The Family on Trial in Revolutionary France.

The Family on Trial in Revolutionary France. By Suzanne Desan (Berkeley: CA: University of California Press, 2004).

FAMILY TIES IN REVOLUTIONARY PRESPECTIVE

Suzanne Desan's The Family on Trial in Revolutionary France opens many new perspectives on our understanding of how the Revolution affected the lives of the French population--men, women, and children--and on the converse process by which the family concerns of ordinary people affected the period's politics. Desan's dense and complex arguments, backed up by detailed evidence from the period's political debates, legal codes, and citizens' petitions to the legislature, challenge familiar assumptions about many issues, ranging from the nature of citizenship and the changes in women's roles in the Revolution to the extent of the continuity from the revolutionary to the Napoleonic period. As Desan shows, the interactions between family concerns and revolutionary politics were complicated, and her conclusions do not lend themselves to summary in simple formulas. Nevertheless, she has convincingly demonstrated that the revolution's "conflict of discourses" vitally affected people's most intimate relationships, and that revolutionary legislation was shaped by the everyday experiences of family life. At a time when historians have largely abandoned the attempt to understand the French Revolution in social terms, Desan offers a new vision of what a social interpretation of that event might mean, one that emphasizes "the interactions between social practices and cultural construction" (5) rather than social structure and class conflict.

The revolutionary legislators quickly realized that their efforts to "invent the rights-bearing, legal individual within a newly secularized state" and to "remold social bonds and practices to promote equality, liberty, and unity" (3) implied a reshaping of the family. Under the Old Regime, "the legal stature of each ... subject had been determined in part by his or her familial status," (7) and attempts to make equality a fundamental norm required a redefinition of family relationships as well as political ones. The revolutionaries had no intention of abolishing the family or even reducing its importance in French society, nor did the male legislators want to abolish gender differences, which they understood as natural. On the contrary, at every stage of the Revolution, the family was defined as the basis of society, and men and women were seen as having distinct, though complementary, public duties. Nevertheless, the revolutionary legislators' emphasis on the rights of the family's individual members and of the conjugal unit as opposed to the interests of the lineage radically redefined the institution. At the same time, the Revolution's language of natural rights gave family reformers powerful new weapons to argue against existing patterns of family relationships, which, as Sarah Hanley and others have shown, were strongly related to the political principles of the Old Regime.

Family-law issues had little to do with the political crisis that led to the summoning of the Estates General, but the expectation of radical change engendered by the events of 1789 encouraged numerous pamphlets calling for changes in family law. Once the National Assembly had passed the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen and defined society as the product of a contract among free individuals, alterations in family law became unavoidable. Free and equal citizens could not logically be left subjected to parental authority long after they had reached adulthood, nor did indissoluble marriage bonds fit with the notion of individual rights. Divorce now appeared as a natural right and "freedom of the heart" as a fundamental liberty (26). In stressing this point, Desan differs with the views of William Reddy, who, in his recent study of "emotional regimes" in the revolutionary era, maintains that the revolutionaries regimented emotional expression prior to thermidor, ultimately setting impossible standards for proper "patriotic" feelings. (1)

The National Assembly's Constitution of 1791 defined marriage as a civil contract, rather than a religious sacrament, but it was left to the Legislative Assembly of 1791-1792 to actually draft legislation appropriate for this new situation. The egalitarian divorce law of September 1792 was passed during the frantic weeks following the overthrow of the monarchy on 10 August 1792, as France plunged into its unprecedented experiment with republican government. "Overturning the monarchy and inventing the republic led to more than killing the father/king: the deputies now counted on constructing a new familial structure to mirror and promote the new political structure." (62) The divorce law was part of a package of measures that transferred authority over the family from the church to the state. Marriage became a voluntary, revocable contract, but also a civic duty. Desan mentions the pressure brought on former priests and nuns to marry, but she does not fully pursue the implications of this potentially coercive facet of revolutionary family legislation. Nor does she mention the fact that, in the process of abrogating religious authority over sexual behavior, the revolutionaries effectively eliminated all laws against homosexuality in 1791. The legislators' silence about the significance of this action makes it difficult to interpret their motives, and certainly they were not imagining the possibility of same-sex marriage, but they did open up a space of alternative possibilities for intimate relationships. (2)

