Retour 1 1 The Family Model of Politics It was a cold and foggy morning in winter when the king of France met his death. At l0:22 A.M. on 21 January 1793, the executioner dropped the guillotine's blade on the neck of Louis Capet, the former Louis XVI. The recently installed guillotine had been designed as the great equalizer; with it, every death would be the same, virtually automatic, presumably painless. The deputies hoped that by killing Louis in this way, they would prove "that great truth which the prejudices of so many centuries had stifled; today we have just convinced ourselves that a king is only a man and that no man is above the laws." In these few words, the newspaper writer captured the meaning of the event in the most accessible terms: the French killed the king in order to convince themselves that the king was only a man like other men, that the magic of kingship which had been so powerful during so many centuries could be effaced. "Capet is no longer! Peoples of Europe! Peoples of the world! Look carefully at the thrones and you will see that they are nothing but dust!" As if to ensure the return of this particular throne to dust, the severed head and body of the king were immediately deposited in a deep grave in the Madeleine Cemetery and covered with quicklime. All remaining traces of the king's physical presence were effaced. The newspaper article's tones of hope and tenses of conditionality belie a great anxiety. France has given a great example to the people of the world and a great lesson to kings, the writer proclaims, but will the one and the other profit from it? The day is forever memorable, but will it survive for posterity? "Never let insult come near you. Historians! Be worthy of the time; write the truth, nothing but the truth."'2 The writer writes to reject all semblance of guilt. The 2 20,000 spectators jammed into the Place de la Revolution had been there to share the experience, and 80,000 armed men had stood guard to make sure that there would be no breaches of security. If guilt was felt, it was presumably widely shared. The killing of the king was the most important political act of the Revolution and the central drama in the revolutionary family romance. Everyone recognized its symbolic significance, yet the revolutionaries had various and often contradictory views about the meaning of the act. Even though the deputies in the Convention frequently cited the historical precedent of the execution of England's Charles I, for example, they drew no single consistent meaning from it. In any case, everyone knew that kingship had been restored in England and the regicides punished; it was not a particularly encouraging precedent. Revolutionaries and royalists alike considered the king the head 3 of the entire social order, even though the political position of Louis XVI had been undermined in some respects before 1793, perhaps even before 1789. The status of Louis Capet was very much in question at the time of his execution. Had the executioner killed a king or a man long since deprived of his sacred status? Whatever the answer, whether the king was symbolically dead in 1793, 1789, or before, his actual death in 1793 drew attention to a sacred void, marked by the empty pedestal facing Louis during his execution. The pedestal had supported a statue of his grandfather, Louis XV. The government which ordered the execution of the former king was a republic whose legitimacy rested on popular sovereignty. Establishing a republic on paper took a stroke of the pen; winning the allegiance of the population and establishing an enduring sense of legitimacy required much more. What would make people obey the law in the new social order? The king had been the head of a social body held together by bonds of deference; peasants deferred to their landlords, journeymen to their masters, great magnates to their king, wives to their husbands, and children to their parents. Authority in the state was explicitly modeled on authority in the family. A royal declaration of 1639 had explained, "The natural reverence of children for their parents is linked to the legitimate obedience of subjects to their sovereign." Once the king had been eliminated, what was to be the model that ensured the citizens' obedience? No one understood better than the English critic of the Revolution, Edmund Burke, the connection between filial devotion and the willingness of a subject to obey. He feared that the whole community would be destroyed by the subversion of "those principles of domestic trust and fidelity which form the discipline of social life." In reviewing the early events of the French Revolution and in particular the demeaning of the royal family during the October Days of 1789, Burke bemoaned the passing of what he called the age of chivalry and its replacement by the age of "sophisters, economists, and calculators": 4 In the new age, all the pleasing illusions, which made power gentle, and obedience liberal, which harmonized the different shades of life, and which, by a bland assimilation, incorporated into politics the sentiments which beautify and soften private society, are to be dissolved by this new conquering empire of light and reason. All the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off. Without that "decent drapery," without "the sentiments which beautify and soften private society," Burke predicted, the revolutionaries would have to rule by the force of terror. "In the groves of their academy, at the end of every vista, you see nothing but the gallows." My analysis in the following pages is much influenced by Burke's fundamental insight into the interweaving of private sentiments and public politics, even though I have a very different view of the Revolution from his. Burke saw that political obedience rested on something more than rational calculation: "To make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely. " Political obedience always rests on a set of assumptions about the proper working of the social order, and obedience - in modern terms, consent - is never automatic, even when it most appears to be so, as in so-called traditional societies. It was certainly not automatic in the new republic, as tax collectors and military recruiters discovered every day. The revolutionaries were ripping the veil of deference off society. Unlike Burke, however, they did not see this as the end of all decency; they wanted to make their government "lovely" too. From 1789 onward, supporters of the Revolution were engaged in the great adventure of the modern Western social contract; they were trying to replace deference and paternal authority with a new basis for political consent. Many of them had read the great theorists of this adventure: Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu, and Rousseau. But the theorists, with the exception of Rousseau, offered little in the way of advice about the affective relations that might cement a new contract. In the absence of any clear model for the private sentiments that might make a new order lovable, the revolutionaries fumbled their way through a thicket of interrelated problems. If absolutism had rested on the model of patriarchal authority, then would the de- 5 struction of absolutism depend on the destruction of patriarchy, what the French called "la puissance paternelle"? How far should the moderation of paternal authority go? Would the restriction of paternal authority make everyone in the political family equal, brother with brother, brother with sister, and children with parents? In other words, what kind of family romance would replace the one dominated by the patriarchal father? If paternalism was to be replaced by a model of fraternity, what were the implications of that new model? How, for instance, was the idea of the political exclusion of women to be maintained in the absence of the old justifications of "natural" family order? Would the model of the family be thrown out altogether in favor of a model based on isolated, independent, self-possessing, contracting individuals? The attack on absolutism brought in its turbulent wake a necessary reevaluation of the shape of the individual self. Although these questions might seem to be obvious, they did not present themselves very clearly or even all at once to the leaders of the French Revolution. To a great extent these questions have also dropped out of much modern, contract-based political theory. Contract theory pretends that questions about the family and the relations between men and women belong in a private sphere separate from the public arena. All of the great political theorists from the seventeenth century onward struggled with the question, in particular, of women's place in the new order, and all of them tried to devise solutions that would ensure the continued subordination of women to their husbands after the breakdown of patriarchy. Yet most of these theorists showed little interest in elaborating what Carole Pateman calls the "sexual contract" between men and women that logically accompanied the social contract. The one great exception is Freud. Although hardly known as a political theorist - indeed his forays in this direction are among his most maligned works - Freud tried to imagine a story about the original social contract that would explain the genesis of "the law of male sex-right," the right of men as men to dominate women. 6 In Totem and Taboo (1913), in particular, Freud offered his own version of the origins of the social contract, or what might be called the original family romance. He located those origins in a kind of prehistoric fall from life in the primal horde, the first amorphous gathering of humans. In "the first great act of sacrifice," as he called it, the sons banded together to kill the father and eat him. They killed the father because he had kept all the females for himself and driven away the growing sons. By eating him, they accomplished their identification with the father. The deed once accomplished, the brothers felt a sense of guilt, so they undid their deed by creating two taboos: a taboo against killing the totem animal that was substituted for the father; and the incest taboo, which denied the liberated women to the brothers. These taboos gave rise to religion and social organization (kinship) respectively, and they effectively repressed for the future the two main wishes of the Oedipus complex: the desire to kill the father and to sleep with the mother. By instituting the taboos, moreover, the brothers solved the major problem facing them after the killing of the father: their feelings of competition with each other for the women. "Sexual desires do not unite men," claimed Freud, "but divide them." If the brothers were to live together in peace, they had to deny themselves the women previously controlled by the father. Freud suggests that the brothers' social organization had a homosexual tinge that was worth preserving. By creating the incest taboo, the brothers "rescued the organization which had made them strong - and which may have been based upon the homosexual feelings and acts, originating perhaps during the period of their expulsion from the horde." Through their new social organization, the brothers were able to reconcile themselves with the dead father, whom they also loved and admired, maintain their feelings for each other, and at the same time enforce a heterosexual system of marriage to ensure the survival of the group. An inevitable "longing" for the father led to a recreation of him in the form of gods and social organization itself. Because of the pres- 7 sure of competition within the band of brothers, no one could be allowed to gain "the father's supreme power," but the desire to mimic the father could be accommodated in new systems of rank and status. "The original democratic equality" of each member of the tribe was relinquished, and individuals who distinguished themselves above the rest were venerated. Thus the social contract as envisaged by Freud was not only based on a concomitant sexual contract, in which women were subject to men's power; it also implied complementary bonds between men. Social organization sublimated an underlying, highly charged, male bonding. Women had no place in the new political and social order except as markers of social relations between men. Freud's own inability to work himself out of a patriarchal model of psychopolitical organization was revealed in one of the throwaway lines of Totem and Taboo. Speaking of the move toward deification of the murdered father, Freud inserts: "I cannot suggest at what point in this process of development a place is to be found for the great mother-goddesses, who may perhaps in general have preceded the father-gods." Freud's vision was so patriarchal that the only contests he could imagine were between fathers and sons; women were merely the objects of these conflicts. In a telling passage, he asserted: "The psychoanalysis of individual human beings, however, teaches us with quite special insistence that the god of each of them is formed in the likeness of his father, that his personal relation to God depends on his relation to his father in the flesh and oscillates and changes along with that relation, and that at bottom God is nothing other than an exalted father." The same might be said of the law and of social organization generally. In the essays in this book, I do not intend to apply Freud or Freudianism to the French Revolution, as if Freud's theories of human development could be simply superimposed as a grid on the raw data of the revolutionary experience. Indeed, many of the central Freudian concepts such as penis envy, castration fears, or even the Oedipal complex will appear infrequently or not at all in these pages. I find Freud's analysis in Totem and Taboo suggestive 8 because it sees a set of relationships as being critical to the founding of social and political authority: relationships between fathers and sons, between men, and between men and women. In addition, Freud's own need to write a myth of human origins demonstrates the centrality of narratives about the family to the constitution of all forms of authority, even though Freud's account cannot fruitfully be read as an analysis of an actual event in prehistory or as a rigid model for social and political relationships. I will be arguing that the experience of the French Revolution can be interpreted to put pressure on the Freudian account, even though that account provides an important point of departure. The very mention of the name Freud by a historian is for some a red flag of danger. Among historians, psychoanalytic interpretation has been largely confined to the analysis of individual biographies or, more rarely, to the analysis of group psychology in times of crisis. The connection between individual psyches and social and historical development is an interesting subject of research, but it does not directly concern me here. I do not, for example, offer an analysis of a figure such as Robespierre in Freudian terms. I am interested rather in the ways that people collectively imagine - that is, think unconsciously about - the operation of power, and the ways in which this imagination shapes and is in turn shaped by political and social processes. Central to this collective imagination are the relations between parents and children and between men and women. To put it in specific historical terms, once the French had killed the king, who had been represented as the father of his people, what did they imagine themselves to be doing? What figure did they imagine to take his place? What was the structure of the new political unconscious that replaced the old one? Answers to these questions require an analysis of the political imagination that is at once historically specific and capable of illuminating generally the basic metaphors of modern political and social life. Freud's apparent insistence that the ritual sacrifice of the father was an actual deed- "in the beginning was the Deed"; his fondness for analogies between the thought processes of "savages" and neurotics; and his incredibly intricate, if not fanciful analyses of particular individuals are all grounds for worry about the verifiabil- 9 ity or scientific grounding of psychoanalysis. Yet they do not vitiate the importance of the questions raised by Freud or of the general metaphorical structure that he outlined. Freud, like Burke, saw that obedience was not automatic, and he tried to provide an explanation for how it works. In so doing, he suggested several themes that will appear again and again in this book: the killing of the father, the nature of fraternity, the assignation of guilt, the fate of the "liberated women", the choice of new totems to replace the dead father, and the enforcement of the incest taboo. The French killed the father in an act that comes as close as anything does in modern history to a ritual sacrifice. 