From The Archives Of "Women And Revolution"-Women And The French
Revolution
Markin comment:
The following is an article from an archival issue of Women and
Revolution, Spring 2001, that may have some historical interest
for old "new leftists", perhaps, and well as for younger militants
interested in various cultural and social questions that intersect the class
struggle. Or for those just interested in a Marxist position on a series of
social questions that are thrust upon us by the vagaries of bourgeois society.
I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of Women
and Revolution during Women's History Month and periodically
throughout the year.
************
Women and The French Revolution-Spring 2001
We publish below an edited version of a presentation given by our
comrade Susan Adams at a Spartacist League forum to celebrate International
Women's Day 2000 in New York City, first published in Workers Vanguard No. 752,
16 February 2001. Susan, who died this February (see obituary, page 2), was a
longtime leader of the ICL's French section and maintained an intense
commitment to the study of history and culture throughout her years as a
communist. These interests were put to particular use in her work as a member
of the Editorial Board of Women and Revolution while that journal existed.
International Women's Day originated in March 1908, with a demonstration
here in Manhattan by women needle trades workers. They marched to oppose child
labor and in favor of the eight-hour day and women's suffrage. March 8 became
an international day celebrating the struggle for women's rights. And then on
International Women's Day in 1917, right in the middle of World War 190,000
textile workers, many of them women, went on strike in Petrograd (St.
Petersburg), the capital of the Russian tsarist empire. They rose up from the
very bottom rungs of society, and it was these most oppressed and downtrodden
of the proletariat who opened the sluice gates of the revolutionary struggle
leading to the October Revolution, where Marx's ideas first took on flesh and
blood.
The Soviet state was the dictatorship of the proletariat. It immediately
enacted laws making marriage and divorce simple civil procedures, abolishing
the category of illegitimacy and all discrimination against homosexuals. It
took steps toward replacing women's household drudgery by setting up
cafeterias, laundries and childcare centers to allow women to enter productive
employment. Under the conditions of extreme poverty and backwardness, those
measures could be carried out only on a very limited scale. But they undermined
the institution of the family and represented the first steps toward the
liberation of women. The collectivized planned economy laid the basis for
enormous economic and social progress. Fully integrated into the economy as
wage earners, women achieved a degree of economic independence that became so
much a matter of course that it was barely noticed by the third generation
after the revolution. We fought for unconditional military defense of the
Soviet Union against imperialist attack and internal counterrevolution up until
the very last barricade.
The great October Russian Revolution has now been undone and its gains
destroyed. Surrounded and pounded by the imperialists for seven decades, the
Soviet Union was destroyed by capitalist counterrevolution in 1991-92. The
responsibility for that lies primarily with the Stalinist bureaucracy which
usurped political power from the working class in 1923-24 and betrayed the
revolutionary purpose of Lenin and Trotsky's Bolshevik Party and the
revolutionary Communist International that they founded. Not the least of the
Stalinists' crimes was the glorification of the family and the reversal of many
gains for women. We called for a proletarian political revolution to oust the
Stalinist bureaucracy and return to the road of Lenin and Trotsky.
In celebrating International Women's Day, we reaffirm that the struggle for
women's rights is inextricably linked to revolution and we honor the women
fighters through the centuries whose courage and consciousness has often put
them in the vanguard of struggles to advance the cause of the oppressed. The
Russian Revolution was a proletarian socialist revolution; it overthrew the
rule of the capitalists and landlords and placed the working class in power.
The Great French Revolution of 1789-94was a bourgeois revolution, the most
thorough and deep going of the bourgeois revolutions of the 17th and 18th
centuries.
The French Revolution overthrew the rule of the monarchy, the nobility and
the landed aristocracy and placed the bourgeoisie in power. It swept Europe
with its liberating ideas and its revolutionary reorganization of society. It
transformed the population from subjects of the crown to citizens with formal
equality. Jews were freed from the ghettos and declared citizens with full
rights; slavery was first abolished on the territory of the French nation. It
inspired the first successful slave revolt in the colonies, the uprising led by
Toussaint L'Ouverture in what became Haiti. And, within the limitations of
bourgeois rule, it achieved gains for women that were unparalleled until the
time of the Bolshevik Revolution.
Today's capitalist ruling class is unsurpassed in bloody terrorism against
working people around the world in defense of its profits and property. As hard
as it is to imagine, the ancestors of this bourgeoisie played a historically
progressive role then, sweeping away the backwardness, irrationality and
inefficiency of the previous feudal system. The leaders of the French
Revolution, who represented the most radical sector of the French bourgeoisie,
spoke with—and for the most part believed—the words of the Enlightenment,
justifying its fight to destroy the nobility as a class and take political
power itself as the advent of "liberty, equality and fraternity" for
all. They could not, and the majority of them did not intend to, emancipate the
lower classes. Nevertheless, something changed in the world.
