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Women, Bread and the Anxious Patriarch in Revolutionary France

Published onFeb 09, 2023
Women, Bread and the Anxious Patriarch in Revolutionary France
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For centuries, bread has been a staple of the French diet and a symbol of national identity and pride. As something so ingrained in French culture and within the French household, bread provides a valuable platform for historical analysis that bridges both the public and private spheres. In eighteenth century France, high bread prices and bread shortages put in place by the government and local authorities sparked outrage and panic among the large lower class who relied on bread to survive. The responsibility of women to provide bread for their families compelled them to take to the marketplaces to protest and negotiate with vendors to lower prices on bread and grain. When peaceful protest proved futile, women intercepted and ransacked grain transportation vessels, raided mills and bakeries, and broke into and stole from local graineries to get the supplies they needed to feed their families. [1] The Women's March on the Palace of Versailles in 1789 was a watershed moment for women in the revolution, as Parisian women, armed and outraged, banned together to demand bread from King Louis XVI himself. This newfound female independence disrupted the social standards that confined women and their societal duties to the home, where they were to support their husbands and raise and educate their sons to be proper French citizens. [2] However, even amidst the Enlightenment, a movement that called for liberty and equality for all, in the end, women found themselves excluded from such natural rights and citizenship afforded to men despite their active participation in the revolution. While many enlightened men advocated for women to become citizens, most men disparaged women’s rioting. On one hand, men saw women’s call to action as maternal rather than civic, and on the other, women’s rioting was seen as an unseemly contradiction to their nurturing roles as wives and mothers and a manifestation of their inferior nature. Either way, women rioters were viewed as suspect rather than patriotic, and ultimately, women were denied citizenship in the new republic.

Although previous scholarship on women’s involvement in the French Revolution suggests that analyzing the participation of women in bread riots might reduce female revolutionary involvement to concern over food, I would argue that it is not reductionist to claim that the majority of French women's initial participation in politics can be attributed to their mobilization to demand fair bread prices. [3] Rather than dismissing women and their role in political affairs as it relates to “thinking with their stomachs”, [4] an understanding of the scope of female involvement with bread rioting legitimizes women’s claim to citizenship and reveals how this participation in the public sphere led to a greater “political consciousness” among women that extended from the grain riots. [5] It is this political consciousness that men intentionally undermined by citing the maternal nature of the protest and the unruly behavior of women rioters as reason enough to solidify a woman’s position within the private sphere of the home and away from political affairs.

In the 1780’s, the French government went bankrupt and bread shortages caused widespread hunger throughout France. When French women struggled to afford or even find bread in the marketplaces, they took matters into their own hands to protect their families and pressure the systems of governance that were benefiting from the bread shortages. Women rioted as mothers and wives to provide for their families in the harsh economic climate, which contributed to the gendering of the early grain riots as "female, or rather maternal terrain.” [6] To some extent, this characterization of the bread rioting as maternal was seen in part as a legitimizing quality, as one local official noted that “only powerful forces of misery and fear could draw women from the hearth to the crossroads of the marketplaces.” [7] However, the same maternal basis on which women were empowered to involve themselves in political rioting over bread shortages also became an argument for men to maintain that women’s revolutionary participation did not resemble acts of active citizenship but was merely an extension of their positions as mothers and providers within the private sphere of the home. Historian Joan Landes writes that “If a woman's service to the community was viewed as a function of her mothering role, the most likely consequence would be to offer women political representation in a mediated fashion.” [8] This concept that the political involvement of women on behalf of their families could prevent them from practicing proper citizenship revealed an inability of French society to tear the veil between gender and state. Dismissing women’s revolutionary involvement as a mere extension of women’s maternal responsibilities to the public sphere allowed men to curb their gender anxieties and reinstitute patriarchal dominance over women who were out of line.

The connection between bread rioting and motherhood also contributed to the misogynistic belief in the differences in nature between the sexes that made women unfit for citizenship. Many historians, including Joan Scott and Joan Landes, argue that it was the Enlightenment ideas relating to the natural body that were so entrenched in French society that men were convinced that the male and female differences in nature and body resembled a natural hierarchy that relegated women to the domestic sphere. [9] In A Discourse on Inequality, Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Raques Rousseau argues that the adoption of distinct gender roles was what brought the family into modernity as a “little society” where “women accustomed themselves to stay at home and look after the children, while the men rambled abroad in quest of subsistence for the whole family.” [10] Here Rousseau argues that the natural evolution of distinct gender responsibilities dictated that women belonged within the home, so the idea of them leaving the home, especially “in quest of subsistence” in the form of bread rioting, violently disrupted the natural order of things. Therefore, since citizenship was a natural right for men who belonged in the public sphere, it was unnatural for women to be citizens due to their evolutionary domestication. [11]

