What role did women play in the French Revolution?

The role of women in the French Revolution is not as well known as that of their peers. And yet, women represented a major force in unleashing the Revolution and, later, in keeping it afloat. There were also many women who initially sympathized with the revolutionary cause, but later denounced the blood that had been spilled in her name.

In this article we are going to analyze what role women played in the French Revolution, and we will dwell briefly on the lives of some of these revolutionaries.

• Related article: "The 3 stages of Ancient Rome: its history and its characteristics"

Women in the French Revolution

The feminine ideal of the French Revolution did not change much from that of previous centuries. Women continued to be excluded from all intellectual and political activity, and special emphasis was placed on the "republican" model of a woman: a wife and mother dedicated to caring for her family; especially, of their male children, future and committed citizens.

However, during the revolutionary years,

women constantly manifested themselves, whether through their pen or through blood and brute force. Thus, the women of the town were the main bearers of the protests in demand for food, while the most educated women began to claim a series of political rights through pamphlets, books and speeches. Both of them played a very prominent role in the evolution of events, as we will see below.

Cultured women are revolutionary...

The role of women in the French Revolution can be traced back much earlier. During the first decades of the 18th century, the so-called salons began to proliferate in France, meetings of intellectuals that used to be held in the house of a distinguished lady. This lady encouraged the meeting between philosophers, politicians and artists and, despite the fact that it was quite usual for her hostess not to participate in the gatherings (he simply listened discreetly, as if he were not with her), these meetings spurred her curiosity for knowledge and knowledge. knowledge. Many of them, like the famous Madame Pompadour, the official mistress of Louis XV, were true intellectuals and great patrons of the arts. These ladies were called salonnières.

Thus, sheltered from the Enlightenment, women began to interfere in social affairs. This is not to say, of course, that it was okay for ladies to participate in debates, but times were certainly changing. Women were no longer content to stay at home in charge of household chores; they aspired to a real equality with their peers, and that happened, of course, through intellectual and political activity. There were not a few women who worked hand in hand with their husbands, writing their speeches and even retouching them, to infuse their texts with new, much more attractive ideas.

These first women carry out their work in the shadows, in hiding, we could say, as is the case with Madame Roland, who we will talk about in another section. But, even from the shadows, the salonnières they had entered the wheel of social change. They were faithful readers of the Enlightenment, especially Rousseau and Voltaire, as well as classics such as Plutarch., and they were completely imbued with his social and republican ideas. For this reason, when the winds of change begin to blow, many of these women enthusiastically throw themselves into building the Revolution.

• You may be interested in: "The 15 branches of History: what they are and what they study"

... and those of the town, too

But if there was a group of women whose role had a direct and crucial influence on the events that unleashed the Revolution, it was that of the women of the common people. His role in this event is such that They almost killed Queen Marie Antoinette several years before the guillotine did it., as we will see in the next section.

in his essay Women of the Revolution, Jules Michelet says that “men have done the work of July 14; the men took the royal Bastille, the women conquered their own royal power and deposited it in the hands of Paris, that is, of the Revolution. Michelet is carried away by exaggeration, it is clear, but his words hide an indisputable reality: that it was women, and only women, those who dared to set off to the very Palace of Versailles to demand that bread that never came. It was what was called “the October marches”.

• Related article: "5 examples of gender roles (and their effects on society)"

"We don't have bread"

The autumn of 1789 was being particularly harsh; cold and famine hung over France. On October 1, a banquet was held in Versailles in honor of the newly arrived guards, and rumors spread like wildfire. The news spread (on the other hand, never proven) that, during the banquet, the assistants had trampled on the newborn tricolor cockade, symbol of the Revolution, and had sworn allegiance to the white color of the Bourbons. This news, together with the harsh conditions that the people of Paris were living, who did not have a morsel of bread to put in their mouths, ignited the flame of protest. The incendiary complaint that the sinister Jean-Paul Marat launched from his newspaper about the banquet L'ami du peuple (“The friend of the people”) did not help cool things down.

On October 5, in the afternoon, some women from the central market gathered around a young woman who had taken a drum from a guardhouse and was playing generala. It was the notice. Within hours, a crowd of women had gathered from the surrounding markets; according to some authors, some 10,000 women could have gathered.

This torrent of hungry and excited vendors wanted bread, but, above all, they wanted the "baker", as they called the king, to move to Paris, near his town. With these ideas, the women traveled the 25 km that separate the capital from Versailles in just six hours, under pouring rain and accompanied by the soldiers from La Fayette who had enthusiastically joined them in their journey. The women carried homemade weapons (knives, forks, mortars), but also real weapons that they had requisitioned in their assault on the Paris City Hall.

After a long wait, as the king was hunting, a small group of women met him in his chambers. and obtained from the monarch the promise of provisions and the signing of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizen. But despite the fact that the king thought he had satisfied the crowd, when night fell most of the women and soldiers were still there.

Around 6 in the morning, some of them managed to access the interior of the palace through a place that was not guarded.; her objective was to go in search of the queen and kill her. Marie Antoinette was miraculously saved because, upon hearing the sounds of the scuffle, she was able to run out of her rooms and reach the king's bedroom in time.

That noon, the royal family left for Paris, just as the people had demanded. They would never set foot in Versailles again.

