Women in Revolution 1789-1796
Author(s): Olwen Hufton
Source: Past & Present , Nov., 1971, No. 53 (Nov., 1971), pp. 90-108
Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of The Past and Present Society
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/650282
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WOMEN IN REVOLUTION 1789-17961
THE HISTORY OF WOMEN IN THE FRENCH REVOLUTION HAS RECEIVED
at best limited attention. If Marie Antoinette, Madam
Claire Lacombe have inevitably found their biog
hagiographers, the ephemeral clubs des femmes their p
their critics,2 and the tricoteuse has been pushed into
place in the most luxurious of pictorial histories,3 t
working women and their revolutionary experience rem
conceded but passing reference even in works concerne
with the attitudes and activities of the working cla
r81e was both unique and important and their attitudes
consideration. This short study is an attempt to beg
something of the balance by isolating a type of wom
information abounds, the working woman of the town
woman the sans culotte most likely went home to, the s
married soldier at the front most probably left behind;
the bread riots, of the revolutionary crowds, the "mot
figure of the fetes nationales, carrying her banner wit
device, "J'ai donni un (deux, trois, quatre, cinq, six)
1 This work was undertaken in response to a request for a pap
by the history society of Balliol College, Oxford in 1969. It ma
be anything other than a preliminary discourse on an imm
perforce leans most heavily on my knowledge of Bayeux du
tionary period and in particular on material found in Arch.
Registres du bureau de district de Bayeux; LX Assistance; LM
parallel material in the Arch. D6pt. du C6te d'Or and of the
pointers were given in G. Langeron, Le Club des Femmes de
Rdvolution (Dijon, 1929) and H. Perrin, "Le club des femmes
Annales Revolutionnaires, ix and x (1917-18), pp. 629-53, PP.
pp. 654-72. Both these studies were undertaken while Mathie
in Dijon and range wider than the titles would suggest. The r
economy of the poor of eighteenth-century France are largely bas
D6pt. of the Aveyron, Haute Loire, Indre et Loire, Loir e
Lozere, s~rie Lx, Assistance.
Much of the inspiration for the work was found in R. C.
Aspects de la mentalite revolutionnaire (Avril 1793 - ther
Terreur et Subsistances 1793-5 (Paris, 1965), pp. 3-53 in whic
enthusiasms and preoccupations of the sans culotte are so imagi
that the task of giving such a flesh and blood individual a
lessened. It is to be regretted that when this piece was writ
The Police and the People (Oxford, 1970) which opens up so ma
for pursuing women in Revolution had not been published.
2 The general bibliography on this currently fashionable sub
M. Cerati, Le Club des Citoyennes Ripublicaines Rdvolutionnair
3 F. Furet and D. Richer, The French Revolution (London, 197
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WOMEN IN REVOLUTION 1789-1796 91
Rdpublique" (I have given a citizen to the Republic) and ultima
the worn-out, disillusioned, starving hag who sank to her knees in
Year III to demand pardon of an offended Christ.
To appreciate the nearness of women to the Revolution one m
understand their r6le in the family economy, an appreciation cru
to our theme. One must start with the recognition that the famil
economy of the working classes, whether in town or country, was t
natural economy: the family needed the work of each of its
component members to support the whole. Hence, in a rural
context, the man who had sufficient land to provide for the wants of
his family had sufficient to employ that family. In the event of his
not having enough, he or his family or both must seek an alternative
source of income. In the case of the towns this was doubly true, for
nowhere could the wage-earner, unless he practised some highly
specialized craft, expect to earn more than he needed for his own
personal maintenance, the rent of a shelter and possibly the upkeep of
one child - a fact which the Comitd de Mendicite spelt out in 1790
for all who cared to read its debates. Once this has been recognized,
then the importance of the earning capacity, the labour and the sheer
ingenuity of women and children becomes readily apparent. They
were expected by their efforts to make a contribution and an
important one to the family economy. Female labour can be easily
categorized: for the unmarried, domestic service where payment was
largely in the form of food and shelter but where a girl might raise
enough to purchase the sheets and household linen which commonly
constituted the dowry of the working girl; for the married, domestic
industry in the form of spinning wool and cotton and the manufacture
of lace.5 The last employed the largest numbers at least in Northern
and Central France and in country as well as town. The value of
lace lay almost entirely in the handiwork, for the quantity of linen or
4 C. Bloch and A. Tuetey, Procks Verbaux et Rapports du Comitg de Mendicite'
de la Constituante (Paris, 1911), p. 77: "un homme valide peut gagner au del,
de ses besoins et faire subsister deux ou trois individus avec lui" ("a healthy man
can earn more than his needs and can give subsistence to two or three people in
addition to himself"); but on p. 379, an older and wiser Comite admitted that
a man paying tax equivalent only to the proceeds of one day's labour (about
a fifth of the work force) could not do as much as that.
6 The lace industry as a massive employer of women and girls has been
strinkingly neglected in standard economic histories such as E. Levasseur,
Histoire des classes ouvridres et de l'industrie en France avant 1789 (Paris, 1900-1)
or P. Leon, Economies et Socidtes Preindustrielles (Paris, 1970). On the massive
numbers employed in the generalitd of Caen, J. C. Perrot, "L'Industrie et le
commerce de la dentelle dans la region de Caen", Actes du 81e Congras des
socidt6s savantes, 1956 (Caen, 1956), pp. 215-37. Unfortunately his study
stops in 1792.
