France after Revolution: Urban Life, Gender, and the New Social Order (review)

Davidson’s France after Revolution offers an original and important analysis of the role of gender in the establishment of the postrevolutionary social order. The model of separate spheres—a female sphere of home and family and a male sphere of work and politics—emerged from nineteenth-century rhetoric and influenced historians of women and gender throughout the 1980s. For the last fifteen years or so, this model has been called into question by works that demonstrate women’s involvement in the public sphere as consumers, philanthropists, journalists, artists, and writers. Davidson takes the critique of this model further, arguing that it “helps little in understanding male and female roles and experiences” in postrevolutionary France (187). As Davidson demonstrates, women were present in a variety of public arenas during the postrevolutionary period. At the same time, however, the emergence of a consensus that women served primarily as models of virtue, helpers and “ornaments,” resulted in a restriction of their opportunities to participate in public life.

This development was part of a larger process of delineating stricter definitions of class and gender identities during the early nineteenth century. Davidson draws on extensive archival research to examine political festivals, theaters, associations, cafés, and cabarets during the Napoleonic Empire and the Restoration in Lyon and Nantes. She demonstrates that during the Napoleonic period, social gatherings included individuals of both sexes and all classes, in part because public spaces, such as political festivals or the theater, allowed them to see how others performed class and gender identities. As new norms emerged, Davidson argues, the middle classes socialized among themselves; less frequent social contact with the working classes bred fear and distrust. Similarly, although women continued to be present in public gatherings, a more limited understanding of acceptable feminine behaviors changed the extent and nature of their presence.

Davidson emphasizes practices rather than language, but she acknowledges her debt to linguistic analysis in her effort to “analyze … the experience of social life in ways similar to the more familiar analysis of linguistic constructs” (9). Texts are therefore the means by which she approaches the question of what people did and how they were described while doing it. In adopting this method, Davidson draws inspiration from the work of de Certeau and Bourdieu to emphasize both individual agency in shaping cultural norms and the symbolic importance of everyday activities.¹

Davidson’s approach to the formation and deployment of identity has fully absorbed the implications of both anthropological and sociological insights, providing a coherent model for the ways in which past practices can be identified and analyzed. The study explores the changing forms and forums of urban, provincial social life, while also providing a platform for examining the interrelationship between social practices and cultural norms. Scholars who study French history and gender history, as well as those interested in exploring the analytical value of the concept of social practice, will want to consult this original, well-researched book.