burdens of male domination within their social milieu.

One acceptable generalization might be that the French Revolution, while opening up radical possibilities and dreams of liberty and equality that could be universalized and were, this universalization seemed to leave women out. The emergence of such radical ideas, in the long run, meant that the issue of male political, social and sexual hegemony could not be left uncontested for long. Early feminist thought – that of Wollstonecraft being a striking example – drew much inspiration from the French Revolution. However, at the same time, the agency enjoyed by women was greatly circumscribed by the Revolution. The authority – often very real – enjoyed by actresses and aristocratic women who ran salons (important constituents of the emergent public sphere of pre-revolutionary France) was severely clamped down upon by revolutionary legislation. In the realm of ideology, what appeared to be axiomatically progressive from a male point of view – Rousseau’s ideas, for instance – often had very contrary implications for women. The ideal of the `virtuous citizen’ defined virtue in extremely masculinist terms, celebrating manliness, virility, self-reliance and other virtues stereotypically associated with men, while condemning as `aristocratic’ qualities popularly seen as feminine – irrationality, susceptibility to strong passions, and so on. Joan Landes and others have pointed out that in real terms the Revolution represented a significant regression for women.

The masculinist conception of society that emerged from the revolutionary process, however, should be seen in terms of gradual development, not as a telos postulated by the very act of revolution. The cahiers had put forward a number of specifically `feminine’ demands – equality before the law, marriage law reform, and the protection of women’s trades. 1789 saw a flurry of radical feminine activity, and the opening of women’s clubs, reading circles, and a women’s press. The radical turn of the (male) revolution towards the Mountain did represent a regression for women, but it was a slow process, and it was only in 1793 that women were robbed of citizenship rights. Even as a masculinist discourse based on virility and strength emerged within revolutionary discourse, the agency of women developed to proportions feared by mainstream male revolutionaries. The need felt by the Jacobins to ban women’s clubs in October 1793 is emblematic of this fear.

While conscious and articulate feminism developed primarily among women of the upper classes (like Theroigne de Mericourt and Olympe de Gouges, who wrote a `Declaration Of The Rights Of Woman And Citizen’ in 1791), the bulk of the women who played an active role in the Revolution were socially tied to the popular movement: market women, wives of wage-earners and artisans, and small businesswomen played the central role in the journee of October 5, 1789, to bring the king back to Versailles. The unofficial pamphlets of poorer women at this time – often-illiterate women who dictated these to a scribe – spoke of the harsh conditions of their trade, of the overcrowding of city hospitals, of the injustice of grain collectors, and of the luxury of bishops and the plight of poor priests. Soboul points out that until the banning of women’s clubs in October 1793, women participated actively in the politics of the sectional organization. Darlene Gay Levy and Harriet Applewhite argue that the concept of militant citizenship – the right to bear arms and use force as citizens of the Republic – was an important feature of women’s activity during the Revolution. This concept, articulated in women’s revolutionary practice in journées between 1789 and 1792, culminated in the militant activities of the Society For Revolutionary Republican Women, set up in May 1793, in the context of the dislocation produced by war and economic crisis. In tune with the dominant pathology of the Revolution, this association was founded on the principle of military patriotism as the duty of a citoyenne.

Claire Goldberg Moses argues that some of the ideas formulated during the French Revolution in the course of women’s protest movements were to have extremely significant consequences for the development of feminisms across national borders in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. While the principal thinkers of the Enlightenment may have been misogynist in their outlook, they also propounded ideas – like the `natural’ right of equality, which had only to be recognized and not granted as a gift – that could be appropriated by revolutionary feminists like Olympe de Gouges, all the more so since they claimed to be universally applicable principles. Moses identifies two major strands in contemporary French and American feminism: one founded on the universal discourse of equality, and the other on the discourse of valorized difference (addressing the special rights and demands of women). The first strand, she argues, can be traced back to the experience of the French Revolution.

At the same time, it has also been argued by many historians that the French Revolution also frequently articulated an intensely conservative view of the role of women in society, paradoxically exemplified by the very protests they engaged in. Thus, the centrality of women in the October 1789 journee, being at base a demand for the regulation of soaring bread prices, expressed the conception of women as sustainers of the family, while their resistance to de-Christianization campaigns defined their social role as sustainers and defenders of the community. This argument runs the risk of exaggeration, since it ignores the (frequently) very militant and radical nature of women’s action and ideology. It could also be argued, on the basis of the same evidence, that these conceptions of the social role of women, conservative though they were, in many cases simply reflected the role that women did actually play in French society: thus, this implicit conservatism was neither new nor remarkable. What was remarkable – and new – was the mobilization (often self-engendered) of women as active agents in revolutionary processes far beyond their normal social experience. The radical potential of this mobilization is undeniable. Yet, as Olwen Hufton argues, the decade of revolution in many ways ended up (for the moment at least) as a debilitating experience for women, especially working-class women, who were hit hardest of all by the economic ravages and political instabilities of the time, and fell prey to a number of insecurities. Thus, what the experience of women in the Revolution represents is really a series of interlocking but contradictory processes, emancipatory potential and repression fighting a protracted battle on the site of gender, neither cancelling the other out completely. As with other aspects of the Revolution, gender is best comprehended in terms of a dialectic between conflictual historical processes, rather than a single unilineal and teleological line of development.

The history of popular forces in the French Revolution, then, discloses considerable ambiguities and internal tensions, whether in the realm of peasant insurrections, crowd behaviour, the experiences of labouring people, or the paradoxes of gender. Such ambiguity necessarily cancels out the possibility of smooth narratives organized around a single constant theme (whether class, community or gender), because the identities and solidarities of people kept shifting, and were rarely clearly defined. A range of motives, interests and ideologies went into the making of popular protest, and apparently solidary interests concealed divergent and conflictual preoccupations. These uncertainties and instabilities of meaning, however, do not negate the possibility of historical enquiry into the processes of popular protest that is oriented towards answers and conclusions. What they do imply, however, is that there may be diverse answers to be deduced from such a study, that the same questions can be approached from very different angles, and that analyses of this revolutionary period need to be founded on an understanding of tensions in the relationships between events, processes and people, rather than mechanical correlations of identities and actions.

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