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92 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 53
silk thread involved was slight and no
needed. Highly dependent upon the dic
industry with an aristocratic and an inte
the eve of the Revolution, the most flour
France even if the lacemaker only received
would ultimately take her sight. In town
of the garment trades - seamstresses,
embroiderers, ribbon-makers, glove-ma
in any community, poor women, the lowe
market, performed the heavy and dis
carrying. Nothing was too menial. T
vegetables to and from market, water,
large cities, they found employment as
refuse collectors, assistants to masons a
easily multiply the examples. Where w
family, then the mother had to have
taught her children how and where to be
minor fee to other women who wanted t
fairs by the appearance of a large family
from door to door with long and pathe
legacy of mendacity to bestow if nothing
Richeprey, Necker's empissary in th
taught individual hard-luck stories by th
passer-by to demonstrate a special claim
court of Laval alone, 2,000 women, mothe
to trial annually for petty salt smuggling
of free salt, and the Maine, against a mer
The importance of the mother within
immense; her death or incapacity coul
the narrow but extremely meaningful ba
destitution.
A contemporary feminist, Madame de Coicy, concerned to draw
the attention of middle-class and aristocratic women to their
subservient position in the household, emphasized the equ
achieved within the working class home of the mother of the f
B Mercier, Tableaux de Paris (Amsterdam, 1782), "Les portefaix".
70. Hufton, "The Rise of the People", in The Eighteenth Centur
A. Cobban (London, 1969), pp. 297-8.
8 Journal des Voyages en Haute Guienne de J. F. Henry de Richeprey (Rodez,
1952).
9 A. Call6ry, La Fraude des Gabelles sous l'ancien regime (Paris, 1882). Also
Arch. Nat. AD IX 426 on similar practices in Touraine and Arch. Dept. Ille
et Vilaine C 3475 on the Vitr6 area.
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WOMEN IN REVOLUTION 1789-1796 93
because of her important participation in the family economy.
Indeed one might, considering the importance of her r61e, go furth
than Madame de Coicy, and claim for her social supremacy with
the limited context of the family. Restif in La vie de mon pere has
painted a patriarchal society but it is comfortable landowning socie
which is thus depicted. In its lower echelons society was far fro
being so. The strains involved in keeping a family together we
immense. Poverty is an acid: it corrodes or dissolves huma
relationships. But it was easier for a father to opt out than f
a mother to do so - easier for him to return home via the cabaret
suitably anaesthetized with cheap alcohol to the squalor of home and
hungry children and easier for him as well to clear off altogether, to
turn temporary migration into permanent disappearance, or in th
words of the Cure d'Athis, "They lose heart: they weary of the strain of
keeping a family on a wage barely adequate for one person and having
done so they gather their few remaining garments into a bundle and
hit the road, never to be seen again by their families"." The divorce
lists of the Year II confirm just this factor: in Metz, for example, 268
working women sought divorce, the grounds, separation, the duration
of that separation commonly nine or five years, coinciding perfectly
with the strains of dearth in 1785 and 1789. 12 The results of the
inquiry conducted by the bishops into the state of their dioceses in
1740 and 1770-4 are no less explicit: I am overwhelmed, wrote the
curd of Bort, near Clermont, with women who come to me not only
beseeching bread but accusing their husbands of threatening them
that if they do not let the youngest children perish they will leave
them and that alone they can manage but that even working all day
they cannot feed their families;13 while a curd of Tours described
a hierarchy of hunger in which he referred not merely to rich and poor
Women, he said, are not the first to die but they feel the pangs of
hunger first because they deprive themseves to feed husband and
children, and he made the inevitable and lengthy comparison with
the pious pelican of the adoro te who gave her blood to feed her
young. 1 This is not to say that women did not drink, thieve, lie,
prostitute themselves, indulge in every criminal practice one can think
10 Mme. de Coicy, Les femmes comme il convient de les voir (Paris, 1785), P-4.
I "Arch. Dept. Calvados, H. Suppl. 1308.
12 J. L'H6te, "Le divorce ' Metz sous la Revolution et l'Empire", Annales
de l'Est, 5th ser., iii (1952), pp. 175-83; the figures offered for Toulouse by
M. Cruppi, Le divorce pendant la Revolution (Paris, 19o09), pp. 150, 161 show
that two thirds of those seeking divorce were working women on the grounds of
abandonment.
13 Arch. Dept. Puy de D6me C 897.
14 Arch. Dept. Indre et Loire C 304.
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94 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 53
of, but that in general they clung more
and that this was widely recognized.
Indeed in time of dearth the importan
family grew beyond measure. It was not merely that her
deviousness, her relationship with baker, pawnbroker and priest
became more important than before"5 - there was no laicized parish
rate as in Protestant countries and the poor had to depend on the
voluntary alms of the faithful administered by the cure' - nor just her
assiduity in rooting out what food there was but that when all else
failed it was she who had the right to spill over into riot, not the
father of the family. By the end of the ancien rigime this was tacitly
not openly expressed: indeed one perhaps has to go back to Aquinas
for the last discourse on the right of a starving mother to thieve bread
for her young; but it certainly was, under certain circumstances,
permitted to her to do so with impunity. She had to do it collectively
and it evidently had to be a very abnormal year. The sort of women
who were punished after a bread riot up to and including 1789 were
those who in the course of rioting had destroyed property or shown
themselves violent towards persons. It was this criterion which
allowed administrators usually to pick out a handful for punishment
- not that their share of the pickings were any greater. She also had
to be doing it for her children, though it was rare to see a grandmother
called before the courts either.16 I am not saying that men were
never involved in bread riots - indeed during the Revolution they
were markedly so - but that predominantly the bread riot was
female, or rather maternal, terrain. One can make further generalizations
about the women involved in these riots. In Bayeux, Troyes
and Orleans those arrested in 1789 did not, with one exception, appear
on the lists of those in those particular towns given an annual subvention
by the bureaux de charitd, so they were not paupers but
women who in normal times could manage, proud women who were
not counted among the destitute and who were fighting to remain so
and to hold their families together.17 There is little doubt the most
15 Often bureaux de charitd dealt directly with the mother of the family and it
was her piety, thrift and readiness to work hard if she was able which were the
conditions for relief being given: Arch. Deipt. Lozere, J 570 bureau de charite de
Florac; E IooO bureau de charitd de Villefort; GG 12 bureau de charitd de Saint
Etienne Vallee Franfaise.
