Gender, Intimacy, and Politics in the French Revolutionary Era

On the eve of the overthrow of the French monarchy in August 1792, the revolutionary Rosalie Jullien penned these words to her son: “The affairs of the state are the affairs of my heart. I do not think, dream, or feel anything but that, my child” (Parker, 88). She is the subject of Lindsay Parker’s biography, but she effectively evokes the theme that resonates across Annie K. Smart’s and Andrew Cayton’s works as well: How did revolutionary politics intersect with “affairs of [the] heart,” with private life, intimate relationships, and family matters?

Smart and Parker both position themselves against an older scholarship that maintained that liberal democracy subordinated women within a private sphere and excluded them from the public sphere of politics, most notably during the French Revolution, as presented in Joan Landes’s account (Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution [1988]; see also Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract [1988]). For her part, in Citoyennes: Women and the Ideal of Citizenship in Eighteenth-Century France, literary scholar Annie Smart counters this view by studying representations of the feminine in a diverse array of Old Regime and revolutionary genres. She argues that a much more dynamic and politically engaged model for women emerged: what she calls citoyennes, “moral individuals devoted to the public good, with a vital role to play in ushering in the good society” (2). Women as citoyennes had an explicit civic identity, and their domestic lives were neither apolitical nor solely private; rooted in the home as a civic space, they were called upon to become domestic activists on behalf of state and society.

To find literary models and representations of the citoyenne, Smart delves into multiple genres, including “educational novels, political writings and speeches, vaudeville plays, a utopian novel, and a few works of art” (5). As a starting point, she rereads Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Emile. Following Tzvetan Todorov in Frail Happiness: An Essay on Rousseau (1985, 2001), Smart suggests that Rousseau laid out multiple positions, leaving room for conflicting interpretations. Regarding Emile, she shifts our focus away from the passive Sophie of Book V and toward Book I and the “good mother who knows how to think” (28). Smart emphasizes how Rousseau endowed mothers with a pivotal civic role in shaping their sons as moral actors for the new republican order. While other scholars have certainly analyzed how Rousseau laid out a moral role for women within the public good, Smart especially emphasizes the civic, or state-oriented, aspect of this ideal.

Smart finds variations on this Rousseauist model of civic motherhood in myriad locations. When Louis-Sébastien Mercier wrote a scathing critique of Old Regime politics and society in his futuristic utopian novel L’an 2440, he intriguingly chose a maternal figure as a politicized, antiabsolutist metaphor. According to Smart, she embodied “the new bond between ruler and subject/citizen” (63). Madame de Genlis, in her socially conservative educational treatise, did not quite craft a citoyenne, but she too proposed a “mother-educator” figure. During the 1790s, such revolutionary artists as Jean-Baptiste Lesueur, and the playwrights of vaudeville in the year II (1793–94), all produced positive imagery of dynamic female revolutionaries as “civic mothers,” saving their households from counterrevolution and inculcating revolutionary values in their children, servants, and husbands.

Smart defines “civic motherhood” and “citizenship” broadly. Citizenship includes “all members of a nation who actively participate in civic life and who play a role in maintaining the life, morals, and values of the public and political arenas” (2). This wide definition has both advantages and disadvantages. One disadvantage: Smart sidesteps the question...