The Family and the Nation: Gender and Citizenship in Revolutionary France, 1789-1830 (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Family and the Nation: Gender and Citizenship in Revolutionary France, 1789-1830 Masha Belenky Heuer, Jennifer Ngaire. The Family and the Nation: Gender and Citizenship in Revolutionary France, 1789-1830. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005. Pp. 256. ISBN 0-8014-4286-9 French revolutionaries used the term "the great family" to refer to the French nation. But what were the actual connections between the evolving notions of family and new ideas about citizenship in the wake of the Revolution? In the era when women largely remained dependent within the household, yet acquired independent rights and duties as citizens, which bonds took precedence, familial or national? Jennifer Ngaire Heuer's book fills a notable gap in both the history of the revolutionary period and in French women's history by providing a thorough and insightful analysis of the connections and contradictions between rapidly changing family law and the radical reconceptualization of citizenship from the early years of the Revolution through the Restoration. Unlike previous studies of the political implications of citizenship for women, Heuer's focuses on "legal, territorial, and civil aspects of national belonging"(6). Looking at both the law and its application, The Family and the Nation traces the increasingly complex relationship between women's dependent status within the family and their identity as French citizens. Building on works by historians of gender and scholars of national citizenship, Heuer offers a fresh way to think about these crucial categories together. Through a meticulous analysis of laws, legal practices and debates, as well as numerous case studies, Heuer demonstrates how in the early years of the Revolution, duty to the nation took priority over familial bonds. However, as the Republic moved into a more conservative phase and was then succeeded by the Napoleonic regime, this tendency was reversed and familial rights and duties were ultimately placed over national ones. Yet, Heuer suggests that even when previous laws were clarified or even reversed, every successive administration struggled to make sense of contradictions between the changes they themselves enacted and those that persisted from previous regimes in a new political context. Ultimately, Heuer argues that the complex connections between the family and the nation cannot be directly correlated with particular regimes: "Although evolutions in family and citizenship rights were intimately bound with the tumultuous series of political regimes in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, competing models of family and citizenship rights cannot be mapped simply onto specific regimes. Nor do they correspond neatly to particular political persuasions or specific groups within the state"(199). The book is organized chronologically and is divided in three parts. Part I, "The Family of the Nation," details the emergence of the conflict between family and citizenship during the early years of the Revolution. The conflict revolves around tension between duties to the literal family and those to the "great family" of the French nation. [End Page 467] Chapter One charts the relationship between family and citizenship in the context of anti-emigration laws enacted by the early Revolutionary government. Heuer argues that, in the early years of the Revolution, when everything was subordinated to the interests of the nation, loyalty to the nation superceded kinship. Specifically, she focuses on cases of women who, having fled with their husbands abroad, could not claim exception to the emigration laws based on gender. Chapter Two moves on to examine the intense confrontation between kinship and citizenship during the radical Jacobin phase of the Revolution (1793–1794). Heuer's analysis revolves around the metaphor of "adoption," as she examines parallels between familial adoption and "adoption" into the nation. It was a period of increased confusion as new regulations co-existed with laws predating the revolution, a time of the greatest collision between duties to the family and obligations to the nation. The second part of Heuer's book, "Toward a Nation of Families: Transitions of the Late 1790s," focuses on the later years of the republic which witnessed further changes in the meaning of national citizenship. This section charts the tensions that arose as the Directory reconsidered the metaphor of nation as a family, replacing it instead with the images of "a nation of...