In a groundbreaking book that challenges many assumptions about gender and politics in the French Revolution, Suzanne Desan offers an insightful analysis of the ways the Revolution radically redefined the family and its internal dynamics. She shows how revolutionary politics and laws brought about a social revolution within households and created space for thousands of French women and men to reimagine their most intimate relationships. Families negotiated new social practices, including divorce, the reduction of paternal authority, egalitarian inheritance for sons and daughters alike, and the granting of civil rights to illegitimate children. Contrary to arguments that claim the Revolution bound women within a domestic sphere,
The Family on Trial maintains that the new civil laws and gender politics offered many women unexpected opportunities to gain power, property, or independence.
The family became a political arena, a practical terrain for creating the Republic in day-to-day life. From 1789, citizens across France—sons and daughters, unhappily married spouses and illegitimate children, pamphleteers and moralists, deputies and judges—all disputed how the family should be reformed to remake the new France. They debated how revolutionary ideals and institutions should transform the emotional bonds, gender dynamics, legal customs, and economic arrangements that structured the family. They asked how to bring the principles of liberty, equality, and regeneration into the home. And as French citizens confronted each other in the home, in court, and in print, they gradually negotiated new domestic practices that balanced Old Regime customs with revolutionary innovations in law and culture. In a narrative that combines national-level analysis with a case study of family contestation in Normandy, Desan explores these struggles to bring politics into households and to envision and put into practice a new set of familial relationships.
विषयसूची
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Freedom of the Heart—Men and Women Critique Marriage
2. The Political Power of Love—Marriage, Regeneration, and Citizenship
3. Broken Bonds—The Revolutionary Practice of Divorce
4. ‘War between Brothers and Sisters’—Egalitarian Inheritance and Gender Politics
5. Natural Children, Abandoned Mothers, and Emancipated Fathers—Illegitimacy and Unwed Motherhood
6. What Makes a Father?—Illegitimacy and Paternity from the Year II to the Civil Code
7. Reconstituting the Social after the Terror—The Backlash against Family Innovations
8. The Genesis of the Civil Code
Conclusion
Appendix I: Communes in the Calvados Studied for Cases of Divorce
Appendix II: Chronology of Revolutionary Family Laws
Note on Archival Sources
Abbreviations
Notes
Index
लेखक के बारे में
Suzanne Desan is Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and author of the prize-winning Reclaiming the Sacred: Lay Religion and Popular Politics in Revolutionary France (1990).
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