Particularly since "death of communism" propaganda has filled the
bourgeois press and media following the destruction of the Soviet Union,
there's been a real attempt to demonize not just the Russian Revolution but any
revolution, the French Revolution in particular. The push for retrograde social
policies has been historically justified with a virtual flood of books and
articles attacking the humanist values of the Enlightenment philosophy which
laid the ideological basis for the French Revolution. Today, while the
bourgeoisie in its decay disowns the rationalist and democratic values it once espoused,
we Trotskyists stand out not only as the party of the Russian Revolution but
the champions of the liberating goals of the French Revolution.
Bolshevik leader V. I. Lenin identified with the Jacobins, the radical wing
of the French revolutionary bourgeoisie, whose most prominent leaders were
Maximilien Robespierre, Jean-Paul Marat and Louis-Antoine de Saint-Just. Lenin
wrote that the "essence of Jacobinism" was "the transfer of
power to the revolutionary, oppressed class" and that Jacobinism was
"one of the highest peaks in the emancipation struggle of an oppressed
class." You can better understand why Lenin was inspired by the Jacobins
from the following words by Saint-Just: "Those who make a revolution, with
half-measures are only digging their own grave."
Women's Oppression and Class Society
In the early 19th century, a French socialist named Charles Fourier
carefully studied the French Revolution. He wrote biting, witty and humorous
criticism of existing social relations, including working out a whole
scheme—kind of nutty but fun and food for thought—for perpetually satisfying
sexual relations. Needless to say, he thought sexual monogamy was a curse worse
than death. In a famous statement quoted by Karl Marx in his 1845 book The Holy
Family, Fourier said:
"The change in a historical epoch can always be determined by women's
progress towards freedom, because here, in the relation of woman to man, of the
weak to the strong, the victory of human nature over brutality is most evident.
The degree of emancipation of woman is the natural measure of general
emancipation."
And that quite profound observation guides us today in our understanding of
society.
Women's oppression is rooted in the institution of the family and has been a
feature of all class societies. At one point before recorded history, it didn't
much matter who the father of a child was, since children were largely cared
for communally. But then inventions such as agriculture made it possible to
produce more than the producers could actually consume. This ability to produce
a surplus meant that a leisure class could live off the labor of others and
accumulate property. It became important to know who the father of a child was
so that he could pass on his property to his own children. Monogamy appeared,
making the man dominant and the woman subservient, enslaved.
The family is a key social unit for the maintenance of capitalism. For the
capitalists, the family provides the basis for passing on accumulated wealth.
And where there is no property to pass on, the family serves to rear the next
generation of workers for the capitalists and to inculcate conservative social
values. It is the family—and the necessity to control sexual access to the
woman to ensure that the man knows who his real heir is—which generates the
morality codified in and reinforced by religion. It is the family which
throughout a woman's life gives definition to her oppressed state: as daughter,
as wife, as mother.
We Marxists fight to rip the means of production out of the hands of the
capitalists in order to put them at the service of the needs of the working
people that create the wealth. Only then can household drudgery be replaced
with socialized child-care, restaurants, laundries and so on. The program of
communism is for a classless society in which the family is transcended by
superior sexual and social relations which will be free of moral or economic
coercion. Our slogan is: "For women's liberation through socialist
revolution!"
Marx said that revolution is the locomotive of history. In the Great French
Revolution, the women of Paris were often the engineers in that locomotive. I'm
going to be talking about the role of thousands of women leaders, military
commanders, propagandists and organizers whose role at key junctures of the
French Revolution was quite simply decisive. Groups like the Society of
Revolutionary Republican Women literally shaped history. Count Mirabeau, one of
the major actors in the beginning of the revolution, was an extremely sleazy
guy, firmly in favor of a constitutional monarchy, occasionally in the pay of
the king. But even he said: "Without women, there is no revolution."
Most histories of the French Revolution concentrate their chief attention on
the upper levels of society and the top layers of the plebeian masses. In
recent years, a number of French and American women historians have done very
interesting and important research into the dusty archives of the revolution in
Paris—police reports, newspaper articles. Some of these historians are feminists;
that is, they see the fundamental division in society as that between the
sexes.
At the time of the revolution, a movement focused specifically on women's
rights was in the minority. One person who was what you would call a feminist
today, at least as far as I have been able to put together her history, was
Olympe de Gouges. In her pamphlet, The Declaration of the Rights of Woman and
Female Citizen, written in the fall of 1791, she implicitly called for the vote
for women, for a women's assembly and for equal rights with men. She also
dedicated her pamphlet to the despised queen Marie Antoinette! De Gouges was
not an aristocrat but a butcher's daughter from outside Paris, yet she remained
a royalist throughout most of the revolution and was guillotined in November
1793.