Together with divorce, revolutionary inheritance laws challenged the traditional structure of the family. In fact, Desan tells us, "no aspect of family restructuring generated more contention in court or more outbursts of popular approval or anger than the new inheritance laws." (141) Divorce may have affected marriage partners' expectations, but only a minority of marriages wound up in court, whereas every household had to deal with the implications of the laws on inheritance. These laws evolved in tandem with the general course of the Revolution, beginning with fairly modest reforms under the National Assembly, followed by a sharp turn against parental authority in August 1792 and culminating in the Convention's radical measures on behalf of illegitimate children in late 1793 and early 1794, some of which were given retroactive effect. Thermidor reversed this dynamic, as legislators responded to public complaints about the threat to families posed by the rights of illegitimate children and overly assertive women, and to the pressure of heirs who had suffered from the new laws' undoing of earlier estate settlements. "Once family interest became conflated with the interest of social order and justice that underpinned the republic, it became much more difficult for individuals to make claims against the family and its collective needs," Desan writes. (274) Even the conservative backlash under Napoleon, however, did not restore primogeniture or a father's freedom to dictate the division of his inheritance. The revolutionary era had fundamentally altered the nature of the contract between state and family.

Although family legislation affected both sexes, these measures were often debated largely in terms of their effects on women, and Desan's interpretation of these effects is one of the most important aspects of her book. Desan's work poses questions about both the paradigm suggested by Joan Landes's Women and the Public Sphere, in which the Revolution is seen as a masculinist movement whose main result was to confine women to the sphere of domesticity, and the counterimage offered in Dominique Godineau's The Women of Paris and their Revolution, which focuses attention on women's influence in the public arena despite their lack of formal political rights. (3) Desan shows that women wrote pamphlets and petitions that had some effect on family legislation, but, unlike Godineau, she does not see women's engagement on these issues as evidence of conscious collective action, and there was nothing that could be considered a feminist movement. Her evidence in fact raises questions about whether women actually constituted a coherent category in discussions of family legislation. Where these issues were concerned, women did not appear as a bloc of individuals with homogeneous interests, but rather as occupants of a variety of subject positions within family units. The concerns of married and unmarried women, of those with brothers or children and those without, and of legitimate and illegitimate daughters, could be quite different. Wives, for example, had a strong interest in opposing the claims of their husbands' "other women" and their "natural" children, who threatened to diminish the inheritance that would otherwise go to the offspring of the marriage.

Although Desan downplays the importance of organized women's groups, she differs sharply with feminist scholars like Landes who see the Revolution as the triumph of Rousseau-inspired misogynists bent on confining women to the home. The same Jacobin legislators who ultimately ruled out women's participation in politics altered family law in ways that were generally favorable to women. The egalitarian family court system, created in 1790 and maintained until 1796, simplified legal procedures and ensured that women's interests were represented in family disputes. (98-99) The 1792 divorce law "gave wives leverage that they had not had before, even though it did not entirely overturn old patterns of male authority," (111) and the changes in inheritance rules allowed sisters to challenge customs that had privileged their brothers. (156) Women who lacked formal status within a family unit were at risk, however. Although Desan argues that the original intent of the law of 12 brumaire II, which promised rights and public support to illegitimate children but discouraged paternity suits, was egalitarian, the promise of state support for those who were now dubbed "natural" children was never fulfilled. The law left fathers' responsibilities to children born out of wedlock undefined, and eventually the argument that the Old Regime's laws made it too easy for scheming women to claim child support, thereby undermining masculine freedom and endangering legitimate families, prevailed. This opened the door to a thermidorian statute forbidding recherche de la paternite (paternity suits) and to subsequent measures that denied unwed mothers and their children any claim on a married man's resources, in the name of defending legally recognized families. (205-16, 226-7)

The thermidorians' disregard for the rights of natural children was part of a wider backlash against the more radical aspects of revolutionary family law. This reaction was not simply dictated from above by reactionary legislators, however. As Desan shows, much of the impetus for it came from the hundreds of petitions with which the post-Robespierrist legislators were inundated, most of them arguing "that revolutionary legislation and court cases had wreaked emotional havoc within families" and "sown chaos into property arrangements, conventional strategies, and long-standing expectations." (250) In the earlier phases of the revolution, law in general and family law in particular had been seen as an instrument for remaking both society and individuals; now much of the population had come to feel that "the law should work to establish stability rather than moral regeneration and social transformation." (251) Some of the more radical and egalitarian laws passed earlier in the Revolution were repealed in this period, but the argument for stability cut both ways: defenders of the Revolution argued that continual legal changes threatened to create more confusion, rather than less, and succeeded in defending fundamental elements of the reforms made after 1789. (276-78)

