feminish

I’ve written some brief background words below. You can also see my post: The March of the Women 5 October 1789: Did it make a difference and why should we care?

A narrative account of the events of 5/6 October 1789 in Paris
(using primary sources where possible…)

At 7 o’clock on the morning of the 5th of October 1789 about 2000 women forced the doors of the Town Hall in the heart of Paris.

Furious at the continued scarcity and expense of bread (a dire situation that had hardly improved in the three months since the National Assembly was set up to solve the crisis), they determined to take matters into their own hands. The women seized bread, weapons and cannon from the Town Hall, and began to throw out papers and files to burn:

[Monsieur Maillard, an influential member of the new people’s National Guard,] found some [women] forcing the downstairs doors and others snatching papers in the offices, saying that that was all the city council had done since the revolution began and that they would burn them… he urged them to keep calm, but these women kept saying that the men were not strong enough to be revenged on their enemies and that they (the women) would do better. While he was in the courtyard, he looked around and saw a large number of men go up, armed with pikes, lances, pitchforks, and other weapons… [They] took all the arms they could find and gave some to the women. He then received word that a number of women had arrived with torches to burn the papers in the building, so he [Maillard] dashed out and flung himself upon them (there were but two) as they approached the City Hall, each bearing a lighted torch; he snatched the torches from their hands, which nearly cost him his life, as they were intent on carrying out their design.
[Taken from the witness statement of Stanislas Maillard, leading member of the National Guard, given to the 1790 Paris commission investigating the October Days 1789]

It wasn’t just the 2000 women at the Hotel de Ville who had been driven to act. In fact, as the French historian G. Rudé describes, women were rallying together all over Paris:

On the morning of 5 October the revolt started simultaneously in the central markets and the Faubourg Saint-Antoine; in both cases women were the leading spirits; and, from numerous and varying accounts, it appears that in the activities that followed women of every social class took part – both fishwives and stall-holders of the markets, working women of the faubourg, smartly dressed bourgeoises, and “des femmes a chapeau”. In the markets … the movement was started by a small girl who set out from the District of Saint-Eustache beating a drum and declaiming against the scarcity of bread; this drew together a large crowd of women, whose numbers rapidly increased …
[G. Rudé, The Crowd in the French Revolution (1959), quoted in Tony Cliff Class Struggle and Women’s Liberation]

Thomas Carlyle, a Scottish Victorian historian, put it a little more dramatically:

The young woman seizes the drum; sets forth, beating it… Descend, O mothers; descend, ye Judiths, to food and revenge! All women gather and go; crowds storm all stairs, force out all women… and so, like snowbreak from the mountains, for every staircase is a melted brook, it storms; tumultuous, wild-shrilling, towards the Hotel-de-Ville….
[Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution]

Stanislas Maillard saw the crowds of women converge on the Place D’Armes, in the middle of the Champs Elysées:

… he saw detachments of women coming up from every direction, armed with broomsticks, lances, pitchforks, swords, pistols, and muskets. As they had no ammunition, they wanted to compel him to go with a detachment of them to the arsenal to fetch powder. . .
[Stanislas Maillard witness statement, as above]

As many as 7,000 women were soon assembled, and it had begun to rain. They resolved not to destroy the Town Hall after all, but to take their demands for bread and action direct to the king and the newly-established National Assembly (representatives of ‘the people’) at the Palace of Versailles. And so they set off, cannon in tow, to walk the ‘four leagues’ - a full twelve miles - to Versailles.

By late afternoon the women finally arrived. From inside the Assembly Hall, where hundreds of men were in session, they could hear “a rustling and justling, shrill uproar and squabbling, muffled by walls… Rushing and crushing one hears now; then enters Maillard, with a Deputation of Fifteen muddy dripping Women, having by incredible industry, and aid of all the macers, persuaded the rest to wait out of doors” [Carlyle, French Revolution].

And what exactly, the Assembly asked, did the women want?