16 Even after the bread riots of the Year III, administrators were reluctant to
imprison women who had been violent but who had babies at the breast: Arch.
Mun. Bayeux, Registres des diliberations du corps municipal, 2-3 florial an Tii.
17Arch. Dept. Calvados C 2643 and C 955; Arch. Mun. Rodez Cite BB 9
CC 318, "Femmes prevenues et condamnees pour sedition"; Bibliotheque
Municipale Orleans MS. 585, "Evenements arrives ' Orleans de 1788 ' 1804",
cited briefly in C. Bloch, "Les femmes d'Orlkans pendant la Revolution",
Rdvolution Fran aise, xxix (1902), p. 62-3.
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WOMEN IN REVOLUTION 1789-1796 95
significant social division of the ancien regime was quite independ
of order or class but lay between those who could make the pr
claim, "There is always bread in our house" and those who co
not; and within those who could not, those who could claim th
was adequate in normal times and those who had fallen below
That the latter were recruited from the former there could be little
doubt and that most were recruited in times of dearth when prices
rose and the family parted with what little property it had to buy
bread and probably ran into debt seems equally axiomatic. The
woman of the bread riots owed her intensity to her appreciation of the
need to stay on the right side of the line between poverty and
destitution. She lived constantly on her nerves but for her there
was a worse state - it might be called living on her wits, on the caprice
of voluntary charity.18
It is with the type of woman who had to struggle to stay on the
right side of the line that one is mainly concerned - though the
destitute should not be forgotten: they comprised after all a fifth of
the total population of France in 1790; but the destitute were not
protesters, not rioters. The line between poverty and destitution
was a psychological as well as a physical boundary, on the other side
lay passive demoralization, the point at which the poor gave up and
expected nothing.
The bread riots of the French Revolution then, whether the march
to Versailles on 5-6 October 1789 or, to a less extent, the journdes of
Germinal and Prairial of Year III were par excellence women's days.
Where bread was concerned this was their province: a bread riot
without women is an inherent contradiction. How much they
understood of the political implications is more open to speculation.
Between October 1789 and Germinal Year III a lot happened to them
however which was strongly to influence what ensued. It is their
revolutionary experience in so far as it can be examined collectively
that must now be outlined. Where did the Revolution impinge on
the family economy of the poor: how did it alter the often delicate
balance between poverty and destitution: and how far did these
issues affect the attitude of women to Revolution?
18 The line between poverty and destitution, between pauvretd honne^te and
indigence, was one to which moralists, physiocrats and administrators alike made
constant reference. The first condition was to physiocrats and administrators
inevitable (Bloch and Tuetey, op. cit., pp. 315-16) and to moralists like St.
Vincent de Paul, even virtuous; only the second condition was to be feared
because of the misery and degeneracy it entailed. The aim of both ancien
rdgime and revolutionary administrators was to prevent the merely poor slipping
into the ranks of the indigent. 0. Hufton, "Towards an Understanding of the
Poor of Eighteenth-Century France", to appear in a Festschrift collection for
Alfred Cobban (London, 1972).
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96 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 53
In answering these questions it is difficult, given
remains to be done, not to be stranded bet
generalizations on the one hand and a multiplicity
on the other. One must at the same time distin
term trends and sharp immediate results: not
seemed so blatantly obvious in 1795 had been
had any conception then, and the question need
further, of the extent to which the economy of t
up with the abuses, institutions and society of t
does not know yet what happened to the 200,ooo B
had lived by salt smuggling when the gabelle w
such as Toulouse, Dijon, Rouen, Montpellier, B
made cogent complaints of the disappearance in ea
of thousands of livres with the destruction of par
the wealth of the church; money spent on con
workmen's and servants' wages and as charity, and
these cases the laments were justified and it i
economy of whole cities could be jeopardized if th
upon ancien rigime institutions.19 If a veil of ignor
here, one can state more categorically the almost un
luxury industries, many of them the preserve of
to the emigration of a wealthy clientele, partly
of international trade and partly to the emerge
austere fashion. The lace industry, for examp
fichus, cravats, ruffles, petticoat edging, the
girl on a swing in a fete galante. The economy
population of Le Puy, Chaise Dieu in the Massi
Norman towns and several in Flanders simply c
Norman and Velay lace riots of the Year II.20 V
19 The dependence of a city on the wealth of the chu
J. McManners, French Ecclesiastical Society under the anc
Angers in the Eighteenth Century (Manchester, I9
O. Hufton, Bayeux in the Late Eighteenth Century (Oxf
The dependence of a city on ancien regime institutions destroyed by the
Revolution is shown in D. Higgs, The Ultra-Royalist Movement at Toulouse
under the Second Restoration to be published shortly by Johns Hopkins. Arch.
Dept. C6te d'Or C 3687 Denombrement des citoyens de la ville de Dijon shows that
out of a population of some 21,ooo, I,8oo were directly employed full-time as
servants by the church and court officials. This is without counting the lesser
officials of minor courts, wig-makers, barbers and tradesmen dependent upon
the business of the courts.
0o On the dependence of certain regions on the lace industry before the
Revolution, J. C. Perrot, "Le commerce et l'industrie de la dentelle dans la
generalit6 de Caen ' la fin de l'ancien r'gime", Actes du 81e Congrds National
des Societds Savantes, 1956), (Caen, 1956), pp. 215-17; V. Thuvenon, "La
dentelle du Puy, la situation presente, son avenir", Bull. Soc. Acad. du Puy, vii
(1922), pp. 1-34. On the collapse of the industry after 1793, Hufton, Bayeux ...,
pp. 241, 248; Thuvenon, op. cit.; and Recueil des 6vlnements qui ont lieu au Puy
et aux environs depuis l'an 1775 jusqu'en r815 (Le Puy, 1931), p. 322.
