The Family and the Nation: Gender and Citizenship in Revolutionary France, 1789-1830 (review)

Heuer has carved out an extremely demanding topic, which is to trace shifts in law and practice concerning women's and men's rights and obligations as members of families and as citizens from the end of the Old Regime through the Revolution to the Restoration. Heuer theorizes that early revolutionaries used the "nation as family" in a metaphorical sense and began to construct increasingly equal citizenship and nationality rights for men and women out of precedents left from the Old Regime. During the radical phase of the Revolution, legislation and discourse emphasized citizenship obligations of women as well as men. Beginning with Thermidor, however, central-government policy shifted. It reworked the nation as family metaphor into one that suggested that families, and not individual citizens, were the foundational units of the nation. With these changes, women were transformed in ideological and legal terms from citizens to dependents of citizens; citizenship became increasingly identified as inhering only to men.

The problem of emigration and emigrants looms large in the study, both as a problem facing radical revolutionaries during the Republic and for the legacies that it left in French laws on citizenship and nationality. Laws regarding citizenship and naturalization were deeply marked by revolutionaries' determination to use absence from the patrie and the status of "ex-noble" as tantamount to a rejection of granted citizenship rights. Revolutionaries in the Convention, in particular, seemed bent on treating women who accompanied their émigré husbands as culpable, holding them to the same obligations to the nation as their husbands, and punishing them for what they perceived as women's greater loyalty to husband than nation.

Discussing the evolution of law, Heuer's text becomes involved in extremely intricate dissections of cases involving contests over individuals' status as émigrés—often when French nationals had wed foreigners during the Revolution—as well as contentions concerning rights of property inheritance in France, reserved for French nationals and those actively seeking naturalization. Heuer's narratives of these cases enliven the more technical discussions of legal history, but they can also lead to some frustration as well. Cases often went through successive levels of litigation and appeal, and although their resolution is sometimes traceable, the practical consequences of litigation over revolutionary law are difficult to interpret.

Heuer's discussion of the impacts of the formidable Napoleonic Civil Code (1804) on French family practices provides insight into tensions between French core and periphery in the march of ideas and legal policy. At a number of points, laws enacted and cases adjudicated in central courts seem to have been ignored in practice wherever distinctive local mentalities concerning marriage and citizenship prevailed. Since the practical consequences of laws on family, citizenship, and naturalization often bore their greatest consequences on the borders of France, Heuer has chosen, at the end of the study, to focus on one such region—Alsace—which was an area of high immigration across the Rhine.

Post-1814 efforts in Alsace to enforce terms of the Civil Code, which assigned French women who married foreigners the nationality of their husbands, met with keen resistance from workers dwelling there and from local authorities. Evidence suggests that the foreign male workers who migrated into France and the French women whom they married had a different notion of citizenship than the one promulgated by the Civil Code. Perhaps they had learned their more egalitarian revolutionary lessons regarding nationality and citizenship too well, believing that women did have citizenship rights that could confer French nationality on their husbands. For their part, weary Alsatian authorities, faced with the proliferation of common-law unions and illegitimate children among these couples, tried to facilitate marriages that would not, however, remove French citizenship rights from the...