“Bread and speech with the King” (Du pain, et parler au Roi) …. “Bread, and the end of these brabbles” (Du pain, et la fin des affaires)

Eventually, after many hours and endless comings and goings, four sodden women secured an audience with the King and by the next morning there was a Royal Letter, authorising and commanding the freest ‘circulation of grains.’ Thousands had camped at the palace overnight, sleeping in hallways, stables, courtyards. The women, now joined by thousands of men from the people’s National Guard (some estimate a full 20,000), determined that the King’s letter was not enough - they didn’t trust him and nor did they trust the wealthy aristocracy controlling the grain reserves. The King, they decided, should return under the people’s guard to the centre of Paris.

After another night and day they got their way: the King agreed to return with the crowd, bringing the contents of the court’s grain store with him. What celebration there was! The women marched and danced “especially about the Royal Carriage; tripudiating there, covered with tricolor; singing ‘allusive songs;’ pointing with one hand to the Royal Carriage, which the allusions hit, and pointing to the Provision-wagons, with the other hand, and these words: “Courage, Friends! We shall not want bread now; we are bringing you the Baker, the Bakeress, and Baker’s Boy” - the King, the Queen and the Dauphin. [Carlyle, French Revolution].

“The people were triumphant”, writes Olwen Hufton, “and the credit for the event was given entirely to the women. Michelet echoed contemporaries when he said that the men took the Bastille and the women took the King.” [Women and the Limits of Citizenship in the French Revolution (1992)]






BACKGROUND IN A NUTSHELL

In 1789 French were hungry (food was scarce) and broke (bread prices had gone through the roof and there was a huge national debt). They were taxed unfairly and resented the extravagant court of king Louis XVI, his absolute power, the feudal system and an intolerant Catholic Church. The French were emboldened by new Enlightenment ideas (the idea that government, for example, was a contract between state and citizen), and they were thirsty for liberty and the radical dream of establishing a French republic (no other European country since antiquity had yet self-governed without a monarch, except momentarily the Brits of course, but that’s another story…).

There was jostling between the King and the people, as he tried, unskilfully to resolve the desperate national economic situation. He was forced to summon he old Estates General (a limited representative assembly) for the first time in 175 years. Once assembled, the Third Estate of the Estates General (representing the middle class & peasants) took it upon themselves to break away from the Clergy and Nobility and establish a new ‘National Assembly’. They declared they would run the nation’s affairs and draft, for the first time, a national constitution. On the 14th July 1789 the Bastille (a symbol of everything that was wrong with the King’s regime) was stormed and within a fortnight insurrection and the spirit of popular sovereignty had spread throughout France.

The new National Assembly published a Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, setting out the democratic principles that would frame the writing of the constitution. (But it took a year for the Marquis de Condorcet, a philosopher and political scientist, to publish his case “On Giving Women the Right of Citizenship”; and another 2 years before Olympe de Gouges published her “Declaration of the Rights of Women and the Citizeness”; but that’s a whole other story….)

The National Assembly demanded that the King ratify their Declaration. But he refused - even though he found himself out-manoeuvred by the National Assembly, and even though his power had been weakened by the popular insurrection. As a precaution he summoned troops to his Versailles palace, doubled the household guards, and sent for the dragoons and Flanders regiment. On October 1st, the King and his courtiers had even enjoyed a huge banquet. All the while bread and flour remained scarce and expensive: the women had had enough.

FURTHER READING

» Women in Revolutionary Paris 1789-95, H.B.Applewhite, D.G.Levy, M.D.Johnson (1979) (collection of primary documents, with commentary demonstrating ‘the extraordinary intellectual activity, social demands and eventual disillusionment of women in the Revolution)
» “Women in Revolution 1789-1796″, Olwen Hufton, in Past and Present, 53 (1971), p.94. See also her Women and the Limits of Citizenship in the French Revolution (1992)
» “The New Sexual Politics of French Revolution Historiography”, Karen Offen, in French Historical Studies, 16:4 (1990) Link is to Jstor (Athens login required)

ONLINE
» Have a look at Joan Landes’s essay “Representing Women in the Revolutionary Crowd”, part of the Imaging the French Revolution website.
» There is also Sunshine for Women’s accessible account of Women and the French Revolution.
» Primary sources on the web include Stanislas Maillard’s testimony, and the testimonies of two women who took part

Technorati tags: women’s history, feminism, political history, women, protest, French Revolution

I’ve written some brief background words below. You can also see my post: The March of the Women 5 October 1789: Did it make a difference and why should we care?