Although Desan recognizes that "the Jacobin legacy for women was ambivalent," (281) and although she sees a definite reaction against women's rights in the period from 1794 to 1799, she nevertheless insists that the revolutionary decade as a whole was not simply a prelude to what happened under Napoleon. The Napoleonic code, in her reading, was genuinely hostile to women's rights within the family, but to achieve this result, its drafters had to undo the many positive changes the revolutionary period had wrought for women and children. The result was not, as some feminist historians have claimed, "a culmination and continuation of the Revolution," (284), but rather part of a more general authoritarianism imposed by the First Consul and later Emperor. The Code's provisions in favor of masculine authority and lineage property were in line with Napoleon's emphasis on guaranteeing property rights, even those of slaveowners in the French colonies. (289-90) Like much of the recent scholarship on the slavery issue, The Family on Trial thus adds to the picture of Napoleon as a distinctly disrespectful child of the Revolution, bent on repealing much of the movement's egalitarian heritage. (4) By implication, Desan also sides with other recent historians who interpret the thermidorian and Directory periods as an integral part of the Revolution, with some constructive achievements to their credit. (5) If Napoleon had not intervened, the lives of nineteenth- and twentieth-century French women (and men) might have been very different from what they were under his legal code.

Desan thus uses the family to bring together aspects of the Revolution that have often been isolated from each other. She demonstrates the close connections between the private sphere of family life and the public arena of lawmaking, and between issues affecting women and the general direction of the Revolution. Her discussion does remain somewhat disconnected from the older scholarship on the family, which was often more sociological in orientation. Aside from a chapter on divorce suits, which confirms earlier research in showing that women were more likely than men to initiate such actions, The Family on Trial makes little effort to quantify the actual impact of revolutionary family legislation, as opposed to the passions these laws generated. Issues that preoccupied previous generations of scholars, such as whether revolutionary laws led to an earlier age of marriage or promoted the spread of birth control, are not part of Desan's purview, nor does she enter the debate about whether the egalitarian inheritance law actually changed reproductive behavior. (6)

Although she turns away from older debates about the revolutionary era's family legislation, Desan misses some opportunities to engage newer scholarly discussions that would have enlarged the perspectives of her study in interesting ways. No group had a greater stake in the changes of laws affecting marriage and inheritance, for example, than the population of France's Caribbean colonies, where relationships between whites and their slaves had produced a "third race," the gens de couleur or "people of color," who were often classified as illegitimate children and who had previously been excluded from staking claims to their white progenitors' property or even using their family names. After the Convention abolished slavery in 1794, former slaves in Guadeloupe and Saint-Domingue rushed to obtain legal recognition of what were in many cases longstanding family relationships. Alyssa Sepinwall, in her recent biography of the abbe Gregoire, the revolutionary legislator usually identified as the strongest supporter of racial equality, has faulted him for urging the black and mixed-race populations of the colonies to adopt the European family model, but Laurent Dubois's work suggests that these groups saw revolutionary family law as one of the most powerful instruments available to them in their struggles to be recognized as full citizens. (7) Desan also says nothing about the issues raised by the attempt to square Jewish family law with French legislation after the granting of citizenship rights to this minority in 1791. (8) The question of whether Jews fully accepted the legal status of mixed marriages, for example, proved to be the touchiest issue presented to Napoleon's famous Sanhedrin in 1806.

A full consideration of the Revolution's impact on family life would have to give more consideration to its impact on actual practices, and also consider the implications of the Revolution's treatment of groups whose status tested the limits of the movement's inclusiveness, such as the colonial populations and the Jews. Even if it leaves some questions unanswered, however, The Family on Trial is unquestionably a major contribution to revolutionary historiography. Desan has convincingly demonstrated the vital connection between the polity and the family during the revolutionary period. Her careful, solidly documented argument demonstrates the two-way flow of influences between the spheres of public and intimate life, and revises overly simplistic notions about the Revolution's effect on women. Together with other new studies on family law during the revolutionary period, such as Jennifer Heuer's The Family and the Nation: Gender and Citizenship in Revolutionary France, 1789-1830, (9) Desan's work suggests a new paradigm for a culturally informed history of French society during this era.

