Revolutionary Ideas: An Intellectual History of the French Revolution From the Rights of Man to Robespierre (25 page)

Plans for reforming the marriage laws, ending the dowry system, and introducing civil divorce had been nurtured by the radical philosophes for decades.
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“Philosophy,” explained Brissot in his
Lettres philosophiques sur Saint Paul
(1783), requires every enlightened nation to adopt a comprehensive divorce law because an enlightened society refuses to chain together “irrévocablement” husbands and wives who make each other unhappy.
⁶⁰
Before the 1780s, only Diderot, d’Holbach, and a few others urged such a reform, but by 1789 the concept was being broadcast widely, especially by Mirabeau, Brissot, and Condorcet.
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The obvious injustice of laws that reduced women “to the condition of slaves” and compelled a mistreated wife to remain under her husband’s tyranny (unless she could prove her life was in danger) must end and a more rational marriage system instituted.
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But little progress was made initially despite legal removal of the obstacle of religious vows and sacraments, which were nowhere, the Cercle reminded readers, explicitly endorsed in the emerging Constitution.
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Mirabeau
was the first to propose civil divorce in the Assembly, noted an abused wife writing to the
Chronique de Paris
on 22 January 1792. During the early Revolution, little attention was paid to female victims whom “our barbaric laws still oblige to live under their husbands’ cruel domination.” Tyrannized by her father and married off at thirteen to a drunken gambler who abused her dreadfully, this lady longed for the liberation civil divorce alone could bring. Legal divorce would already be available, she lamented, had not Mirabeau’s death “aborted all the good he wanted to do.”
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From January 1790, the Condorcet circle initiated several motions in the Assembly to improve the lot of women.
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Condorcet designated indissolubility of marriage as a blight on society and prime cause of prostitution, bastardy, wife-beating, and emotional misery.
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France’s marriage laws must be reformed, urged the Cercle, especially by instituting a comprehensive divorce law according women equal rights with men in seeking divorce.
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The 1791 Constitution did make marriage a civil contract but failed to equalize marriage rights or provide for divorce. Philosophically, the case for seeing divorce as essential to human freedom is unanswerable, commented the
Chronique de Paris
, reviewing the forty-page text
La necessité du divorce
by the writer Cailly on 6 January 1791; yet civil divorce and treating men and women equally continued to be opposed by most of the general public and most of the legislature.
⁶⁸
Support for civil divorce, it should be noted, invariably went hand in hand with republican views and antagonism to religious authority.
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“Divorce is forbidden by the Christian religion,” the Abbé Royou reminded his readers on 25 February 1792, celebrating the repulse in the Assembly of the draft divorce law supported by Cercle leaders and democratic journalists. No one in France advocated divorce, declared Royou (with only scant exaggeration), aside from philosophes,
déistes
, Protestants, and Jews.
⁷⁰

Condorcet’s arguments for woman’s political emancipation appeared first in his article of July 1790,
Sur l’admission des femmes aux droits de la cité
. Women may be unequal in physical strength but are men’s equals in intellect and moral stature, even if this becomes evident only when we disregard the “inequality with which the sexes are treated by the laws, institutions, custom, and prejudice.”
⁷¹
Only stupidity and barbarism could sustain a code as “impertinent as that contemporary society applied to women,” Charles-Michel du Plessis, Marquis de Villette (1736–93), an ex-noble who had formally renounced his former noble status concurred in the
Chronique de Paris
that same month. He had no wish
to waste his time on “fools and the ignorant,” he added: he knew perfectly well most of the public took no interest in women’s rights; his goal was to persuade men of discernment and understanding—philosophes. Reason, morality, and the progress of the sciences and arts had all transformed women no less than men. Was any contradiction more “revolting” than that great sovereigns like Catherine II and Maria Theresa, acknowledged by Europe’s powers, would be excluded from “our political assemblies” and organizations? For many centuries women had been subjected to senseless “feudal servitude”; “our legislators” should now accord the twelve million females in France “the rights they possess from nature.” Villette especially championed women’s right to attend the primary assemblies and participate in their decisions.
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“Woman, be a
citoyenne
!” within the French Revolution hence remained exclusively the call of la philosophie and republican philosophisme. It was not promoted by liberal monarchism, Marat’s populism, or any other revolutionary political, cultural, or social movement. Backed by Condorcet, Bonneville, Brissot, Villette, and the Revolution’s leading women—Gouges, Palm, and Sophie Condorcet—an argued, developed, politically organized feminism that conquered a narrow but real enclave in the public sphere was forged for the first time in human history. As a public persona, Sophie Condorcet was undoubtedly eclipsed by Mme. Roland, Palm d’Aelders, and the fiery Gouges. Angered by the Assembly’s refusal to consider women’s rights, Gouges, before 1789 a high-class
courtisane
and then dramatist, published her famous
Declaration of the Rights of Women
in September 1791. To highlight her satirical intent, she composed it in the same number of articles, seventeen, as in the Declaration of the Rights of Man. Her first four articles proclaimed:

(I)   Woman is born free and lives equal to man in her rights. Social distinctions can be based only on the common good.

 (II)   The purpose of any political association is the conservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of woman and man; these rights are liberty, property, security, and especially the right to resist oppression.

(III)   The principle of sovereignty rests essentially in the nation, which is nothing but the union of woman and man. No body or individual can exercise authority that does not derive expressly from the nation.

(IV)   Liberty and justice consist in restoring all that belongs to any, to all. Thus, the only limits on the exercise of the natural rights of
woman are perpetual male tyranny. These boundaries are to be reformed by the laws of nature and reason.

The first gathering of the Cercle’s “women’s circle” who established their own
directoire
, meeting at the offices of the Cercle in the Paris Théâtre-Français section, occurred in March 1791. In her inaugural speech as their first “president,” Etta Palm d’Aelders, an emancipated lady from Groningen (close to Brissot and Carra) who had lived in Paris since 1774 and was the translator of Mirabeau and Condorcet into Dutch, expressed the hope that their group would secure concrete advantages for women. Earlier, in December 1790, she had delivered an acerbic discourse on how French law discriminated against the female population, which was later printed by the Cercle Social.
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“Our holy Revolution,” proclaimed Palm d’Aelders “we owe to the progress of philosophy”; but now a second revolution must be wrought by la philosophie, this time in social practice, so that discrimination against women, condemned by
la vraie philosophie
, “gives way to a gentle, just and natural order.”
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Palm d’Aelders spoke optimistically of the future, lauding the Cercle Social “the first organization in France to admit women to political meetings.”
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The March 1791 meeting agreed to establish a full-fledged society with local branches, admission cards, and a vetting system for excluding undesirable types, so as to ensure the women’s circle consisted only of “excellentes patriotes.”
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Each Paris section needed its own locally affiliated
société patriotique de citoyennes
that met weekly and was sustained by a small entry fee. These women’s section associations would spread enlightenment, assist the destitute, run nurseries for children of unmarried women and vagrant girls, and help guard society against “the people’s enemies,” namely, aristocrats, royalists, and theologians.
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Charity schools, presently entrusted to ignorant beings “nourished on prejudices of all kinds,” should also come under their supervision.

