Practiced Citizenship: Women, Gender, and the State in Modern France - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1496206665 ISBN 13: 9781496206664

Publisher: University of Nebraska Press, 2019

Synopsis

Over fifty years ago sociologist T. H. Marshall first opened the modern debate about the evolution of full citizenship in modern nation-states, arguing that it proceeded in three stages: from civil rights, to political rights, and finally to social rights. The shortcomings of this model were clear to feminist scholars. As political theorist Carol Pateman argued, the modern social contract undergirding nation-states was from the start premised on an implicit “sexual contract.” According to Pateman, the birth of modern democracy necessarily resulted in the political erasure of women.

Since the 1990s feminist historians have realized that Marshall’s typology failed to describe adequately developments that affected women in France. An examination of the role of women and gender in welfare-state development suggested that social rights rooted in republican notions of womanhood came early and fast for women in France even while political and economic rights would continue to lag behind. While their considerable access to social citizenship privileges shaped their prospects, the absence of women’s formal rights still dominates the conversation. Practiced Citizenship offers a significant rereading of that narrative.

Through an analysis of how citizenship was lived, practiced, and deployed by women in France in the modern period, Practiced Citizenship demonstrates how gender normativity and the resulting constraints placed on women nevertheless created opportunities for a renegotiation of the social and sexual contract. 

About this title

About the Author

Nimisha Barton is the associate director of the Freshman Scholars Institute and Programs for Access and Inclusion at Princeton University. Richard S. Hopkins is an assistant professor of history at Widener University. He is the author of Planning the Greenspaces of Nineteenth-Century Paris.
 

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Practiced Citizenship

Women, Gender, and the State in Modern France

By Nimisha Barton, Richard S. Hopkins

UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS

Copyright © 2019 Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-4962-0666-4

Contents

List of Illustrations, 
Foreword by Johnson Kent Wright, 
Introduction Nimisha Barton and Richard S. Hopkins, 
1. "Patriotic Discipline": Cloistered Behinds, Public Judgment, and Female Violence in Revolutionary Paris Katie Jarvis, 
2. Restoring the Royal Family: Marie-Thérèse and the Family Politics of the Early Restoration Victoria E. Thompson, 
3. Gender, Immigration, and the Everyday Practice of Social Citizenship Nimisha Barton, 
4. Hospital Policies, Family Agency, and Mothers at l'Hôpital Sainte-Eugénie, 1855–1875 Stephanie McBride-Schreiner, 
5. Illustrations as Good as Any Slides: Women's Activist Social Novels and the French Search for Social Reform, 1880–1914 Jean Elisabeth Pedersen, 
6. French Girls Are the Most Desired: Organizing against the White Slave Trade in the Belle Epoque Eliza Earle Ferguson, 
7. Vérine, the Ecole des Parents, and the Politics of Gender, Reaction, and the Family, 1929–1944 Cheryl A. Koos, 
8. Politics, Money, and Distrust: French-American Alliances in the International Campaign for Women's Equal Rights, 1925–1930 Sara L. Kimble, 
Afterword, 
Elinor A. Accampo, 
Contributors, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

"Patriotic Discipline"

Cloistered Behinds, Public Judgment, and Female Violence in Revolutionary Paris

Katie Jarvis

Two years into the French Revolution, just days before Holy Week of April 1791, the mood in Paris was far from peacefully contemplative. As Easter approached, rumors flew that counterrevolutionary nuns were colluding with priests who had refused to swear their loyalty to the Constitution. Journals painted pictures of "aristocrat-nuns" secretly attending "good" Masses with these refractory priests. Editors reported that the priests' sermons brazenly compared the counterrevolution to Christ, the government assemblies to tyrants, and the Revolution to Hell. However insulting this was to the nation, things truly exploded when the disgruntled nuns spanked their pupils for confessing to a pro-revolutionary priest. Unluckily for the nuns, their pupils happened to be the children of tenacious market women called the Dames des Halles.

The backlash would be remembered for "posterity" as one giddy witness put it. Fed up, the Dames des Halles literally took matters into their own hands and submitted the nuns to their own "correction." The market women dragged the counterrevolutionary nuns out of their cloistered convents into public streets. Swiftly lifting the nuns' skirts, the Dames struck the nuns' bare rears with bunches of straw and brooms. As the nuns prayed to endure the trial, the Dames exposed the nun's naked bottoms to the public gaze. The Dames boldly continued their rounds over two days to several counterrevolutionary convents throughout the capital. Most Parisians shared the Dames' anger. They worried that rebellious priests and nuns would undermine new religious reforms called the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. This controversial legislation subordinated the Catholic Church to the nation. As Parisians cheered on the Dames from the sidelines, they defended revolutionary reform.