Department of History

Lexington, KY 40506-0027

ENDNOTES

1. William M. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge, UK, 2001).

2. Michael D. Sibalis, "The Regulation of Male Homosexuality in Revolutionary and Napoleonic France, 1789-1815," in Jeffrey Merrick and Bryant T. Ragan, eds., Homosexuality in Modern France (New York, 1996), 80-101.

3. Joan B. Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca, N.Y., 1988); Dominique Godineau, The Women of Paris and their French Revolution, trans. Katherine Streip (Berkeley, CA, 1998) (orig. 1988).

4. On the restoration of slavery under Napoleon, see Yves Benot and Marcel Dorigny, eds., Retablissement de l'esclavage dans les colonies francaises. Aux origines de Haiti (Paris, 2003).

5. A sampling of recent publications reflecting this emphasis on the period's positive accomplishments includes James Livesey, Making Democracy in the French Revolution (Cambridge, MA, 2002); Howard G. Brown and Judith A. Miller, eds., Taking Liberties: Problems of the New Order from the French Revolution to Napoleon (Manchester, UK, 2002); Charles Coulston Gillispie. Science and Polity in France: The Revolutionary and Napoleonic Years (Princeton, N.J., 2004); and Laurent Dubois, A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787-1804 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2004).

6. See, for example, Margaret H. Darrow, Revolution in the House: Family, Class, and Inheritance in Southern France, 1775-1825 (Princeton, N.J., 1988) and Jacques Dupaquier et al., Histoire de la population francaise, t. III (1789-1914) (Paris, 1988).

7. Alyssa Sepinwall, The Abbe Gregoire and the French Revolution: The Making of Modern Universalism (Berkeley, CA, 2005), 190-3; Dubois, Colony of Citizens, 251-3.

8. See Ronald Schechter, Obstinate Hebrews: Representations of Jews in France, 1715-1815 (Berkeley, CA, 2003).

9. Ithaca, N.Y., 2005.

By Jeremy D. Popkin

University of Kentucky 

THE SOCIAL REVOLUTION IN FRENCH REVOLUTIONARY FAMILIES

"We were so accustomed to see our daughters, only as a portion, so to speak, of our beings ... that we cannot resolve without pain to treat them as equals of their brothers ... {But}by birthright, all the children of the same father merit his affection and aid equally;... the new law does not so much offer daughters an additional benefit, as it restores a right, which the old law had taken away from them out of contempt for nature." (1) With these claims, four Norman lawyers, serving as arbiters in a family court, justified the revolutionary move of granting daughters an equal share in their fathers' legacies. Their words betray ambivalence about recognizing the "restored rights" of daughters once seen "as a portion, so to speak, of our beings," but at the same time, their legal position endorses the Revolution's "new law" and espouses a model of egalitarian affection and property within the family.

This court case, like many others, suggests three themes of my book which Jeremy Popkin highlights. First, although family and politics were already intertwined in the Old Regime, the French Revolution infused politics into the most intimate family relationships and provoked family members to introduce revolutionary ideals, such as liberty or equality, into their domestic lives. Second, this struggle over how to "regenerate the family" took place as a continual dialogue, a negotiation between men and women at all levels of society: lawmakers and jurists, pamphleteers and journalists, younger sons and desperate wives, judges and lawyers, they all took part. Like these four Norman arbiters, they strove to negotiate their way between new reforms and old customs, in dialogue with revolutionary politics. Third, studying the family challenges the dominant interpretation of the French Revolution's impact on women; this theory holds that the Revolution primarily encouraged domesticity by confining women to the "private sphere." On the contrary, like the Norman daughters in this court case, certain women won unprecedented opportunities to gain property, power, or independence; yet, as I will discuss below, the Revolution left a complex legacy for women as well as men.

