The Role of Women in Religious Riots During the French Revolution

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AS THE PARADE FOR THE FESTIVAL of the Supreme Being was forming in Auxerre on 20 prairial an II (30 June 1794), one soldier turned to an old woman looking on and asked her why she wasn't joining in the festival. She responded, Ce n'est pas le tien que j'adore; il est trop jeune; c'est le vieux. (It is not your god that I adore. He is too young. It is the old one.)' Behind the simple statement of this old Auxerroise lay a wealth of unspoken beliefs and meanings. When the radical leaders of the French Revolution launched the dechristianization campaign of 1793-94 to close churches, to urge priests to abdicate, and to replace Catholicism with new revolutionary cults and with a secular political culture, many French men and women shared the reluctance of this old woman of Auxerre to set aside traditional Christian beliefs and practices. Particularly when the Thermidoreans relaxed some of the laws regarding public worship after the fall of Robespierre, Catholic villagers struggled through legal and illegal means to return to collective Catholic practice. Both men and women participated in the movement to resurrect Catholicism in the late 1790s. Together they pressured local officials to reopen churches and protect priests from arrest; together they created innovative forms of lay worship and danced on saints' days in open defiance of the law. However, there were differences in the roles and attitudes of Catholic men and women as they strove to regain the right to worship. Women were constantly in the forefront of the religious movement, especially as leaders of religious riots. And according to most testimony of the time, Catholic women seemed even more intent than their husbands on returning to public Catholic practice. Traditional prerevolutionary roles combined with the social and legal structures of France in the 1790s to bring about a gender-based dichotomy in the means of the religious revival. While Catholic men, as legal citizens, could use the petition, the vote, and the village assembly to put legal pressures on local and national authorities, women more often voiced their demands through di-