Some of the recent analysis by feminist historians feeds right into today's
reactionary climate. Taking aim at the French Revolution itself, they claim
that the failure of women to secure the right to vote for national parliaments
and the suppression of the exclusively women's political clubs during the most
radical period of the revolution proves that misogyny triumphed. This view is
also promoted in an article in the New York Times Magazine (16 May 1999) called
"The Shadow Story of the Millennium: Women." The article states that
the French Revolution's "new philosophy of rational natural rights placed
all men on an equal footing in regard to citizenship and the law" but
adds: "Men of the revolution said that women should stay home and rear
their sons to be good citizens."
Let us allow a participant to refute this falsehood. Mere Duchesne was a
domestic servant, a cook, who, unlike most domestic servants then, defied her
aristocratic masters. She was described in a police report as "the satellite
and missionary to all women under Robespierre's orders, a most ferocious
woman." The Mere Duchesne newspaper wrote in September 1792:
"In the past, when we wanted to speak, our mouths were shut while we
were told very politely, 'You reason like a woman'; almost like a goddamn
beast. Oh! Damn! Everything is very different now; we have indeed grown since
the Revolution."
"The Columns of French Liberty"
Now I want to go into some detail about the French Rev¬olution itself. A
revolution is a monumental military and social battle between classes. The
dominant class in any society controls the state—the police, courts, army—which
protects its class interests. In modern society there are two fundamental
classes: the big capitalists who own the means of production (the mines,
factories, etc.) and the workers who own absolutely nothing except their
personal effects and are compelled to sell their labor power to the
capitalists. At the time of the French Revolution, there were essentially four
classes. The king and the nobility who owned nearly all of the land, the
rising bourgeoisie, the peasants (who constituted over 80 percent of the
population) and the urban sans culottes. The latter consisted of artisans, who
worked either at home or in very small workshops, shopkeepers, day laborers,
the poor and unemployed. Those who did manual labor wore loose trousers and
were sans—without—the tight silk leggings worn by aristocrats and those
imitating them.
A revolution happens when the ruling class can no longer rule as before, and
the masses are no longer willing to be ruled in the same way. We're talking
about a political crisis in which the rulers falter and which tears the people
from the habitual conditions under which they labor and vegetate, awakening
even the most backward elements, compelling the people to take stock of
themselves and look around. That political crisis was provoked in France by the
1776 American Revolution.
France had taken the side of the American colonies against its perpetual
enemy England and so had emerged on the side of the victors, but totally broke.
In May 1789, King Louis XVI convened an Estates General—a meeting of
representatives of the nobility, the clergy and the non-noble property owners
and lawyers (the so-called Third Estate)— at Versailles, where his palace was
located, about 12 miles from Paris. He hoped to convince some of them to pay
more taxes. But they refused, while every village throughout the country wrote
up its grievances to be presented at Versailles. The meeting of the three
estates transformed itself into a National Assembly.
It was clear that the king was gathering troops to disperse the National
Assembly. The negotiations out at Versailles might have gone on forever, except
the Parisian masses took things into their own capable hands and organized to
arm themselves, seizing 60,000muskets from armories like the Invalides and the
Bastille prison fortress around the city on 14 July 1789. You know of this
event as the storming of the Bastille. The freeing of the handful of prisoners
was incidental; it was the arms that were the goal. The Paris garrisons had
been deeply influenced by revolutionary propaganda following a massacre of
rioters in the working-class quarters of Faubourg Saint-Antoine some months
earlier. In June, the troops paraded through the streets to shouts of
"Long live the Third Estate! We are the soldiers of the nation!"
The king backed down, but the monarchy still had its army and its throne.
The bourgeoisie and the aristocracy, mutually hostile classes, were relying on
essentially incompatible government institutions, the National Assembly and the
royal throne. One or the other would have to go. Either the king (and his many
royal cousins and relations by marriage ruling other countries of Europe) would
crush the National Assembly or the king would meet up with what came to be
known as "Madame la Guillotine."
The weeks following the July 14 events were known as the "Great
Fear," the fear that the aristocrats were coming to take the land back and
were organizing brigands and robbers and bands of pirates and so forth. So the
peasants armed to protect themselves. Then it turned out to be a rumor, but
there they were, armed and ready, and being practical sorts, they turned on the
landlords' manor houses and made use of the arms that they'd gotten.
The people's representatives, who were deliberating out at Versailles, took
note of the insurrection and on August 4 passed laws eliminating feudal
privileges, which had been the original issue all summer. The problem was that
you had to buy your way out of your feudal duties and pay 25 times your feudal
taxes in order to free yourself from them. Most peasants simply ignored that
and had been seizing the land all over the country since July 14. They also
would burn down the lord's manor house, where the records and the deeds were
kept. You know, straightforward and practical.
The next major event is crucial to our understanding of the women's role. It
was October and the people of Paris were starving again. October is usually a
cold and wet month in Paris. It was indeed raining at 8 a.m. on the morning of
5 October 1789. Thousands of women—eventually some 8,000—had already gathered
in front of City Hall. They knew where to find the arms because it was they who
had helped store them here after July 14.
