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Journal of Interdisciplinary History 33.4 (2003) 638-640



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The Virtuous Marketplace: Women and Men, Money and Politics in Paris, 1830-1870. By Victoria E. Thompson (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000) 229pp. $32.00

Students of French culture and contemporary social critics alike often invoke "social types," ranging from the eighteenth-century salonnière to the garçonne of the 1920s, to explore the stereotypes that have shaped the imaginative construction of gender roles in France. In The Virtuous Marketplace, Thompson argues that between 1830 and 1870, as the French rushed to embrace an increasingly market-oriented economy, they engaged in a heightened effort "to define, distinguish and classify so as to make sense of changes within society" (7). Thompson places the dynamic transformation of female social types—the prostitute, the grisette, the ouvrière, the market woman of the halles, and the lorette—at the heart of her study of the changing nature of economics, politics, and gender relations in mid nineteenth-century Paris.

Thompson's book addresses three key questions central to the recent scholarly debates concerning women, gender, and the market: How did making money come to be an honorable pursuit for men, especially associated with public virtue and self-control? How were French women defined in opposition to the marketplace as economically [End Page 638] dependent consumers? And how did the French resolve the conflict of interests in their burgeoning market economy between domesticity and capitalism, order and disorder, and self-interest and the public good? The creation of a powerful new gender ideology that denied women's economic agency, Thompson argues compellingly, stands at the heart of the solution.

Yet, as Thompson suggests in her analysis of the literature of the grisette and the lorette, these female stereotypes worked on multiple levels, potentially empowering women and offering resistance to the momentum of the market. In the eighteenth century, the term grisette was applied to working women of easy virtue, ready to sell their sexuality for a shawl or a pretty hat. But by the 1830s, struggling journalists and ardent republicans had crafted a new image of the grisette, whom they re- envisioned as a self-sacrificing, virtuous heroine who spurned the values of the marketplace to pursue true love. She became the female embodiment of those who wanted to temper and check the competitive values of the market with self-sacrifice and sentiment, offering a radical message wrapped in the cloak of feminine domesticity. But by the 1850s and 1860s, the booming stock exchange and rage for speculation had gained such a grip on the French that the stories of the grisette offered little more than a nostalgic paean to an earlier era. In literature and in social criticism, a new female type, the lorette, emerged to embody cultural anxieties about the market. As Thompson writes, "Associated with modernization, masculinity, and speculation, the lorette seemed to embody, for good and for bad, the new mores and attitudes of a society in search of easy money" (133).

Although the journalists and novelists who provided the most incisive descriptions of these new female social types form the core of Thompson's research, she resists a "top-down" or one-dimensional approach to the spread of ideas. She supplements novels and newspapers with a variety of sources ranging from legal codes to police reports and architectural plans for the reconfiguration of les Halles market. Inspired by the theoretical work of Bourdieu and Bakhtin, Thompson stresses that the construction of a "virtuous market" was the result of "multiple articulations, challenges and negotiations" of a cultural dialogue that included disagreement, as well as consensus (13).1

Nineteenth-century French historians, in particular, will benefit from Thompson's insights, but her subtle and multidimensional study has much to offer other historians and scholars interested in the cultural history of the market economy. Moreover, Thompson's work reveals that social types such as the grisette and lorette are much more than static illustrations or stereotypes; they must be situated in the rich social and...

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