The spanking spree generated numerous pamphlets and images that offer rich commentary on what the authors termed "patriotic discipline." In the aftermath the general public took delight in what one artist described as the "good lessons" that the "female citizens" gave to nuns who aided "fanatic priests." Most newspapers, pamphlets, and images satirically depicted the event but praised the market women's attack. The accounts burst with gendered tropes colored by sexual overtones. Citing an oft-repeated statistic, one watercolor proudly reported the Dames' accomplishment of "621 buttocks spanked; Total 310 and a half asses" since, as another pamphlet thankfully explained, "the Treasurer of the Miramionnes order only had one buttock."

The revolutionaries' endorsement of this collective violence among women stands in stark contrast to the deputies' condemnation of violent confrontations among women two years later. In 1793 officials lambasted fights that spilled out across the city's markets between the Dames des Halles and a women's political club. The two groups disputed price controls and patriotic clothing with their fists. The National Convention famously asserted that these massive brawls stemmed from women's irrationality, and, following this Rousseauian discourse, the deputies claimed women were unsuited for political participation. The National Convention then banned women's political clubs, which effectively blocked women from full citizenship until 1944. Led by Joan Landes, Joan Scott, Geneviève Fraisse, and Carole Pateman, scholars have built an enduring narrative of female citizenship across the longue durée based upon the gendered overtones of the deputies' 1793 ban. Modern French citizenship, they maintain, was inherently bifurcated by sex from the outset.

In contrast, by probing the Dames' violence in 1791 and other revolutionaries' reactions to it, this chapter overturns the notion that the revolutionaries immediately envisioned citizenship as masculine. During the nun spankings, no male or female revolutionaries blamed mass violence on natural feminine disorder. Far from condemning the Dames' assault on counterrevolutionary nuns as manifesting feminine deficiencies, public opinion celebrated the market women's violent attack as civic activism and explicitly championed the Dames as exemplary female citizens. The unexpected cleavage between the applause of 1791 and the ban of 1793 disrupts our historical starting block for modern female citizenship. How, then, did the revolutionaries conceptualize the relationship among gender, violence, and women's political action in 1791?

This chapter focuses on the slaps that echoed across the capital to ask two key questions: First, how did artists and pamphleteers use gender as a common key for portraying, judging, and re-disseminating the violence? I argue that the revolutionaries seized gendered tropes to denounce the nuns' moral and political failings. Writers spread rumors of convent lust and artists drew battered nuns in titillating poses to denounce them as counterrevolutionary plotters. For Parisian consumers, this well-worn imagery amounted to more than a sexual critique. Authors and illustrators relied on Parisians' understanding of gendered stereotypes to convey additional messages. They channeled their religious and political grievances across the nuns' beaten rears. Their tactics bring us to a second pivotal question: Why did male and female revolutionaries justify this collective violence among women in 1791? I argue that state officials could not condemn the Dames' attacks because the market women defended religious reform while thrashing the nuns. The Dames did not undercut their political legitimacy by lashing out at the vowed women. On the contrary, they strengthened it. The convent clashes suggest that the relationship between gender and violence was much more contingent than the deputies later maintained in 1793. The discrepancy reveals that the relationship between gender and citizenship remained uncertain in the formative stages of modern democracy. It forces us to reconsider the narrative arc that posits gender as the initial prerequisite for revolutionary citizenship.

The Counterrevolution in the Cloister

The revolutionaries began to overhaul their relationship between the Church and the state in 1789, but the centuries-old alliance between cross and crown created a political minefield. Four months after the fall of the Bastille, the deputies nationalized Church property as a way to generate revenue for the national debt. But in 1790 the deputies drastically wrested power from the Church by passing the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. In a series of volatile laws, the Legislative Assembly decreed that priests would become civil servants elected by parishioners, responsible to the nation, and paid by the state. In the late winter of 1791 the deputies required priests to take an oath "to the Nation, to the Law, and to the King, and to uphold with all their power the Constitution decreed by the National Assembly,'" and, in the same breath, to "watch carefully over the parish faithful who are entrusted to [them]." It became impossible to pledge equal allegiance to the revolutionary government and to St. Peter's seat in Rome. French clerics personally chose sides. All but seven French bishops refused the oath, and only half of parish priests accepted the stipulations on their collars. Revolutionaries considered nonjuring priests to be dangerous cadres of counterrevolutionaries who could sway the hearts and minds of their parishioners. Likewise patriotic newspapers warned that nuns and monks who sympathized with rebellious priests swelled the ranks of counterrevolutionary agents who plotted inside the nation.

