Although festivals drew much smaller audiences during the final years of the Revolution, the government continued to celebrate them. Now, however, they tended to commemorate apolitical events: thus a festival, and hymn, devoted to the subject of…
After Jacobin control faded, with its repression of exuberant social life as well as political diversity, the following years saw a rebirth of open pleasures. This image focuses on fashionable men and women enjoying the good life. Some contemporaries…
De Staël was the daughter of Jacques Necker, Louis XVI’s Swiss Protestant finance minister. She published novels, literary tracts, and memoirs and became one of the best-known writers of the early nineteenth century. Napoleon exiled her in 1803. In…
Moreau de Saint–Méry painted a particularly negative portrait of mulatto women whom he considered to be voluptuaries and a threat to morals and decency.
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…
Men and women threaten the deputies on 20 May 1795. They demand "Bread and the Constitution of 1793." This day marked one of the last interventions of ordinary women into national politics.
In this engraving of the Festival of Reunion or Unity of 10 August 1793, a female statue of Nature in the form of the Egyptian goddess Isis represents the regeneration of the French people. It sits on the site of the Bastille prison, whose fall…
Once the uprising of May 1795 had been suppressed, the government set up a military tribunal, which gathered denunciations of presumed rioters. This one gives a good sense of the charges made and the kind of language used ("infernal sect of Jacobin…