The king had allowed the symbol of the revolution—the red-white-and-blue
cockade (rosette)—to be trampled underfoot by some foreign troops brought in to
protect him and his Austrian queen, Marie Antoinette. The women intended to
stop this anti-revolutionary activity and they wanted bread. Huge stores of
fine white flour waited at Versailles. They began to walk there. They couldn't
get anyone to come with them, but later in the afternoon about 20,000 troops of
the National Guard—which had been formed by the bourgeoisie—forced the very
reluctant General Lafayette, whom you might know as a hero of the American
Revolution, to lead them there. One of the women was Pauline Leon, a chocolate
maker, who was later to lead the Society of Revolutionary Republican Women.
That day she was armed with a pike, which was known as the people's weapon,
because it was so easy to make. You could pull something off the top of a
railing and attach it to a good hefty stick. It was said that "the pikes
of the people are the columns of French liberty."
This was no protest march—it was a sea of muskets and pikes. The women were
determined not to come back without the king and his family. There were still
plenty of illusions in the king, but they wanted him under their watchful eye,
in Paris. At one point the crowd apparently invaded the palace and was
wandering through Marie Antoinette's chambers and some things were getting
broken and stepped on and stomped and so forth. One very respectable woman in a
velvet hat and cloak turned around and said very haughtily, "Don't do
that, we're here to make a point, not to break things." And a woman from
the artisan class turned around and said, "My husband was drawn and
quartered for stealing a piece of meat." Finally the women demanded that
the royal family get into their carriage. Lafayette's troops led the way and
the women marched in front carrying on their pikes loaves of fresh, very white
bread—the kind reserved for the upper classes—and the heads of two of the king's
bodyguards.
The Revolutionary Jacobin Dictatorship
While pretending to be happy with the situation, the king was secretly
corresponding with the other royal heads of state and nobles began to emigrate
en masse, establishing counterrevolutionary centers outside the country. In
June 1791, the king and queen disguised themselves and tried to escape,
intending to return with the backing of the Austrian army. But an observant
revolutionary recognized them in the town of Varennes, and they were brought back
to Paris. This destroyed the people's remaining illusions in the monarchy and
triggered an upsurge in revolutionary agitation. But the bourgeoisie, fearing
things could get out of hand, sought to maintain the monarchy and clamp down on
the mass turmoil. A month after the king's arrest, a petition to abolish the
monarchy was being circulated among the crowd on the broad expanse of the
Champs de Mars. The National Guard fired on the crowd and many were killed.
Commanded by the aristocrat Lafayette, the National Guard had been organized as
a force not only against the king but also against the threat that the
bourgeoisie had already seen coming from the Parisian working people.
The Champs de Mars massacre marked a split within the bourgeois
revolutionary forces. The two main factions that emerged—the Girondins and the
Jacobins—represented the same social class, but they were deeply politically
divided. The Prussian monarchy and the rest of royal Europe were mobilizing
militarily and in April 1792 revolutionary France went to war. The Girondins
sought a "negotiated solution" with the reactionary feudal armies
combined with concessions to the nobility and the clergy. The Jacobins were
ready to make temporary concessions to the hungry urban masses in order to thoroughly
vanquish feudal reaction. You could say that the Girondins were the reformist
wing and the Jacobins the revolutionary wing of the bourgeoisie.
In June 1792, thousands of armed marchers, including numerous women armed
with sabers, paraded through the Assembly in the first of what became known as
journees, or days of action. One official observed at the time, "The
throne was still standing, but the people were seated on it, took the measure
of it." The monarchy was finally overthrown by a second journee on 10
August 1792, when the masses invaded the king's residence at the Tuileries
Palace in Paris and imprisoned the royal family.
The war was not going well. Most of the former officers, aristocrats, had
emigrated. A government representative appealed for recruits by invoking
"the heartbreaking thought that, after all the efforts that have already
been made, we might be forced to return to the misery of our former
slavery." While the best of the revolutionaries volunteered for the front,
they were untrained and assumed to be undisciplined. Most of the new recruits
were trades people, artisans and journeymen, not the sons of the bourgeoisie as
before. The road to Paris seemed open to the Prussian royal armies.
The king of Prussia expected the French troops to scatter in disarray when
his troops moved to drive them out of a strip of land near Valmy in eastern
France. But not a man flinched as the French general waved his hat in the air
on the point of his sword, shouting "Long live the nation!" The
sans-culottes fired straight and repeatedly at the enemy. With a torrential
rainstorm some hours later, the armies fell back. The German writer Goethe was
present at Valmy, and as he looked out over the battlefield that night he said,
"This day and this place open a new era in the history of the world."