10 The radical newspaper that published the engravings reproduced in figures 1 and 2 put it just that way: "We owe to the earth, since we have in a manner of speaking consecrated slavery by our example, we owe a great lesson in the person of the 66th king, more criminal than all his predecessors taken together. The blood of Louis Capet, shed by the blade of the law on 21 January 1793, cleanses us of a stigma of 1300 years. . . . Liberty resembles that divinity of the Ancients which one cannot make auspicious and favorable except by offering to it in sacrifice the life of a great culprit." It is worth noting that in this passage the editor did not describe the "great culprit" as a father figure. By 1793 the revolutionaries wanted to reject any such role for Louis Capet, the former Louis XVI. Nevertheless, the father is implied because the paper went on to refer to the brothers who had killed him, and it described a scene in which the victim was metaphorically devoured. A crowd of people ran up to the scaffold after the execution to dip their pikes and handkerchiefs in the blood of the former king. One zealot sprinkled blood on the crowd and shouted, "Brothers, they tell us that the blood of Louis Capet will fall again on our heads; well, so be it, let it fall. . . . Republicans, the blood of a king brings happiness." This is one of those rare occasions when revolutionary discourse provides its own revealing glimpse into the psychosexual foundations of the political order. Yet even in this case, the evidence is subject to more than one interpretation. In a major rereading of Freud's analysis, the literary critic René Girard has offered a different psychoanalytical perspective on just such a scene. He argues that ritual sacrifice is not fundamentally about parricide and incest but rather is a way of concealing and disguising the community's terror of its own violence. The ritualization of violence - the singling out of a scapegoat - serves to reinstitute differences, limits, and boundaries and thereby displaces violence from the interior of the community. He insists, "The purpose of the sacrifice is to restore harmony to the community, to reinforce the social fabric." Boundaries are especially important because any "sacrificial crisis," according to Girard, threatens sexual differentiation. The singling out of 11 the scapegoat, who might be anyone and not just the father, is for Girard the true origin of all myths, rituals, kinship systems, indeed, symbolic thought itself. The Girardian reading provides a different angle on the passage from the revolutionary newspaper about the execution of the king. In a Girardian account, the emphasis would not be on the king's position as father of his people. The brothers do not kill him because they want to share his power but rather because the French fear their own capacity for violence and need a ritual act in order to reinstitute community boundaries. In other words, the king has to die to erase the guilt that the French themselves feel before the act has been committed. As the editor of the Revolutions de Paris wrote: "We owe to the earth, since we have in a manner of speaking consecrated slavery by our example, we owe a great lesson in the person of the 66th king." In order to displace its own violence, which follows from the disintegration of Old Regime cultural and political codes, the revolutionary community has to focus its guilt on a surrogate victim, the scapegoat, who is, as Girard puts it, a kind of "monstrous double": "The surrogate victim constitutes both a link and a barrier between the community and the sacred. The king has to be transformed into a kind of sacred monster, whose expulsion will return the community to itself. His monstrousness is defined by his outrageous culpability; he is, the newspaper claims, "more criminal than all his predecessors taken together." He has to be in order to be a suitable victim. As a consequence, his blood (another sacred allusion) "cleanses us of a stigma of 1300 years." Only the sacrifice of a great culprit would be sufficient to the task of community redefinition and redemption. Several themes from Girard's reinterpretation of Freud will appear in the essays that follow: the moment of sacrificial crisis, the need for the community to define itself through the choice of victims, and the threat of the loss of boundaries, especially sexual boundaries. It is not enough, however, to replace Freud with Girard. In the French Revolution, the king was victimized for several reasons; he may have been a great culprit and hence a monstrous 12 double of the community, but he was also the father. So, in a sense, I want to have it both (Freudian and Girardian) ways. The French Revolution is a drama about conflict between father and sons and about the threat of violence to the community. Girard denies the validity of the Oedipal triangle between father, mother, and son and replaces it with a more generalized mimetic model of desire which emphasizes the identification between men; nevertheless, he too accords some importance to the role of women. Women are often blamed for violence in order to exonerate men; women are associated with delirium in order to reassure male dignity and authority and in particular to eliminate the blurring of sexual boundaries that accompanies the sacrificial crisis. In the end, however, Girard, like Freud, refuses all independence of action to women; in both psychoanalytic scenarios they are simply the objects of desire, whether directly (in the case of Freud) or indirectly through male mimesis (in the case of Girard). It is one of my aims here to redress that balance, to insist that women were viewed as threats because they could act and not just because they were convenient figments of the male imagination. The French revolutionaries did talk self-consciously about "fraternity," the least understood of the values in the revolutionary triad of "liberty, equality, and fraternity." In conscious discourse fraternity was an idea associated with political solidarities and the drawing of political and social boundaries within the community. The notion of fraternity gradually evolved during the revolutionary decade, as a recent study by Marcel David has shown. In the early years of the Revolution, fraternity had a large and confident meaning because almost everyone could be imagined as participating in the community. For example, at the Festival of Federation of 14 July 1790, Lafayette swore on behalf of all the federated national guards present "to remain united to all the French by the indissoluble bonds of fraternity." 13 During the radical years, 1790-94, fraternity was used more often in a narrow and fearful sense; fraternity defined a kind of "us" and "them" of revolutionary politics, especially on the popular level. One Parisian sectional assembly proclaimed in February 1793, "For a free people, there should be no neutral being. There are only brothers or enemies." The slogan "fraternity or death" seemed to capture this sentiment in dramatic fashion. A reaction against such a belligerent notion of fraternity accompanied Robespierre's fall from power. In the first months after his execution, most representations of fraternity associated it with symbols of sweetness, purity, innocence, and union. Domestication of fraternity did not prove to be enough, however. Progressively after the fall of Robespierre, "fraternity" dropped out of revolutionary slogans to be replaced by liberty and equality standing alone. Official engravers no longer included fraternity in their repertoire of themes, and royalist engravers represented it in derisory contexts. An engraving of 1797, for example, shows a sans-culotte trampling on the constitution. The word fraternity is written on his dagger. Fraternity and fraternization were now cynically limited to the relations with the "sister republics," the satellites and dependents of the conquering French nation. Under the Consulate, prefects were expressly forbidden to use the word. This brief history suggests that the word had a political charge that was indissolubly linked with radical revolution. Getting at the affective charge implicit in the notion of fraternity is more difficult. Revolutionaries rarely explained their emotional motives for, or reactions to, their language, gestures, or rituals. As a consequence, my analysis will usually have to proceed by indirection and inference. There are, however, all sorts of clues about the psychosexual meaning of fraternity in revolutionary symbolics, for instance, in the ordering of festivals and the choice of icons and emblems: and, on occasion, in revolutionary discourse itself - for example, in the debates on women's clubs or in the newspaper accounts of the killing of the king. The psychosymbolics of the 14 revolutionary political imagination are also apparent, however, in less conventional sources for historical analysis: in novels, in paintings, and especially in political pornography. All of them are examples of genres in which family romances can be dramatically enacted. In what follows, I offer a necessarily selective but I hope not arbitrary reading of a wide range of sources, from laws about the family to pornographic novels. My subjects will include such diverse topics as the rise of portraiture in 1791, the regularization of inheritance for illegitimate children in 1793, and the vogue of novels about orphans after 1795, as well as the more obvious topics such as the killings of the king and the queen. Although the iconography of the Revolution has of late attracted considerable attention, especially as it is expressed in graphic form, much less has been done as yet with revolutionary painting and literature. The revolutionary decade has been considered unworthy of attention by most literary critics and art historians because it produced little in the way of great literature or painting, apart from works by Jacques-Louis David. Until very recently, scholars continued to assume that the Revolution had had little positive impact on "high" art beyond the "vandalization" of national treasures that occurred during the radical period of late 1793 and early 1794. Literary histories of the Revolution, for instance, still begin with considerations of political speeches and newspapers, just as they did in the nineteenth century. It is obvious that no one scholar can hope to offer a survey of all the relevant cultural and political expressions of the period in the search for their underlying patterns of familial imagery. I certainly 15 do not claim to account for every engraving, painting, or novel in my analysis, but I do hope to offer an account of the links between family images and power that will prompt others to examine their own sources in new lights. Anyone who works on the revolutionary period knows how difficult it is to use art-historical and literary materials. Sources such as paintings, engravings, and novels are by their nature particularly rich in representations of fathers, mothers, and children, but they are not transparent representations of the imagery of power. Painters rarely painted with straightforward political purposes, even during the French Revolution, and novelists rarely wrote with the self-conscious aim of supporting a particular political order. Moreover, we know little about the specific intentions of artists or novelists of the period. The difficulties are also technical. We do not know the press runs of most novels published at the time, and the exhibition catalogues of the revolutionary period are often limited to simple and uninformative designations of paintings such as "family scene" or "head of an individual." The example of engravings is particularly instructive. Prints required less time for production and as a consequence could be expected to follow the latest political developments more rapidly than the less obviously politicized media. Revolutionary prints were not produced from a set of systematic or self-conscious themes, however; they were produced in response to a variety of demands ranging from the immediate propaganda aims of the government to the consumer market for subscription engravings that captured revolutionary history even as it unfolded. There are over 30,000 prints from the French Revolution collected in various libraries and museums in the world. Most of them are not dated or signed, so drawing conclusions about their meaning is even more risky than in the case of works by well-known painters. These problems compound the difficulty of working in a psychoanalytic perspective. I will be moving constantly between the familial 16 and the political, on the grounds that they are interconnected; and I will be shifting back and forth through a variety of sources. on the grounds that they tell a set of interrelated stories about the founding of a new political and social order. Like the "new historicists" in art and literary criticism, I juxtapose the work of literature, painting, or other art form with other kinds of contemporaneous historical documentation. Yet in the end, my aim is different from theirs. Rather than trying to account for the work of art or literature, I want to get at the common historical and imaginative processes that animate painting, engraving, and literature -as well as political events during the French Revolution. I find that common ground in the development of family romances that both unified and threatened to unravel the revolutionary experience as a whole. 17 2 The Rise and Fall of the Good Father In a speech given to the Constituent Assembly in August 1790, a little-known deputy drew the connection between tyranny in the family and tyranny in the polity: After having made man free and happy in public life, it remains for us to assure his liberty and his happiness in private life. You know that under the Old Regime the tyranny of parents was often as terrible as the despotism of ministers; often the prisons of state became family prisons. It is suitable therefore to draw up, after the declaration of rights of man and citizen, a declaration, so to speak, of the rights of spouses, of fathers, of sons, of parents, and so on. The Revolution opened the way to a reconsideration not only of state authority but also of authority within the family. The rights of every family member and all family relationships were now to be regulated in the interest of liberty and happiness. It is obvious from this passage that the position of the king was still very much undecided one year after the beginning of the Revolution. The despotism of ministers, rather than the tyranny of kings, was the focus of the deputy's concern. Within a year, however, both the king and his queen would become the focus of a violent, often scurrilous campaign to denigrate their authority. The story of the king's fall from his lofty position was intimately tied up with the fortunes of the ideal of the good father. If the king was father of his people, then changes in the image of fathers would have an inescapable impact on the king's representation of himself to the public. Criticism of excessive or tyrannical paternal authority began long before 1789. The Enlightenment conviction that man-kind was moving out of its political and intellectual adolescence led to increasing demands for participation in public affairs. It might be 18 said that the emergence of a new realm of public opinion in the eighteenth century implied the maturation of the king's subjects/children into autonomous men/citizens. The general eighteenth-century trend in western Europe toward regarding children as separate individuals deserving of affection and educational concern also helped to create the ideal of the good father. Rousseau and the other philosophes had taken up Locke's and Pufendorf's insistence on the limits to paternal power: the father's power was to end when the child no longer needed his help, and after that moment, father and (male) children were presumed to be equals. Rousseau explained: "The father is only the master of the child as long as his help is necessary to him; beyond that moment, they become equals and then the son, perfectly independent of the father, owes him only respect and not obedience." The philosophes also subscribed to Locke's notion that paternal power could not provide