Talking Heads? Guillotined Women in the Revolutionary Afterlife

Abstract

Abstract During the early months of the Terror, five notable women were guillotined within months of one another. Charlotte Corday, Marie-Antoinette, Olympe de Gouges, Marie-Jeanne Roland, and Jeanne Du Barry are also among the handful of female voices featured in two turn-of-the-century collections of dialogues des morts (one anonymous; one by François Pagès); a genre which came to serve a commemorative and political function in the period, providing its authors with a means to articulate their vision of French history and national identity in the turbulent revolutionary years. This article examines the presence of women in these collections, considering what is at stake in giving them (imagined) voice and adopting (and adapting) their names and histories. It argues that these texts play on the trope of the silent or speaking woman to explore the notion of existence in posterity, and that it is through lost bodies, rather than attributed words, that these women ultimately come to signify most of all.