The French Revolution a Political History 17891804 by a aulard

Author:a aulard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Macmillan Company
Published: 1910-06-17T16:00:00+00:00

1 (Euvres, viil 141.

232 FORMATION OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY

suffrage seemed to be justified by a partial experience. Accordingly, in 1789, there was a first and very lively feminist movement, which manifested itself in petitions and pamphlets, but which emanated, it seems, almost entirely from the women themselves ; men seem at the outset to have met it with disdainful silence.

Women pleaded their cause by means of acts as well as words : they took part in the Revolution, to the success of which they contributed : some in the salons, some in the streets, some at the taking of the Bastille. They took a hand in the municipalisation of the country in July, 1789. The decisive character of October 5th and 6th was due to women. The Commune, in 1790, decorated a number of the women of Paris with medals. Here and there, in the provinces, as, for example, at Vic-en-Bigorre, there were actual battalions of Amazons. Women had, indeed, really played the part of citizens when Condorcet took their cause in hand, with more insistence and more publicly than in 1788, and published, in July, 1790, in the Journal de la Socitti de 1789, a vigorous and eloquent article, entitled : " On the Admission of Women to the Rights of the State," which was a veritable feminist manifesto.

On this occasion men could not, as in 1789, simply pass disdainfully to the " order of the day " on the question of political rights for women. Condorcet's manifesto produced a great sensation. The matter was debated in the journals, the salons, the clubs, and at the Cercle social. This latter club, at first of indefinite views, finally adhered (December 30, 1790) to the views of Condorcet, marking this adhesion by printing and distributing a feminist pamphlet by Mme. Aelders, who was trying to found and federate throughout France patriotic societies of "citizenesses."

However, the majority of the more prominent democrats avoided any theoretical pronouncement on the

FEMALE SUFFRAGE—POPULAR CLUBS 233

subject of the women's rights, much more any encouragement of the feminist movement as Mme. Aelders was attempting to organise it. These women's clubs, established apart from and in some sense in opposition to the men's clubs, were liable to form a cause of division among revolutionists. Patriots of enthusiastic spirit a-nd enlightened mind preferred, to this schismatic effort, the noble and faithful revolutionary attempt at the fraternal co-operation of man and woman.

I am referring to the " Fraternal Societies of the two Sexes," which played so' important a part in the evolution of democracy and the Republic.

These societies were one of the means and one of the effects of the democratic anti-bourgeois movement ; they were one of the forms of the Soctites populalres.

At the present time one understands the phrase Soctttte popataires as denoting all political clubs of whatever kind, and that was, in fact, precisely what it used to mean in 1793 and 1794. But in 1790 and 1791 it was otherwise. The Jacobin Club, or the Friends of

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