2 Thanks to influential contributions by American and French feminist scholars, we now have a much better understanding of women's participation in the revolutionary movement, especially women of the popular classes.  For essential reading, see Darline Gay Levy, Harriet Branson Applewhite, and Mary Durham Johnson, eds., Women in Revolutionary Paris, 1789-1795: Selected Documents, Translated with Notes and Commentary (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979); Dominique Godineau, Women in Revolutionary Paris, trans. Katherine Streip (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988);  Harriet B. Applewhite and Darline G. Levy, ed., Women and Politics in the Age of Democratic Revolution (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990).

3 In Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988), I addressed the contradiction between the proclamation of universal law and the constitutional privileging of gender.  Important exceptions to men's opposition to female activism, however, should be noted:  the Enragés, who encouraged militant women's activism, and whose leaders were political allies and intimates of key women in the revolutionary women's club “Society of Revolutionary Republican Women”; members of the Girondin circle, particularly David Williams and Antoine-Nicolas de Condorcet, who argued on behalf of women's rights; and also the Jacobins, who, up to a point, encouraged politicized working class women's participation on their behalf.  See my discussion, however, of the limits and contradictions of such support in Visualizing the Nation: Gender, Representation, and Revolution in Eighteenth-Century France (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2001), esp. pp. 128-134, 218-219.  Besides the important contributions cited in note 2, see Darline Gay Levy and Harriet B. Applewhite “Women and Militant Citizenship in Revolutionary Paris,” in Rebel Daughters: Women and the French Revolution, ed. Sara E. Melzer and Leslie W. Rabine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992); Elisabeth Roudinesco, Theroigne de Mericourt: A Melancholic Woman during the French Revolution, trans. Martin Thom (London: Verso, 1991); Maïté Albistur and Daniel Armogathe, Histoire du féminisme français (Paris: des femmes, 1977); Suzanne Desan, “‘Constitutional Amazons’: Jacobin Women's Clubs in the French Revolution” in Re-creating Authority in Revolutionary France, ed. Bryant T. Ragan, Jr. and Elizabeth A. Williams (Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1992); Joan Wallach Scott, Only Paradoxes to Offer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996).  For recent contributions stressing the Revolution positive results for women, see: Carla Hesse, The Other Enlightenment: How French Women Became Modern (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001); Suzanne Desan, The Family on Trial in Revolutionary France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); and Lynn Hunt, “Male Virtue and Republican Motherhood,” in The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture, vol. 4, The Terror, ed. Keith M. Baker (Oxford: Pergamon Press, 1994), pp. 195-208; Lynn Hunt, “Forgetting and Remembering: The French Revolution Now and Then,” American Historical Review 100 (1995): 11199-1135, esp. 1130-1132.

4 But see Jules Michelet's observation:  “La femme est née pour la souffrance.  Chacun des grands pas dans la vie est pour elle une blessure.  Elle croît pour le marriage; c'est son rêve légitime.” (La Femme [Paris: Flammarion, 1981], p. 221).

5 On nineteenth-century historians see Linda Orr, Headless History: Nineteenth-Century French Historiography of the Revolution  (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990).  The historian of French republicanism, Maurice Agulhon has shown that the embodiment of republican values in anonymous females was intended to limit women's participation to a passive role associated best with republican motherhood. The power of these allegories has been explained in various ways:  their resonance with Catholic iconography of Mary and female saints, and with stories of (real and fictive) heroines in the ancient republics; their contrast to the male faces of French monarchy; the grammatical gender of such words in Latin-derived languages. Maurice Agulhon, Marina Warner has compared their abstract and female character with women's failure to achieve full and equal freedom with men. For Lynn Hunt, a figure like La Nation is something of a disguise, in that “the nation as mother, La Nation, had no feminine qualities.”  And, she adds: “it was not a threatening feminizing force and hence not incompatible with republicanism. La Nation was, in effect, a masculine mother, or a father capable of giving birth.” [Maurice Agulhon, Marianne into Battle: Republican imagery and Symbolism in France, 1789-1880, trans. Janet Lloyd  (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Marina Warner, Monuments and Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form  (New York: Atheneum, 1985); Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 99].  In my view, put forward in Visualizing the Nation, the allegory of the nation's female body operated to consolidate the heterosexual investments of modern nationalism. See also  Joan B. Landes, “Republican Citizenship and Heterosocial Desire: Concepts of Masculinity in Revolutionary France,” in  Masculinity in Politics and War: Rewritings of Modern History, eds. Stefan Dudink, Karen Hagemann and John Tosh (Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 2003).