He could not have been more prescient. On that day, the Assembly gave way to
the Convention, which was elected by universal male suffrage and convoked
expressly to give the nation a constitution which codified the overthrow of the
king. Also, as we will see, the most progressive marriage and divorce laws
until the Bolshevik Revolution were passed on exactly the same day as the
victory at Valmy. Five months later, the king was beheaded.
In a third uprising in June 1793, the people of Paris and 80,000 National
Guard troops surrounded the Convention and demanded the arrest of the Girondins
and a comprehensive program of revolutionary defense of the country. This
ushered in the Jacobin revolutionary dictatorship, which irremediably abolished
seigneurial (feudal) rights, instituted the price controls (referred to as the
"maximum") demanded by the sans-culottes and destroyed the resistance
of the feudal order through a reign of revolutionary terror carried out by the
Committee of Public Safety.
A month after the foreign troops were driven from France in mid-1794, on
July 27 (9 Thermidor in the revolutionary calendar), the conservative wing of
the bourgeoisie took the reins of power. The next day Robespierre followed the
Grindings to the guillotine. The Thermidorians thought they could do without
the alliance with the lower classes. That calculation was proved false, and
they were themselves replaced in 1799 in the coup of the 18th Brumaire
(November 9) by Napoleon Bonaparte, who subsequently declared himself emperor.
But the Jacobin dictatorship had irreversibly consolidated the central
achievement of the French Revolution, the rooting out of feudal relations in
the countryside.
Marriage, Divorce and Inheritance
As materialists, we understand, as Marx put it, that "Law can never be
higher than the economic structure and the cultural development of society
conditioned by that structure." The rising capitalist class was firmly
committed to the preservation of private property, as indeed it had to be. It
was precisely this which staked out the limits of the revolutionary social
changes that could be carried out, although the most radical years of the
French Revolution went very far indeed.
The family was temporarily undermined in order to serve the needs of the
revolution against its enemies, the feudal nobility and Catholic church. This
is one demonstration of the fact that social institutions which seem to be
immutable, to be "natural" and "eternal," are in fact
nothing more than the codification of social relations dictated by the
particular economic system that is in place. After the bourgeoisie consolidated
its power as the new ruling class, it re-established the constraints of the
family. But nothing would ever be the same again. The contradictory reality of
the French Revolution—the breathtaking leap in securing individual rights and
the strict limits imposed on those rights by the fact that this was a bourgeois
and not a socialist revolution—was captured by Karl Marx in The German
Ideology:
"The existence of the family is made necessary by its connection with
the mode of production, which exists independently of the will of bourgeois
society. That it was impossible to do without it was demonstrated in the most
striking way during the French Revolution, when for a moment the family was as
good as legally abolished."
The feminists who want to dismiss the bourgeois revolution as anti-woman end
up echoing those who justify suttee (widow-burning) in India and the imposition
of the chador in Iran and Afghanistan as "cultural differences."
Where the bourgeois revolution did not triumph, the status of women is
qualitatively inferior. It is enough to contrast the condition of women today
in West Europe with Afghanistan, groaning under the rule of the Islamic
fundamentalist Taliban.
I'll give you a very small example of what it meant to have a society in
which a rising, vigorous, productive class—the bourgeoisie—was held in check by
outmoded institutions. France was a Catholic country. In 1572, tens of
thousands of French Protestants were killed in the St. Bartholomew's Day
massacre, and more fled the country. The 1598 Edict of Nantes assured them the
free exercise of their religious beliefs, but this was revoked in 1685. Some of
the richest merchants were Protestant, but marriages performed by their own
pastors were not officially recognized. At the death of a spouse, you would
have distant Catholic relatives claiming the inheritance, because legally there
was no spouse and the children were illegitimate. Both Protestants and Jews accepted
divorce. In 1769, according to James Traer in his Marriage and the Family in
Eighteenth-Century France (1980), a respected author advocated permitting
divorce on the grounds that "the Protestant nations of northern Europe
were enjoying both population growth and prosperity while the Catholic states
of southern Europe were suffering from declining population and poverty."
But the conservatives always managed to get the law postponed.
Under the Old Regime, women had the right to exactly nothing. The monarchy
consistently sought to reinforce, supplement and extend the father's control
over the marriage of his children. Women found guilty of adultery were
sentenced to public whipping or imprisonment. Women were also put into convents
for life for adultery. Marriage was indissoluble—a life sentence. If you were a
man, you couldn't marry until you were 30 without your parents' permission. If
your family had property, your father could get the king to issue a lettre de
cachet, something like an unlimited arrest warrant, and you could be locked up
indefinitely. If you married a minor (under the age of 25 for women) without
permission, the penalty was death for rape notwithstanding the woman's consent.
By the way, actors and actresses couldn't marry either, because their
profession was viewed by the church as immoral.