I am grateful to Popkin for discussing these arguments, but the Norman arbiters' willingness to reallocate property and overturn gendered family strategies suggests a fourth theme that Popkin has overlooked or underplayed: the lived experience of social revolution within households. My response will focus on this strand within my work. For although Popkin initially acknowledges my attempt to envision a new social interpretation, his review is strangely dismissive about the intensive social history work that underpins my analysis of family reform. My book is definitely in dialogue with older scholarship on the family as well as with newer work on gender and political culture. Far from privileging "passions" over "actual impact" (Popkin, 995), The Family on Trial in Revolutionary France seeks to show how fundamentally revolutionary passions and new social practices influenced one another as they together recast intimate relations between the genders and generations.

Methodologically, this book aims at bridging the false dichotomy between social "experience" and discursive "construction." Deeply influenced by cultural forces, the family is also a socioeconomic institution, a network of individuals engaged in negotiation and conflict over resources, gender roles, legal status, and domestic authority. In addition to the petitions, debates, and laws mentioned by Popkin, I draw extensively on classic social history sources--including hundreds of court cases, etat civil records, pregnancy declarations, and notarized property donations--to analyze the domestic impact of controversial laws mandating egalitarian inheritance, legalizing divorce, endowing illegitimate children with rights, implicitly outlawing paternity suits by unwed mothers, and reducing parental authority over adult children's property and marital choices. The four central chapters of the book incorporate a case study of the Norman department of the Calvados to peer into households and assess the transformations wrought by both new cultural ideals about the family and changes in family law.

I argue that many individuals experienced the tumultuous 1790s as a social revolution as well as a political one. Rather than simply promoting domesticity, the Revolution rocked the economic, legal, and cultural bases of the patriarchal, lineage family. Two striking transformations stand out: the decline of parental, especially paternal, authority; and the challenge to marital indissolubility and male authority within marriage. These changes demanded new family strategies for the long term. At the same time, new laws, institutions, and cultural expectations enabled all sorts of individuals--such as illegitimate daughters, younger sons, or ill-suited wives and husbands--to defy traditional family practices and remake their positions within their families.

Access to revolutionary changes such as divorce or rights for natural children was markedly uneven, and The Family on Trial attempts to sort out how numerous factors, from geography to class to family position to politics, informed the ability of individual women and men to reshape or defend their domestic experiences. For example, class, gender, geography, and access to revolutionary political ideas all had a significant impact on couples' ability to divorce. When Marie Anne Maurice, a boatbuilder's daughter, divorced her candle-maker husband for incompatibility in Caen in the spring of 1793, the couple fit the profile of a typical divorcing couple, at least in statistical terms. More frequently initiated by women than men, divorce became primarily an urban phenomenon, used most readily by couples from artisanal, commercial, or bourgeois backgrounds. Yet my case study of 468 divorces in the Calvados also sheds light on the previously unexamined question of rural divorce. Although rural divorce was always hard to come by, it nonetheless made inroads in certain pockets, in the livestock-producing Pays d'Auge for example. Here divorce was most likely facilitated by various factors, such as lower rates of religious practice, a relatively wealthy peasantry, greater exposure to revolutionary ideology, proximity to urban culture, and access to legal practitioners. In stark contrast, divorce remained virtually unheard of in the poorest, most Catholic, most counter-revolutionary areas of the Calvados, such as the Bocage Virois.

Grassroots struggles over divorce illustrate again and again one of the main themes of my book: social forces and the new political culture collided and interacted, and revolutionary politics informed the most intimate relationships. Not only was divorce more common in communities with Jacobin clubs, but more broadly, unhappily married couples saw their conflicts through the lens of revolutionary politics. Angered by her husband's infidelity, Marie-Francoise Godefroy tapped into the ambient revolutionary language and declared to the family tribunal that she "could no longer convince herself to sacrifice her liberty and put herself into slavery." While wives were more likely to decry "marital despotism" or critique "tyranny" within marriage, husbands too employed the imagery of "irons" or "chains" binding them "as slaves to Hymen." One inhabitant of Caen begged lawmakers to let him set an example "of liberty by breaking these cruel chains and living forever free in the bosom of loving friendship and happiness, invaluable for the life of every good French patriot." (2)

