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REVIEWS
| The Family on Trial in Revolutionary France. By Suzanne Desan (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004. xiv plus 456 pp. $50.00).
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| A book review can scarcely begin to explain the significance of Suzanne Desan's The Family on Trial in Revolutionary France. In short, this work, though it almost completely eschews a polemical style, takes on three major positions developed since the early 1970's regarding the French Revolution. First, despite an early commitment to social history, revolutionary scholars abandoned it even sooner than many other historians for the linguistic turn. Although Desan uses discourse, especially regarding the construction of gender, she remains committed to social history, in order to explore behaviors. In large part, this study relies on techniques used by family historians. Second, the book challenges the main substantive assertions by François Furet and others that the Revolution, despite a nod to libertarianism, became quickly absorbed in egalitarian concerns that led directly to the Terror. To the contrary, Desan believes that the revolutionaries initiated a radical individualism in policy and practice concerning the family that would, despite a retreat in the nineteenth century, never be completely undone. And as many scholars before her have done, she finds that views of family were central to the entire eighteenth-century project of change: While the Old Regime depended on a king and patriarchy, the new would be democratic and egalitarian in family interactions. |
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Finally, and more openly here than for the other themes already noted, the work confronts the dominant thesis regarding the revolution and gender announced first by Joan Landes in 1988 and still largely triumphant. In the reigning approach, the Enlightenment and Revolution from the start were hostile to women. The nineteenth century cult of domesticity located its origin in this revolutionary development. Instead, for Desan, the Enlightenment attacked the paternalism of the Old Regime and the Revolution and replaced it with a system raising the individual to new heights. In short, marriage—sounding very modern—became the contract between two free people who could dissolve it at will. In this version, domesticity emerged as a reaction against this revolutionary endeavor. |
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A brief review can only give a summary and outline of the structure and arguments of The Family on Trial. The initial chapters analyze the Enlightenment's assault on the patriarchal Old Regime and the development of the revolutionaries' new vision. Desan assumes that one can generally speak of a revolutionary approach to constructing the family that began in 1789 and persisted through the decade. From this view emerges a revolutionary definition of family relations. Desan finds three essential characteristics. First, as part of the new definition of the autonomous individual, men and women freely entered marriage and were thus entitled to break such vows through divorce. Families were made up of individuals, so that the revolutionaries allowed partners to manage their own financial resources. |
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Second, such rampant libertarianism was not, however, supposed to dissolve the family or society. Just as the revolutionaries expected political freedom would produce social attachment, so they also expected individuals to generate stronger families. Desan argues that "... the natural bonds of conjugal love and family unity assumed ever greater importance as an imagined source of political transformation as well as social cohesion" (p. 90) Marriage could then harmonize liberty and social bonds. |
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