The aristocracy was hardly committed to the sanctity of marriage. It was
said at the court of Louis XIV some decades before the revolution that the
aristocracy frowned on marital fidelity as being in bad taste, and a German
visitor noted, "I know of not a single case of mutual affection and
loyalty." I introduce this to make the point that marriage for the upper
classes was all about property. Many of the sans-culottes did not marry at all.
But in the Paris of the French Revolution, women were still largely dependent
on men for economic reasons (whether or not they were legally married).
Much debate and several pieces of draft legislation on marriage and divorce
had already been considered by the National Assembly before September 1792. All
proposed to make marriage d simple civil affair. However, what stood in the way
of this was the Catholic church. Those clergy who refused to swear an oath of
loyalty were threatened with deportation. But the Pope forbade it, and a lot
did refuse. Though some were deists or free thinkers, the bourgeois deputies in
the Assembly had no intention of suppressing religion; they nearly all agreed
that some kind of religion was necessary to keep the people pacified. But now they
had a big problem on their hands as the village priests became organizers for
counterrevolution.
The local priests not only carried out marriage ceremonies, baptisms and
funerals, but also recorded them. If these records were in the hands of hostile
forces, how could you count the population? You wouldn't even know if you had
enough draftees for the army. When in June 1792 the Minister of Justice wrote
that the civil war launched by the aristocracy and the church in the Vendee
region in southwest France had completely disrupted the keeping of records, one
delegate rose to propose that the marriage ceremony be abolished with the cry,
"Freedom or death!" So in some ways, the progressive marriage and
divorce laws enacted in September the same day as the victory at Valmy were war
measures.
The age of adulthood was lowered to 21 and marriage without parental consent
was legalized. This was followed by a June 1793 decree that proclaimed the
right of illegitimate children to inherit from both their mothers and their
fathers. At a stroke, the institution of the family lost one of its main
functions as the framework for the transfer of property from one generation to
the next. While inheritance rights didn't mean much to those without property,
the new laws also tended to legitimize "free unions." For example,
soldiers' common-law wives could receive government pensions.
Divorce had not been high on the list of grievances before the revolution,
but as the pamphlets flowered, so did the notion that divorce was a necessary
right in society. Probably rarely in history had a simple law so delighted the
female population. When a certain citizen Bellepaume came to the town hall
intending to oppose the divorce demanded by his wife, he found that she had
organized "a considerable number of citizens of both sexes, but chiefly
women" who pursued him in the corridors, abused him and tore his clothes.
In the first year after the divorce law was passed, women
initiated over 70 percent of all divorces. One woman wrote to the Convention:
"The female citizen Govot, a free woman, solemnly comes to give homage
to this sacred law of divorce. Yesterday, groaning under the control of a
despotic husband, liberty was only an empty word for her. Today, returned to
the dignity of an independent woman, she idolizes this beneficial law that
breaks ill-matched ties and returns hearts to themselves, to nature, and
finally to divine liberty. I offer my country six francs for the expense of
war. I add my marriage ring, which was until today the symbol of my
slavery."
The Society of Revolutionary Republican Women
The question of women's status in society had been a subject of debate
throughout the Enlightenment. The Encyclopedia, published just before the
revolution and intended as a compendium of all knowledge, contained four
contributions under the category "Women": one in favor of equality,
one ambiguous and two against. Even in a very radical work like Mary
Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), woman's role as
subordinate to man inside the family was not seriously called into question.
Wollstonecraft was part of a circle of British radical-democratic
revolutionaries who supported the French Revolution against English monarchical
reaction, even participating in the French government.
Most of the Enlightenment thinkers and writers concentrated on education for
women, and that was about it. Now, this is undeniably a very important
question, and it refuted the prevalent idea that women were inferior to men and
their brains worked in an inferior way. Only about a third of French women at
the time were literate. You'd find them during the revolutionary years at the
corner cafe with their glass of red wine, reading or listening to someone else
read Robespierre's latest speech. The hunger for knowledge was totally linked
to the desire to change society. Before 1777, France had no daily newspaper.
Two years later, there were 35 papers and periodicals and by 1789 there were
169. Thousands of political pamphlets rolled off the printing presses.
One of the novels based on the new research published in the last few years
has the Enlightenment philosopher Condorcet, who wrote very eloquently about
women's rights, and his lovely young wife enjoying long mornings reading a bit
of Voltaire or the equivalent of the Sunday New York Times in bed with their
cafe au lait, making love, and then getting up in the afternoon to walk in the
garden and do their very serious intellectual work. Not a bad life, right? But
it wasn't available to most people, of course. Condorcet ended by opposing the
execution of Louis XVI, ostensibly on the grounds of opposition to the death
penalty.
The working women of Paris who were a motor force in the revolution lived
very different lives. Perhaps 45,000 women in Paris, some 20 percent, were wage
earners; a similar percentage of women in cities like Lyon and Rouen worked.