Parisians reached into a deep arsenal of Old Regime anticlericalism to attack refractory priests and their nun and monk allies in the winter of 1790–91. For over two centuries the French had attacked clerics as undersexed or oversexed to buck their authority in local and national politics. Now the French redeployed these techniques with a vengeance to protect the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. Since the mid-eighteenth century, critics had increasingly questioned the virtues of celibate life. Priests failed to live up to the ideal Enlightenment father who served the public good by raising a family. Celibacy likewise robbed nuns of the opportunity to fulfill their highest gendered calling as mothers who raised moral children. Revolutionary propagandists seized these themes to portray "the celibate clergy as a nation within the nation" whose sexual and political loyalty lay with Rome and the counterrevolution.

But if revolutionaries chastised clerical celibacy, they feared the erotic relations of religious men and women in cloistered spaces even more. Sexual deviance had long formed the backbone of anticlerical sentiment. Pornographic novels portrayed "'unnatural' sexual practices that resulted from claustration." Court cases in which clerics sadistically abused their pupils fed public anxieties. Personal memoirs led the French to imagine that the sexually unimaginable hid in dark convent cells. Moreover, as Mita Choudhury has argued, Enlightenment and revolutionary writers wavered between portraying the convent as a sexual playground and as a place of unjust imprisonment. Aristocratic families could consolidate their inheritances by cloistering unlucky children in convents and monasteries. In the explosive atmosphere of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, revolutionaries imagined nonjuring priests and nuns as robbers of children's liberty as well as spiritual, sexual, and political seducers.

Exposing the Counterrevolution: The Parisian Spanking Sprees

The deputies had ridden roughshod over priests who challenged their authority since they instituted the oath in 1790, but anticlerical anxieties peaked just before April 1791. Provocative plays such as The Capuchins, The Nun Despite Herself, and The Priests' School bubbled with dissimulating priests, debauched nuns, and innocent children incarcerated by their families. For example, The Cloistered Victims, performed at the Théâtre de la Nation, wove the tale of a young girl whose fanatical mother throws her into a convent. There the nonjuring priest and treacherous mother superior abuse the innocent girl. She remains locked away until a juring priest, the revolutionary mayor, and the National Guard free her, much to the delight of theatergoers. The dismayed editor of the Journal général de France noted, "The spectators never fail, at every performance, to cry against the [counterrevolutionary] religious characters." Parisians theatrically rehearsed opening the counterrevolutionary cloisters before the market women invaded the real cloisters nine days later.

In early April the mounting tensions between nonjuring priests and Parisian revolutionaries came to a head as municipal officials replaced refractory clerics with juring, elected ones. On April 3 Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Gobel assumed his post as the new bishop of Paris. When the revolutionaries installed Gobel to lead the capital's faithful, they rejected the pope's bishop, confirmed their split with Rome, and entrusted religious morality to the state. The next day National Guardsmen escorted elected priests to their congregations throughout the capital. Père Duchesne, a leftist pamphlet character of the popular classes, had high hopes that the new clerics would be "more human, more charitable than the old ones." He abrasively offered lunacy certificates for asylum lockup "to the former Archbishop of Paris [and] to all the other Bishops, Priests, and to all the skullcapped john-fuckers who have not taken their oath." Patriotic citizens, the government, and their juring priests hoped to have thrown away the metaphorical key.

However, on April 4 rumors flew that the refractory clergy and counterrevolutionary nuns were plotting their next move. Parisians even speculated that scorned priests stuffed barrels of gunpowder into the church basement of Saint-Roch. The neighborhood grew so nervous that the National Guard had to search the dark caverns to disprove the paranoia. In this contentious environment, Antoine-Eléonor-Léon Leclerc de Juigné, the former archbishop of Paris, issued an incendiary ordinance against the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. On April 5 reports surfaced that nonjuring priests responded by rallying at the Sorbonne and that, together, "they declared the new Bishops elected by the People intruders." Newspapers incensed readers by reporting that three juring priests retracted their oaths during the meeting. In the course of one week the revolutionaries realized that their ecclesiastical system could unravel.