a model for political power, though like Locke before them, they still insisted that fathers should be dominant within families. As Montesquieu argued, "the example of paternal power proves nothing," but "paternal authority is still very useful for the maintenance of morals." The influence of the ideal of the good father was apparent on the most self-conscious political level, as Jeffrey Merrick has shown in his study of parlementary discourse in the eighteenth century. During the rhetorical struggles between king and parlement, parlementary magistrates used filial language to express their obedience but also to make palatable their resistance to royal authority. In 1732 the magistrates asked Louis XV to show them that he was "more our father than our master." In their view, "filial respect is not at all opposed to legitimate complaints." When requesting royal action against "despotic" behavior by clergy, tax collectors, or even royal officials, the magistrates appealed to the "common father," who 19 would show "paternal solicitude," "paternal affection," and "paternal tenderness." They were asking the good father to curb his own powers. In countering parlementary resistance to his policies, the king used some of the same rhetoric, but to his own advantage. He knew how "to let himself be moved like a father" but also how "to make himself obeyed like a master." He was willing to respond "with the indulgence of a father," but he also required that the magistrates set an example of filial submission for the kingdom as a whole. The king and his ministers were quick to seize upon the implications of the rhetoric of the good father and to insist on their own interpretation. Faced with the challenge, the king insisted that the magistrates could not be "masters" on their own and remain loyal to him. Images of state and familial power were perhaps most closely intertwined in the controversy over lettres de cachet that developed during the eighteenth century. The king could use lettres de cachet to imprison or exile anyone who threatened public order, and lettres de cachet could be solicited by parents to incarcerate their children, without a hearing, for the sake of familial order and reputation. During the eighteenth century, critics of government policy and officials of the crown alike began to doubt the wisdom of using lettres de cachet, whose very name had come to connote secrecy and arbitrary judgment. In l770, for example, Malesherbes attacked the use of lettres de cachet on behalf of the Cour des Aides of Paris. Malesherbes complained of the abuses of power made possible by these extraordinary administrative instruments: "The orders signed by Your Majesty are often filled with obscure names of people whom Your Majesty could not possibly know. . . . The result, Sire, is that no citizen in your realm is assured of not seeing his liberty sacrificed to personal vengeance. 20 The publication of memoirs written in the Bastille or other prisons by those who had suffered from the abuse of lettres de cachet drew public attention to the intertwining of despotic royal and despotic familial power. Mirabeau wrote of his father, who had had him imprisoned by lettre de cachet for causing a public scandal by his affair with a married woman, "Listening to the enemies of his son and refusing to hear him, punishing him more severely than the law required and by extrajudicial means, immolating him slowly and refusing him what a human master would not refuse his lackey - those are so many parricides. While in prison in Vincennes, Mirabeau wrote an extensive denunciation, Des Lettres de cachet et des prisons d'etat (published in 1782), which helped transform public opinion both about the powers of the monarchy and about the porters of families. Mirabeau addressed himself to public opinion and to parents with the aim of showing that "the use of lettres de cachet is tyrannical. " The abuse of lettres de cachet in family matters eventually attracted the attention of the king's own ministers. In 1784 Breteuil sent out a circular to all intendants and to the lieutenant general of police in Paris warning of parental severity: "Fathers and mothers are sometimes either unjust or too severe, or too easily alarmed: and I think that it is always necessary to require that at least two or three principal relatives sign the memoirs requesting orders [for lettres de cachet] along with the fathers and mothers." The efforts of the king's ministers to put a stop to misuse of lettres de cachet was part of the remaking of the king's image as good father. This image emerged in a variety of forms, sometimes in spite of official efforts. While the king's officials were commissioning paintings in the grand manner of classical and French history subjects, for instance, Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette appeared in popular paintings, drawings, and engravings as examples of virtue and beneficence - the good parents - rather than in old-style dynastic glory. Thus the public came to 1789 already prepared for the ambiguities of the reference to the king as good father: would the 21 good father give in to demands for independence from the children or resist changes in his status as detrimental to good family and political relationships? The ideal of the good father took shape in a variety of ways, ranging from tracts on education to paintings of sentimental family scenes. Perhaps the most influential source for new attitudes about both fathers and children was the novel. The rise of the novel and the emergence of interest in children and a more affective family went hand in hand. It is in fact impossible to tell which - the novel or the child-centered family - was cause and which was effect. As sensibility and individual subjectivity, even for children, came to be more and more emphasized, the role of the father was bound to change. A stern, repressive father was incompatible with the new model of the family as emotional center for the nurturing of children and the new model of the individual as an autonomous self. Since eighteenth-century novels focused on the individual in his or her relationship to the social world and especially to family pressures, they inevitably enacted a family romance (or series of them). In the form of fiction, writers were able to explore facets of social existence usually suppressed in polite discourse: dreams of social mobility and individual self-transformation; fatal conflicts between parents and children; and the perils and allures of incest. As a consequence, the novel is an essential starting point for any consideration of the familial foundations of authority. The increasing prominence of the novel in eighteenth-century France is in itself a sign of the growing interest in the sources of personal identity and in conflicts between the individual and the family. Novels were not limited to relations between fathers and children, of course. Joan De Jean has shown how women writers at the turn of the eighteenth century novelized their concern with the conflicts between marriage as a social contract and marriage for personal fulfillment. In these novels, the problem is not the father but the abusive husband and the support he gets from unjust laws. 22 Similarly, in the novels of Marie-Jeanne Riccoboni, one of the most popular novelists of the last half of the eighteenth century, it is the husband and lover, not the father, who is identified with tyrannical authority and arbitrary constraint. Men "pretend to be made to guide, sustain, and protect the weak and timid sex, but all the while it is they alone who attack, insist on her timidity, and profit from her weakness." The ultimate in this tendency to efface father figures in female-authored novels may be Françoise de Graffigny's widely read Lettres d'une Peruvienne ( 1747). Her central character Zilia is an Inca priestess who is captured by the Spanish and then the French. The center of her emotional life is her "brother" Aza, whom she was slated to marry on the day of her capture. She is the model of a woman living outside of conventional family life, and she refuses to marry anyone once her brother abandons her for a nonincestuous Spanish Christian marriage. It seems, then, that women writers in the eighteenth century identified the law with husbands, not fathers, and they showed little concern for paternal authority per se. The intensity of concern with family conflicts - whether between wife and husband or between father and children - is reflected in the sheer number of novels that were produced. Eight new novels appeared in France in 1701, 52 in 1730, and 112 in 1789; the production of new works increased constantly (and then declined during the decade of revolution, a subject to which I will return). There have been many explanations of the eighteenth-century explosion of the novel. Most critics seem to agree, however, that the good father only emerged in force in novels after 1750 and that even then the role of the father was often ambiguous; as the father became "good," he also carried less weight in the story line. There may be a convergence of novels written by men and those by women in this respect; fathers had not played a major role in most novels written by women, and by the end of the eighteenth century even novels written by men began to efface the father. 23 From the 1720s onward, the French novel went through a remarkable evolution in regard to father figures. Some critics have argued that father-son conflict was not much of an issue in the French novel before 1725. Father-son conflict was hardly new in French literature, however; the classical theater of the seventeenth century had given great prominence to family conflicts. In the second and third quarters of the eighteenth century, the depiction of the family in both the novel and the theater changed decisively. The novels of the 1730s 1740s and 1750s portrayed a family world in disarray, whether in novels by women in which wives confronted the abuses of husbands or in novels by men in which tyrannical fathers were opposed by rebellious and sacrilegious sons. Family relations in the writings of Prevost, Voltaire, and Marivaux, for instance, tended to be tragic or at least filled with obstacles. In the novels and plays of the 1760s 1770s and 1780s in contrast, the "bourgeois drama" with its emphasis on emotion and good family relations became prominent; yet paradoxically, both the drama and the novels of this later period became more insipid. Good fathers apparently did not make for compelling drama. First, the obstinate tyrants were domesticated as good fathers, even as fathers made to suffer by their children. Then, almost as soon as they were established as virtuous and emotional figures who cared for their children in a new way, fictional fathers began to be effaced; they were lost, absent, dead, or simply unknown. Whatever the father's status in any particular novel, in almost all cases fathers were ambivalent and ambiguous figures, not unlike Louis XVI himself on the eve of 1789. At least one critic has discerned a reorganization of "family mythology" in French literature after 1750. Replacing the repressive father of the earlier (male-authored) novels and plays is the generous and sometimes tortured father who is made to suffer by his guilty children. The good, virtuous, and sensitive father, in Diderot's 24 play The Father of the Family (1758), for example, is portrayed as suffering from the errors, however minor, of his son. In The Unhappy Fathers (1771), Diderot depicts a rebellious son who lives in misery after rejection by his father. The son's wife consoles him by evoking an image of a father who is suffering too. The fathers in Baculard d'Arnaud's widely published Tests of Sentiment ( 1770-80) seem almost incapable of being anything but good. When they are harsh, they themselves suffer. The tragic image of family relations so current in the generation of Prevost thus gives way to one of two myths: the idyllic family without conflict or the family where conflicts exist only to be resolved as soon as the son (or more rarely, daughter) sees his (or her) guilt. In Marmontel's Moral Tales (1761), for instance, problems are never posed, and family life is portrayed as an almost continual idyll. In Baculard d'Arnaud, Oedipal struggles are easily resolved when the son admits remorse. The father could still be a source of ambivalent feelings, especially when he vacillated between the roles of stern patriarch and loving father. The most influential example of this ambivalent father type was the Baron d'Etange in Rousseau's Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse (1761); in fact Julie's father may be the transition figure between the tyrannical and the good father. In the celebrated sixty-third letter of part 1, Julie describes to Claire how her father first berated her mother for allowing a man without station or name into their home. When Julie interrupts and tells her father to calm himself, her father strikes her in a fit of violence. Julie notes that this is the first time in her life that he has struck her, and in his fury he also hits her mother, who has tried to interpose herself between them. Over dinner, the baron tries to make up with his wife. and after dinner he pulls Julie to him and sits her on his knees. They both cry, and Julie describes this moment of reconciliation as "the 25 most delicious" in her life. Julie's father had recognized that parental severity would not work, but a soft touch would get him what he wanted: his daughter's obedience. He remains firm in his decision that she shall not marry Saint-Preux. Critics have disagreed over the meaning of this change in the father's behavior, some seeing in it the decline of the patriarchal father and others seeing instead a new manner of exercising an old structure of authority. This difference in interpretation is worth pausing over, however briefly, because it goes to the heart of the interpretive issues of my entire analysis. Literary critics seem to agree that real, biological fathers began to disappear from novels in the last half of the eighteenth century and that the fathers that were portrayed were depicted as new-model fathers relying on affection and concern rather than unquestioned authority. I view this as a major shift in the representation of fatherhood and in the meaning of all authority relations. Critics who follow a strictly Freudian interpretation insist that the absence of fathers simply enhances rather than eradicates paternal power. In Freud's terms, there is no escape from the "longing for the father." I reject this view as inherently ahistorical and reductionist (everything can be interpreted as reflecting longing for the father), and I hope to demonstrate that the shift toward the good father fatally undermined absolutist royal authority. Julie's father gets what he wants, but only because Julie agrees to it; and twice in this crucial letter she describes him as filled with shame for having struck her. Julie's willingness to submit to his will is the central ingredient, not his desires. The sentimentalization of family relations in the novel and theater did not necessarily enhance the roles of daughters and mothers. The girls of Marmontel's stories, for instance, were always submissive to their parents, chaste, modest, and never responsible for any unhappiness that came their way. The good fathers of Baculard d'Arnaud were seconded by mothers who were devoted and good by 26 their very nature. Daughters depended on their mothers for protection and advice in navigating the transition to marriage, and mothers relied on their daughters for companionship. When this relationship failed, as in Laclos's novel Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782), the result was disastrous for the family's honor. For all their importance to their daughters, however, fictional mothers did not make fathers good. Fathers, like the Baron d'Etange, had to become good on their own. Whatever the merit of the novels and plays about virtuous families, the publication of so many popular novels and plays on this theme reflected the growing French interest, apparent in America and England too, in fatherhood as a vocation. Jacques-Pierre Brissot defended his interest in Mesmerism in the 1780s for example, by saying, "We unfortunate fathers, caught up in our business affairs, are practically nothing to our children. By mesmerism, we become fathers once again." Good fathers were by eighteenth-century definition interested in their children. The emphasis on fathers' interest in their children paralleled an increasing attention to children in fiction in the eighteenth century. In Marmontel's and Baculard's widely read works, for example, children played important roles, but they still functioned primarily as metaphors for something else; pathetic children evoked a world of hypersentimentality. Children stood for innocence, emotion, and simplicity, and the family rather than childhood itself is the focus of the action. In virtually none of the novels of the eighteenth century did the years of childhood themselves feature in any important way in the plot. The children in conflict with their fathers are always grown, though they are not yet married. 