Just as divorce became more conceivable and more available to certain groups for cultural and social reasons, inheritance reform and the assault on paternal prerogative had a much stronger impact among certain populations, notably in Normandy, where customary law privileged sons over daughters, and in the Midi, where fathers wielded authority over adult offspring and could craft their legacies at will, often favoring the eldest son. Egalitarian inheritance laws wreaked havoc with property arrangements, disturbed long-standing lineage strategies, and uprooted gender patterns. In the family tribunals within the district of Caen in the early to mid 1790s, contests between siblings made up sixty percent of the 143 inheritance cases in my sample, and sisters beat out their brothers 78% of the time. Realigning property not only gave certain women more power within households, it also provoked politicized debate about relationships among parents, children, and siblings. The language of both courts and petitions revealed a profound dispute over the revolutionary meaning of "equality" within the home, as brothers claimed to have earned their larger shares through merit and labor, while sisters idealized the egalitarian, affectionate family and denounced the "despotism and tyranny" of hard-hearted fathers and greedy brothers.

These domestic conflicts over property and affection produced a speedy backlash but also had a long-term impact on family strategies into the nineteenth century. Although the Civil Code tempered the strictness of egalitarian inheritance, it continued to mandate much greater equality than in the Old Regime. These revolutionary and Napoleonic innovations nudged Norman families toward downplaying their customary law emphasis on lineage. Placing increased focus on the conjugal family, more couples embraced communal marital property in their marriage contracts, not only because of changes in property law, but also because the region's modernizing economy made the liberation of capital more appealing. Families in certain social groups in the Midi also edged toward the communal property system in the early nineteenth century. (3) It is not easy to assess how these changes affected relations between spouses, but arguably they gave the couple more autonomy from kin networks, augmented their shared interest in financial ventures, and could increase a widow's benefits if the couple had done well. In short, I argue that, as part of a much longer term trajectory, the revolutionary era encouraged the shift toward conjugal families and what Andre Burguiere has called "the invention of the couple." (4)

The social revolution also reached outside the legal bonds of marriage and had a wide-ranging influence on courtship, illegitimacy patterns, and the rights of natural children and their unwed mothers and fathers. Illegitimacy rates continued to rise in the Calvados and elsewhere in France during the Revolution. Using pregnancy declarations and paternity suits, The Family on Trial analyzes how the Revolution loosened the practice of courtship in the early 1790s. Young couples found themselves suspended between two worlds. On the one hand, marriage and family continued as always to be crucial for survival, and young women were keenly aware of the need to preserve their sexual virtue and honor in order to marry well. But on the other hand, the Revolution brought structural and cultural changes. War and economic distress led to an escalation in male mobility. New laws and practices undercut the moral authority of the Church and, even more importantly, reduced parental control over marriage choices and the property of their adult children. At the same time, revolutionary rhetoric reinforced the language of love and affection; the new politics proclaiming "freedom of the heart" built on the Old Regime's celebration of sentiment in novels, songs, and legal briefs. Many an unmarried mother, pressing her paternity suit in the Calvados, testified to her lover's "most sincere love," "friendship," or "captivation" of her heart. While seduction obviously had certain timeless qualities, the shifting circumstances of Revolution changed the rules and expectations of courtship, and illegitimacy rates rose.

Worried about this trend, revolutionary lawmakers developed a complex plan, built on faith in the power of the state and a deeply gendered vision of equality. To deal with illegitimacy, they strove to destigmatize unwed mothers as patriotic producers, build a poor relief system for these women and their offspring, and mandate equal inheritance rights for illegitimate children who were recognized by their parents. Keenly aware of the coercive power of older fathers and of the state on adult young men, the deputies also chose to liberate putative fathers from possible false accusations of paternity. But although the deputies vaguely abolished paternity suits as part of their law offering rights to natural children, judges at the grassroots level continued to award damages, lying-in expenses, and child support to unwed mothers. In the Calvados, two-thirds of natural mothers won their paternity suits in the early 1790s, and even after the implicit abolition of paternity suits in 1793, local judges awarded damages into 1795 when the Committee of Legislation finally interpreted the ambiguous law in favor of alleged fathers. (5)