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WOMEN IN REVOLUTION 1789-1796 97
ribbons, embroideries - all these ceased to command a clientel
In the classical gown alone is succinctly expressed the decline of
least five industries. Straight, austere, untrimmed by lace or ribbo
made of lawn, cambric or wool over a straight shift, it hid the wai
and even put the stay maker out of business.21
The second categorical statement that can be made is that ultimate
when dearth and disease came in 1794 all the poor were to be affect
by the total failure of French Revolutionary legislation on poor relief
This legislation was to be the culmination of the enlightenment, th
creation of a social utopia in which the poor were to be legislated aw
Reduced to its simplest what was aimed at was: the assumption of t
property of the hospices which catered for the old, the sick and th
orphaned as biens nationaux and the direction and financing of the
by the state; the total abolition of almsgiving, and bureaux de char
and the creation instead of work projects to employ the able-bodied
poor at wage rates slightly below those current in the particul
locality, that is work for the unemployed adult male; lastly, an annu
subvention to the fathers of large families based on the numbers a
age of the children. On paper it was at the time unparalleled in the
history of philanthropy but those who drew it up neither had an i
of the numbers or kinds of people involved - they imagined
problem of unemployment, not a problem of the living wage; nor h
they any conception of the value of the property of the hospices - th
imagined it was huge and that just as the property of the church wo
allow the financing of the constitutional clergy, so the assumption
hospital property would go a good way to financing both the n
hospices and the work projects. Two years were spent in compil
some sort of reliable figures but when this was realized, it beca
apparent that the issue was not mainly unemployment but th
" At Bayeux the lace-makers viewed the coronation of the Empress Josephi
as heralding the first real break the industry had had since the end of the
ancien regime in heralding the advent of a court with more sumptuous clothi
which others would wish to copy.
2 The historiography of this failure is extensive but scattered. There is
overall adequate study. L. Lallemand, Le Rdvolution et les Pauvres (Par
1898), is largely concerned with legislation as is M. Bouchet, L'Assistance
publique en France pendant la Rdvolution (Paris, 1908). But there are
innumerable local studies: e.g. E. Chaudron, L'Assistance Publique a Troyes
a la fin de l'ancien regime et pendant la Revolution, z770-z8oo (Paris, 1923);
M. Accapias, L'Assistance Publique dans le Puy de D6me sous la Rdvolution
(Clermont Ferrand, 1933); J. Dubois, L'Assistance dans le district de Bar
pendant la Rdvolution (Paris, 1930); Hufton, Bayeux ... , pp. 236-49; J. Adher,
Recueil de documents sur l'assistance publique dans le district de Toulouse 1789S8oo
(Toulouse, 1918); P. Rambaud, L'Assistance publique 'a Poitiers, jusqu'en
l'an V (Paris, 1912); X Renouard, L'Assistance publique ' Lille de 1527 a l'an
VIII (Paris, 1912); etc.
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98 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 53
subvention of huge numbers of women and ch
immense that the comite' saw that it did not have the means to
cope. Even before the war came to reduce government finances to
havoc, the government tacitly admitted failure in this respect. The
net result was that the traditional methods of according relief were
destroyed without any substitute. Moreover, in its need to raise
money in 1795 the government assumed the property of the hospices,
and the hospitals were made totally dependent upon the state just at
the time when the war was demanding every penny the government
could muster; many, especially in small towns, were simply obliged to
close and that on the eve of the epidemics which chronic malnutrition
inevitably brings in its wake. The frail safety valves of a society
facing dearth were taken out.
Lastly, there was of course inflation and dearth which in some areas
prevailed even with the maximum and certainly existed when it was
withdrawn. Inflation and dearth which were to place a strain on the
family economy of the poor in the traditional way and to demand that
the women of the poor play their accustomed r61e but in circumstances
which were markedly changed.
All these facets were glaringly apparent by the Year III but no one
could have envisaged them in 1789. Indeed to do so is to pass from
winter to winter without considering spring, summer and autumn.
It is to imply that right from the beginning all looked bleak for all the
poor: they did not necessarily, why should they, identify their fate
with cleric and imnigrd, parlement and dtats. They did not
necessarily see that they had any common interests with the indigent
and destitute - quite the reverse. The hand that gave to some,
under the ancien rigime, or any regime, invariably took from someone
else. The Trappist monastery of Bonnecombe near Flavin in the
district of Rodez was in the habit of dispensing 300,000 livres' worth
of bread annually to the destitute of the area but the grain used was
drawn from the tithe paid in the main by the little landholders of the
area.23 Now the destitute lost their bread and the little landholders
retained a share of the crop which they much needed. The bishop
of Mende usually accorded an annual Io,ooo livres in bread to the
destitute of the town but much of this came from tithe and
seigneurial rights paid by the poor in the country.2' It all seemed
it all was incredibly complicated. It is not surprising that admini
tors of towns, districts and departments spoke half of the time in
future or conditional tense: when lists had been compiled, w
"3 Arch. Dept. Aveyron 5L236 Assistance Publique.