The fight was on in Paris, and soon also provincial centers like Caen and Bordeaux, where local patriotic societies likewise set up women’s circles. Etta Palm continued delivering speeches defending women’s rights. Many of these speeches were subsequently printed by the Cercle. To develop a sound moral sense in women, society must provide education equal to that for men, not impose unequal restrictions and penalties. The law, urged Palm d’Aelders, should protect women and men equally and promote equality within marriage. She especially deplored the Assembly’s new police code, with its Article XIII, which stipulated that adultery charges could be brought only by husbands against wives,
and that women convicted of adultery, unlike men, could be imprisoned. She excoriated all the highly unequal laws concerning adultery and the one-sided arrangements for matrimonial settlements, labeling the corpus of supposedly revolutionary marriage law approved by the Assembly’s constitutional committee an affront to human rights that rendered women men’s slaves.
⁷⁸
“Moderate” monarchist papers, like the
Gazette universelle
, vilified her as an extremist democrat,
contre-révolutionnaire
, prostitute, and agent of the Prussian court in “criminal correspondance with the nation’s enemies.”
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A hard-hitting retort by Palm d’Aelders, carried by the
Bouche de fer
, accused the Assembly of abasing women with barbaric rules indubitably formulated by a constitutional committee that consulted “theologians instead of
philosophes
.”
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Scorn, noted Villette, was the usual response among both sexes to the Cercle’s campaign on behalf of women. Palm d’Aelders, protested many, seemed not to consider sexual chastity something that should be imposed upon women. But here the clash was complicated by the ongoing conflict between radical thought and populist Rousseauisme. Not a few, including Ginguené, extolled Rousseau’s
Lettre à d’Alembert
for censoring everything impinging on woman’s virtue, everything worldly, and philosophique detrimental to woman’s special charm.
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Robert’s ardently Rousseauiste wife, Louise Kéralio-Robert, a prominent political journalist collaborating with him on the
Mercure national
, furiously attacked Palm d’Aelders and her feminist cohort. The Cercle should concentrate on improving morals, not establishing women’s political clubs or seeking woman’s emancipation. Instead of convening a “crowd of idle and curious women,” the Cercle should follow Jean-Jacques in exhorting women to chastity, staying at home, and concerning themselves with children and serving their husbands, not with meetings and enlightenment.
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The marriage laws were eventually further reformed, and civil divorce was secured on 20 September 1792, when the legislature finally mustered sufficient votes, at Brissot’s urging, to institute civil divorce in law, with incompatibility of temperament firmly included among grounds for ending marriages.
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But most of the Cercle’s women’s rights program was not accomplished. Opposition arose on all sides. The philosophes had acquired their ability to influence society, warned Feller, in no small part by appealing to young and pretty women. If the philosophisme behind the Revolution advanced further, women would become “the instruments of their power,” endorsing their arrogance,
tolérantisme
, and freeing the passions, dissolving the very fabric of society.
⁸⁴
Opposition
stemmed not least from among Faubourg Saint-Antoine workingmen, chief focus of Marat’s authoritarian populism. On returning from a hard day’s work, they wanted their dinner, complained the men, not to find their wives had gone out to political meetings.
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Putting women in their place became a goal of Rousseauist populist authoritarianism, no less than of the Counter-Enlightenment war on philosophisme. As authoritarian populism gained ground in 1793, women’s emancipation inexorably receded. During the Robespierriste repression (1793–94), Chaumette, a leading proponent of the drive to confine women to the home, denounced Olympe de Gouges as the very epitome of the revolutionary virago, a dangerous man-woman and sexually immoral creature.
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Most of the agenda of woman’s emancipation projected by Condorcet and the Cercle, Robespierriste reaction ensured, remained a distant ideal.
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The secte philosophique fought to emancipate blacks, Jews, and women. They likewise strove to alleviate the plight of the “illegitimately” born and the social stigma condemning pregnancy and births out of wedlock. Villette, an ex-marquis of notoriously homosexual proclivities, published an open letter in the
Chronique de Paris
in August 1790 demanding justice and humanity also for “these unfortunates called natural children.” Laws were urgently needed to rescue the illegitimate from the demeaning abasement to which for centuries theologians had condemned them. Existing laws curtailed their inheritance rights and unjustly disallowed their legacies. Church law excluded them from the priesthood. As a bastard, the great académicien d’Alembert was unable to leave a final testament or receive a proper funeral. “Prejudice scarcely allows the illegitimate to exist.” It was an issue taken up by the Cercle repeatedly. It was the Assembly’s duty, contended Villette, to acknowledge the illegitimate as full “citizens” enjoying equal rights.
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