27 After 1730, both male and female authors began to publish books written specifically for children. Typical of the new didactic genre were the sixty volumes by Madame Le Prince de Beaumont published in the 1750s, 1760s, and 1770s, and the twenty-four volumes of Arnaud Berquin's The Children's Friend, published in 1782-83. Yet hardly any of the children's books published before the 1780s incorporated much in the way of child psychology. Unsystematic collections of stories, dialogues, and plays are presented in a constantly moralizing tone; the children's ages and characters are depicted very vaguely; and much of the children's speech is obviously artificial. In many novels about children written after 1750, the chief aim of the author (whether Rousseau in Emile or Madame de Genlis in Adèle et Théodore) was the development of theories about education rather than exploration of children's characters from the inside. The children in these two influential novels are given hardly any physical description, for example. The first time that children appear as protagonists in their own right in French literature is in Paul et Virginie (1788). Like Rousseau and the sentimental authors of the last half of the eighteenth century, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre also used his young characters as metaphors of innocence and simplicity, and he certainly used his novel to develop ideas about education, but the role of the children was no longer limited to these functions. Paul and Virginie are described in great detail from a young age, and their process of learning about the world is at the center of the novel. It seems likely that the popularity of such novels during the Revolution rested at least in part on this new emphasis on the development of children depicted from a child's point of view; the child is now viewed as an autonomous being. The independent sphere of action of children was increasingly recognized in novels of the revolutionary period, and this recognition went hand in hand with a diminution of the father's traditional patriarchal role, if not with his absence altogether (as in Paul et Virginie). This trend was already apparent even in the novels about children's education, for almost all of them emphasized the role of a tutor or governess (in the case of Adèle et Théodore, of the mother), 28 rather than of the child's father. It might be argued that the tutor was simply a substitution figure for the father's authority, but surely it is significant that the father's authority was now being replaced. The next step - taken in the revolutionary novels - is the disappearance of the tutor and the child learning on his or her own (see chapter 6). The effacement of the father can also be found in what the leading revolutionary politicians said about their childhoods. Fathers had no prominence, whereas maternal influence occupied a large place. Danton, Barnave, Condorcet, Marat, Barbaroux, Saint-Just and Larevelliere-Lepeaux all spoke with great emotion about their mothers' imprint on them at a young age but hardly mentioned the influence of fathers (some were fatherless, of course). Like the other readers of sentimental novels, these men identified the good mother with touching scenes of a happy family life. Brissot's worries about being a good father may simply have reflected a widespread sense that fathers had not yet made a successful transition into the new mores of sensibility and affection. The literary transformations of repressive fathers into good and generous ones and the seeming effacement of the father in contrast to the more emotive mother and the increasingly interesting child all suggest that the novel as it developed in eighteenth-century France was inherently antipatriarchal. In her influential study of the origins of the novel, Marthe Robert claims that "there are but two wavs of writing a novel: the way of the realistic Bastard who backs the world while fighting it head on; and the way of the Foundling who, lacking both the experience and the means to fight, avoids confrontation by flight or rejection." Neither of these options, it should be noted, has anything to do with a father's direct authority. In Robert's view, the novel marks the emergence of the Freudian family romance from the realm of individual daydreams into the world of literature. What had been an individual fantasy that one's real parents were princes and ladies rather than the peasants or shopkeepers sitting at the family table now becomes the literary 29 trope of social ascension. The novel as a genre is about the foundling and the bastard making a place for themselves in the social world: they do not simply imagine a better place for themselves. This emergence from the realm of daydreams was made possible, Robert argues, by the reality of greater social mobility in the eighteenth century: dreams of social mobility now became reality and hence could be written about. If the novel as a literary form was essentially about the "ideologies of independence and initiative" necessary to social mobility, then it was perhaps inevitable that many novels would be concerned with children living without the protection of their fathers. One of the most influential eighteenth-century French novels, Marivaux's La Vie de Marianne, had exploited this narrative device already in the 1730s. Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's novel Paul et Virginie brought together the various strands of the French novel's eighteenth-century development into one astounding popular triumph. On the very eve of the French Revolution, the author took the relatively common setting of an island paradise and wove a story around the lives of two children. Neither Paul nor Virginie have fathers in the novel, which gets its motive force precisely from the effort of their two families without fathers to confront the world outside the island paradise (see figure 3). In the very first pages of the novel, the author sets the scene by explaining the absence of the fathers, as if all else follows from this. Virginie's father, Monsieur de la Tour, had come to the Ile de France (now Mauritius) with his young wife when her family had opposed their marriage because he was not a nobleman. He died in Madagascar on an expedition to buy slaves before the action of the novel begins. Marguerite, the mother of Paul, was a peasant girl from Brittany who had been seduced, impregnated, and abandoned by her noble lover. The two women establish themselves next to each other and swear to provide their children with "the pleasures of love and the happiness of equality." A kind of metaphorical incest seems to threaten this island para- 30 dise in the absence of the fathers. The mothers bring up Paul and Virginie as virtual brother and sister: "Thus these two small children, deprived of all their relatives, were filled with sentiments more tender than those of son and daughter, of brother and sister, when they were exchanged from one maternal breast to another by the two friends who had given them birth." At the same time, their marriage is destined from the cradle. Virginie explains to Paul that their love is natural: "Oh my brother! . . . You ask me why I love you; but all things that have been raised together love one other. Look at 31 our birds: they are always together like us." Yet Virginie senses a problem: "The unfortunate girl felt troubled by the caresses of her brother." Thus families without fathers are presented as at once compelling and tragic; the female-oriented society animated by the two mothers is naturally beautiful and good, though poor; yet in the end, family ties pull the island community apart at its very seams. Virginie returns to France to her mother's aunt in the expectation of gaining a fortune in inheritance and returning to marry Paul and assist her island families, but she finds convent education little to her liking and is disinherited when she refuses to marry the man her great-aunt has chosen for her. She dies in a shipwreck on her way back to the island. Published in 1788, Paul et Virginie was reprinted more often than any novel published during the revolutionary decade; thirty separate editions appeared between 1789 and 1799. The author wrote to his cousin that "talk of my book brings me more than 500 letters a year." In his long preamble to the illustrated 1806 edition, Bernardin explained that many novels, idylls, and plays had since been based on Paul et Virginie; parents often named their children after the two protagonists; and bracelets, buckles, and other female decorations were made with scenes from the novel on them. It is not entirely clear why the novel was so popular; it combined the genres of the Robinson Crusoe tale, travelogue, and utopian fiction in a rhetoric of Rousseauean sentimentality that verged on melodrama. Despite the emphasis on the pastoral idyll in the narrative, the family aspects of the novel nevertheless stand out: the fathers' absence sets the scene in the beginning, and the tragic ending depends upon a family quarrel over proper lineages (the aunt's decision to disinherit). 32 Paul et Virginie was not the only novel about fatherless children in the prerevolutionary years. The first novels of Francois-Guillaume Ducray-Duminil, Lolotte et Fanfan (1788) and Alexis (1789), helped establish the vogue of popular novels about orphans and abandoned children that would continue throughout the decade of revolution. Lolotte et Fanfan appeared in ten editions between 1788 and 1810; Alexis appeared in seven editions between 1789 and 1818. These novels put the family drama front and center. In the preface to Alexis, Ducray-Duminil explained that he got his taste for literature from his "enlightened" mother. In Lolotte et Fanfan, an English nobleman awakes on shore after a shipwreck to find two young children, brother and sister, hovering over him dressed in animal skins. Like Bernardin's novel, this one is meant to provide accurate descriptions of local customs and natural life; but the main line of development is an incredibly intricate family plot. Lolotte and Fanfan have been abandoned because of family relations gone bad, and in the end, a thousand pages, four volumes, and many astounding adventures later, their family is miraculously reconstituted along with the family of the English nobleman. Alexis is a darker novel, filled with mysterious letters, illegitimate children, double identities, and murder. Alexis is a teen-age boy, abandoned by his noble father; his story is dominated by the effort to find his father, and in the end he, like Lolotte and Fanfan, succeeds. The contrast between Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's idyllic but tragic novel and the more gothic yet happily ending tales of Ducray-Duminil is instructive. Bernardin uses the pastoral description of the island to attack the prejudices of European civilization, especially the emphasis on rank, wealth, and useless knowledge. His trenchant criticisms are set in the context of a little society without fathers: only a society without fathers (and all they represent in terms of social placement) can be utopian, it seems. At the same time, however, the fatherless society comes to a tragic end without hope of progeny. Ducray-Duminil's novels include some social crit- 33 icism, but despite appearances they are not utopian. Lolotte and Fanfan and their new protector-father, Milord Kelly, are eager to get off the island in order to search for their respective families. They return in the end, but only because they are forced into exile in the last pages of the novel, and only when the families have been happily reunited and Lolotte and Fanfan each marry socially suitable partners. The exile is not tragic because it is accompanied by the restoration of the fathers and the continuation of the lineage. Lolotte, Fanfan, and Alexis, moreover, all turn out to be nobles by birth. In this sense, it might be said that their stories are revealing twists on the Freudian family romance; rather than fantasizing that their real parents are of a higher social standing than they find them-elves in as children, they are in fact the sons and daughters of nobles and the action of the novels restores them to their real status. Their problem, then, is not the low rank of their fathers, so much as fathers who are too ambitious for their children and insufficiently attentive to their needs. Lolotte and Fanfan's problems can be traced back to their grandfather, who wanted their father to marry someone of the grandfather's choosing. Instead he married secretly against the grandfather's wishes (a typical instance of father-son conflict in the eighteenth-century novel) and tried to flee with his children and wife to Charleston. He was wounded and taken off the ship before sailing, and his wife was then forced to abandon her children on the voyage, setting in motion the train of the action. The English rector who explains the moral of the story blames the father for disobeying the grandfather, but then turns to reprimand the grandfather too: "He then criticized the ambition of the parents, who only consulted their interests and standing when establishing their children." The author recommends that parents become the "confidant," "the friend" of their children: "Coldness punishes them, friendship rewards them, and they will give way more to these two sentiments than to menaces and fear." In other words, the novel is a brief for the good father, which is what Milord Welly becomes when he takes on Lolotte and Fanfan as his charges after his shipwreck. 