The Virtuous Marketplace: Women and Men, Money and Politics in Paris, 1830-1870 (review)

While historians have long been interested in the rise of the marketplace in modern France, research to date has focused primarily on bourgeois consumption in the late eighteenth and late nineteenth centuries. By studying a neglected period and new protagonists, Victoria Thompson's book, The Virtuous Marketplace: Women and Men, Money and Politics in Paris, 1830-1870, makes an important contribution. Thompson explores the understudied mid-century and concentrates on working-class women's roles in the market, thus providing a fuller picture of French responses to commercialization. More than simply supplementing current research, she pro-vides an imaginative analysis of the ways in which new gender norms were used to manage the market and, in turn, of the impact of the market in shaping these norms.

Thompson starts from the premise that French women were once accepted figures in the marketplace and asks why, by the middle of the nineteenth century, their roles as sellers and buyers had become so fraught. In this period, the French grappled with a deregulated market and the advent of a bourgeois political order based on money and talent, both of which threatened to foment individual self-interest and thereby to erode class, family, and national solidarities. Thompson argues convincingly that anxieties about the new market society tended to be projected onto the figure of the market woman, and proposes two explanations for this. First, while the female merchant traditionally had close connections to money and credit, the Napoleonic code greatly strengthened her real economic power. This authority - unique among French women - aroused disquiet in the post-revolutionary political order in which money determined access to political rights and social status. Second, the rising influence of the bourgeois model of domestic womanhood, reinforced by currents of popular romanticism and Catholic thought, served to naturalize the economically dependent woman and to stigmatize the market woman.

In a series of eclectic chapters, Thompson looks at how these tensions about market women unfolded and were addressed. One chapter explores the figure of the prostitute as a metaphor for the market and argues that efforts to redefine her image sought to solve the problems posed by market society. Middle-class journalists thus sought to recast the once seedy, grasping grisette as the self-sacrificing seamstress who supported her man for love, suggesting that female virtue could protect both men and women from commercial corruption. A second, pivotal chapter argues that politicized artisans campaigning for higher wages in the 1840s eluded the charge of self-interest by presenting the male breadwinner, the sole support of female and juvenile dependents, as a paragon of virtue and selflessness. In taking this position, Thompson points out, working-class men cannily appropriated bourgeois domesticity for their own political ends and in so doing forged a cross-class alliance with their bourgeois counterparts.

The remaining two chapters examine instances of the growing marginalization of women in public that followed from the spread of the domestic model. Chapter 3 charts the regulation of female merchant's activity in the central Parisian markets by urban authorities involved in the policing and renovation of the capital. In the final and perhaps most inventive chapter, Thompson investigates women's expulsion from the stock market under the Second Empire and links it to the concomitant transformation of the image of the lorette from a courtesan who used her erotic power to financially manipulate men into an economic victim dependent on them. By literally and figuratively stripping women of economic power, contemporaries thus sought to construct a virtuous marketplace of which they were masters.

Thompson concocts an unusual and satisfying blend of ethnographic description (based on archival research) and discourse analysis (based on wide reading in popular literature), using these diverse sources to create a sophisticated portrait of debates about the market that evokes its attractions...