14 Arch. Dept. Lozere, H. 495.
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WOMEN IN REVOLUTION 1789-1796 99
estimates had been submitted and approved, if old regime offic
would speedily turn over the information which they had at th
disposal, if the government would accept a temporary or provision
estimate while a more accurate one was drawn up - then such a
such a thing could be done. It was merely a question of waiting: the
period was one of adjustment: Rome was not built in a day. In t
meantime indirect taxes had gone for good; there were two go
harvests and bourgeois ladies (as opposed to aristocratic ones w
had done the same thing in the eighteenth century but under anot
name) formed clubs desfemmes whose function was to collect volunt
alms (the government pretended not to notice) to help the destitut
until new legislation was implemented. The club des Amies de
Verite et de la bienfaisance of Dijon formed in 1791 is utterly typical
The wives of department and district authorities and town official
met every Sunday; gave the populace an example of attending t
mass of a constitutional priest and swore not to employ a servant o
purchase from a shopkeeper or dressmaker who favoured a non
juror; and they ran lotteries to help families suffering from
temporary dislocation and who might have cause to regret the
regime. One cannot as yet draw a clear picture of the workin
woman in 1790-1. In Bayeux, in Orleans, there are sporad
references in 1791 to women forcing assignats upon peasants at the
market who reluctantly exchanged their produce for paper money,
but the image is shadowy, unclear: she is a thing of bits and pieces
In 1792 she emerges in anger at the interruption of supplie
particularly milk, which the country failed to deliver to the town,
and increasingly her voice is heard as the protagonist of price fixatio
From mid-1792 local attempts were made to stabilize prices and
Lyons and the large cities of the east, Besanqon, Chalons, Vesoul, th
impetus came from the local club des femmes whose recruitme
expanded in the course of that year and changed rapidly in charact
from the rather precious early women's associations. Until th
were forcibly closed by the Convention about a fortnight after the
elimination of the Hebertistes, this was the common platform of t
clubs des femmes and "any other business" was confined to the war
effort. Indeed it is with the war in the spring of 1792 that one rea
gets an indication that women had come to have an emotional
25 Langeron, op. cit., pp. II-13.
" Arch. Mun. Bayeux, "Registres des d61iberations du corps municipa
September 1791; G. Lefebvre, Etudes Orleanaises (Paris, 1963), ii, pp. 53-5.
27 Arch. Mun. Bayeux, "Registres des deliberations du corps municipal"
July, 1792; Arch. Comm. Troyes, D4 fol. 72 23 January 1793.
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I00 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 53
investment in the Revolution and an inten
of this investment is reflected in the tons
the main assets of a working class family,
to last for life - which were sacrificed as
Chalons gathered together 20,000 pounds o
Bergerac in the Dordogne ran a close secon
the area asked the Convention for a pub
was told that instances of such patrioti
special mention.28 Women of Pontarlier, a
their wedding rings - the most pawnab
woman had - to clothe volunteers; in Be
women who had toiled all day turned up
children to bed to knit stockings for the
the summer of 1792 when war fever ran h
were drawn up and sent to the Assembl
their patriotism and swore to feed their
milk: the milk of "bons principes, amour
tyrans" ("good principles, love of the c
tyrants"), or more specifically hatred
Piedmontese, milk of liberty and equalit
mixture on which the mothers of Clermont swore to nourish their
young "un lait incorruptible et que nous clarifions a cet effet avec
l'esprit naturel et agreable de la liberte" ("a milk we shall purify with
the natural, sweet spirit of liberty").30 Moreover and much more
significantly, they undertook personally to conduct the internal war
while their husbands and sons went to the front: the war against
traitors at home and not only actual traitors but potential ones, the
children of traitors. On the outbreak of war against Austria the
women of Lons le Saulnier, Macon and the C6te armed themselves
with pitchforks and pans and declared they would defend their homes
and children in the absence of their men, and if their men were
defeated (the Legislative took exception to the implication) then they
would make a last stand.31 The women of the district of Tarbes in
the summer of 1792 armed themselves with kitchen knives and their
children with ladles and set out to meet the Spanish. The women of
2" Moniteur no. 99, 29 Dec. 1793; no. 130, Io Pluvi6se Year II.
29 The club at Besanqon was in fact expressly formed to cope with the war
effort: Perrin, op. cit., p. 634.
30 Adresse des citoyens de Clermont Ferrand ac l'Assemblie Legislative, cited
by M. Villiers, Histoire des Clubs des Femmes et des Ldgions d'Amazones (Paris,
191o), p. 72.
31 A. Laserre, La participation collective des femmes a la Rdvolution Fran;aise
(Paris, 1906), p. 281.
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WOMEN IN REVOLUTION 1789-1796 IOI
Port en Bessin erected coastal defences lest the English should take
them unawares.32 As early anticipated victory turned into early
defeat, antipathy turned more and more against those suspected of
internal conspiracy. There is little to equal in hatred and
vindictiveness the venom poured out by women on fleeing priests and
the relations of Jmnigres. September 1793 saw a spate of professions
and declarations, a popular theme "Comment peupler la terre avec
d'autant de Marats" ("how to people the country with so many
Marats") wherein women volunteered to breed little spies who
would report on their playmates who were not being brought up on
principles of civisme so that these unpatriotic mothers and children
could be not corrected but exterminated and France's progeny could
hence be purified.33 Old ladies called out in Lady-Macbeth-type
language that children at the breast of a traitor should have their
brains dashed out. When Pourvoyeur, a police official, spoke in the
Year II of the bestialization of women and compared them to tigresses
and vultures anxious for blood, the language seems rather strong but
the evidence to support it is not lacking."' Citoyenne Defarge,
tricoteuse, the one stock image on which anyone can draw of women in
Revolution, the hag knitting stockings for the war effort as the
internal conspiracy is annihilated before her eyes, is a grim expression
of the same thing and she is undoubtedly real.3" In every outward
manifestation in 1793 women were more frenzied, more intense,
doubly gullible, doubly credulous, doubly vindictive and the only
exception to this is that they were less publicly garrulous than their
men - but here it may merely be a question of lack of opportunity.
But how far was all this emotion a cover for the uneasy realization
that circumstances were rapidly deteriorating? How far was she
transferring her discontent, seeking some scapegoat, some acceptable
explanation for the suspension of trade, the drying up of luxury
industries, the very evident economic dislocation which was by
now only too visible? Initially war can seem to unite a society
in opposition to a common enemy and anticipated victory can too
often seem the panacea to current economic problems. Both respects
are deceptive: the last doubly so. The unity involved at a national
" Villiers, op. cit., p. 105.