34 Thus, on the eve of the Revolution, fathers are very much at issue in literature. Paul and Virginie come to a tragic end because they do not have fathers; Lolotte, Fanfan, and Alexis reach happy endings when they find their lost fathers. Whether tragic or comic in genre, these prerevolutionary novels portray families in crisis, and the crisis in each instance has been set in motion by the actions of fathers. rebelling against their fathers or abandoning their children. The popular novels of Ducray-Duminil seem to argue that fathers can be reformed and found again. The more powerful novel of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre refuses this "longing for the father," as Freud termed it, but also explores the consequences of a world without fathers. What is perhaps most remarkable, however, is how much of the action of all of these novels takes place in the absence of the father. In a sense, then, the eighteenth-century French novel predicts the fate of the king; it might even be argued that the novel produces the fate of the king in that the spread of the ideal of the good father and the father's subsequent effacement fatally undermined the absolutist foundations of the monarchical regime. Even the minor genres on the eve of the Revolution are animated by the father's absence. The sexual education of the young noble-man depicted in the anonymous libertine novel, Interesting Adventures of a French Orphan, or Letters of M. the Count of ***, to Madame the Baronness of **, M. ** (1786), depends on the same device of the father's absence; the boy had never known his mother and expresses no emotion whatsoever about the death of his father. This novel combines libertine adventures with an attack on the despotic powers of the family; much of the plot concerns the orphan's efforts to recover the fortune that is being dissipated by his high-living uncle-guardian. In a reversal of the family romance, the uncle tries to force the fourteen-year-old to serve as apprentice to a wigmaker. The boy escapes and has an affair with a marquise whom he calls "ma chère maman [my dear mama]." The affair ends precipitously with her untimely death. In the end, the orphan recovers both his fortune and his rightful place. The possibility of incest, whether real or metaphorical as in this 35 instance of "ma chère maman," runs like a red thread through the eighteenth-century novel. Some have seen in the incest theme a representation of the impossibility of socially integrating the "adventurer," whether the adventurers are foundlings or bastards (the prototypical heroes of the novel), or just social parvenus more generally. The threat of incest, in this view, necessarily lurks behind every attempt of the adventurer to establish social relationships, because he or she does not know his or her true origins. Whatever the possible social implications of the incest theme (and we will return to them in subsequent chapters), incest always depends on uncertainty about lineage and especially about paternity. The suggestion of incest in Paul et Virginie, for instance, depends on the absence of the fathers, which leads the mothers to bring up their children in excessive proximity to each other. The incest theme is taken to its logical, literal conclusion in the 1789 epistolary novel The Illegitimate Son. Jules, who only discovers at age fourteen that he is not a peasant but born of noble blood (yet another version of this particular prerevolutionary family romance). is "the most miserable being, always alone, always wandering among men," because he is obsessed with discovering the secret of his birth. He knows that his father died just before marrying his mother and that he was separated from his twin sister at birth. In the course of his wandering, he falls in love with an older woman only to discover just in time that she is his mother. Forced to flee in order to keep the secret of his illegitimate existence from her husband, Jules then retires to a monastery, where he falls in love with Sophie. He only realizes that she is his long-lost twin sister after they have made love and she finds herself pregnant. Once the baby is born in his monk's cell where he has hidden Sophie, the guilty couple are found out and denounced to the Inquisition, only to be saved at the last minute by their mother and Jules's steadfast friend Dormeuille. This unlikely reconstituted family then goes off together into exile in England. As in virtually all pre-Sade novels about incest, the lovers are not guilty because they did not know of their family relationship before 36 the deed was committed. In this novel, brother and sister are willing to take responsibility for their act and bring up their child together (they promise never to commit the crime of incest again). Once more, the absence of the father both motivates the child's wandering in the world and undermines the possibility of his or her establishing true social relationships, that is, relationships that bring outsiders into the family circle. Even before the beginning of the Revolution, then. novelists had begun to explore the consequences of a world without fathers. Father figures had also become problematic in painting in the decades before the Revolution. In Jean-Baptiste Greuze's paintings of the 1750s 1760s and 1770s we can see an analogue to the sentimental bourgeois drama that dominated the novels and theater of the time. Children have great prominence in the paintings of Greuze, but they are there for moralizing purposes. Greuze alternately portrayed good fathers surrounded by their virtuous families (The Father Reading the Bible to His Children, 1755, or The Village Bride, 1761) and conflicts between fathers and their children. Struggles for power between father and son fascinated Greuze, who developed his paired paintings of The Father's Curse and The Son Punished (1778) out of earlier tinted drawings (1765), which were much admired by Diderot. In his criticism of the Salon of 1765, Diderot called Greuze the first French painter "to make art moral and to develop events in such a way as to suggest a novel." The paintings based on the biblical story of the prodigal son emphasized the faults of the son, not the tyranny of the father, despite the terrible sound of the titles. The son's punishment is to return just as his father breathes his last breath in his bed. Thus it is the excessively egoistic son, not a despotic father, who threatens the harmony of the family. This is a version of Diderot's fathers who are made to suffer by their sons. 37 In general, French Salon paintings in the second half of the eighteenth century seem increasingly preoccupied with figures of old men who had trouble holding onto their powers. Greuze himself painted a Return of the Drunken Father (1780?) and The Death of an Unnatural Father Abandoned by His Children (1769). Paintings of rebellious sons were appearing with great frequency, along with paintings of Oedipus as an old and blind patriarch or of the general banished by the emperor Justinian, old Belisarius, who was often shown blindly wandering and begging for alms. Such images of sympathetic but weakened old men, according to one interpretation, expressed forbidden Oedipal impulses of aggression toward fathers (and by extension all established authority), and they prepared the way for the internalization of patriarchal authority by the revolutionary sons and its transformation into a new state authority. It is not necessary to subscribe to this particular Freudian reading of the pictorial trend, however, in order to accept the trend's general significance as an indicator of a growing crisis in paternal authority. The status of fathers is particularly ambiguous in the two best-known paintings of the immediate prerevolutionary decade: Jacques-Louis David's Oath of the Horatii (figure 4) and Lictors Returning to Brutus the Bodies of His Sons (figure 5). These paintings cannot be read as straightforward attacks on paternal authority; in the Oath the sons swear allegiance before the father, and in Brutus the father has had to sacrifice the sons to the well-being of the republic. Both of the fathers in these paintings appear vigorous and austere, exemplars of male virtue. Nevertheless, the paintings demonstrate a deep worry about the relationship between family and state obligations, which sometimes seem to be in irreconcilable conflict with each other. In the Oath, the brothers must ignore their attachments through marriage to their opponents (incarnated by the women on the right-hand side of the painting); in Brutus, the father has had to overcome his natural love for his sons in order to defend the new republic. In Brutus, moreover, the father exercises power as a father by destroying his own lineage, his own paternity; paternity and republicanism here seem 38 incompatible. Of all the possible moments in the stories that were available to him in these immediate prerevolutionary years, David chose to represent just those that most called attention to fathers' relationships with their sons within the polity. The paintings signal as well that the sons can be imagined now as the equals of the father, even perhaps as threats to his power. Yet despite the potential father-son conflict within the polity, these work depict men bonding to the state through their affective rela- 39 tions to each other and developing their bonds in distinction to ordinary mixed-gender family relationships. The gender differentiation of the two paintings quite literally divides the canvases in two in ways that foreshadow the gender differentiation of republicanism. Critics at the time drew attention to the separation into two parts; as one critic of Brutes remarked, this was the mark of a new "virile, severe, terrifying" style. It is noteworthy that this gender differentiation appears most strikingly in paintings that foreground the relationship between political fathers and sons. In that sense the paintings seem to argue that the struggle between fathers and sons for authority will necessarily entail some redistribution of control over domestic space as well. The painters and novelists of the prerevolutionary years put the 40 father's authority in question, either by showing tensions between fathers and children or by proceeding from the fact of the father's absence. These stories are fundamentally ambivalent about the father hgure. After 1760, at least, there seemed to be less interest in denouncing the bad father than in either representing good ones or exploring the consequences of a world in which their authority was much weakened or absent altogether. The world without fathers frequently appeared as a problematic one, in which children wandered in search of their social place, risking along the way the perils of incest, the ultimate sign that social location was uncertain. Yet one thing seemed certain in this atmosphere of family crisis: despotic paternal authority was unacceptable. Revolutionary legislators had grown up with the novels and paintings that described paternal authority in crisis. After 1789 they began to take measures to circumscribe the father's authority in laws. Since absolutism and paternal power had been ideologically intertwined under the Old Regime, an attack on absolutism seemed to entail an attack on excessive paternal authority as well. The legal challenge to "the tyranny of parents," as the deputy had described it in 1790, took shape in a series of laws restricting paternal authority over children, establishing a family council to replace the father's sole right of action, lowering the age of majority, regularizing emancipation of children from their fathers' authority, regulating rights of inheritance to limit a father's testamentary control, and not least, establishing the principle of compulsory national education. The Constituent Assembly began the process by confronting the issues that had aroused the most legal controversy under the Old Regime: the lettres de cachet and primogeniture. Primogeniture - the passage of all titles and most of the family's land to the eldest son - was considered an integral right of noble status; it was condemned as inherently unfair to younger children (including girls). Lettres de cachet had been widely denounced as despotic in the cahiers de doléances that were submitted in 1789, though some cahiers, from both the Third Estate and the nobility, expressed reservations about completely abolishing their use in family matters. In March 1790 the Assembly abolished primogeniture ("Les droits 41 d'ainesse et de masculinité a l'égard des fiefs, domaines et alleux nobles, et des partages inégaux a raison de la qualité des personnes, sont abolis") and the use of lettres de cachet. In August 1790 the new law on judicial organization established family councils or courts (tribunaux de famille) to hear disputes between parents and children up to age twenty. In setting up such councils, the Assembly hoped to democratize family life, by replacing the father's sole power with that of a broader council of relatives. At this stage, early in the Revolution, the state kept out of most family matters, leaving problems to be resolved by a council made up of family members. The deputies in the Constituent Assembly hoped to reform the family, removing its despotic and aristocratic characteristics, while leaving it in place as the bedrock of society. As one further element in this reform of the family, in April 1791 the Assembly decreed the equality of division of properties in all intestate successions ("Toute inégalité ci-devant, résultant, entre les héritiers ab intestat, des qualités d'ainé, de puiné, de la distinction des sexes et des exclusions coutumières, soit en ligne directe, soit en ligne collatérale, est abolie"). The Legislative Assembly continued the work of dismantling paternal prerogatives and made it part of the effort to establish contractual relations between individuals and between individuals and the state. At issue was the definition of the individual, including the age at which a child became an adult. In a discussion of July 1792 about the age of majority, a voice was heard in the Legislative Assembly exclaiming, "A father ought to be more flattered by the respect of a free child than by the regard of a slave." In August 1792, adults were declared no longer subject to paternal authority, and in September the age of majority was lowered to twenty-one. One of the last acts of the Legislative Assembly was the law of 20 September 1792 establishing divorce. It gave mothers equal 42 rights with fathers in control over the children after divorce: in marriage, however, the mother's rights were still subordinate to the fathers. Divorce followed from the declaration that marriage was a civil contract, and hence breakable under regulated conditions. The statute stated that the ability to divorce "follows from individual liberty, which would be lost in any indissoluble commitment." if men and women were freely contracting individuals, then they had to have the right to break their marriage contract under certain conditions defined by law. The contractual association of free individuals was now supposed to replace the patriarchal family despotically controlled by the father as the fundamental unit of the new polity. Two different kinds of issues were raised by this model of the freely contracting individual: how far did freedom of contract reach, and how much did it include women? If contractual notions established the freedom of property, for example, then how could the government justify restraints on the freedom of the testator by insisting on equality of inheritance (for the moment, limited to intestate successions)? Should equality have precedence over liberty? In this case, the deputies insisted that the law must prevent any despotic tendencies in the father's control over inheritance. Such tensions were inherent in the ambiguity of the revolutionary idea of the individual; individuals were imagined as free (especially if adult, male, and not economically dependent), but they were also imagined as subject to the general will. Revolutionary legislators continually wrestled with the problem of bridging this gap between the individual and the general will. They would also have to confront the vexed issue of the status of women; did women have the same freedom or not? The emphasis on the equality of individuals under contracts led the legislators of the early assemblies to equalize inheritance for girls and boys and to grant women equal status in suing for divorce. They were not willing, however, to grant women equal status as citizens. 