The fate of natural mothers and children reveals most markedly how the revolutionaries' intentions could fall short of their goals and also how deeply politics affected the social impact of attempted reforms. According to the deputies' vision, these illegitimate children and unwed mothers who lost the traditional support of paternity suits should either be cared for by the state or, in the children's case, gain new benefits as heirs to their fathers' legacies. But, in fact, the state was too impoverished to offer adequate aid; and furthermore, over the late 1790s, the courts gradually became resistant to allotting inheritance to illegitimate children. Assuming that fathers would naturally and willingly recognize their children, the legislators had decreed that fatherhood must be "voluntary," freely chosen, and clearly demonstrated by active care for the child. But the shifting course of revolutionary politics allowed this poorly written and controversial law to be subverted in practice. In the conservative climate of the Thermidorian Directory, judges at the appeals court level made fatherhood ever more difficult to prove and increasingly defined both illegitimate children and unwed mothers as threats to the property and stability of the legitimate family. As these judges undercut the attempt to grant rights to natural children, they also contributed to crafting a more conservative model of the family, now defined not by the "natural" bonds of affection, but rather bound by legal ties aimed at protecting property and honor.

The authors of the Civil Code would amplify this family model, as they reacted against the most controversial and egalitarian aspects of revolutionary family law and reinstated male authority over women and children. As the Napoleonic jurists enlisted legitimate fathers as guarantors of social stability and of the family's name and goods, they simultaneously undercut the radical revolution's vision of masculinity. That ideal had certainly encouraged men to be dynamic and even militant activists on behalf of the new nation, but it had also urged them to be humane and sensitive, open to affection and equality within the natural ties of family and nation. Republican wives should cultivate this male sensitivity, since it also made men more capable of making moral, political judgments for the bien public, the general good. The Napoleonic backlash redefined masculinity in a patriarchal mold and validated stability over equality and sentiment within families: fathers should use their renewed authority to defend the honor, property, and order of their households.

This summary of the social revolution within households would be incomplete without highlighting its complex impact on women. The French Revolution left three intertwined, and at times contradictory, legacies for women. It fostered strong discourses that emphasized female domestic powers and moral responsibilities, often framed in Rousseauist terms. But at the same time, legal reforms enabled women to claim greater autonomy, property, or authority within households, and to use the state to make civil rights claims as legal individuals. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the gradual construction of domesticity drew upon the Revolution's endorsement of women's moral power, but also developed as a reaction against the gender turmoil of the Revolution and against women's impressive political and legal power in the 1790s. Third, the Revolution generated political practices and ideologies of rights and equality that enabled women to criticize gender inequities and lobby for feminist reforms. Nineteenth-century feminists appropriated and transformed these political tools and arguments. Clearly, the Revolution's impact on women was not simply "good" or "bad," and it varied immensely for individual women according to family position, geography, class, religion, etc. Further studies of groups within the French population will help us develop a clearer portrait of the diverse meanings and experiences for women as well as men, including Jews in various parts of France and people of color in Saint-Domingue, as suggested by Popkin. (6)

Recognizing the multi-faceted impact of the Revolution on women also has implications for thinking about female political activism. Rather than focusing primarily on collective or official forms of politics, I define politics broadly to include a range of activities, such as going to court, refusing the caresses of a counter-revolutionary suitor, petitioning the state, creating a civil marriage festival, or posting a placard to demand female property rights. By politicizing everyday life, the French revolutionaries generated new forms of power. (7) As various women invented and exercised these new forms of power, their actions often transcended the division between "public" and "private." Without downplaying the significance of women's exclusion from formal political power, such as the vote, I aim to understand and analyze their extensive informal power as well as their new access to revolutionary institutions and rights. As Popkin notes, by exploring the varying political attitudes of women toward family reform, I break down any assumption that "women" as a whole shared the same set of political (or familial) interests. However, my book is meant to complement not contradict Godineau's excellent study of Parisian women's political activism, (8) nor do I deny the presence of a feminist movement in revolutionary France. On the contrary, revolutionary ideology and new political practices fostered a feminist critique of the family. Acting sometimes collectively, but often individually, the women (and men) who forged this feminist critique took part in a collective cultural movement demanding greater rights for women in both the household and the state, and their feminism undoubtedly influenced nineteenth-century activists.

