Politics in the Marketplace. Work, Gender, and Citizenship in Revolutionary France

Book announcement

One of the most dramatic images of the French Revolution is of Parisian market women sloshing through mud and dragging cannons as they marched on Versailles and returned with bread and the king. These market women, the Dames des Halles, sold essential foodstuffs to the residents of the capital but, equally important, through their political and economic engagement, held great revolutionary influence.

Politics in the Marketplace examines how the Dames des Halles invented notions of citizenship through everyday trade. It innovatively interweaves the Dames' political activism and economic practices to reveal how marketplace actors shaped the nature of nascent democracy and capitalism through daily commerce. While haggling over price controls, fair taxes, and acceptable currency, the Dames and their clients negotiated tenuous economic and social contracts in tandem, remaking longstanding Old Regime practices. In this environment, the Dames conceptualized a type of economic citizenship in which individuals' activities such as buying goods, selling food, or paying taxes positioned them within the body politic and enabled them to make claims on the state. They insisted that their work as merchants served society and demanded that the state pass favorable regulations for them in return. In addition, they drew on their patriotic work as activists and their gendered work as republican mothers to compel the state to provide practical currency and assist indigent families. Thus, their notion of citizenship portrayed useful work, rather than gender, as the cornerstone of civic legitimacy. 

Politics in the Marketplace challenges the interpretation that the Revolution launched an inherently masculine trajectory for citizenship and reexamines work, gender, and citizenship at the cusp of modern democracy.

Katie Jarvis is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame.

 

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Inventing Citizenship in the Revolutionary Marketplace 
Chapter 1: The Dames des Halles: Economic Lynchpins and the People Personified
Chapter 2: Embodying Sovereignty: The October Days, Political Activism, and Maternal Work
Chapter 3: Occupying the Marketplace: The Battle Over Public Space,Particular Interests, and the Body Politic
Chapter 4: Exacting Change: Money, Market Women, and the Crumbling Corporate World 
Chapter 5: The Cost of Female Citizenship: Price Controls and the Gendering of Democracy in Revolutionary France
Chapter 6: Selling Legitimacy: Merchants, Police, and the Politics of Popular Subsistence
Chapter 7: Commercial Licenses as Political Contracts: Working Out Autonomy and Economic Citizenship
Conclusion: Fruits of Labors: Citizenship as Social Experience 
Notes 
Bibliography 
Index

 

 

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