43 Women were by definition citizens since they were not slaves, but they could not vote or hold office. In these early years of the Revolution, nonetheless, the question of the status of women was still an open one. In 1790 Condorcet could argue that excluding women would fatally undermine the principle of equality of rights: "Either no individual of the human race has true rights, or all of them have the same ones: and he who votes against the right of another, whatever his religion, his color, or his sex, has from that moment abjured his own rights. The question of women's status was not resolved in definitive fashion until the great debates of 1793 (see chapter 4). Revolutionary legislation and its attendant debates reveal only what the deputies were willing to say in formal settings about the legal powers of fathers and the new model of politics. The legislators constantly reiterated their conviction about the importance of good fathers for the social order, and their legislation was designed to eliminate or contain "bad" fathers. They did not intend to eliminate the power of fathers altogether. Similarly, they did not envision eliminating all the power of the king in those early years of the Revolution. They hoped that the king would agree to become a good father too. In iconographic sources, in particular, it is possible to trace the vicissitudes of the image of the king as good father. Until 1794 at least, engravings and caricatures represented changes in paternal and fraternal imagery much more quickly than did paintings or novels, if only because they took less time for production. During the first two or three years of the Revolution, most occasional imagery of political fatherhood focused on the king, and it was marked by 44 the hope of finding the good father. This might be termed the conflict over the comic father. In his now classic analysis of comedy, Northrop Frye provides a description that includes many elements of family romance. The movement of comedy, according to Frye, is usually a movement from one society to another: "What normally happens is that a young man wants a young woman, that his desire is resisted by some opposition, usually paternal, and that near the end of the play some twist in the plot enables the hero to have his will." In the end, a new society crystallizes around the hero, and its appearance is "frequently signalized by some kind of party or festive ritual." Rather than being repudiated altogether, the "blocking characters," usually including the arbitrary and conventional father, are most often reconciled with the son or sons. An engraving of Louis XVI helping to prepare the Champ de Mars for the Festival of Federation in July 1790 (figure 6) is typical of the comic genre as defined by Frye. Here the father is reconciled in classic comic fashion to the demands of the sons. Louis is now ready to join his family as an equal rather than as a patriarch, he works rather than standing idly by in a posture of superiority, and he participates in the preparation of a festival: festivals often celebrate just this kind of reconciliation between fathers and sons in comedy. This is the good father prefigured by eighteenth-century parlementary rhetoric and by such novelists as Ducray-Duminil. I read this image as more than a representation of a specific event-the preparations for the Festival of Federation in 1790 - and more than a sign of conscious political struggles, such as the effort to establish a constitutional monarchy. The engraved image includes within the representation a narrative of a family romance, a narrative about what the French expected of a father-king in these early years of the Revolution. There are many other engravings of Louis XVI as the good father, dispensing alms to the poor, or watching the preparations for the Festival of Federation with Marie-Antoinette and his young son. Surprisingly, though, few ordinary family scenes appear in the 45 engravings of the Festival of Federation. There are scenes of children with their mothers and even depictions of children with their fathers, but most often the engravings present large masses of adults, who are not grouped in families. If children appear, it is 46 frequently on the edges of the great gatherings of adults (see figure 7). The engravings of the Festival of Federation thus portray the new individual-state relationship envisioned by the liberal ideology that was taking root through the legislation of the Constituent Assembly; individuals relate to the state as individuals, through contracts (in this case oaths of allegiance, which were the centerpiece of the ceremony). The family is still essential to society, but its status as political building block is now in some doubt. The fathers as fathers are politically absent. The public exhibition of art in the Salon of 1791 shows similar tendencies. The prints of the Salon focused on contemporary scenes of oath taking, from the Tennis Court Oath of June 1789 to the Festival of Federation of July 1790. The prints depicting the festival showed, as one prospectus for a print explained, "all the inhabitants, " "French people of every station and every part of the kingdom . . . with the qualities of free and equal men," in short, virtually atomistic individuals linked to the nation through their oaths rather than by their families or other particular ties. The other major innovation of the Salon of 1791 was the rise of portrait painting. Not only did the number of portraits entered increase, from 45 in 1789 to 210 in 1791, but the clientele also shifted as a result of the emigration of many leading nobles. Half of the individuals in the portraits were unidentified ("head of a man"), and the identified ones were often deputies, officials, or other individuals moving in the public sphere, that is, the world outside of family and corporate ties. Thus the vogue of prints about oath taking and the rise of portraiture both reinforced an emphasis on the public individual rather than the private family man/father. Almost always, when specific public individuals were represented, they were men, not women. These new trends toward the representation of unaffiliated individuals coexisted uneasily with the continuing effort to represent the king as good father. In one of its last acts, the Constituent Assembly asked the king for a portrait of himself giving the constitution to the Dauphin. One of the most prolific portrait painters of the time, Adélaïde Labille-Guiard, was commissioned to paint the 47 picture; but in early 1792, newspapers reported that David had been asked to undertake the same commission. Neither of them ever finished a painting on the subject, but David did several drawings which showed the virtuous father Louis XVI teaching his son the principles of the Revolution. By the spring of 1792, no doubt, such images, "resonant with ancien régime moralizing" about the family, no longer seemed appropriate. Some of the old proponents of the good father in sentimental fiction continued to publish works with this theme during the early years of the Revolution. Between 1790 and 1792, for example, Marmontel published his New Moral Tales in the Mercure de France. Included among them was a long story titled "L'Erreur d'un bon pere [The Error of a Good Father]," which recounted the sad tale of Monsieur de Vaneville, who had been too busy with his business to see that his second wife was systematically alienating his son by his first marriage. The son, Alexis, runs away and becomes a shepherd. He is taken in by a man who sees him reading Virgil, and through the usual remarkable set of coincidences, Alexis is finally reunited with his father, who recognizes his error. As if to warn fathers of the consequences of their inattention and lack of emotion, Monsieur de Vaneville explains how he had alienated his son: "I ended by pushing him away, and then he became really sullen." Marmontel, the prophet of family harmony in the 1760s, now recognizes that problems must be confronted or the sons will revolt. In Marmontel's vision of the world, fathers (and kings?) still have time to repent and win back their sons. When the king himself is mentioned in the novels of the early tears of the Revolution, he is often referred to as the good father; for example, "le pere le plus tendre [the most tender father]." As a fishwife explains in Francois Marchant's 1792 novel The Good Deeds of the National Assembly, "Si not' bon Roi, qu'est la justice meme, avoit z'ete instruit dans le temps des injustices qui se commettiont [sic], il y auroit bien mis ordre" ("If our good king, who is justice itself, had been informed at 49 the time of the injustices that were being committed, he would have put them right"). The comic image of the political father of 1786-92 was steadily eroded not only by the force of political circumstances but also by an increasing number of engravings that were devoted to denigrating the royal family (see figure 8). In these prints we see the hope of the good father disappointed and the father now being rejected. The mother too is being rejected and held in some way accountable for the failure of the father, as in the pornographic engraving of the 50 king impotent in bed with Marie-Antoinette (see figure 9). The text below the print blames Louis for his lack of vigor but also accuses the queen of being too lascivious. A fundamentally new family romance of politics could take shape only if both the romance of patriarchal kingship and that of the king as good father were destroyed. All possibilitv of reconciliation with the father is implicitly denied in such prints, and the distance between father and sons is obliterated as the king becomes an animal, lower even than his human subjects, or a pathetic ordinary man incapable of establishing his own succession. The flight to Varennes in June 1791, the return from which is 51 caricatured in figure 8, marked the turning point in representations of the king-father. According to one royalist commentator, many such engravings were sold at the time. He condemned another, similar engraving as the abominable caricature that the factious distributed with the greatest profusion during this deplorable time. It provides great illumination to the sentimental historian because it proves to him that the French in revolt had lost all feeling of humanity. . . . A being can be found that has the sacrilegious audacity to represent a wagon filled with straw and each of the members of this august family in the form of that animal which is still the most vile of all. The meaning of the representation of the royal family as pigs - or as other animals considered low - escaped no one. It was a direct means of vilification, since the pig was the most vile of all animals. At least fifteen different prints of the king as pig were printed, and Camille Desmoulins brought the metaphor to everyone's attention in his newspaper: "The citizens are warned that a fat pig has escaped from the Tuileries; those who run into it are asked to bring it back to its pen."" In late 1791 and 1792, the flood of caricatures denigrating the king and the royal family overwhelmed those depicting the good father. From engravings such as L'idole renversée (The overthrown idol) depicting a national guardsman, two soldiers, a veteran, an ordinary man, and a boy celebrating the destruction of a bust of Louis XVI, to pornographic attacks on the queen (described in detail in chapter 4), the aim was the same. The royalist critic quoted earlier put it in factional terms, but his language was significant: "The republican faction made the greatest efforts . . . to push a new Clement to plunge a parricidal sword into the sacred flanks of the king. . . . There is no manner of insult, no manner of horror and atrocity that the pen and the engraving tool have not traced during this memorable event [the flight to Varennes]." In the view of the royalist critic, such engravings did nothing less than prepare the way for the destruction of kingship and political fatherhood, for the 52 murder of the father with "a parricidal sword." The critic was not explaining an event that had already occurred, however; his book was published in 1792, before the trial and execution of the king. Like Burke before him, this royalist commentator was tracing a desacralization of monarchy, in this case through the medium of print rather than in more palpable political actions. The king no longer seemed an august, patriarchal figure far removed from the lives of ordinary mortals. In a sense, the king had already lost one of his two bodies; he still had his mortal body like all other men, but the immortal body that represented the office of kingship had been seriously undermined. One very important step in this process had been the gradual transformation of the king into a good father. By the time Louis XVI became king in 1774, the transformation was already well under way, as the rhetorical back and forth between king and parlement had shown. By 1790 it was complete, and the fortunes of the French monarchy steadily declined thereafter. In this sense, then, the murder of the tyrannical father had already taken place before the king himself was killed. As the novels and paintings of the prerevolutionary period demonstrated, it was already possible to imagine a world without fathers. Issues about the fate of the women liberated from the control of the father (and the accompanying possibility of incest) had already been raised in these imaginary forms. They could become even more pressing, however, when the deed itself was done. 89 4 The Bad Mother Once the father was dead, fraternity did not prove to be easy sailing. The brothers faced two major issues: their relations with each other, and their relations with the now "liberated" women, who in Freud's analysis had previously been controlled exclusively by the father. The king of France did not directly control the destinies of all women, of course, but the legal and cultural system of the Old Regime certainly did. Once the Old Regime had been relegated to the past, some of the most pressing questions concerned the status of women: did they have equal rights in property inheritance, did they have equal rights in the family, could they participate fully in politics? In short, were they citizens in the full sense of the word? What was their role to be in the new revolutionary family? The killing of the king/father left particularly pressing questions about one woman: the queen. Although Freud gives the mother great prominence in his Oedipal triangle, she does not figure at all in his story of the origins of political power. Moreover, in the Oedipal triangle, the mother is an object of desire (both the son's and the father's) rather than an acting subject in her own right. Similarly, queens in France had no status as actors in their own right, since women could not inherit the throne. They could act as regents for their underage sons but could not hold power in their own names. Yet French queens often attracted considerable attention - usually negative attention. As in the case of Marie-Antoinette, they were often foreign and frequently portrayed as evil influences. They never seemed to qualify as mothers of the people. The question of Marie-Antoinette and the issue of the status of women more generally were closely connected, even though Marie-Antoinette herself probably had no interest in women's rights and 90 the early French feminists had little concern for the queen. The two issues were tied together, if only unconsciously, because the queen was the most important example of a woman acting in the public sphere. Rousseau railed against the influence of women in the public sphere in his Letter to M. d'Alembert on the Theater (1758): "No longer wishing to tolerate separation, unable to make themselves into men, the women make us into women. . . . Whether a monarch governs men or women ought to be rather indifferent to him, provided that he be obeyed; but in a republic, men are needed." With her strategic position on the cusp between public and private, Marie-Antoinette was emblematic of the much larger problem of the relation between women and the public sphere in the eighteenth century. This issue, as Rousseau himself argued, concerned not only the specific status of women but also the grounds of sexual differentiation itself. Women in public might turn men into women, Rousseau warned ominously. Such concerns took very concrete form in the underground pamphlets published against the influence of Louis XV's mistresses, the marquise de Pompadour and especially the comtesse Du Barry. According to pamphlets such as Les Fastes de Louis XV (1782), the rising influence of such women on public life feminized both the king's ministers and the king himself, who was depicted as withdrawing into a "private, slothful and voluptuous life." On the eve of the Revolution, similar themes were still much in view. A newspaper review of recent novels in September 1788 reproduced, without attribution, the views expressed in the preface to Restif de la Bretonne's novel The Unfaithful Wife, published in 1786. Restif had attacked the "gynomanes" who argued for the education of women. The "ignorance of women" had an infinite advantage, he claimed, because it contributed to subordination, to keeping women at home. Instructing them would overturn the sexual order: "In a word, making women into scholars makes men stupid and inept." 91 The two sexes were unequal in nature, and destroying this natural order would have nefarious consequences: "I consider it a fact that a woman-Voltaire would only produce deformed children; I consider it a fact that a woman-Rousseau will never be able to breastfeed." As we shall see, this idea of a woman-man as monster came to dominate much of the thinking by male revolutionaries about women in the public sphere. It has long been known that Marie-Antoinette was the subject of a substantial erotic and pornographic literature in the last decades of the Old Regime and during the Revolution itself. Royal figures have often been the subject of such writing, but not all royal figures at all times. When royalty's physical bodies become the focus of such interest, we can be sure that something is at issue in the body politic. As Robert Darnton has shown, for example, the sexual sensationalism of Old Regime pamphlets was a choice means of attacking the entire establishment-the court, the church, the aristocracy, the academies, the salons, and the monarchy itself. Marie-Antoinette occupies a curious place in this literature; not only was she lampooned and demeaned in an increasingly ferocious pornographic outpouring, she was also tried and executed. A few other women, such as Louis XV's notorious mistress Madame Du Barry, suffered a similar fate during the Revolution, but no other trial attracted the same attention or aired the same range of issues as that of the ill-fated queen. The king's trial, in contrast, remained entirely restricted to a consideration of his political crimes. As a consequence, the trial of the queen, especially in its strange refractions of the pornographic literature, offers a unique and fascinating perspective on the unselfconscious presumptions of the revolutionary political imagination. It makes manifest, more perhaps than any other single event of the Revolution, the underlying interconnections between pornography and politics. 