Politics in the Marketplace

Abstract

Politics in the Marketplace integrates politics, economics, and gender to ask how the Dames des Halles invented notions of citizenship through everyday trade during the French Revolution. As crucial food retailers, traditional representatives of the Third Estate, and famed leaders of the march on Versailles, these Parisian market women held great revolutionary influence. This work innovatively interweaves the Dames’ political activism and economic practices to reveal how marketplace actors shaped the nature of nascent democracy and capitalism through daily commerce. Parisians struggled to overhaul the marketplace and reconcile egalitarian social aspirations with free market principles. While haggling over new price controls, fair taxes, and acceptable currency, the Dames and their clients negotiated economic and social contracts in tandem. The market women conceptualized a type of economic citizenship in which individuals’ activities such as buying goods, selling food, or paying taxes positioned them within the collective social body and enabled them to make claims on the state. They insisted that their commerce served society and demanded that the state pass favorable regulations to reciprocate. The Dames also drew on their patriotic work as activists and their gendered work as republican mothers to compel the state to provide practical currency and assist indigent families. Thus, the Dames’ notion of citizenship portrayed useful work, rather than gender, as the cornerstone of civic legitimacy. Consequently, Politics in the Marketplace challenges the interpretation that the Revolution launched an inherently masculine trajectory for citizenship. It calls on scholars to rethink the relationship among work, gender, and embryonic citizenship.