Because of the war, women were able to break into traditionally male
professions and they were also employed at sewing, as domestic servants. Some
were proprietors of shops. Wives, legal or otherwise, of soldiers at the front
were given subsidies. The Paris municipal government and the political clubs
set up spinning workshops that at a certain point employed several thousand
women, though the wages were miserable. They were centralized by the government
office responsible for producing clothes for the troops.
It was from among these women of the sans-culottes that the Society of
Revolutionary Republican Women was formed in the spring of 1793. One of the
leaders of the society was the chocolate maker Pauline Leon, whom we last saw
with her pike on the October 1789 march to Versailles. Another was the actress
Claire Lacombe, who always followed her signature with "A Free
Woman." A third was Anne Felicite' Colombe, who owned a print shop.
Typography was generally a man's job, so she was already exceptional for this.
In 1791, she had been one of the four women arrested when the National Guard
shot down demonstrators at the Champs de Mars calling for the overthrow of the
monarchy. Colombe printed the revolutionary newspapers of Jean-Paul Marat,
L'Ami du Peuple (The Friend of the People) and L'Orateur du Peuple (The Orator
of the People). She was dragged into a libel suit, which she eventually won,
and distributed the 20,000-//vre settlement to the poor in her neighborhood.
While women did not win the right to vote for delegates to the Convention,
especially after the establishment of the Jacobin dictatorship in 1793 they
played a full role in the Parisian sectional assemblies, intervening,
presenting positions, voting and being elected as delegates. They refused to be
"servile women, domestic animals," as one put it in May 1793.
Interestingly, the one widespread demand for formal equality was for the right
to bear arms. In March 1792, Pauline Leon had led a delegation to present a
petition to the Assembly declaring:
"You cannot refuse us and society cannot remove from us this right
which nature gives us, unless it is alleged that the Declaration of Rights is
not applicable to women and that they must allow their throats to be slit, like
sheep, without having the right to defend themselves."
The women demanded the right to arm themselves with pikes, pistols, sabers
and rifles, and to assemble for maneuvers on the Champs de Mars. After much
debate, the Assembly moved to put the petition in the minutes with honorable
mention. Dozens of women actually went to the front when the war began, a few
as officers.
The Society of Revolutionary Republican Women solidly backed the Jacobins as
the revolutionary government and politically supported the extreme left Enrages
around Jacques Roux, who spoke for the popular masses. Just after the
Revolutionary Republican Women was founded, they mobilized the support of the
masses in the streets for the Jacobins, whose battle to oust the Girondins was
then coming to a head. As the split deepened, there were many more women than
men in the street gatherings, according to police reports. The Revolutionary
Republican Women dressed in military clothes and carried sabers. One account
has them waging a military battle in the Convention to get back the seats which
had been taken from them by supporters of the right-wing Gironde.
Reversal of Gains Under Thermidor
In October 1793, the society became one of the first organizations to be
banned by the Jacobin government. Those feminist historians I mentioned earlier
claim that this proves that the French Revolution was essentially hostile to
women. That's wrong. The society was banned not because it was composed of
women, but because it was one of the most radical expressions of the
sans-culottes.
Here's what happened. The Enrages and the Revolutionary Republican Women
fought for strict price controls, especially on food, and an upper limit on the
size of personal fortunes. In October, the Revolutionary Republican Women
launched a campaign to force all women to wear the revolutionary cockade. They
brought their campaign to Les Halles, the central marketplace in Paris. The
market women were of course hostile to the price maximum on food that had just
been imposed by the Jacobin government as a concession to the sans-culottes.
The question of the cockade was just the pretext for the major-league brawl
that ensued between the market women and the women revolutionaries. This fight
represented an early split in the Jacobins' base, and the Jacobins sided with
the market women, banning the Revolutionary Republicans.
The peasants wanted maximum food prices, the artisan-proletariat in the
cities wanted minimum ones, pointing to the spectre of a civil war which the
sans-cullotes could not win. The Jacobins could have tried to strike a deal,
but ultimately they could not satisfy the conflicting demands of the urban poor
and the peasantry. When revolutionary Russia in the early 1920s was confronted
with the "scissors crisis," as the price of scarce manufactured goods
rose and the price of agricultural products fell 3nd the peasants threatened to
withhold their produce, Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky proposed a course of
planned industrialization to make more manufactured goods available to the
peasants and maintain their support for the proletarian dictatorship. Trotsky's
proposal was rejected at the time (only to be implemented at forced-march pace
a few years later by Stalin). But such an option was objectively unrealizable
in the capitalist economic system of pre-industrial France.
By the fall of 1793, the Jacobins and revolutionary France were gasping for
air. Mandatory conscription had provoked mass uprisings in the Vendee; there
had been treachery at the front; the armies of the European monarchies had
reinvaded France; and Girondin provinces were seceding; Marat, the "friend
of the people," had been assassinated by the royalist Charlotte Corday.
