France after Revolution

Urban Life, Gender, and the New Social Order

ISBN 9780674024595

Publication date: 04/30/2007

The decades following the French Revolution saw unprecedented political and social experimentation. As the Napoleonic and Restoration regimes attempted to build a stable order, ordinary city dwellers began to create their own sense of how society operated through everyday activities. Interactions between men and women--in theaters, cafes, and other public settings--helped to fashion new social norms.

In this extensively researched work, Denise Z. Davidson offers a powerful reevaluation of the effects of the French Revolution, especially on women. Arguing against the view that the Revolution forced women from the public realm of informed political discussion, Davidson demonstrates that women remained highly visible in urban public life. Women of all classes moved out of the domestic sphere to participate in the spectacle of city life, inviting frequent commentary on their behavior. This began to change only in the 1820s, when economic and social developments intensified class distinctions and made the bourgeoisie fear the "dangerous classes."

This book provides an important corrective to prevailing views on the ramifications of the French Revolution, while shedding light on how ordinary people understood, shaped, and contested the social transformations taking place around them.

Praise

A compelling account of the gendering of spatial and social relations in the wake of the French Revolution. Davidson highlights the seemingly paradoxical ways in which social mixing--between men and women, 'elite' and 'popular' classes--served to at once unify and differentiate post-Revolutionary society. This book will appeal to historians of modern France, women's and gender historians, and readers interested in performance and spectacle.

—Judith Surkis, Associate Professor of History and of History and Literature, Harvard University
In a lively and original study, Davidson shows how residents of Lyon, Nantes, and Paris shaped their identity and social place in the political and cultural order of the post-Revolutionary world. Her keen attention to gender and class make it clear how the real lives of women and men often contradicted political, cultural, and discursive ideals. Firmly rooted in astute archival research, France after Revolution is a major contribution to urban social and cultural history.

—Rachel Fuchs, Arizona State University
This welcome and important book takes a novel approach to the little-studied topic of gender dynamics in early nineteenth-century France. Denise Davidson argues compellingly that public interactions between the sexes played a critical role in allaying the social anxiety wrought by the French Revolution. By analyzing male and female behavior in urban public spaces, she skillfully illustrates how certain gender ideals and class expectations came to underpin France's new social order.

—Suzanne Desan, University of Wisconsin, Madison