Besides Amazon and Julie: Reinterpreting the Definition of Citoyenne in the French Revolution

While scholars of the French Revolution have analysed famous militant women, gender historians have elaborated on how Rouseauean republican virtue, represented by his character ‘Julie’, influenced women to stay in the family sphere. The idea of the private-public dichotomy so infused 19th century literature on gender relations that historians came to argue that the Revolution excluded women from politics. While gender historians have challenged these older views, I argue that women’s actions crossed the boundaries between politics and family sphere. The metaphor of “frontstage” (public places) and “backstage” (private spaces), which mirrors the public-family domain dichotomy, provides a way of understanding the roles women played during the revolution that revises the more simplistic interpretations of subsequent historians. Revolutionary women bridged the two in ways that allowed them to express their political attitudes as well as maintain the ‘appropriate’ status of women.