Revolutionary Decade Research Articles

La Iglesia Católica en Guatemala frente a la <em>década revolucionaria y la liberalización</em> (1944-1954)

Este artículo estudia la situación de la Iglesia católica durante la Década Revolucionaria en Guatemala. La Constitución de 1945 prolongó la marginación que sufría la Iglesia desde la Revolución liberal de 1871. Pero la política gubernamental fue colocando en la oposición a amplios grupos de los implicados en la Revoliución. Estos grupos vieron, entonces, un posible aliado en la Iglesia. Así, en 1954, la Iglesia encontró un camino para modificar las limitaciones legales. Por esta causa, justificará la sublevación contrarrevolucionaria. Pero, al mismo tiempo, intentará marcar distancias con respecto al nuevo gobierno.

The balance of ecumenism and sectarianism: rethinking religion and foreign policy in Iran

Foreign policy development in the Islamic Republic is often conceived through secularizing homologies of ideology and pragmatism and radicalism and moderation. Policy practice, however, has often welded their crossed terms together religiously. This article seeks to resolve some contradictions in extant models by reconceiving of Iran’s foreign policy since 1979 as a religious system that differentiates contending values hierarchically. It explores policy in three periods representing particular balances of ecumenism and sectarianism: the revolutionary decade (1979–1989), the reformist interlude (1989–2005) and the era of radical reassertion (2005–2013). Rather than being perceived as fundamentally opposed orientations, ecumenism and sectarianism are presented as integrated tendencies of Shiite Islamism.

El rey y el gran inquisidor: religión y política en los escritos de B. Monteagudo y C. Henríquez (Buenos Aires, 1810-1820)

El artículo examina la relación entre política y religión durante la primera década revolucionaria del Río de la Plata a partir del análisis de la crítica a la Inquisición española por parte de quienes se aventuraron a la revolución. El análisis de las representaciones que B. Monteagudo y C. Henríquez construyeron acerca del tribunal, y el uso político que se hicieron de las mismas en la esfera pública porteña, demuestra que la cuestión inquisitorial ocupó un lugar significativo en el pensamiento político del período revolucionario. Es que la crítica a la Inquisición, allí cuando aparece, cede lugar a la defensa de los derechos naturales del hombre conjugada con una forma de gobierno que se imagina como liberal. Pues su crítica no era un mero recurso para atacar a España, era, también, un medio para imaginar nuevas formas de articular religión y política.

Network-centric digital development in Korea: Origins, growth and prospects

South Korea is currently the world leader in digital network infrastructure and the leading example of ICT-driven development. However, the explanation of how and why Korea accomplished these things is not clearly apparent from a review of mainstream scholarship. A deeper understanding of Korea’s “miracle on the Han” requires more historical, cultural, political and social context. This study addresses questions of how, when and why a nation whose infrastructures were utterly destroyed at the 1953 cessation of hostilities in the Korean War could emerge as the world’s digital network leader. It examines policy issues bearing on digitization of networks, network architecture and network technologies, along with broader context in which these policies were considered, drafted and implemented. Chronologically, the study explains the origins of digital development in the revolutionary decade of the 1980s, Korea’s rise to world broadband leader in the 1990s and its ambitious plans for next generation networks. The study concludes with a review of policy “lessons”, including both successes and failures, that may be drawn from the Korean experience.

The Black Legend of Texas

Among The Many Significant Contributions of Raúl Coronado's A World Not to Come: A History Of Latino Writing and Print Culture is its vivid account of a lost Latino public sphere, a little-known milieu of hispanophone intellectual culture dating back to the early nineteenth century and formed in the historical interstices of Spanish American colonies, emergent Latin American nations, and the early imperial interests of the United States. In this respect, the book builds on the foundational work of Kirsten Silva Gruesz's Ambassadors of Culture: The Transamerican Origins of Latino Writing, which gave definitive shape to the field of early Latino studies by addressing what were then (and in some ways still are) the “methodological problems of proposing to locate the ‘origins’ of Latino writing in the nineteenth century.” Gruesz unfolded a vast panorama of forgotten Spanish-language print culture throughout the United States, from Philadelphia and New York to New Orleans and California, in which letters, stories, essays, and above all poetry bequeathed what she showed convincingly were “important, even crucial, ways of understanding the world” that had been largely lost to history (x). Coronado's book carries forward this project of recovery, exploring a particular scene of early Latino writing centered in Texas during its last revolutionary decades as one of the Interior Provinces of New Spain, its abrupt transition to an independent republic, and its eventual annexation by the United States. As a “history of textuality” rather than a study of literary culture per se (28), the book tells the story of the first printing presses in Texas but also evinces the importance of manuscript circulation as well as private and sometimes unfinished texts. A World Not to Come concerns both print culture and origins but refuses to fetishize either, attending to the past not to “the degree that it is a measure of the future,” as Rosaura Sánchez once put it, but for the very opposite reason: because it portended a future that was never realized (qtd. in Gruesz, Ambassadors xi).