6 In addition to works by Maurice Agulhon, Marina Warner, Lynn Hunt, and Joan B. Landes already cited, see: Lynn Hunt, “Hercules and the Radical image in the French Revolution.” Representations 1:2 (Spring 1983): 95-117; idem., Politics, Culture and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984); idem., “Pourquoi la république est-elle une femme?: La Symbolique républicaine et l'opposition des genres, 1792-1799,” in Michel Vovelle, ed., République et Révolution: L'Exception française (Paris: Kimé, 1994); Michel Vovelle, La Révolution Française: images et récit, 5 vols. (Paris: Editions Messidor, Livre Club Diderot, 1986); Antoine de Baecque, La Caricature révolutionnaire  (Paris: CNRS, 1988); Claude Langlois, La Caricature contre-révolutionnaire (Paris: CNRS, 1988); James A. Leith, The Idea of Art as Propaganda in France 1750-1799: A Study in the History of Ideas (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1965); idem., Media and Revolution: Moulding a New Citizen in France during the Terror  (Toronto: CBC Publications, 1968); Philippe Bordes and Régis Michel, eds., Aux Armes et aux arts! Les Arts de la Révolution 1789-1799 (Paris, Adam Biro, 1988).

7 I refer to the archive in the larger sense, e.g., the important collections preserved and catalogued at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, the Musée Carnavalet, the Musée de la Révolution française and elsewhere, thanks to the efforts of earlier collectors and cataloguers, such as Boyer de Nîmes, M. Hennin, or Baron Eugène de Vinck. Regarding the matter of scholarly collaboration and using an electronic archive, I share the optimism of several of my colleagues about the enormous scholarly potential of digital technology, with the following caution: It seems to me that adoption of a model already in place in the sciences will demand an even more thorough-going reconsideration of existing protocols of humanistic scholarship than already required by the advent of electronic publishing. Also if “posting” amounts to a new kind of publication or pre-publication - by which others can view the changes to one's work resulting from external comments and before a work is “published” in the conventional sense - what impact will this have on the evaluation of individual creativity and merit? Will completion of a work continue to be prioritized? Can we find better mechanisms to appraise seriously a person's work in progress? How can we protect scholars from the risk of a public exposure of ignorance and error, or from an erroneous charge directed (publicly) against their work?

8 There is now a very large literature on the topic of the revolutionary press. For some important contributions, see Pierre Rétat, ed., La Révolution du journal, 1788 - 1794 (Paris: Centre National de la Récherche Scientifique, 1989); Jack R. Censer, The French Press in the Age of Enlightenment (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1994); idem., Prelude to power : The Parisian Radical Press, 1789-1791 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1976); Press and Politics in Pre-Revolutionary France, ed. Jack R. Censer and Jeremy D. Popkin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); Jeremy D. Popkin, Revolutionary News: The Press in France, 1789-1799 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1990); idem., The Right-Wing Press in France, 1792-1800 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980);  idem., News and Politics in the Age of Revolution : Jean Luzac's Gazette de Leyde (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989); Roger Chartier, ed.,  The Culture of Print: Power and the Uses of Print in Early Modern Europe, trans. Lydia G. Cochran (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989); Histoire de l'édition en France, 4. vols., ed. Henri-Jean Martin et Roger Chartier (Paris: Promodis; Fayard, 1983-1986); Carla Hesse, Publishing and Cultural Politics in Revolutionary Paris, 1789-1810 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).

9 There remains the important issue of what is now called “visual literacy,” which would certainly have influenced a person's comprehension of an image. In this context, I discuss the debates over the allegorical image and other such concerns.  See Visualizing the Nation, chapter 1.  See also Antoine de Baecque, “The Allegorical image of France, 1750 - 1800: A Political Crisis of Representation,” Representations 47 (Summer 1994): 11-43.