33 Arch. Nat., C 262 no. 580.
34 Arch. Nat. W 191, Report of 26 Pluvi6se Year III. Pourvoyeur found
repellent the presence of women at executions "C'est 6tonnant a quel point les
femmes sont devenues f6roces. Elles assistent tous les jours aux executions".
("It is astonishing how ferocious women have become. Every day they are
present at executions".)
"5 Visual evidence of this is found in Furet and Richet, op. cit., p. 208.
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102 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 53
level is a dissolvent at a personal level. War
takes fathers and sons and what death do
to the effect of a long separation. This wa
of the French Revolution. Moreover, th
generous in sharing his new-found poli
backbone of the local sociedts populaires, hi
1793 and the winter of 1794 were spent ou
verbal demonstrations of patriotism and gr
sans culotte, Chaumette said when he dissolved women's clubs in
October 1793, had a right to expect from his wife the running of his
home while he attended political meetings: hers was the care of the
family: this was the full extent of her civic duties."7 Others have
lingered on the pride of the sans culottes in his new-found importance
in socidtd populaire, section or as a professional revolutionary on
commission, but in the meanwhile what was happening to his wife in
isolation; how did she respond when he returned drunk on dubious
alcohol and the vocabulary of liberty? Obviously the sans culotte
in his home is a somewhat closed book, but at least one can know that
the wife was steadily accumulating experience which was to sour her
on the Revolution and all it stood for; that she was to turn against it
sooner and with far greater intensity than her man, and in a way
which was totally original, totally hers. In 1794 and even more so in
1795 she was to be confronted with the sort of crisis which was to
try her particular r61e in society: with a famine which as usual was to
hit her strikingly in her family and in her own health.38 It was to
confront her with watching the unit she fought to maintain spilling
over into the ranks of the destitute. While her husband was still
talking she in some areas had joined the food queues and the minute
she did that her loyalty was potentially suspect. For a time it might
well intensify her hatred of the internal conspiracy: nourish her
antipathy towards malevolent land-owners intent upon starving the
people for their own gain by this artificial dearth and hence increase
3" Most socidtes populaires did not welcome women or, if they admitted them,
did not allow them to speak: Villiers, op. cit., p. Io9.
"7 Cerati, op. cit., p. 173-4; on the political machinations behind this closure,
S. H. Lytle, "The Second Sex (September, 1793)", Jl. of Modern History,
xxvii (1955), PP. 14-26.
38 The point at which food crisis was experienced varied considerably. The
artificial food shortage of the Year II provoked by peasant hostility to the
maximum and the deflection of food supplies to feed the armies meant that the
incidence of hardship varied whereas in the Year III real famine took over and
suffering was generalized. The priorities of the Jacobin government and the
problems of supply are cogently illustrated in Cobb, Terreur et Subsistances,
1793-5. Broadly speaking, the more important and larger the city, the better
its chances of adequate provisioning.
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WOMEN IN REVOLUTION 1789-1796 Io3
the violence of her disposition. But her nerves, her patience, he
physical strength were already being stretched. At what point would
she turn against the administration for its failure to cope? Som
evidently were put more to the test than others. If the maximum in
1794 largely worked in Paris and ensured basic food at a reasonab
price, the same could not be said for the little towns and villages of
Normandy, for example, where the reluctance of the peasantry
turn over their food at a fixed price coupled with a deflection o
resources to feed the troops in the Vendee and the great gaping mout
of Paris put women into food queues from February 1794 while the
black market thrived.3" When real famine came with the failure of
the harvest of Northern France and the great wheat belt later that
year she had already been struggling for eight months to keep her
family fed and that in a totally inadequate fashion. The death toll of
1795-6 was the result of cumulative weakening - not just the shortag
of one year. The lifting of the maximum in December 1794 and the
rocketing of prices only universalized a problem which in some area
was already advanced.40 By May 1794, seven months previously
the women of Masannay were already demanding the annihilation of
people over sixty in order to increase the ration for the young. 41 Th
first lace riots had already occurred in the Velay, and the women of
Le Puy (if not the men who lived off them) were already identifyin
the cessation of the lace industry with the disappearance of th
Church.
The woman had both to procure the food and to cook it; all her
husband had to do was eat what she prepared and judge whether he
was hungry or not. What she got was often the result of hours of
waiting. She stood in the endless queues, each one a hotbed of
discontent hoping that when her turn came something would be left
" Examples of small towns which felt hardship from mid-1794 were Bayeux,
Hufton, op. cit., pp. 219-25; and Honfleur, R. C. Cobb, "Problkmes de
subsistance de l'an II et de l'an III. L'example d'un petit port normand.
Honfleur, 1794-5", Actes du 8ie Congrns des Socidtes Savantes (Rouen-Caen,
1956). An example of a city experiencing grave difficulty from the beginning
of 1794, if not earlier, is Troyes (Chaudron, op. cit., pp. 239-44), perhaps
because of its proximity to the army on the frontier. Certainly small towns
whose interests had been sacrificed to the larger cities had little ease from the
Jacobin policy of price controls and hence little nostalgia for the maximum.
4o Lefebvre, Etudes Orleanaises, vol. ii, p. 294 offers an excellent instance of
a large city where the suppression of the maximum was the beginning of major
troubles.
41Villiers revelled in this kind of story, op. cit., p. 123, but similar instances
are not difficult to find: e.g. Le club des femmes de Gevrey Chambertin,
"Famille et clocher", Bulletin paroissial de Gevrey Chambertin, no. 187 (Dec.
1962).
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104 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 53
and even then her troubles were not at an end. Often what she was
confronted with was beyond her knowledge or resources to prepare.
