Politics in the Marketplace: Work, Gender, and Citizenship in Revolutionary France by Katie Jarvis

Abstract

Reviewed by: Politics in the Marketplace: Work, Gender, and Citizenship in Revolutionary France by Katie Jarvis Elizabeth Colwill Katie Jarvis, Politics in the Marketplace: Work, Gender, and Citizenship in Revolutionary France (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2019). Pp. 352. $47.95 cloth. In this prize-winning book on the Dames des Halles of revolutionary Paris, Katie Jarvis brings to life a rich and multifaceted history of the female hawkers of produce, fish, and flowers whose retail privileges were first bestowed by Saint Louis in the thirteenth century. Jarvis maps the residences and market stalls of the Dames des Halles, listens to their disputes, and traces their steps through the muddy streets and into the turbulent halls of governance. The tableau that she paints is so richly textured that the reader can almost glimpse the Dames as they bargain with consumers, petition for currency reform, denounce monopoly-holders, and contest price limits. Delving deep into police, legislative, judiciary, and financial records, Jarvis illuminates the evolving moral economy of the Dames des Halles and their significance as revolutionary actors. Jarvis presents compelling evidence for the tangible political impact of the Dames des Halles during the early years of revolution—an influence rooted, as Rene Marion’s 1995 dissertation demonstrated, in the Dames’ corporate role in certifying the legitimacy of the early modern monarchy. “After the opening salvo of the Revolution,” Jarvis writes, “most Parisians readily accepted the Dames’ authority as the sovereign people incarnate” (50). Jarvis disentangles the voices of live Dames des Halles from the fictive “poissarde” stereotypes of the revolutionary pamphlet literature. While the pamphleteers drew upon the Dames’ words and reputations to advance their own political agendas, Jarvis shows how the market women manipulated and refashioned that political symbolism in their own interest, mobilizing their unique identity to influence popular politics, deputies, and legislative decisions. Melding an older corporate identity with a revolutionary sense of maternal and civic duty, the Dames hired a poet to compliment the electors of the Third Estate, organized processions and patriotic subscriptions, and called on Lafayette to forgive wet-nursing debts. After the March to Versailles, they strategically distanced themselves from the violent excesses of revolutionary activism, then requested medals from the municipal government as bonnes citoyennes. “Protectors of the nuclear and national family,” they exposed revolutionary plots and spanked recalcitrant nuns (69–75). By bestowing or withholding their allegiance to the monarch and speaking out as revolutionary mothers to patriotic father-deputies, they reshaped the nature of sovereignty. [End Page 1042] Politics in the Marketplace situates the Dames squarely in the public sphere—not the public sphere of letters but in the hubbub of les Halles teeming with wholesalers, consumers, retail merchants, and government inspectors. The revolutionary marketplace, in transition from royal domain to national property and from corporate privilege to protocapitalist “liberty,” formed the locus of the Dames’ collective identity as merchants and as citoyennes. Jarvis’s meticulous analysis of the reconstruction of les Halles and the reorganization of trade establishes that debates over commerce, from hoarding and high prices to market space and taxation, were central to the politics of revolution. Her sleuthing uncovers the Dames’ vigorous involvement in revolutionary negotiations over parasols and patentes, credit and currency reform. The final chapter turns to the patente, an occupational license tax for the self-employed, which altered the Dames’ relationship to citizenship and the state under the Directory between 1796 and 1798. In the wake of the Le Chapelier law, the patente shifted the organizational nexus of the market from corporate bodies to the individual, transforming “occupational labor into intangible personal property” (203). Jarvis reads the Directory’s imposition of the tax on ambulant merchants in 1796 as conferring a form of fiscal citizenship through which the Dames, now considered individual commercial agents, entered a personal contract with the state. “The patente transformed work into a type of property,” which, she asserts, “signified civic independence without gendered foundations.” In formalizing the Dames’ contract with the state as “citizen workers” and taxpayers, the patente “disrupt[ed] the gendered binaries of citizenship” (203). If, in theory, the patente undermined the logic of gendered exclusions from citizenship, as Jarvis argues, in fact, the state’s...