• You may be interested in: "What is social psychology?"

women's clubs

After the triumph of the Revolution in 1789, the will of women to actively participate in political and social changes was evident in the founding of countless women's clubs. Thus, parallel to the famous men's revolutionary clubs (such as the Club des Jacobins or the Club des Cordeliers), are inaugurated on Club des Republicaines Révolutionnaires (the Club of the Revolutionary Republicans), the Club des Amazones Nationales (the Club of the National Amazons), or the famous Club des Amies de la Loi, founded by the quarrelsome Théroigne de Méricourt, who is said to have actively participated in the October marches and later confronted Robespierre himself.

These women's clubs were associations of women from the popular classes, who met to read the daily newspapers, exchange opinions and debate. The male revolutionaries did not see the existence of these groups very favorably; in fact, on October 30, 1793, the Convention declared the closure of women's clubs, arguing that their violence compromised the security of the Republic.

Were women's clubs violent? Certainly many did, but they were no less so than those that were monopolized by men. Behind the decision to close them there was a much more ideological than practical reason: the Revolution granted freedoms, but not to women.

The tricoteuses: the most violent face of the Feminine Revolution

Of all these revolutionaries, the most violent were undoubtedly the so-called tricoteuses, so nicknamed because they had the habit of knitting while attending Assembly sessions. During the sessions, they constantly interrupted the deputies with their shouts, either asking for more severity or demanding the immediate death of a suspect. These women were also called furies, because his position in the Revolution was most radical; it is said that they even soaked his handkerchief in the blood of the beheaded.

The role of these knitting was decisive during the so-called insurrections of pradial (May 20, 1795). That day, a group of these women and a few sans-culottes stormed the Convention and demanded a tougher hand on the suspects. When the deputy Féraud refused to listen to them, they did not hesitate to assassinate him and walk his head on a pike throughout Paris.

next to the knitting there were the sans-culottes, men of the common people who formed the most radical wing of the popular revolution. They were so called because instead of wearing the typical culotte (that kind of tight pants that the nobles knee-length, just where the stocking began to show) this social group wore long pants up to the feet.

Some of the women of the French Revolution

Here is a short list of 5 women who deeply marked the French Revolution.

1. Madam Roland

Born Marie-Jeanne Philipon into a more or less wealthy family, Madame Roland was a highly educated woman who stood out for her ingenuity and sensitivity. She and her husband, Jean-Marie Roland de la Platière, formed a highly esteemed couple of intellectuals in revolutionary society.. Although Madame Roland always tried to stay in the background, everyone knew that her husband's speeches had previously passed through her hand. Her salon at the Hotel Britannique in Paris was very famous, and distinguished political figures paraded through it, such as Robespierre himself.

At first she was enthusiastic about the outbreak of the Revolution, since she was a republican and a faithful follower of Rousseau. However, later, and deeply disappointed with the course that events were taking, she denounced together with her husband the numerous crimes that were being committed in the name of freedom. Madame Roland fell out of favor and was guillotined in November 1793. Her husband, who had fled Paris, committed suicide upon hearing the news.

2. Olympe de Gouges

This is how Marie Gouze is known, an intrepid writer who has gone down in history for her Declaration of the Rights of Women and Citizens. Daughter of a bourgeois family, Olympe frequented the best salons of enlightened Paris; after becoming a widow, she began her literary career. The marked anti-slavery of her work did not allow it to premiere at the Comédie Française until the Revolution.

After the revolutionary outbreak, Olympe began a political activity that culminated in the writing of the aforementioned Declaration (1791), which was intended to be a response to the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, that she had deliberately forgotten about women. The Olympe Declaration began with the famous phrase: “Man, are you capable of being fair? A woman asks you this question…”.

Aligned with the Girondins, the moderate branch of the Revolution, Olympe confronted Robespierre and the Committee of Public Safety, which earned him her death sentence. The great feminist and abolitionist writer was guillotined on November 3, 1793.

3. Anne-Josephe Theroigne de Mericourt

Coming from a humble Belgian family, in 1789 the young Anne-Josèphe finds herself in Paris, in the midst of the revolutionary tide. It is not certain that she participated in the October marches, but we do know that she was the founder of Club des Amies de la Loi, one of the women's associations so in vogue at the time, of which she was always a fervent defender as a vehicle of expression for women.

In May 1793, the tricoteuses stripped her naked to humiliate her and whipped her, in revenge for Théroigne's adherence to the Girondin faction. It is not known if it was because of this brutal attack or if the serious syphilis that she suffered from it also had an influence, but the fact is that Anne-Josèphe ended up losing her mind. She was admitted to various sanatoriums, a fact that, paradoxically, seems to have saved her from the guillotine.

4. charlotte corday

“The murderous angel”, called it the French poet Lamartine. And it is that Marie-Anne-Charlotte Corday has gone down in history as the murderer of Jean-Paul Marat, the director of the most radical newspaper of the Revolution, the friend of the town.

Charlotte was a girl from the provinces, belonging to a family of low Norman nobility. A fervent republican and faithful follower of the Girondins, she was convinced that Marat was to blame for all the blood that was spilling in France. Reason was not lacking, since, from his diary, the journalist demanded more and more heads.

Determined to put an end to the problem, the young woman travels to Paris and fatally stabs Marat in the chest, in her own house, in her bathtub. The consequences of the murder were not what Charlotte expected; she was taken to the guillotine and, meanwhile, she was radicalized in Terror in France.

Nobles, bourgeois, saleswomen, intellectuals, weavers... The French Revolution is the great revolution of women. Because without them, probably the facts would not have been what we know now. While it is true that her decisions and actions were not always the most moral and correct, the enormous role that women played in the French Revolution is indisputable.