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The Family on Trial in Revolutionary France. By Suzanne Desan (Berkeley: CA: University of California Press, 2004).
FAMILY TIES IN REVOLUTIONARY PERSPECTIVE
| By Jeremy D. Popkin |
University of Kentucky |
| Suzanne Desan's The Family on Trial in Revolutionary France opens many new perspectives on our understanding of how the Revolution affected the lives of the French population—men, women, and children—and on the converse process by which the family concerns of ordinary people affected the period's politics. Desan's dense and complex arguments, backed up by detailed evidence from the period's political debates, legal codes, and citizens' petitions to the legislature, challenge familiar assumptions about many issues, ranging from the nature of citizenship and the changes in women's roles in the Revolution to the extent of the continuity from the revolutionary to the Napoleonic period. As Desan shows, the interactions between family concerns and revolutionary politics were complicated, and her conclusions do not lend themselves to summary in simple formulas. Nevertheless, she has convincingly demonstrated that the revolution's "conflict of discourses" vitally affected people's most intimate relationships, and that revolutionary legislation was shaped by the everyday experiences of family life. At a time when historians have largely abandoned the attempt to understand the French Revolution in social terms, Desan offers a new vision of what a social interpretation of that event might mean, one that emphasizes "the interactions between social practices and cultural construction" (5) rather than social structure and class conflict. |
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The revolutionary legislators quickly realized that their efforts to "invent the rights-bearing, legal individual within a newly secularized state" and to "remold social bonds and practices to promote equality, liberty, and unity" (3) implied a reshaping of the family. Under the Old Regime, "the legal stature of each ... subject had been determined in part by his or her familial status," (7) and attempts to make equality a fundamental norm required a redefinition of family relationships as well as political ones. The revolutionaries had no intention of abolishing the family or even reducing its importance in French society, nor did the male legislators want to abolish gender differences, which they understood as natural. On the contrary, at every stage of the Revolution, the family was defined as the basis of society, and men and women were seen as having distinct, though complementary, public duties. Nevertheless, the revolutionary legislators' emphasis on the rights of the family's individual members and of the conjugal unit as opposed to the interests of the lineage radically redefined the institution. At the same time, the Revolution's language of natural rights gave family reformers powerful new weapons to argue against existing patterns of family relationships, which, as Sarah Hanley and others have shown, were strongly related to the political principles of the Old Regime. |
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Family-law issues had little to do with the political crisis that led to the summoning of the Estates General, but the expectation of radical change engendered by the events of 1789 encouraged numerous pamphlets calling for changes in family law. Once the National Assembly had passed the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen and defined society as the product of a contract among free individuals, alterations in family law became unavoidable. Free and equal citizens could not logically be left subjected to parental authority long after they had reached adulthood, nor did indissoluble marriage bonds fit with the notion of individual rights. Divorce now appeared as a natural right and "freedom of the heart" as a fundamental liberty (26). In stressing this point, Desan differs with the views of William Reddy, who, in his recent study of "emotional regimes" in the revolutionary era, maintains that the revolutionaries regimented emotional expression prior to thermidor, ultimately setting impossible standards for proper "patriotic" feelings.1 |
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