Women in the Revolutionary Decades: Ireland at the turn of the 20th century

Women in the Revolutionary Decades: Ireland at the turn of the 20th century

Nómadas, desempleados y suicidas: racionalidad neoliberal y subjetividades alternas en la literatura centroamericana de posguerra

In this article, I argue that Central American postwar literature—rather than expressing cynicism, affliction or disenchantment as some critics have argued— reveals, questions, and resists the shift in the locus of sovereign power from the political to the economic sphere, which is the result of the consolidation of neoliberalism as the governing rationality and the ensuing economization of all domains of life. Given this context, I claim that the parameters of inclusion and exclusion no longer stem from ideological or political affinities, as was the case during the revolutionary decades, but depend instead on the ability and willingness of the subject to (1) compete and participate in the free market as producer, worker, and/or consumer; and (2) internalize the alleged moral and ethical precepts by means of which neoliberal rationality constructs both the subject and life in common. I therefore argue that the prominent presence in this literary production of subjectivities such as the nomad, the unemployed and the suicide—subjectivities that in one way or another manage to escape neoliberal logic and morality—is not only symptomatic of this change in the locus of sovereignty and the construction of the subject, but also politically critical of it. What is at stake in this literary production is no longer the re-signification of the past, but rather the articulation of the present itself and a different future in which the subject is no longer conceived of and constructed as a mere homo oeconomicus .

Moderation in the Lyrical Ballads: Wordsworth and the Ballad Debates of the 1790s

IAN NEWMAN Moderation in the Lyrical Ballads: Wordsworth and the Ballad Debates ofthe 1790s I N A GENERALLY FAVORABLE REVIEW OF THE I 800 EDITION OF THE LYRICAL Ballads published in The British Critic, John Stoddart took exception to the title of Wordsworth’s collection for two reasons. Firstly, there were many compositions in blank verse that were not at all lyrical, and secondly, the title was a tautology: “For what Ballads are not Lyrical?” he asked.1 Precisely what Stoddart understood by the terms “lyrical” and “ballad” is not entirely clear, but his suggestion that ballads had always been lyrical challenges the frequent supposition that in combining these terms Words­ worth and Coleridge had developed a revolutionary new form of poetic expression. Marilyn Butler, for example, wrote that “by adding the implic­ itly genteel ‘Lyrical’ to the plebeian ‘Ballad,’ ” Wordsworth and Coleridge signaled a “change of direction” for English radical poetry.2 As Stoddart’s review implies, however, a decade after the French Revolution it was not at all self-evident that these poetic forms mapped as cleanly onto social hierarchies as Butler implies.3 Whether the term “lyrical ballad” was a contradiction, a tautology, or an unexceptional generic description is significant given the claims frequently made for the revolutionary nature ofWordsworth’s and Coleridge’s collec­ tion, and its monumental position in the canon of British poetry. The na­ ture of the lyric has been a touchstone for Romanticist scholarship since well before M. H. Abrams first described the “Greater Romantic Lyric” in 1965.4 The ballad, however, has received a similar kind of attention only 1. [Stoddart], The British Critic 17 (1801): 131. 2. Butler, “Wordsworth and the Well-Hidden Corpse,” London Review ofBooks 14 (6 Au­ gust 1992): 12-13. 3. For a more recent take on what it means to make the ballad lyrical see Saree Makdisi, Making England Western: Occidentalism, Race and Imperial Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 87-132. 4. Abrams, “Structure and Style in the Greater Romantic Lyric,” in From Sensibility to SiR, 55 (Summer 2016) 185 186 IAN NEWMAN more recently but, as I hope to demonstrate, it is worth our trouble to be precise about what was understood by the term “ballad” in the period lead­ ing up to the publication of Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s collection. By mapping the landscape ofpopular balladry in the 1790s, taking into account both radical and conservative valuations, I will show how the ballad form had become suffused with anxieties about class, literacy, piety and the in­ teraction of orality and print. Seen in the context of ongoing controversies about the ballad, it becomes clear how careful Wordsworth is in the “Preface” to present his collection neither as revolutionary, nor as a with­ drawal from the political domain, but as cautiously, complexly moderate— a thorny middle ground between radical zeal and sanctimonious piety. My main interest here is in Wordsworth’s theory of balladry, and how the “Preface” participates in contemporary debates about the aesthetics and politics of the ballad and the stakes involved in engaging those debates. As critics from Wordsworth’s contemporaries on have frequently pointed out, however, the “Preface” and the poems it precedes are not necessarily coex­ tensive, and the theory is often unevenly deployed in practice. But seen in the light of the ballad debates of the 1790s, certain poems in the collection that have received scant critical attention, such as “The Two Thieves,” ap­ pear newly significant for the way they engage with ballad debates. A de­ tailed excavation of these controversies helps us understand that Stoddart’s objection to the tautology of the collection’s title was a calculated stance, itself an intervention into fiercely contested disputes over the meaning of the ballad form. As I will show, no one who had lived through the 1790s— not Stoddart, and certainly not Wordsworth—could have been insensible to the powerfully contested social, moral, and political valances that balladry carried during the revolutionary decade. Before exploring this ter­ rain in more detail, however, it will be helpful to understand in broad terms what is meant by the term ballad. 1. Defining the Ballad Commonly defined as...