A narrative account of the events of 5/6 October 1789 in Paris
(using primary sources where possible…)

At 7 o’clock on the morning of the 5th of October 1789 about 2000 women forced the doors of the Town Hall in the heart of Paris.

Furious at the continued scarcity and expense of bread (a dire situation that had hardly improved in the three months since the National Assembly was set up to solve the crisis), they determined to take matters into their own hands. The women seized bread, weapons and cannon from the Town Hall, and began to throw out papers and files to burn:

[Monsieur Maillard, an influential member of the new people’s National Guard,] found some [women] forcing the downstairs doors and others snatching papers in the offices, saying that that was all the city council had done since the revolution began and that they would burn them… he urged them to keep calm, but these women kept saying that the men were not strong enough to be revenged on their enemies and that they (the women) would do better. While he was in the courtyard, he looked around and saw a large number of men go up, armed with pikes, lances, pitchforks, and other weapons… [They] took all the arms they could find and gave some to the women. He then received word that a number of women had arrived with torches to burn the papers in the building, so he [Maillard] dashed out and flung himself upon them (there were but two) as they approached the City Hall, each bearing a lighted torch; he snatched the torches from their hands, which nearly cost him his life, as they were intent on carrying out their design.
[Taken from the witness statement of Stanislas Maillard, leading member of the National Guard, given to the 1790 Paris commission investigating the October Days 1789]

It wasn’t just the 2000 women at the Hotel de Ville who had been driven to act. In fact, as the French historian G. Rudé describes, women were rallying together all over Paris:

On the morning of 5 October the revolt started simultaneously in the central markets and the Faubourg Saint-Antoine; in both cases women were the leading spirits; and, from numerous and varying accounts, it appears that in the activities that followed women of every social class took part – both fishwives and stall-holders of the markets, working women of the faubourg, smartly dressed bourgeoises, and “des femmes a chapeau”. In the markets … the movement was started by a small girl who set out from the District of Saint-Eustache beating a drum and declaiming against the scarcity of bread; this drew together a large crowd of women, whose numbers rapidly increased …
[G. Rudé, The Crowd in the French Revolution (1959), quoted in Tony Cliff Class Struggle and Women’s Liberation]

Thomas Carlyle, a Scottish Victorian historian, put it a little more dramatically:

The young woman seizes the drum; sets forth, beating it… Descend, O mothers; descend, ye Judiths, to food and revenge! All women gather and go; crowds storm all stairs, force out all women… and so, like snowbreak from the mountains, for every staircase is a melted brook, it storms; tumultuous, wild-shrilling, towards the Hotel-de-Ville….
[Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution]

Stanislas Maillard saw the crowds of women converge on the Place D’Armes, in the middle of the Champs Elysées:

… he saw detachments of women coming up from every direction, armed with broomsticks, lances, pitchforks, swords, pistols, and muskets. As they had no ammunition, they wanted to compel him to go with a detachment of them to the arsenal to fetch powder. . .
[Stanislas Maillard witness statement, as above]

As many as 7,000 women were soon assembled, and it had begun to rain. They resolved not to destroy the Town Hall after all, but to take their demands for bread and action direct to the king and the newly-established National Assembly (representatives of ‘the people’) at the Palace of Versailles. And so they set off, cannon in tow, to walk the ‘four leagues’ - a full twelve miles - to Versailles.

By late afternoon the women finally arrived. From inside the Assembly Hall, where hundreds of men were in session, they could hear “a rustling and justling, shrill uproar and squabbling, muffled by walls… Rushing and crushing one hears now; then enters Maillard, with a Deputation of Fifteen muddy dripping Women, having by incredible industry, and aid of all the macers, persuaded the rest to wait out of doors” [Carlyle, French Revolution].

And what exactly, the Assembly asked, did the women want?