While women were discounted within the Revolution on the basis of motherhood, many believed that a woman’s role as mother and authority within the home was her largest political duty and her most natural and legitimizing claim to rights. [12] Therefore, men saw women’s active participation in rioting as an unnatural and delegitimizing form of political involvement and a manifestation of their inherent weaknesses as the inferior sex. By nature, women were perceived to be “emotional, sentimental and feeling creatures, e.g., irrational and lacking in conscience, and therefore unsuitable subjects of justice and the state.” [13] When detained and questioned about their participation in bread rioting, men often blamed their wives for involving them and starting the riots due to their inherent “disorderliness” and inability to control their impulses and emotions. [14] This understanding of women as weaker in nature was no new phenomenon and can be linked to a “disorderliness… in the Garden of Eden, when Eve had been the first to yield to the serpent’s temptation and incite Adam to disobey the Lord”. [15] Even while marching alongside women in bread riots and other revolutionary efforts, men were able to disparage women on the basis of their natural inferiority. One revolutionary recounted his experience leading the March on Versailles saying how the women he directed “conceal[ed] moral qualities, and above all, judgment, which always makes it possible for them to value sound advice” and that he “stooped to their level of intelligence” to describe the injustices being done unto them by the state. [16] Although this man was in the company of fellow revolutionaries, his perception of these women as immoral and lacking judgement resulted in him seeing the women as exploitable for the cause rather than equals in the fight for liberty. To many men, women’s rioting stripped them of their femininity, as it represented a sharp contrast to their traditional roles as passive contributors to society within their roles as wives and mothers. In a police report on the 1793 food disturbances in Paris, an officer reported that a “grocery boy [...] had been imprudent enough to brutally push back a pregnant woman, even threatening to string her up from a beam.” [17] While a pregnant woman symbolizes the role of mother, this grocery boy saw the rioter as a threat first and foremost. This exchange is symbolic of a larger theme in which men saw women rioters as brutelike, impulsive creatures, who could in no way be considered proper recipients of the right of citizenship.

Ultimately, the potential for women’s citizenship was extinguished by the appeal to women’s nature and her relegation to responsibilities within the home. Rather than viewing bread rioting as an impactful revolutionary effort, most men felt threatened by the ways in which women’s involvement in public matters disrupted traditional gender roles upheld by Enlightenment ideals. Although women were denied formal citizenship, they were never fully confined to the home after the revolution. In reality, women’s rioting for food on behalf of their families was a completely legitimate form of political participation that proved to be a valuable catalyst for increased political awareness among women beyond the revolution.

"Surrounded by her children, this woman represents conventionality and respectability."

“Provincial Painting—Minatures,” LIBERTY, EQUALITY, FRATERNITY:EXPLORING THE FRENCH REVOUTION, https://revolution.chnm.org/d/596.

"To Versailles, To Versailles!"

None Identified, “To Versailles, To Versailles!,” LIBERTY, EQUALITY, FRATERNITY: EXPLORING THE FRENCH REVOUTION, https://revolution.chnm.org/d/12.

"To Versailles, To Versailles!"

None Identified, “To Versailles, To Versailles!,” LIBERTY, EQUALITY, FRATERNITY: EXPLORING THE FRENCH REVOUTION, https://revolution.chnm.org/d/12.

Bibliography

“Police Reports on Disturbances over Food Supplies (February 1793),” LIBERTY, EQUALITY, FRATERNITY: EXPLORING THE FRENCH REVOLUTION, https://revolution.chnm.org/d/480

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, and Maurice Cranston. A Discourse on Inequality.Harmondsworth,Middlesex, England: Penguin Books, 1984.

Primary Source: Women in Revolutionary Paris, 1789–1795, edited and translated by Darline Gay Levy, Harriet Branson Applewhite, and Mary Durham Johnson. Copyright 1979 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Used with the permission of the University of Illinois Press.

Bouton, Cynthia A. "Gendered Behavior in Subsistence Riots: The French Flour War of 1775." Journal of Social History 23, no. 4 (1990).

Garrioch, David. "The Everyday Lives of Parisian Women and the October Days of 1789." Social History 24, no. 3 (1999): 231-49.

Hulfton, Owlen. “Social Conflict and the Grain Supply in Eighteenth-Century France” The Journal of Interdisciplinary History , Autumn, 1983, Vol. 14, No. 2, Hunger and History: The Impact of Changing Food Production and Consumption Patterns on Society (1983)

Kaplan, Steven L., and Sophus A. Reinert. Bread, Politics and Political Economy in the Reign of Louis XV Second Edition. Anthem Press, 2015.

Landes, Joan B. "WOMEN AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE: A Modern Perspective." Social Analysis: The International Journal of Social and Cultural Practice, no. 15 (1984): 20-31.

Natalie Davis, “Women on Top” in Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford, California: Stanford University, 1975).

Scott, Joan, “A Woman Who Has Only Paradoxes to Offer,” in Rebel Daughters: Women and the French Revolution, ed. Sarah E. Melzer and Leslie W. Rabine (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992)

Weiss, Penny A. "Rousseau, Antifeminism, and Woman's Nature." Political Theory 15, no. 1 (1987): 81-98.

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