‘Le Néant de ce qu’on appelle gloire’: Post-Revolutionary Cultural Memory and the Dialogue des Morts

As France struggled to find ways to shape its national history and cultural heritage following the Revolution, an unknown author in a minor genre was reflecting on what the recent social and political upheaval meant for the celebrated protagonists of France’s past and present. François de Pagès, in his 1800 collection of dialogues des morts, brings together the illustrious dead to comment on the world they have left behind, and on their own lives and legacies. A particular concern, articulated by Mirabeau, Marat, Voltaire, Rousseau, and others, is what it takes to be remembered and, conversely, to be forgotten. This article explores this issue first as it appeared in the reality of 1790s France — from the ‘impossible’ Panthéon, to the reimagining of pre-revolutionary cultural icons — then as it is set out in Pagès’s text, which brings together pre- and post-revolutionary greats, and examines their relative ‘gloire’. I underline the contentious nature of the ‘grand homme’ in the revolutionary decade, and suggest that the capacity of literary creation to provide a durable but flexible form of cultural memory is one of the reasons for the renewed popularity of the dialogue des morts in this period.

Ralph Kingston on the Bourgeoisie and Bureaucracy in France, 1789–1848

Ralph Kingston, inBureaucrats and Bourgeois Society, argues that government employees constituted the core of the French bourgeoisie in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The book lends support to the Marxist interpretation of the Revolution, not as a breakthrough of a capitalist bourgeoisie, but as a conflict originating in a social structure whose economic surplus was appropriated politically. This review posits that the peasants’ subsistence strategies constrained the economic evolution of the country and led well-to-do families to invest in shares of governmental authority and careers in the civil service rather than in private enterprises. The slow economic growth and pursuit of state offices represent underlying continuities between the Old Regime and the nineteenth century. The notable changes resulted from the popular uprisings of 1789–93 and the rationalisation of the state apparatus during the revolutionary decade.

Ecclesiology, Piety, and Presbyterian and Independent Polemics During the Early Years of the English Revolution

Religious controversy swept across England during the revolutionary decades of the 1640s and 1650s. Historians have studied the attendant ecclesiological debates meticulously. The piety as practiced by the puritans has also been carefully examined. Yet generally, these two subjects of ecclesiology and piety have been kept as separate compartments of analysis. The plethora of tracts that rolled off the press during the initial years of the 1640s, nevertheless, shows that many contemporary polemicists were keen to tie the two themes together. The Presbyterian and Independent polemicists were no exception. As this article seeks to demonstrate, a common feature of their publications was the belief that their preferred ecclesiastical polity best served the purpose of promoting individual piety and creating a godly society. Thus the Presbyterian and Independent conflict waged not only over issues of ecclesiology proper such as categories of church offices and of governing councils or composition of church membership to which historians have directed their attention hitherto, but also over questions of how ecclesiology affected piety. Such conflict was a reflection of the commitment of Presbyterians and Independents to their respective vision of reformation for the country. More broadly, this article shows a facet of religious controversy that ultimately led to the disintegration of the godly community and weakened the base of support for the Commonwealth and the Protectorate.