Against this backdrop, the Revolutionary Republican Women, in their
revolutionary zeal against the market women, threatened to get in the way of
prompt and regular deliveries of food to the city from the countryside, without
which the Jacobins would have lost the allegiance of the urban masses.
Many of the revolutionary women continued to be active as individuals. Even
after being arrested by the Jacobin government, Claire Lacombe stayed loyal to
Robespierre. She never renounced her support, and after Robespierre's execution
she always refused to point out that she had been arrested by his revolutionary
government because she hated the idea of becoming a hero of the Thermidorians.
Women played a vanguard role in the last uprising of the French Revolution in
the spring of 1795, after Thermidor. The rallying cry was "Bread and the
Constitution of 1793!"
The modern feminist historians believe that the role of women who rose up
from the "cellars and catacombs" has been largely obscured because of
prevailing patriarchal attitudes in society. Or they seek to show that women
acted only on "women's issues," mainly food shortages. While there's
some truth in both these observations, they fundamentally miss the point. The
mass of active women in the French Revolution did not fight and organize as women
but as revolutionaries. And, as the October 1789 march that brought the king
back from Versailles showed, it wasn't simply the question of bread that
motivated them.
Thermidor marked the end of the radical phase of the revolution, and women
were among the first to feel this. This was especially true for divorced women,
who would have trouble finding work and maintaining themselves under the
conservative Thermidorians. Divorce became identified with the "ruin of
society" and the "torrent of corruption that invaded the cities and
especially Paris" during the Terror and the months that followed it. Proof
of a legitimate marriage became a requirement for soldiers' wives seeking to
receive aid. After May 1795, the Convention banned women from "attending
political assemblies," urging them to withdraw to their homes and ordering
"the arrest of those who would gather together in groups of more than
five."
The Napoleonic Code saw a further reversal of the gains of women. It's
reported that the only part of the deliberations on the Napoleonic Code that
Bonaparte sat in on was the Family Code enacted in 1804. The Family Code again
made women minors from the standpoint of the law, mandating that they had to
have the approval of their husbands for all contracts and so forth. In 1816, a
year after Napoleon was overthrown and the monarchy restored, divorce was
abolished.
For Women's Liberation Through Socialist Revolution!
I want to briefly trace the revolutionary continuity extending from the
French Revolution through the 19th century. The French Revolution, refracted
through Napoleon's armies, brought the first notions of women's equality to
hideously backward tsarist Russia. Following Napoleon's defeat, Paris was
occupied by Russian troops for a period of time. A number of young officers
spent a lot of time in the cafes talking to people about what had been going
on, and went back to St. Petersburg and led the Decembrist Uprising against the
tsarist autocracy in 1825. They fought, among other things, for women's equality.
The very first communist ideas came out of the analysis developed by some of
the radical Jacobins while in prison after the defeat of the Jacobin
dictatorship. Revolutionaries like Gracchus Babeuf, who organized the
Conspiracy of Equals, and Philippe Buonarroti came to believe that private
property itself was the cause of oppression. They provided a living link to
Marx and Engels, who issued the Communist Manifesto as the next revolutionary
wave swept Europe in 1848, declaring: "The bourgeois family will vanish as
a matter of course when its complement vanishes, and both will vanish with the
vanishing of capital." In France, a program was advanced for women's
emancipation that called for replacing domestic slavery with socially organized
and financed services. I found this 1848 program reprinted in an early 1920s
women's journal published by the French Communist Party, L'Ouvriere (The Woman
Worker).
In the Paris Commune in 1871, women once again played an extremely important
role. Marx described the Commune as the first realization of the dictatorship
of the proletariat, though it lasted less than three months. The women of the
Paris Commune were called the "incendiaries" by the reactionary
press, and a correspondent for the London Times wrote, "If the French
Nation were composed of nothing but women, what a terrible nation it would
be." But Marx hailed them: "The women of Paris joyfully give up their
lives on the barricades and execution grounds" (quoted in Edith Thomas,
The Women Incendiaries [1967]). When the French capitalist rulers finally
defeated the Commune after heroic resistance, they slaughtered at least 30,000
people in one week, and many thousands more were sent to penal colonies.
Today, bourgeois France is an imperialist power, where the July 14 storming
of the Bastille is celebrated as a chauvinist glorification of the
"grandeur of France"—much like July 4 here—while French colonial
atrocities are carried out to the music of the once-revolutionary hymn, the
Marseillaise.
We Trotskyists know that it will take world socialist revolution to do away
with the institutions which are the root cause of women's oppression. In our
fight to reforge Leon Trotsky's Fourth International, world party of socialist
revolution, to lead new October Revolutions around the planet, we are guided by
the words of the Fourth International's founding document, the 1938
Transitional Program: "The sections of the Fourth International should
seek bases of support among the most exploited layers of the working class, consequently
among the women workers. Here they will find inexhaustible stores of devotion,
selflessness, and readiness to sacrifice." Join us!