92 When Marie-Antoinette was finally brought to trial in October 1793 (see figure 19), the notorious public prosecutor Antoine-Quentin Fouquier-Tinville delivered an accusation against her that began with extraordinary language, even for those inflamed times: In the manner of the Messalinas-Brunhildes, Fredegund and Medicis, who were called in previous times queens of France, and whose names, forever odious, will not be effaced from the annals of history. Marie-Antoinette, widow of Louis Capet. has been during her time in France the scourge and the bloodsucker of the French. The bill of indictment then went on to detail the charges: before the Revolution, she squandered the public monies of France on her "disorderly pleasures" and on secret contributions to the Austrian emperor (her brother); after the Revolution, she was the animating spirit of counterrevolutionary conspiracies at the court. Since the former queen was a woman, it was presumed that she could only 93 achieve her perfidious aims through the agency of men, such as the king's brothers and Lafayette. Most threatening, of course, was her influence on the king: she was charged not only with the crime of having perverse ministers named to office but, more generally - and more significantly - with having taught the king how to dissimulate, that is, how to promise one thing in public and plan another in the shadows of the court. Finally, and to my mind most strangely, the bill of indictment specifically claimed that : "the widow Capet, immoral in every way, the new Agrippina, is so perverse and so familiar with all crimes that, forgetting her quality of mother and the demarcation prescribed by the laws of nature, she has not stopped short of indulging herself with Louis-Charles Capet, her son - and on the confession of the latter - in indecencies whose idea and name make us shudder with horror." Incest was the final crime, the very suggestion of which was cause for horror. The trial of a queen, especially in a country whose fundamental laws specifically excluded women from ruling, must necessarily be unusual. There was not much in the way of precedent for it - the English, after all, had only tried their king, not his wife - and the relatively long gap between the trial of Louis (in December and January) and his queen ten months later even seemed to attenuate the linkage between the two trials. Unlike her husband, Marie-Antoinette was not tried by the Convention itself; she was brought before the Revolutionary Criminal Tribunal, like all other suspects in Paris, and there her fate was decided by a male jury and nine male judges. Because queens could never rule in France, except indirectly as regents for underage sons, they were not imagined as having the two bodies associated with kings. According to the "mystic fiction of the 'King's Two Bodies' " as analyzed by Ernst Kantorowicz, kings in England and France had both a visible, corporeal, mortal body and 94 an invisible, ideal "body politic" that never died. As the French churchman Bossuet explained in a sermon preached before Louis XIV in 1662: "You are of the gods, even if you die, your authority never dies. . . . The man dies, it is true, but the king, we say, never dies." It is questionable whether this doctrine still held for French kings by 1798, but it is certain that it never held for French queens. We might, then, ask why the destruction of the queen's mortal body could have had such interest for the French. What did her decidedly nonmystical body represent? I am going to argue that it represented many things; Marie-Antoinette had, in a manner of speaking, many bodies. These many bodies - hydralike, to use one of the favorite revolutionary metaphors for counterrevolution - were each in turn attacked and destroyed because they represented the threats, conscious and unconscious, that could be posed to the republic. These were not just ordinary threats, for the queen represented not only the ultimate in counterrevolutionary conspiracy but also the menace that the feminine and the feminizing presented to republican notions of manhood and virility. Most striking is the way in which the obsessive focus on the queen's sexualized body was carried over from political pamphlets and caricatures to the trial itself. In the trial there were frequent references to the "orgies" held at Versailles, which were dated as beginning in 1779 and continuing into 1789. In his closing statement, Fouquier-Tinville collapsed sexual and political references in telling fashion when he denounced "the perverse conduct of the former court," Marie-Antoinette's "criminal and culpable liaisons" with unfriendly foreign powers, and her "intimacies with a villainous faction." Armand Herman, president of the court, then took up the baton in his summary of the charges against her: he too referred to "her intimate liaisons with infamous ministers, perfidious generals, disloyal representatives of the people." He denounced again the "orgy" at the chateau of Versailles on 1 October 1789, when the queen allegedly encouraged the royal officers present to trample on the revolutionary tricolor cockade. In short, Marie-Antoinette had used her sexual body to corrupt the body politic 95 either through "liaisons" or "intimacies" with criminal politicians or through her ability to act sexually upon the king, his ministers, or his soldiers. In Herman's long denunciation, the queen's body was also held up for scrutiny for outward signs of intentions and motives. On her return from the flight to Varennes, people could observe on her face and in her movements "the most marked desire for vengeance." Even when she was incarcerated in the Temple, her jailers could "always detect in Antoinette an attitude of revolt against the sovereignty of the people." Capture, imprisonment, and the prospect of execution were, it was hoped, finally tearing the veil from the queen's threatening ability to hide her true feelings from the public. Note too the way that Herman clearly juxtaposes the queen and the people as a public force; revelation of the queen's true motives and feelings came not from secrets uncovered in hidden correspondence but from the ability of the people or their representatives to "read" her body. The attention to the queen's body continued right up to the moment of her execution. When the tribunal announced her condemnation to death, she was reported to have kept "a calm and assured countenance," just as she had during the interrogation. On the road to the scaffold, she appeared indifferent to the large gathering of armed forces (see figure 20). "One perceived neither despondency nor pride on her face." is More radical newspapers read a different message in her demeanor, but they showed the same attention to her every move. Révolutions de Paris claimed that at the feet of the statue of Liberty (where the guillotine was erected), she demonstrated her usual "character of dissimulation and pride up to the last moment" (see figure 21). On the way there, she had expressed "surprise and indignation" when she realized that she would be taken to the guillotine in a simple cart rather than in a carriage. The queen's body, then, was of interest, not because of its connection to the sacred and divine, but because it represented the opposite principle: the possible profanation of everything that the nation held sacred. But apparent too in all the concern with the queen's body was the fact that the queen could embody so much. 96 The queen did not have a mystic body in the sense of the king's two bodies, but her body was mystical in the sense of being mysteriously symbolic. It could mean so much; it could signify a wide range of threats, just as the representations of Marianne, the goddess of liberty, might have several, and sometimes conflicting, inflections. Dissimulation was consequently an especially important theme in the denunciations of the queen. The ability to conceal one's true emotions, to act one way in public and another in private, was repeatedly denounced as the chief characteristic of court life and aristocratic manners in general. These relied above all on appearances, that is, the disciplined and self-conscious use of the body as a mask. The republicans, consequently, valued transparency-the unmediated expression of the heart-above all other personal qualities. Transparency was the perfect fit between public and private; 97 transparency was a body that told no lies and kept no secrets. It was the definition of virtue, and as such it was imagined to be critical to the future of the republic. Dissimulation, in contrast, threatened to undermine the republic: it was the chief ingredient in every conspiracy; it lay at the heart of the counterrevolution. Thus, to charge Marie-Antoinette with teaching the king how to dissimulate was no minor accusation. Dissimulation was also described in the eighteenth century as a characteristic feminine quality, not just an aristocratic one. According to both Montesquieu and Rousseau, it was women who taught 98 men how to dissimulate, how to hide their true feelings in order to get what they wanted in the public arena. The salon was the most important site of this teaching, and it was also the one place where society women could enter the public sphere. In a sense, then, women in public were (like prostitutes) synonymous with dissimulation, with the gap between public and private. Virtue could only be restored if women returned to the private sphere. Rousseau had captured this collection of attitudes most clearly in his Letter to M. d'Alembert: Meanly devoted to the wills of the sex which we ought to protect and not serve, we have learned to despise it in obeying it, to insult it by our derisive attentions; and every woman at Paris gathers in her apartment a harem of men more womanish than she, who know how to render all sorts of homage to beauty except that of the heart, which is her due. The sexuality of women, when operating in the public sphere through dissimulation, threatened to feminize men - that is, literally to transform men's bodies. Rousseau feared that "the women make us into women." In response to critics of this work, Rousseau made his position completely clear: "I am not of your opinion when you say that if we are corrupted it is not the fault of women, it is our own; my whole book is undertaken to show how it is their fault." If the queen was a dissimulator, then it is not surprising that she was also not a good mother. Fouquier-Tinville explicitly contrasted her to Paris itself - described in his closing statement as "this city, mother and conservator of liberty." The queen was the antonym of the nation, depicted by one witness at the trial as the "generous nation that nurtured her as well as her husband and her 99 family." The nation, Paris, and the Revolution were all good mothers; Marie-Antoinette was the bad mother. It should be noted, however, that the nation, Paris, and the Revolution were motherly in a very abstract, even nonfeminine fashion in comparison to Marie-Antoinette. The abstractness and nonsexual nature of these political figures of the good political mother reinforces what Carole Pateman has tellingly described as the characteristic modern Western social contract: The story of the original contract is perhaps the greatest tale of men's creation of new political life. But this time women are already defeated and declared procreatively and politically irrelevant. Now the father comes under attack. The original contract shows how his monopoly of politically creative power is seized and shared equally among men. In civil society all men, not just fathers, can generate political life and political right. Political creativity belongs not to paternity but masculinity. Thus the nation as mother, La Nation, had no feminine qualities; it was not a threatening feminizing force and hence not incompatible with republicanism. La Nation was, in effect, a masculine mother, or a father capable of giving birth. Several satirical prints derided the "labor" of Deputy Guy Target in giving birth to the constitution of 1791 (see figure 22). They can be taken as almost inadvertent representations of the unconscious supposition that men will give birth to the new order themselves under the new regime of fraternity. Marie-Antoinette's body stood in the way, quite literally, of this version of the social contract, since under the Old Regime she had given birth to the child who would be the next sovereign. Pateman is unusual among commentators on contract theory in that she takes Freud and his conception of fraternity seriously: 100 "Freud's stories make explicit that power over women and not only freedom is at issue before the original agreement is made, and he also makes clear that two realms [the civil, political realm and the private, sexual realm] are created through the original pact." Pateman's analysis underscores the importance of the gender question to political reconstitution, but she tends to overlook how much anxiety went into the resolution of the woman question. She claims that competition between the brothers was quickly channeled into the competition of the market and the competition for women in marriage. In the French Revolution, however, competition between the brothers continued to be deadly, and the problem of women was not easily resolved. The difficulty of this resolution can be seen. for example, in the persistent recurrence of the theme of incest. 101 The charge of incest in the queen's trial was brought by the radical journalist Hebert, editor of the scabrous Le Père Duchesne, which was the most determinedly "popular" newspaper of the time. Hebert appeared at the trial in his capacity as assistant city attorney for Paris, but his paper had been notorious for its continuing attacks on the queen. Hebert testified that he had been called to the Temple prison by Antoine Simon, the shoemaker who was assigned to look after Louis's son. Simon had surprised the eight-year-old engaging in "indecent pollutions" (i.e.. masturbating), and when he questioned the young boy about where he had learned such practices, Louis-Charles replied that his mother and his aunt (the king's sister) had taught him. The boy was asked to repeat his accusations in the presence of the mayor and city attorney, which he did, claiming that the two women often made him sleep between them. Hebert concluded: There is reason to believe that this criminal enjoyment [jouissance, which has several meanings including pleasure, possession, and orgasm] was not at all dictated by pleasure, but rather by the political hope of enervating the physical health of this child, whom they continued to believe would occupy a throne, and on whom they wished, by this maneuver, to assure themselves the right of ruling afterward over his morals. The body of the child allegedly showed the effects of this incestuousness; one of his testicles had been injured and had to be bandaged. Since being separated from his mother, Hebert reported, the child's health had become much more robust and vigorous." What better emblem could there be of feminization - that effect predicted by Rousseau - than the actual deterioration of the boy's genitals? As sensational as the charge was, the court did not pursue it much further. When directly confronted with the accusation, the former queen refused to lower herself by responding "to such a charge made against a mother." But there it was in the newspapers, and even the Jacobin Club briefly noted the "shameful scenes between the mother, the aunt, and the son," and denounced "the venom that 102 now runs through [the boy's] veins and which perhaps carries the source of all sorts of accidents." The Jacobin newspaper Journal des hommes libres de tous les pays carried a long editorial on the subject during the trial. It denounced Marie-Antoinette and her sister-in-law for initiating the young Capet into the "mysteries of unbridled libertinage." Since it seems surprising that republican men should be so worried about the degeneration of the royal family, it is not farfetched to conclude that the incest charge had a wider, if largely unconscious, resonance. On the most explicit level, incest was simply