Jacobin History: Charlotte Smith's Old Manor House and the French Revolution Debate

Given the fundamental importance of history to the disputes which raged in the 1790s about questions of tradition, authority and social change, and the meaning of the British national past, it is perhaps unsurprising that both radical and anti-Jacobin novelists employed forms of fictional historical narrative to intervene in the French Revolution debate. During the ‘war of ideas’, writers clearly conceived of an active political purpose for the historical novel, and these texts appear as a vital element within the wider response of the British novel to the crisis engendered by the French Revolution. While conservative authors such as Clara Reeve, George Walker and Jane West relied on the genre to counter the threat of revolution, echoing Edmund Burke’s appeal to history to defend the eighteenth-century British political and institutional structure against the encroaches of radical reformers unversed in the lessons of history and experience, a turn to historical fiction simultaneously permitted radical novelists such as William Godwin and Charlotte Smith to extend the pervasive social and cultural analysis of the Jacobin novel into the theatre of history, and promote a spirit of political enquiry and reflection through the medium of the historical. Published during the early years of the pamphlet war, Smith’s The Old Manor House (1793) appears as a key instance of the intersection of the genre of historical fiction with the political and historical dialogue generated by the French Revolution controversy. As Godwin would do at the close of the revolutionary decade in St Leon (1799), Smith employed imaginative historical narrative to issue a direct challenge to the historical view of Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), presenting readers with a complex narrative meditation on the American and French Revolutions, and the ongoing debate surrounding the political settlement that followed the Glorious Revolution of 1688. The use of history to comment on contemporary politics was a well-established practice by the eighteenth century, and, in The Old Manor House, Smith undoubtedly drew on the 1770s as a means of offering a displaced mode of political critique in the reactionary climate of the 1790s. The composite historical agenda of the text indicates, however, that Smith’s narrative intentions extended beyond veiled political expression. Composed in a moment marked by the intensifying violence of the French Revolution, the return of The Old Manor House to the period of the American Revolution facilitated a celebration of their shared ideals, allowing Smith ‘to remind her readers of a fact that had slipped from the

Reviving the Radicals: Clement Writer and the Historiography of the English Revolution

This article seeks to recover civil war radicalism as a fit subject for scholarly enquiry, in the wake of “revisionist” responses to the work of Christopher Hill that challenged the validity of concentrating upon “marginal” figures, and upon aspects of the revolutionary decades that were merely “epiphenomenal.” It does so by drawing attention to one particular individual – Clement Writer – who played a significant part in Hill's work, although it does so by highlighting something other than his ideas, or even his status as a humble and uneducated clothier. My focus, therefore, is less upon Writer's religious radicalism than upon his participatory practices, and his appropriation of print as a tactical device; upon the part that experience of political processes played in his radicalization; and upon evidence of what might be described as his “political imaginary,” or his less-than-fully-theorized understanding of the political system, its faults and its possibilities.

RELIGIOUS LIBERTY IN AMERICA: MYTHS AND REALITIES

The Whiggish story of ever-evolving liberty issuing from the Revolutionary decades and progressing straightforwardly over the next two centuries is dead. But so too, it seems, on the evidence of these two good books, is the revisionist tale of either “republican virtue” (often trumpeted by progressives) or “evangelical piety” (often trumpeted by Christian conservatives) governing the American mind and its understanding of rights, obligations, and collective identity. Both Steven K. Green and David Sehat see the narrative arc of American history as a continual tension between the religious and secular understandings of the American Constitution. Sehat is more doubtful that the Jeffersonian–Madisonian doctrine of separation of church and state ever commanded broad assent. The “myth” that America was born religiously free, though peddled by liberals, he argues, actually disables secularists who are struggling to create a public realm truly free from religious coercion. Green more readily accepts the proposition that the germ of religious freedom grew from its eighteenth-century origins along a non-continuous but nonetheless clearly secularizing trajectory.