Finally, if The Family on Trial seeks to show the continual interplay between everyday social experiences and political culture, it also demonstrates that gender was central to the construction of the French state and citizenship. Beyond the more readily acceptable idea that political shifts affected family reform, I argue that revolutionary state-builders could not invent a secular state and a rights-bearing citizen without addressing the legal rights of women and adult children. In addition, since the family underpinned the state, lawmakers continually attempted to rebuild the political and social order in sync, and were deeply influenced by the ordinary citizens who sought to reform or defend family practices. To give a salient example, when Thermidorian and Directorial politicians reacted against the radical revolution and tried to stabilize society in the aftermath of the Terror, they drew on the outpouring of conservative petitions that bemoaned the gender chaos and confusion over property wrought by new family laws. Conservative politicians essentially appropriated this popular defense of traditional family property and gender hierarchy in order to legitimize a political order based on class and to edge France toward the more patriarchal gender order that the Napoleonic era would promote. Throughout the revolutionary era, family and state shaped one another in tandem with the changing course of politics.

Department of History

Madison, WI 53706-1483

ENDNOTES

1. Emphasis mine. Archives nationales DIII 339, Question de droit. Consultation. De la succession des filles normandes, delibere a Caen, 22 decembre 1792, by hommes de loi Thome, Regnault, Pelvey, et Chretien (Caen, 1792).

2. Archives departementales du Calvados, 3L 616, Sentences arbitrales du district de Caen, 8 prairial-6 messidor an III (27 May-24 Jun. 1795); Archives nationales, DIII 33, Petition d'un citoyen de Caen aux dignes representants du peuple, 8 Sep. 1792.

3. Charles Alline, De l'ancien regime matrimonial normand et de sa survivance dans la pratique notariale sous le droit intermediaire et sous le code civil, Universite de Caen, These de droit (Paris, 1908); Jean-Pierre Chaline, Les bourgeois de Rouen. Une elite urbaine du XIXe siecle (Paris, 1982). Beyond Normandy, see Nicole Arnaud-Duc, Droit, mentalites et changement social en Provence occidentale. Une etude sur les strategies et la pratique notariale en maitere de regime matrimonial de 1785 a 1855 (Saint-Etienne, 1985); Alain Collomp, La maison du pere: Famille et village en Haute-Provence aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siecles (Paris, 1983); Margaret Darrow, The Revolution in the House: Family, Class, and Inheritance in Southern France, 1775-1825 (Princeton, NJ, 1989); Adeline Daumard, La bourgeoisie parisienne de 1815 a 1848 (Paris, 1963), chap. 4; David Garrioch, The Formation of the Parisian Bourgeoisie, 1690-1830 (Cambridge, MA, 1996). For a more complete discussion of these trends, see Desan, Family on Trial, Chap. 4 & Conclusion.

4. Andre Burguiere, "Les fondements d'une culture familiale," in Histoire de la France. Les formes de la culture, ed. Andre Burguiere (Paris, 1993), 25-118.

5. The law of 12 brumaire an II (2 Nov. 1793) outlawed paternity suits by offspring in pursuit of inheritance. It eventually came to be interpreted as outlawing paternity suits by unwed mothers as well. Only with the Civil Code did the abolition of paternity suits by mothers become definitively codified into law.

6. Elizabeth Colwill is currently using etat civil records and other archival material to study marriage of former slaves and free people of color in Saint-Domingue. "'Fetes de l'Hymen, Fetes de la Liberte': Matrimony, Emancipation, and the Creation of 'New Men'" in The Haitian Revolution: 200 Years After, ed. David Geggus and Norman Fiering (forthcoming).

7. Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley, CA, 1984).

8. Dominique Godineau, The Women of Paris and Their French Revolution, trans. Katherine Streip (Berkeley, CA, 1998, orig. ed. 1988) does not argue that women's clubs, and esp. the Parisian Citoyennes republicaines revolutionnaires, acted collectively in favor of family law reforms. They lobbied primarily for other goals, such as improved work conditions, price controls, the right to bear arms, the overthrow of the Girondins, etc. At the same time they articulated a defense of women's rights within a world view emphasizing gender complementarity of the two sexes. I found similar patterns in the collective action of the sixty provincial women's clubs that I studied for my book: although they did not often lobby the state for family law reform, women's clubs criticized the subjugation of women within marriage and played a crucial role in cultivating women's moral and political power as republican wives and mothers. Family on Trial, 67-92. See also Suzanne Desan, "'Constitutional Amazons': Jacobin Women's Clubs in the French Revolution," in Re-creating Authority in Revolutionary France, ed. Bryant T. Ragan and Elizabeth A. Williams (New Brunswick, NJ, 1992), 11-35.

By Suzanne Desan

University of Wisconsin, Madison