Rice was first introduced to Normandy at this time. Some did not
have the fuel to boil it; others did not know that it required boiling
and merely soaked it in water - what both tried to eat was a hard
gritty substance in no way digestible. Then there were the queues
for which the only reward was a ration of salt fish which had already
begun to go off with the rising temperature of the summer months
and which when boiled yielded a stench like ammonia."2 Just what
of all this was a fit meal for a child? Even if the food ration consisted
of vegetables, turnips or swedes, fears were not totally allayed for
a pure vegetable diet was associated in the popular mind with the
advent in children of summer diarrhoea which was a heavy killer of
the young. And when malnutrition hardened into real starvation in
1795, when the government had abandoned price fixation and could
be identified with the hardship, and when obviously the rich were
still well fed, when the family's small saleable possessions had either
been disposed of or dumped at the mont de pited, and when the riots
of Germinal and Prairial had failed to bring relief, then the usual
"sexually selective" manifestations of dearth became apparent. It is
perhaps unnecessary to recall the classical manifestations of famine:
the death of the weakest, the young and the aged, the increases in the
number of miscarriages and the number of still births - but one
should bear in mind that the latter are the fate of women, that the
whole female body is a grim metering device registering degrees of
deprivation. A premature termination of pregnancy or infertility
through malnutrition are the best things under these circumstances
to be hoped for: better than knowing that one is carrying a dead child,
motionless within one or that if one gives birth one will not have the
milk to feed it. The mothers of Caen in 1795 were allaying the cries
of their new born children with rags dipped in water43 - that way
they did not take long to die. Then there was watching one's children
grow too feeble to cry. The silence of the hungry household was
something that struck St. Vincent de Paul in 166o but it also moved
observers in 1795.44 And in Rouen, in Bayeux, in Troyes the female
death toll was far higher than the male - for the reasons suggested
42 On the diet of the poor of Rouen in this period, Cobb, "Disette et Mortalite,
La crise de 1'an III et de P'an IV A Rouen", Terreur et Subsistances, pp. 309, 339-
40; Hufton, Bayeux, p. 234.
S3 Arch. Nat. Fic III Calvados 7.
44 Ibid.: report of 20 Brumaire An IV.
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WOMEN IN REVOLUTION 1789-1796 105
by the cured of Tours some twenty years previously.45 If death usually
came to the adult from a minor disease playing on a weak body, the
chances of confining that disease within the hospitals was nonexistent.
Even under the ancien regime, these were fairly frail
institutions catering only for the poor urban sick but the nomina
absorption of their property in the Year II by the government and the
suspension of payments to them meant that except in the large cities
where departmental authorities stalled on putting the property up for
sale, the hospitals just closed: ceased to operate. Indeed, 1795-6
became legendary not only for the hardness of the times but for the
total lack of any organs of public relief. The mayor of Toulouse in
1816 challenged a group of petitioners about the inadequacy of poor
relief with the words: do you prefer the charity of the philosophes ?
He needed to say no more: la charitd des philosophes was no charity."4
There can be no over-emphasizing that the revolts of Germinal and
Prairial mark that frontier, that psychological watershed, that last
weapon in the armoury - whichever metaphor one chooses to express
the final woman's protest before watching herself and her family
spill over into that silent twilight world of the weak and the worn out
which is so difficult to fathom because so largely inarticulate: it was
her last defence of her human relationships. One can perhap
discount the accompanying cries of vive le roi, or the Parisian one for
the days of Robespierre, the rivers of blood and the time of chea
bread or the Bayeux one of "quand le bon Dieu 6tait 1 nous avions du
pain" ("when God was there we had bread"), as more an expression
of opposition to the present than hankering for the past; though one
should take more seriously the women's cries for peace in Rouen and
even more in the frontier towns of the East like Besangon and Vesou
where war fever had run so high in 1792. The cry for peace was one
for normalcy: to call a halt - their great grandmothers had done the
same in 1709 under exactly the same physical conditions.
The aftermath of Germinal had been indicated in terms of suicides
the daily occurrence of women and children fished out of the Seine,
45 The death toll of children was of course the highest of all. On the
situation in Rouen, Dieppe and Havre, see Cobb, "Disette et Mortalit6..."
pp. 339-42; the death rate at Bayeux rose overall by some 30% but that of adult
males was scarcely affected: Hufton, Bayeux, p. 235 and Arch. Dept. Calvados
Etat Civil, Bayeux, Registres 32 and 33; similarly in the case of an overall ris
of some 35% at Troyes, Arch. Dept. Aube 40oH.
46 D. Higgs, "Politics and Charity at Toulouse, 1750-1850", to appear in the
Festschrift collection for Alfred Cobban. According to Dr. Higgs the failure of
the Revolution to make any provision for the poor, and the pauperization of the
once proud and independent was a fact much capitalized by Restoration
governments.
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Io6 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 53
economically and emotionally bankrupt,"4
profitably linger on another aspect: the revival
perhaps one of the most striking characteristic
in the last five years of the eighteenth centur
r81e of women was decisive.
The intensity of religious fervour that emerged from 1792 was
without parallel in the eighteenth century. Much remains to be
explored of the quality of religious belief under the ancien regime:
indications point to a general formal adherence to the faith without
the existence of any marked degree of fervour and of areas where
even formal adherence was diminishing - perhaps that most
particularly in the cities which attracted the rural immigrant and where
the pattern of religious worship was most easily eroded.48 Certainly
anti-clericalism could always find popular support in the towns
perhaps because here the wealth of the higher clerics was most
conspicuously on view. Moreover the anti-clericalism which surrounded
the implementation of the civil constitution of the clergy was
an end in itself: it was not part of a wider movement, part of a
programme for the achievement of religious purity. Latreille noted
the falling off of observance in the towns from mid 1791 when clerics
became involved with the pros and cons of oath-taking and the
framework of religious worship became clouded.49 Without doubt,
the equation of "non-juror" with "traitor", the result of the panic
surrounding the outbreak of war, made the non-juring church the
object of popular violence in which women undoubtedly played
their part.50 The constitutional church never secured any widespread
loyalty and a couple of years' absenteeism from worship was
the background to the image breaking and desecration of places of
worship in which women were often predominant during the
47 Cobb, "Disette et Mortalite", p. 315 and the footnote; G. Duval, Souvenirs
thermidoreans (Paris, I843), and R. C. Cobb, The Police and the People (Oxford,
1970), PP. 161-2.