Prensa y sociedad en las décadas revolucionarias (1910-1940)

El artículo aporta una visión panorámica de lahistoria del periodismo en las décadas revolucionarias, considerando el vínculo entre el quehacer periodístico y la sociedad. Se pretende aquíun acercamiento a las diferentes actitudes quecada uno de los gobiernos revolucionarios manifestaron hacia la prensa, los periodistas y la libertad de expresión. Como parte de una investigación más amplia sobre el tema, esta revisiónpropone que la esfera pública mexicana se fortaleció entre l910 y 1940 debido a la fuerza quetomó la idea de la libertad de imprenta y expresión, a la fuerza política adquirida por los periodistas revolucionarios y a causa también de ladebilidad del Estado.

Industry and revolution: social and economic change in the Orizaba Valley, Mexico

The Mexican Revolution has long been considered a revolution of peasants. But Aurora Gomez-Galvarriato’s investigation of the mill towns of the Orizaba Valley reveals that industrial workers played a neglected but essential role in shaping the Revolution. By tracing the introduction of mechanized industry into the valley, she connects the social and economic upheaval unleashed by new communication, transportation, and production technologies to the political unrest of the revolutionary decade. Industry and Revolution makes a convincing argument that the Mexican Revolution cannot be understood apart from the changes wrought by the Industrial Revolution, and thus provides a fresh perspective on both transformations. By organizing collectively on a wide scale, the spinners and weavers of the Orizaba Valley, along with other factory workers throughout Mexico, substantially improved their living and working conditions and fought to secure social and civil rights and reforms. Their campaigns fed the imaginations of the masses. The Constitution of 1917, which embodied the core ideals of the Mexican Revolution, bore the stamp of the industrial workers’ influence. Their organizations grew powerful enough to recast the relationship between labor and capital, not only in the towns of the valley, but throughout the entire nation. The story of the Orizaba Valley offers insight into the interconnections between the social, political, and economic history of modern Mexico. The forces unleashed by the Mexican and the Industrial revolutions remade the face of the nation and, as Gomez-Galvarriato shows, their consequences proved to be enduring.

Geometries of Power

In the revolution of 1789, France set out to replace its absolute monarchy with a government based on a separation of legislative, judicial, and executive powers. In Geometries of Power: Royal, Revolutionary, and Postrevolutionary French Courtrooms, Katherine Fischer Taylor asks how the goal of separating powers affected the reform of French justice through its physical housing. Providing the first overview of French courtroom layout, Taylor identifies four geometric configurations that characterize in turn the late ancien régime, the revolutionary decade, and the Napoleonic era and beyond. While taking account of changes in the conduct of trials, the analysis emphasizes instead how the courtroom’s spatial arrangement expresses the political source and status of justice. The revolution’s hitherto-unstudied circular layout is placed in the context of the novel curvilinear legislative chamber and influential theater reform. It proposes that the Napoleonic replacement, a rectangular layout inspired by contemporaneous basilican church interiors, instead reframed justice as a sacral power distinct from the theatrical legislature.

Women on Fire: Immolation, Consent, and the Revolutionary Subject

The years between 1930 and 1933 saw a dramatic rise in anticolonial violence in Bengal. Young women who participated in this violence, caught between competing masculinist discourses of colonial authorities and nationalist communities that deemed them either dupes or martyrs, recognized an incongruity between their revolutionary insurgency and the conditions of possibility for its memorialization. This essay follows Pritilata Waddedar, the first woman to die in the commission of an anticolonial terrorist attack, as she is incarnated into legal, historical, and cultural evidence by colonial authorities and nationalists alike. It responds to Gayatri Spivak’s canonical question of whether the subaltern woman’s voice can be excavated from the historical archive by suggesting that Waddedar augurs and undermines the future narratives of her death and allegorically calls herself sati as a political strategy of refusal and illegibility. Waddedar’s iteration of sati relies on its peculiar status in nineteenth-century colonial law, where it was classified as “voluntary culpable homicide by consent.” This legislation inaugurated a new juridical index of female desire that shaped the political conditions of possibility for revolutionary women decades later. Waddedar prophesies the ways in which her death, like that of the immolated widow, will come to be the object of disputed meaning making and insistently jams the gears of systems of evidence that promise an epistemological clarity of the terms by which a woman lives or dies.