The revolutionaries suspected that hostile nuns would hide and support these rebellious priests. Nuns who staffed schools and hospitals did not have to take the oath. And Parisians feared the refractory clergy would work through them. Refashioning anticlerical traditions, Parisians hypothesized that the nuns' confessors seduced them into being counterrevolutionary agents. The revolutionaries suspected that "shameful monks" and "beguines, who were like submissive women imitating their lovers," engaged in debaucheries while plotting behind cloister grilles. The day after the rumored assembly of rebellious priests, a leftist pamphlet under the name of Mère Duchêne, the wife of the fictive Père Duchesne, explicitly attacked the nuns of St. Anne. She maintained the nuns "jumped with rage on the [revolutionary] catechisms" when their "wise" students wanted to welcome their new juring priest. In a passage filled with foresight, the fictitious Mère Duchêne eerily warned the nuns, "Behold the people who are running[,] they are going to bring you reason, they are going to thrash you ... in order to make you learn to shut yourselves away in your sphere."

Over the following two days, from April 6 to 8, Mère Duchêne's threats became a reality as the massive spanking spree rocked the capital. Saint-Roch became a hotbed once again. The market women had previously demanded that nuns there admit the elected priest and educate their children with the reformed catechism. The nuns, however, repelled their new priest and his National Guard escort with insults. They also refused to teach their pupils spiritual lessons that supported the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. After these final affronts, "the citizen mommies rushed [the convent] armed with switches" and took matters into their own hands.

The Dames des Halles raced across the city to at least eight of sixty Parisian convents to patriotically "discipline" the scrambling nuns. Although the revolutionaries accused all nuns of similar sins, pamphleteers who reproduced the event assigned each order a particular counterrevolutionary specialty. The writer of Song on the Whipped Asses: Historical Detail on the Communities of Grey Sisters, one of the least sensational pamphlets, accused the sisters at Saint Nicolas-des-Champs of turning away their juring priest and menacing the crowd with threats of cannons behind convent walls. The market women responded to these nuns by wielding bundles of sticks on their behinds. In contrast, the revolutionaries charged the Filles de Sainte Marie with spiritual and political plotting in the form of sexual collusion. The public first suspected that the order harbored nonjuring priests when they hosted twenty-two masses instead of the usual six. Parisians concluded that, in the arms of these welcoming nuns, "the refractory priests found all sensual satisfaction." On the other side of the Seine, the market women from the Place Maubert found a refractory priest and his seminarians hiding inside the convent of the Miramionnes. Because of the order's large pensions, the pamphleteer concluded that the Miramionnes attracted "some Priests, Monks & Abbots who knew well how to make them taste the joys of Paradise." The Miramionnes' wealth did not spare them from the Dames' slaps either. For two days the Dames reddened rears across the capital, from Saint Sulpice in the southwest to Saint Martin des Champs in the north and the Trinitaires de la Roquette in the eastern Faubourg Saint Antoine.

Amid whistling blows and clattering clogs, the Dames physically delineated two clear rivals: counterrevolutionary religious persons faithful to Rome and citizen supporters of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. Yet the two sides in the nuns affair stretched beyond factional politics. On a fundamental level the market women and the nuns engaged in a battle between two competing discourses of "good" and "evil." One account reported that a "Dame-Citizen" shouted that the nuns had "dared" to choose the "house of God" for their mischievous activities. Revolutionary pamphleteers painted the Dames' busy hands as the earthly hands of God, who "wants to punish" nuns. Ensuing articles frequently called the spankings "Patriotic Discipline" or "Corrected Fanaticism." Thus the Dames punished the nuns' ideological misbehavior just as the nuns would punish their children. One spiritually indignant journalist huffed that the "fanaticism" of these Roman supporters especially had no place in the upcoming "holy week."

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Practiced Citizenship by Nimisha Barton, Richard S. Hopkins. Copyright © 2019 Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS.
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Edition details

• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Publication date: 2019
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1496206665
• ISBN 13: 9781496206664
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 330
• Editor: Barton Nimisha, Hopkins Richard S.