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Book Review
| Jennifer Ngaire Heuer, The Family and the Nation: Gender and Citizenship in Revolutionary France, 1789–1830, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005. Pp. viii + 256. $34.95 (ISBN 0-8014-4286-9).
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| The Family and the Nation is a major contribution to scholarship on nationality and on gender and citizenship. It analyzes French policies on national citizenship from the Old Regime through the Restoration and demonstrates how unforeseen contradictions were built into the Napoleonic Civil Code, and thus into the law of the many countries influenced by it. |
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The book explores tensions between "the rights and duties associated with the personal status of 'French citizen' and those associated with men and women's legal position within the family" (2). Several aspects of it are innovative. First, the author notes that scholarship on nationality law often neglects gender, while that on gender and citizenship often focuses on issues of political rights. She argues that it is vital to look at family, gender, and nation together to see how "changes in each domain reinforced or challenged one another" (9). Furthermore, Heuer uses an extraordinary range of sources to understand both law and practice: not only legislation and parliamentary debates, but also police files, administrative reports, case law, and citizens' petitions. Using archives from both Paris and the frontier region of Alsace, she offers excellent reminders about the differences between legislation and its implementation, and between the expectations of framers and the real-world effects of their laws, especially in a time of chaos such as the French revolutionary wars. Heuer also highlights the human dimension to nationality law. |
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An additional strength of this study is its longue durée. While most works on this period focus either on the Old Regime or Revolution or postrevolutionary era, Heuer is interested in subtle continuities and ruptures across the entire period. In adopting this approach, she reaches conclusions closer to Isser Woloch (The New Regime [New York: W. W. Norton, 1994]) than to Tocqueville (who famously argued that the revolutionaries, despite their assertions, largely continued efforts begun by the Old Regime). Like Woloch, Heuer contends that the French Revolution departed from the Old Regime in many crucial areas, and that the Restoration continued many revolutionary and Napoleonic innovations rather than returning to the prerevolutionary system. She notes that in the Old Regime, citizenship was not presumed to carry political rights, so nationality applied to men and women. The "new regimes," however, eventually stripped women of independent nationality, tying their status to that of husbands or fathers. |
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Part I examines the relationship between familial and national bonds during the Revolution. The author explains that, as the nation replaced the king as a citizen's object of allegiance, the revolutionaries defined national citizenship as "an individual and voluntary contract" for men and women alike (20). Though this kind of patriotism was not foreseen as changing women's status, it had the effect of requiring them to make independent decisions, particularly in cases of emigration; wives of émigrés were defined as traitors if they followed their husbands abroad (unlike in the American Revolution). Many revolutionaries and administrators were troubled by the implications of this policy for gender roles in France, and it was not implemented uniformly. After the Terror, as Heuer explains in Part II, authorities began "to subordinate national bonds to familial ones while still arguing that women had important duties as members of the nation" (13). Administrators increasingly suggested that male heads of household should mediate their dependents' relationship with the state. |
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Part III looks at the Civil Code's effect on family and nationality, particularly in "systematizing modern forms of 'Frenchness'" and "in institutionalizing hierarchical family relations" (123). The Code aimed to give male heads of household positions within the family analagous to Napoleon's place in the state. Yet "the new legislation was almost immediately challenged . . . and its interpretation and application were often as important as its initial formulation . . . " (124). Particularly confusing to administrators were cases with immigrant husbands and French wives. With the return of the Bourbons, national bonds were further subordinated to family ones. French women married to foreigners were subsumed under their husband's nationality; foreign women were told they could not naturalize in France, since naturalization was only relevant to those with political rights, which women did not have. The Code's approach to naturalization, Heuer argues, was adopted by several other nations, and did not change in France until 1973. Heuer notes, however, that "The postrevolutionary order was far less coherent than many of the legislators and politicians of the new regime wanted to believe" (191); in Alsace, villagers and local administrators alike often treated foreign men as French when they married local women. |
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Heuer's book is fascinating, and the author has a talent for finding interesting stories in the archives that bring abstract legal issues to life. She has a keen eye for detail, and while it would be possible to become confused by all of the changes of the era, Heuer does a fine job of guiding the reader through their nuances. The book is likely to be of major interest not only to scholars of the French Revolution, but also to those who study nationality, gender, comparative legal history, and modern political theory. |
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| Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall
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| California State University—San Marcos |
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