Suzanne Desan

What's after Political Culture? Recent French Revolutionary Historiography

In 1989, amid the bicentennial’s swirl of celebrations, new books, conferences, and special editions, many historians on both sides of the Atlantic discerned a pattern within the whirlwind. In historiographic terms, the bicentennial marked not just an intense outpouring of new publications, especially in France, 1 but also the triumph of the ‘‘revisionist’’ over the ‘‘classic’’ or ‘‘Marxist’’ social interpretation. Francois Furet, in particular, seemed to emerge the victor from the bicentennial, both in the media and in historiographic debates. Two sets of publications combined to crown Furet’s interpretation as ‘‘the new orthodoxy’’: Le Dictionnaire critique de la Revolution francaise, edited with Mona Ozouf, and the conference series The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture, directed with Keith Baker and Colin Lucas. 2 Furet’s success could be read in a variety of ways. Especially within France, his interpretation held considerable political resonance, made even more loaded by the fall of communism in Eastern Europe. He inevitably ignited controversy by proclaiming that the Revolution was over and insisting that the democratic impulse within the Revolution had in fact led toward the Terror. In the realm of methodology, his minimizing

The Politics of Intimacy: Marriage and Citizenship in the French Revolution

Among the many newspapers springing to life in the early years of the French Revolution, one, entitled the Courrier de l’Hymen, the ‘Marriage Gazette’, offered an unusual format: side-by-side with political news summaries and witty editorials critiquing marriage practices, it featured what could only be called personal ads, quite detailed paid announcements by individuals who hoped to engage in that matrimonial institution that the rest of the journal seemed bent on reforming. Among the hottest candidates were deputies, members of the National Assembly. One representative from the Antilles advertised for a fiancee in Paris: he hoped she would have ‘a gentle character and an agreeable face’, and concluded, ‘Although I am a member of the legislative body, I don’t need her to have strong opinions on politics and would even prefer that she leans neither to the right nor to the left but rather maintains a judicious moderation.’ A later issue printed a scathing reply from one woman who declared that there could be no marriage without politics and that even though she was 25, ‘forgotten for seven years in an Ursuline Convent’ (in other words even though she was desperate), she ‘would not take him even though he was a deputy and even if he owned all the 660,000 unhappy beings who paid with their liberty and their blood for the wealth and pleasure of 40,000 Europeans. I hate tyrants and executioners … and I don’t want anything to do with someone who does not cherish with his whole heart this happy Revolution which has restored the rights of man.’1 Soundly rebuked, the deputy probably slunk off to find a less vocal wife from a procolonial town like Nantes or Bordeaux.

Qu'est-ce qui fait un père ? Illégitimité et paternité de l'an II au Code civil

Résumés À l’automne 1793, la Convention a essayé d’accorder aux enfants illégitimes, lorsqu’ils étaient reconnus par leurs parents, des droits successoraux égaux àceux des enfants légitimes. Cet article explore le combat judiciaire sur cette politique familiale controversée et examine comment la négociation des pratiques sociales était imbriquée dans la convalescence politique consécutive àla Terreur. Les enfants naturels avaient du mal àfaire valoir leurs droits au tribunal, non seulement en raison des pratiques d’Ancien Régime, mais aussi parce que la Terreur s’est efforcée plus encore de rétablir le pouvoir et la définition de la famille comme institution. Les descendants illégitimes ont, pour soutenir leurs demandes d’héritages, proposé le modèle d’une famille inclusive et perméable, unie par l’affection et les liens naturels. A l’inverse, leurs adversaires ont entretenu des angoisses d’après-Terreur sur les familles divisées, les émotions instables, la fragilité des pères et l’incertitude de la propriété. Dans ce climat conservateur, les juges, de plus en plus exigeants dans la recherche des preuves de la paternité, ont affaibli l’application de la loi de l’an II. Ces négociations populaires et judiciaires sur la paternité ont influencé les législateurs au moment où ils se dirigeaient vers le Code civil de 1804 et soutenaient un modèle familial fondé sur une paternité autoritaire, le droit positif et la propriété sûre et certaine.

Book Reviews : Kristin Elizabeth Gager, Blood Ties and Fictive Ties. Adoption and Family Life in Early Modem France. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996, pp. 197. U.S.

The fact that marriages were regulated by church and state in this way suggests, among other things, that women’s anticipated life course as Hufton traces it (in which marriage and motherhood were the norm) was a social and political, rather than a natural or inevitable, phenomenon. Yet her descriptive treatment (even with the occasional observations cited previously) leaves an impression of naturalness or inevitability. If, as she comments, &dquo;the patriarchal family needed to be backed by the force of law&dquo; (p. 258), then what is the relationship between continuities in women’s life-course experience and the changes in law that took place in this period? And is there as sharp a distinction as she says she wants to maintain (p. 5) between legal regimes, women’s social position, their lived experiences, and their biology? Hufton’s emphasis on structural continuities also leaves open questions about change, not only in demographic patterns and religious prescriptions, but also in the very meaning of concepts such as wife and mother. Were these enduring concepts, based finally on the imperatives of women’s reproductive biology? What was the relationship between the formal structure of marriage and the subjective experience of being a wife or mother? Did these change and in what ways? Hufton’s book does not provide the answers to these questions, nor the analytic framework that could answer them (she treats the ideological, the material, the practical, and the biological realms as more separate than I think they are). Still, the sheer quantity of information she has assembled, the rich detail that she offers, and the synthesis she provides make this book one of those important and worthy contributions to women’s history and to the social history of Western Europe.

39.50 (hardcover

From 1770 to 1789 a succession of highly publicized cases riveted the attention of the French public. Maza argues that the reporting of these private scandals had a decisive effect on the way in which the French public came to understand public issues in the years before the Revolution.