The commission investigating the October Days took testimony from twenty–five women who had participated, including Marie–Rose Barré, a twenty–year old unmarried lace–worker, whose testimony is excerpted below. Barré had been one of the women chosen…
An observer of Jacobin club meetings in 1791, in the passage below, describes somewhat disorderly debates, in which speakers are shouted down from the rostrum and women participate openly. This is indicative of what this author sees as the…
Popular clubs in Paris, unlike electoral assemblies, were not limited to men, at least in the early months of the Republic. One of the most active and radical clubs composed entirely of women, the Society of Revolutionary Republican Women,…
Popular radical activity continued throughout the period of the Terror (see Chapter 7) and did not end with 9 Thermidor. On 1–4 Prairial, Year III (20–23 May 1795), a large group composed largely of women surrounded the Convention Hall and massacred…
Although a small minority in the Legislative Assembly when it convened in September 1791, the Girondins succeeded in passing a resolution in favor of war with "the King of Bohemia and Hungary," meaning the Habsburg Empire in April 1792. Citing the…
At the conclusion of her trial, the Queen was found guilty and sentenced to death. The newspaper of record, the Moniteur, reports the Queen’s response to the verdict and her execution the next morning with a good deal of sympathy and respect.
Born in 1770 and married to the only surviving son of one of the greatest noble families in France, the Marquise de la Tour du Pin endured humiliation, emigration, and Terror during the first part of the revolutionary decade. Upon her return to…
The article "Woman" was written by four contributors who considered the question from four angles: medicine and the history of opinions about women’s nature; writings about women’s place in the state and marriage; the social differences between men…
Rousseau was the most controversial and paradoxical of the writers of the Enlightenment. Born in Switzerland, he published important works on politics, music, and in Emile, education. He also wrote one of the most widely read novels of the century,…
Madame de Beaumer (d. 1766) was the first of three women editors of the Journal des Dames, a newspaper founded in Paris in 1759 to encourage women to write seriously. Little is known about her, perhaps because she was a Calvinist and Calvinists in…