48 This is a line of research on which much work is heralded in the imminent
future (Annales, E.S.C., xxv, 1970, "Enquete Ouverte".) in response to
suggestions made by G. Le Bras, Etudes de Sociologie Religieuse (Paris, I955),
2 vols. in which pointers to a decline in religious fervour in the towns at the end
of the ancien rdgime are indicated; vol. i, pp. 51, 68; they are also made in
P. Deyon, Amiens, Capitale Provinciale (Mouton, 1967), P. 425 and Histoire de
Bordeaux, vol. iv (Bordeaux, 1968), pp. 140-I.
49A Latreille, L'Eglise Catholique et la Rivolution frangaise (Paris, 1964),
p. lo8.
50 E. Sv&estre, La Diportation du clerge orthodoxe pendant la Rdvolution
(Paris, 1915), P. 192; Uzureau, "La Deportation ecclksiastique dans le Calvados,
1792", Revue Catholique de Normandie (1931).
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WOMEN IN REVOLUTION 1789-1796 107
Jacobin period.51 In short, the women of this study could feel they
had actively participated in the disintegration of the Roman Catholic
Church: they had done enough to feel guilty, and the existence of this
guilt is crucial to an appreciation of why, in 1796, women ended up on
their knees and from then on worked wholeheartedly for the
restoration of formal religion within France, the Roman Catholi
religion of the ancien rdgime, but endowed with a new vigour from
below.52
When Citoyenne Defarge, ex-tricoteuse, put down her needles and
reached for a pair of rosary beads, an image to linger on if ever one
was, she had to search out her priest and even force the opening of
a church. From late 1795 onwards, even in cities which had
demonstrated the most intense anti-clericalism, like Paris, this is
exactly what women did. They brought back the formal worship
of God. Nor can this be shrugged off superficially as both Aulard and
Mathiez did in terms of women turning from the fanatisme of their
particular clubs to the fanatisme des pretres. This is only a half truth.
They were not trying to revenge themselves on the Revolution. The
cycle of dearth, disease, devotion is a common enough one: one has
only to think what fruitful ground the hardship of 1816 would provide
for the priests of the mission, but in 1795 there was something extra,
contrition. The catholicism of 1795-onwards was the visceral kind:
it owed its strength to the rigours of the times, the imminence of
death from disease or undernourishment, disillusionment, shame,
failure, the sense of contrition which sought as solace the confiteor
and the viaticum and as such the sort of expiatory religion which defies
rooting out. Women at Vidouville, in the Calvados, queued to have
their tongues scraped free of the contamination of the masses of
a constitutional priest and ensuing blasphemies;53 the wife of a
fishmonger of St. Patrice, also in the Calvados, scrubbed out the parish
church which her husband had bought for a song as national property
to use as a fishmarket and which probably represented his one solid
gain from the Revolution, and she and the women of the parish
5, Perrin, op. cit., pp. 636, 649. In Besangon a midwife, a traditionally anticlerical
figure, led an attempt to lynch a non-juror: Bisson, Histoire Eccle'asitique
du diocese de Bayeux pendant la Rdvolution, p. 20.
52On the return to religion of townswomen: C. Bloch, Les femmes
d'Orleans ... , p. 66; R. Patry, Le regime et la libertd des cultes dans le ddpartment
du Calvados pendant la premiere siparation, 1795-1802 (Paris, 1921), p. 6o;
Hufton, Bayeux, pp. 262-4; M. Reinhard, Le ddpartment de la Sarthe sous le
Directoire (Paris, 1935); Cobb, "Politique et Subsistances au Havre", Terreur et
Subsistances, p. 25I.
r" Bibl. Chanoine Deslandes, Bayeux: correspondence of the episcopal
vicars, an V - an VII.
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108 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 53
handed it back to a non-juror emerging from e
couched an impotent letter of protest to an equ
mental authority.54 The women of Coutances f
over whose babies should be baptized first and
resolved the problem by a personal estimate
likely to be dead before he reached the end of t
in two cases but he sprinkled water notwithsta
corpses. No government could hope to eradi
on emotions which ran as deep as this: there w
fundamental in circulation in the last fifty year
Such a movement had its vicious aspects. It was an essential
accompaniment of the White Terror, as in the diocese of Le Puy
where women sought out local Jacobin leaders, clawed them to death
or perhaps ripped them limb from limb while the churches of that
most clerical of cities were triumphantly reopened. But oftener the
return to religion was quieter, less obtrusive, more symptomatic of
the desire for a return to a way of life remembered.55
Women perhaps turned to the church too for another fundamental
reason: revolution, war, famine - these are the dissolvents of the
family while the church stood at least for its integrity, its sanctity;
the hallowing of birth, marriage, death; the cement of something
much more intrinsic than the social system. When the cards were
down and the scores chalked up, what really was the cumulative
experience of the working woman from 1789-95? How else could
she assess the Revolution except by examining her wrecked
household; by reference to children aborted or born dead, by her own
sterility, by the disappearance of her few sticks of furniture, by the
crumbling of years of effort to hold the frail family economy
together and what could her conclusion be except that the price paid
for putative liberty had been far too high?
University of Reading Olwen Hufton
" Arch. Dept. Calvados, "Comptes decadaires", 19 Ther
55 There was of course nothing incompatible in violen
religious revival. On women in the White Terror and pe
transmitted by them down the generations, Cobb, The P
p. 146.
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