“Bread and speech with the King” (Du pain, et parler au Roi) …. “Bread, and the end of these brabbles” (Du pain, et la fin des affaires)

Eventually, after many hours and endless comings and goings, four sodden women secured an audience with the King and by the next morning there was a Royal Letter, authorising and commanding the freest ‘circulation of grains.’ Thousands had camped at the palace overnight, sleeping in hallways, stables, courtyards. The women, now joined by thousands of men from the people’s National Guard (some estimate a full 20,000), determined that the King’s letter was not enough - they didn’t trust him and nor did they trust the wealthy aristocracy controlling the grain reserves. The King, they decided, should return under the people’s guard to the centre of Paris.

After another night and day they got their way: the King agreed to return with the crowd, bringing the contents of the court’s grain store with him. What celebration there was! The women marched and danced “especially about the Royal Carriage; tripudiating there, covered with tricolor; singing ‘allusive songs;’ pointing with one hand to the Royal Carriage, which the allusions hit, and pointing to the Provision-wagons, with the other hand, and these words: “Courage, Friends! We shall not want bread now; we are bringing you the Baker, the Bakeress, and Baker’s Boy” - the King, the Queen and the Dauphin. [Carlyle, French Revolution].

“The people were triumphant”, writes Olwen Hufton, “and the credit for the event was given entirely to the women. Michelet echoed contemporaries when he said that the men took the Bastille and the women took the King.” [Women and the Limits of Citizenship in the French Revolution (1992)]






BACKGROUND IN A NUTSHELL

In 1789 French were hungry (food was scarce) and broke (bread prices had gone through the roof and there was a huge national debt). They were taxed unfairly and resented the extravagant court of king Louis XVI, his absolute power, the feudal system and an intolerant Catholic Church. The French were emboldened by new Enlightenment ideas (the idea that government, for example, was a contract between state and citizen), and they were thirsty for liberty and the radical dream of establishing a French republic (no other European country since antiquity had yet self-governed without a monarch, except momentarily the Brits of course, but that’s another story…).

There was jostling between the King and the people, as he tried, unskilfully to resolve the desperate national economic situation. He was forced to summon he old Estates General (a limited representative assembly) for the first time in 175 years. Once assembled, the Third Estate of the Estates General (representing the middle class & peasants) took it upon themselves to break away from the Clergy and Nobility and establish a new ‘National Assembly’. They declared they would run the nation’s affairs and draft, for the first time, a national constitution. On the 14th July 1789 the Bastille (a symbol of everything that was wrong with the King’s regime) was stormed and within a fortnight insurrection and the spirit of popular sovereignty had spread throughout France.

The new National Assembly published a Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, setting out the democratic principles that would frame the writing of the constitution. (But it took a year for the Marquis de Condorcet, a philosopher and political scientist, to publish his case “On Giving Women the Right of Citizenship”; and another 2 years before Olympe de Gouges published her “Declaration of the Rights of Women and the Citizeness”; but that’s a whole other story….)

The National Assembly demanded that the King ratify their Declaration. But he refused - even though he found himself out-manoeuvred by the National Assembly, and even though his power had been weakened by the popular insurrection. As a precaution he summoned troops to his Versailles palace, doubled the household guards, and sent for the dragoons and Flanders regiment. On October 1st, the King and his courtiers had even enjoyed a huge banquet. All the while bread and flour remained scarce and expensive: the women had had enough.

FURTHER READING

» Women in Revolutionary Paris 1789-95, H.B.Applewhite, D.G.Levy, M.D.Johnson (1979) (collection of primary documents, with commentary demonstrating ‘the extraordinary intellectual activity, social demands and eventual disillusionment of women in the Revolution)
» “Women in Revolution 1789-1796″, Olwen Hufton, in Past and Present, 53 (1971), p.94. See also her Women and the Limits of Citizenship in the French Revolution (1992)
» “The New Sexual Politics of French Revolution Historiography”, Karen Offen, in French Historical Studies, 16:4 (1990) Link is to Jstor (Athens login required)

ONLINE
» Have a look at Joan Landes’s essay “Representing Women in the Revolutionary Crowd”, part of the Imaging the French Revolution website.
» There is also Sunshine for Women’s accessible account of Women and the French Revolution.
» Primary sources on the web include Stanislas Maillard’s testimony, and the testimonies of two women who took part

Technorati tags: women’s history, feminism, political history, women, protest, French Revolution