The Women of Paris and Their French Revolution

During the French Revolution, hundreds of domestic and working-class women of Paris were interrogated, examined, accused, denounced, arrested, and imprisoned for their rebellious and often hostile behavior. In this volume, the author offers an account of these female revolutionaries. This account consists of common women who struggled for bare subsistence by working in factories, in shops, on the streets, and on the home front while still finding time to participate in national assemblies, activist gatherings, and public demonstrations in their fight for the recognition of women as citizens within a burgeoning democracy. Relying on exhaustive research in historical archives, police accounts, and demographic resources at specific moments of the Revolutionary period, the author describes the private and public lives of these women within their precise political, social, historical, and gender-specific contexts. Her observations shed new light on the importance of women as instigators, activists, militants, and decisive revolutionary individuals in the crafting and rechartering of their political and social roles as female citizens within the New Republic.