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Book Review
| Suzanne Desan, The Family on Trial in Revolutionary France, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. Pp. 470. $50.00 (ISBN 0-520-23859-1).
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| In this engaging, well-researched, and comprehensive account of how French revolutionaries sought to remake the family and thereby regenerate the state, Suzanne Desan works her way from 1789 through Napoleon's Civil Code of 1804, examining a variety of issues that are typically studied in isolation—including, marriage, divorce, inheritance, paternity, and illegitimacy. She argues that the revolutionaries sought to use law and legal institutions to restructure the family on the basis of free choice, equality, and "natural" affection. Since they viewed the family as the core building block of state and society, they thereby hoped to remake politics. Accordingly, they defined marriage as a civil contract subject to dissolution through divorce, limited fathers' power to control children's marital choices and property, and required greater equality in inheritance. Through such reconstructed family life, they believed, individuals would learn to conduct relationships on the basis of liberté, égalité, fraternité and would thereby become better people and better citizens. |
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Admirably, Desan combines the insights and tools of two methodologies whose practitioners usually fail to engage with one another: cultural history (with its attention to discursive practices of power) and social history (with its focus on actual, lived experience). She examines the discourse deployed in such materials as petitions to the National Assembly, pamphlets, legal briefs, and speeches, while also undertaking an empirical study of family-law cases decided in Calvados, a Department in Normandy. The revolutionaries, she thus demonstrates, succeeded in refashioning attitudes towards familial and gender relations and in remaking actual families and their socio-economic practices. But she recognizes that change, while significant, was not uniform, and instead varied, depending on such factors as wealth, professional status, and urban or rural residence. |
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Desan concludes that it was precisely because the revolutionaries proved so successful in remaking the family that they engendered an intense backlash against their novel ideas and practices—a backlash that emerged in the Thermidorian period and that was subsequently enshrined in the largely reactionary Napoleonic Code. In arguing that women's subjugation arose in reaction to, rather than as a product of, revolutionary ideology and practice, Desan provides a much needed corrective to the prevailing feminist critique of the Revolution. According to this critique, the Revolution divided a (male) public sphere from a (female) private sphere, such that, in the modern liberal state, only men could be citizens, and women were necessarily relegated to domesticity. This feminist critique has long been subject to criticism regarding, among other things, its identification of Rousseau's undisputed misogyny with the entirety of Enlightenment thought and its faulty characterization of the Revolution as a univalent force, with a single, unwavering attitude towards women. Desan, however, is the first to construct a comprehensive, alternative account of the Revolution's approach to citizenship and gender. In this account, she identifies how attempts to reconstruct the family enabled women to reposition themselves in relation to domineering husbands and fathers and to conceive of a new role for themselves in family, state, and society. Yet, this is no paean. Desan recognizes that the Revolution sometimes hurt, rather than helped women—as in the case of unwed mothers, who were forbidden to file paternity suits, on the theory that liberated men would freely choose affective, paternal bonds. |
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Because Desan focuses on the Revolution and, in so doing, seeks to correct the view that it institutionalized the Enlightenment's supposedly latent misogyny, she largely ignores pre-revolutionary developments and underplays continuities with both the Old Regime and the nineteenth century. For example, while she briefly acknowledges that the conception of marriage as contract arose prior to the Revolution, she emphasizes the Old-Regime view of marriage as a Catholic sacrament—thereby highlighting the radical nature of the revolutionaries' decision to secularize it. But while this decision was indeed radical, Desan's emphasis on dechristianization obscures important links between Old Regime, Revolution, and beyond. Indeed, after a brief discussion of the Revolution's efforts to wrest control of civil record keeping from the clergy, the Church largely disappears from her account. Yet, Desan herself remarks on the continuing power of the nonjuring priests who refused to swear loyalty to the Revolution and later observes that "the clergy maintained a powerful informal influence over intimate relations into the modern era." (315). Indeed, as is well known, the loyalty of women to the Church played a key role in its nineteenth-century resurgence. To the extent that nonjuring priests continued (clandestinely) to perform such sacraments as marriage and baptism, then surely—if we seek to explore the discourses and practices of family during the Revolution—these Christian discourses and practices are an important source to consider. This is to ask much, however—perhaps, indeed, too much—of a book that is already remarkably comprehensive and that will no doubt serve for years to come as the deservedly foundational text on family in the French Revolution. |
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| Amalia D. Kessler
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| Stanford Law School |
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