American Zion: The Old Testament as a Political Text from the Revolution to the Civil War by Eran Shalev (review)

Reviewed by: American Zion: The Old Testament as a Political Text from the Revolution to the Civil War by Eran Shalev Alexis McCrossen (bio) Keywords Bible, Old Testament, Biblical language American Zion: The Old Testament as a Political Text from the Revolution to the Civil War. By Eran Shalev. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013. Pp. 239. Cloth, $40.00.) In the index of Bernard Bailyn’s classic The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA, 1967) appear many references to Rome, a couple to Greece, and none to the Old or New Testament. Since then, numerous historians—not the least of whom is Eran Shalev, author of Rome Reborn on Western Shores: Historical Imagination and the Creation of the American Republic (Charlottesville, VA, 2009)—have investigated how familiarity with ancient history and the classics informed American political and artistic culture. Shalev’s recent book, American Zion, departs from Bailyn’s model by revealing how profoundly the Old Testament influenced political debate and reflection in the United States between the Revolution and the 1830s. It shows how the Hebrew Bible was the source of images, stories, and tropes that resonated with Americans as they fashioned an understanding of themselves as a “chosen people” and of their nation as a “new Israel.” Drawing on Hebraic political studies, which investigates the “Hebraic tradition in political thought” (3, 52), Shalev has written an intellectual history that traces the origins, circulation, and adaptation of Old Testament themes in American political and religious treatises. He extends Eric Nelson’s inquiry in The Hebrew Republic: Jewish Sources and the Transformation of European Political Thought (Cambridge, MA, 2010) to the American context. Shalev investigates the fluorescence of what he calls “Old Testamentism” during the Revolutionary decades and [End Page 771] beyond, before proposing in a closing chapter that midcentury debates over slavery contributed to its demise as a frame of political and religious reference. Shalev’s focus on the political imagination rather than on politics frees the book from a developmental trajectory whereupon one sort of reference to the Old Testament begets another. In five chapters, the book instead highlights the incidence of what Shalev characterizes as “Hebraic” tropes, themes, and metaphors in various forms of political speech. Drawing attention to “biblical republicanism,” the first chapter redresses the scholarly neglect of the role of the Old Testament “in the formation and evolution of an American republican worldview” (19). It underscores how Americans relied on the Old Testament to identify corruption. Shalev masterfully explains how Americans “made sense of civic corruption through biblical narratives” (30), particularly in their oft-repeated references to the Maccabean Revolt (167–160 BC); Persia’s corruptible king Ahasuerus and his mendacious, scheming minister Haman; and the Israelite town of Meroz, which sided with Canaan’s invading armies. Thus, Americans “read the Old Testament as a narrative of resistance to tyranny” (41). It gave them a language and discourse through which they could talk about tyranny and republican virtue. To close chapter 1, Shalev shows how Gideon provided a model for disinterested republican virtue as important as the Roman Lucius Quinticus Cincinnatus. George Washington, it was said, embodied the admirable traits of the biblical as well as the Roman hero. Shalev’s literary analysis, particularly discourse analysis, illuminates the book’s middle chapters. Chapter 2 explores the appropriation of Israel as a model of republican governance by figures as diverse as patriotic pastors Gad Hitchcock and Samuel Cooper, Harvard President Samuel Langdon, and the inestimable Thomas Paine. Even Lyman Beecher believed that the American Constitution came from the Bible, not Rome or Greece. The chapter concludes with a fascinating account of Mordecai Manuel Noah, who in 1825 tried to “reconstitute a Hebrew government” (77) a few miles from Buffalo on an island in the Niagara River, in a city he named Ararat, after the biblical Mount Ararat, where Noah’s ark landed after the flood. Chapter 3 investigates the uses of biblical language, arguing that the discourse itself perpetuated and supported ontological claims for authority and legitimacy. The biblical style influenced nomenclature as well as [End Page 772] literary form, and provided a venue through which satire could be developed. More important...

Family and Feminism in the French Revolution: The Case of Rosalie Ducrollay Jullien

The debate over whether women had a French Revolution is a spirited one. Limited sources, however, have frustrated our efforts to learn how women described their experience of the Revolutionary decade. This article introduces readers to a new female voice, the bourgeois Parisian, Rosalie Jullien. In her remarkable collection of over eight hundred private letters, we seek evidence of change in her descriptions of women and the family and her gendered self. We argue that the Revolution led gradually to a more republican understanding of family dynamics and a politicization of femininity. However, we also see that new ideas about women's independence mixed ambiguously with traditional notions of gender hierarchy. This insight into the private life and thoughts of an unknown citoyenne demonstrates how ordinary and obscure women could be profoundly influenced by Revolutionary discourse and experience, even if they rarely expressed those changes beyond private writings and interactions.