another sign of the criminal nature of royalty. Hebert complained rhetorically to the supporters of royalism, "You immolate your brothers, and for what? For an old whore, who has neither faith nor respect for the law, who has made more than a million men die; you are the champions of murder, brigandage, adultery, and incest." Although incest can hardly be termed a major theme in revolutionary discourse, it did appear frequently in prerevolutionary novels, as we have seen, and in the political pornography of the last decades of the Old Regime and during the revolutionary decade itself. Perhaps the most striking example is the pornography of the marquis de Sade, which makes much of incest between fathers and daughters and brothers and sisters (see chapter 5). The official incest charge against the queen has to be set in the context provided by the longer history of pornographic and semi-pornographic pamphlets about the queen's private life. Although the charge at the trial was based on alleged activities that took place only after the incarceration of the royal family in the Temple prison, it was made more plausible by the scores of pamphlets that had appeared since the earliest days of the Revolution and that had their origins in the political pornography of the Old Regime itself. When Révolutions de Paris exclaimed, "Who could forget the scandalous 103 morals of her private life?" or repeated the charges about "her secret orgies with Anois [one of the king's brothers], Fersen, Coigny, etc.," the newspaper was simply recalling to readers' minds what they had long imbibed in underground publications about the queen's promiscuity." Attacks on the queen's morality had begun as early as 1774 (four years after her arrival in France) with a satirical lampoon about her early morning promenades. Louis XV paid considerable sums in the same year to buy up existing copies in London and Amsterdam of a pamphlet that detailed the sexual impotence of his grandson, the future Louis XVI. Before long, the songs and "little papers" had become frankly obscene, and the first of many long, detailed pamphlets had been published clandestinely. The foremost expert on the subject found 126 pamphlets which he could classify in the genre of "Marie-Antoinette, libertine. " Even before the notorious Diamond Necklace Affair of 1785 and continuing long after it, the queen was the focus of an always proliferating literature of derision that was preoccupied with her sexual body. Many of the major accusations against Marie-Antoinette were already present in the prerevolutionary pamphlets. The Portefeuille d'un Talon Rouge (condemned in 1783) begins in classic eighteenth-century fashion with a preface from the presumed publisher announcing that someone had found a portfolio while crossing the Palais-Royal (the notorious den of prostitution and gambling that was also the residence of the king's cousin, the duc d'Orleans, who was assumed to have paid for many of the pamphlets). In it was found a manuscript addressed to Monsieur de la H. . . of the Academie francaise. It began. "You are out of your mind, my dear la H. . . ! You want, they tell me, to write the history of tribades at Versailles." In the text appeared the soon to be standard allegation that Marie-Antoinette was amorously involved with the duchesse de Polignac ("her Jules") and Madame Balbi. The comte d'Artois was 104 supposedly the only man who interested her. These charges, as harshly delivered as they were, formed only part of the pamphlet's more general tirade against the court and ministers in general. Speaking of the courtiers, the author exclaimed, "You are an abominable race. You get everything from your character both of monkeys and of vipers." With the coming of the Revolution in 1789, the floodgates opened, and the number of pamphlets attacking the queen rapidly rose in number. These took various forms ranging from songs and fables to alleged biographies (such as the widely circulated Essais historiques sur la vie de Marie-Antoinette, which appeared under various titles after 1781), confessions, and plays. Sometimes, the writings were pornographic with little explicit political content; for example, the sixteen-page pamphlet in verse titled Le Godmiché royal (The royal dildo, 1789) told the story of Juno (the queen) and Hebe (presumably either the duchesse de Polignac or the princesse de Lamballe). Juno complains of her inability to obtain satisfaction at home, and pulls a dildo out of her bag ("Happy invention that we owe to the monastery"). Her companion promises her penises of almost unimaginably delicious size. The long 1789 edition (146 pages in the augmented French edition) of the Essai historique sur la vie de Marie-Antoinette already demonstrated the rising tone of personal hostility toward the queen that would characterize revolutionary pornographic pamphlets. In the most detailed of all the anti-Marie-Antoinette exposes published up to that time, it purported to give the queen's own view through the first person: "My death is the object of the desires of an entire people that I oppressed with the greatest barbarism." Marie-Antoinette here describes herself as "barbarous Queen, adulterous spouse, woman without morals, polluted with crimes and debaucheries," and she details all the charges that had accumulated against her in previous pamphlets. Now her alleged lesbianism is traced back to the Austrian court, and all the stories of amorous intrigues 105 with princes and great nobles are given concreteness. Added to the charges is the new one that she herself poisoned the young heir to the throne, who died in early 1789. This pamphlet has a characteristic seen in many of the later pamphlets: a curious alternation between frankly pornographic staging - descriptions in the first person of her liaisons, complete with wildly beating hearts and barely stifled sighs of passion - and political moralizing and denunciation put in the mouth of the queen herself. The contrast with the king and his "pure, sincere love which I so often and so cruelly abused" is striking. The queen may have been representative of the degenerate tendencies of the aristocracy, but she was not yet emblematic of royalty altogether. The Marie-Antoinette pamphlets reflect a general tendency in the production of political pornography: the number of titles in this genre rose steadily from 1774 to 1788 and then took off after 1789. The queen was not the only target of hostility; a long series of "private lives" attacked the conduct of courtiers before 1789 and revolutionary politicians from Lafayette to Robespierre afterwards. Aristocrats were shown as impotent, riddled with venereal disease, and given over to debauchery. Homosexuality functioned in a manner similar to impotence in this literature; it showed the decadence of the Old Regime in the person of its priests and aristocrats. Sexual degeneration went hand in hand with political corruption. This proliferation of pornographic pamphlets after 1789 shows that political pornography cannot be viewed simply as a supplement to a 106 political culture that lacked political participation. Once participation increased dramatically, particularly with the explosion of non-censored newspapers and pamphlets, politics did not simply take the high road. Marie-Antoinette was without question the favorite target of such attacks. Not only were there more pamphlets about her than about any other single figure, but they were also the most sustained in their viciousness. One author has claimed that the Essais historiques alone sold 20-30,000 copies. 1789 does appear to mark a turning point not only in the number of pamphlets produced but also in their tone. The pre-1789 pamphlets tell dirty stories in secret; after 1789 the rhetoric of the pamphlets begins self-consciously to solicit a wider audience. The public no longer "hears" courtier rumors through the print medium; it now "sees" degeneracy in action. The first-person rendition of the 1789 French edition of the Essai historique is a good example of this technique. In the much more elaborately pornographic Fureurs uterines de Marie-Antoinette, femme de Louis XVI of two years later, colored engravings showed the king impotent and Artois and Polignac replacing him. Obscene engravings with first-person captions were the most obvious form of this visualization of female debauchery. The long Vie de Marie-Antoinette d'Autriche, femme de Louis XVI, roi des Français; Depuis la perte de son pucelage jusqu'au premier Mai 1791, followed by volumes two and three, titled Vie privée, libertine, et scandaleuse de 'Marie-Antoinette d'Autriche, ci-devant Reine des François, was accompanied by engravings that are an interesting case in point. They showed Marie-Antoinette in amorous embrace with just about everyone imaginable: her first supposed lover, a German officer; the aged Louis XV; Louis XVI impotent (see figure 9 in chapter 2): the comte d'Artois; various women (figure 23); various threesomes with two women and a man (figure 24); Cardinal de Rohan, of the 107 Diamond Necklace Affair; Lafayette; Barnave; and others. The rhymed couplets that serve as captions are sometimes in the first person (in figure 23: "Dieux! quels transports ah! mon ame s'envole, pour l'exprimer je n'ai plus de parole [God! what rapture! Oh, my soul takes flight, I have no words to express it]"), sometimes in the third. The effect is the same: a theatricalization of the action so that the reader is made into voyeur and moral judge at the same time. The political effect of the pornography is apparent even in this most obscene of works. In volumes two and three, the pornographic engravings are interspersed with political engravings of aristocratic conspiracy (figure 29, the assault on the Tuileries palace, and even a curious print showing Louis XVI putting on a red cap of liberty and drinking to the health of the nation in front of the queen and his remaining son and heir. Such juxtapositions, which seem strange to us now, underlined the connection between sexual misbehavior and aristocratic conspiracy. That the pamphlets succeeded in attracting a public can be seen in the repetition of formulaic expressions in nonpornographic political pamphlets, "popular" newspapers, petitions from "popular societies," and the trial record itself. The Essai historique of 1789 already included the soon to be standard comparison between Marie-Antoinette and Catherine de Medicis, Agrippina, and Messalina. A sixteen-page anonymous pamphlet published in 1789 developed the comparison between Marie-Antoinette and her predecessor queens in some detail. Fredegund, the evil mistress and eventual wife of Chilperic I, a Merovingian king, talks with Catherine de Medicis: "Our crimes are finally going to be forgotten. . . Incest, adultery, and the most infamous and shameful lubricity, the overturning of the sacred order of Nature, were games for this lewd Messalina." 109 These comparisons were expanded at great length in a curious political Tract called Les Crimes des reines de France (The crimes of the queens of France), which was written by a woman, Louise de Karalio (though it was published under the name of the publisher, Louis Prudhomme). The development of this work over time shows how opinion about the queen moved from questions about her virtues to certainties about her vices. The early editions of the tract (1791, 1792) denounced the queen in somewhat conditional terms: "Does she merit the hatred and contempt which has been shown her so many times? We have no certain proof of everything that has been imputed to her; we cannot act on conjectures." The "corrected and 110 augmented" edition dated "an II" changed tone: now all the questions were replaced by declarations of the queen's guilt. Les Crimes was not a pornographic tract; it simply referred to the "turpitudes" committed by the queen as background for its more general political charges. Keralio reviewed the history of the queens of France and emphasized in particular the theme of dissimulation."The dangerous art of seducing and betraying, perfidious and intoxicating caresses, feigned tears, affected despair, insinuating prayers"- these were the weapons of the queens of France (which had been identified as the weapons of all women by Rousseau). When the author came to the wife of Louis Capet, she listed many of the queen's presumed lovers, male and female, but she insisted upon passing rapidly over the "private crimes" of the queen in favor of consideration of her public ones. Marie-Antoinette "was the soul of all the plots, the center of all the intrigues, the source of all these horrors." As a "political tarantula" (a phrase introduced in the later editions), the queen resembled that "impure insect, which, in the darkness, weaves on the right and left fine threads where inexperienced gnats are caught, whom she makes her prey." On the next page the queen is compared to a tigress that, once having tasted blood, can no longer be satisfied. All this to prove, as the caption on the first engraving said, that "A people is without honor and merits its chains / When it lowers itself beneath the scepter of queens." The shorter, more occasional political pamphlets picked up the themes of the pornographic literature and used them for straight-forward political purposes. A series of pamphlets appeared in 1792, for example, offering lists of political enemies who deserved immediate punishment. They had as their appendices lists of all the people with whom the queen had had "relationships of debauchery." In these pamphlets, the queen was routinely referred to as "mauvaise fille, mauvaise épouse, mauvaise mère, mauvaise reine, monstre en tout [bad daughter, bad wife, bad mother, bad queen, mon- 111 ster in everything]." The royalist commentator Bayer-Brun, who wrote on the subject of revolutionary caricatures, railed against these pamphlets in particular. He claimed that they appeared in June 1792 and were sold openly right under the windows of the Tuileries palace. He also noted that leading revolutionary newspapers, such as the 'Annales patriotiques and the Chronique de Paris, were repeating the same sorts of "blasphemy." The pamphlet literature had already begun to do its work before the beginning of the political attack on the monarchy in June 1792. Speeches in the Jacobin Club were picking up on these themes as early as the spring of 1792. One speaker at the club in April 1792 called Marie-Antoinette "this impudent woman, the modern Brunhilde . . . perverse woman" and advised Louis to banish her from his presence. Boyer-Brun claimed that Les Crimes des reines de France of 1791 was the precursor of all the horrible writings against the queen and that "it was only done, perhaps, in order to remove from the French every vestige of pity that might be inspired by the horrible fate of the unfortunate daughter of the Caesars." The people - "the misled multitude" - now believed anything written about the queen even without any proof, according to Boyer-Brun. Newspapers carried articles calling for public whippings of the queen at the theater. Everywhere, according to the outraged royalist observer, from the local marketplaces to the terrace of the Tuileries palace itself, people were heard insulting the queen. The movement from allegations of sexual misdemeanors to bestial metaphors that was apparent in the later editions of Les Crimes des reines de France was characteristic of much "popular" commentary on the queen, especially in her last months. In Le Pere Duchesne Hebert had incorporated the Fredegund and Medicis comparisons by 1791, but still in a relatively innocent context. One of his favorite devices was to portray himself as meeting in person with the queen and trying to talk sense to her. By 1792 the queen had become 112 "madame Veto," and once the monarchy had been toppled, Heben made frequent reference to the "menagerie royale." In prison, the former queen was depicted as a she-monkey ("la guenon d'Autriche"), the king as a pig. In one particularly fanciful scene, Pere Duchesne presents himself in the queen's cell as the duchesse de Polignac ("cette tribade"), thanks to the effect of a magic ring. The former queen throws herself into her friend's arms and reveals her fervent hopes for the success of the counterrevolution. After her husband had been executed, the tone of hostility escalated, and Marie-Antoinette became the she-wolf and the tigress of Austria. At the time of her trial, Hebert suggested that she be chopped up like meat for pâté in revenge for all the bloodshed she had caused. Local militants picked up the same rhetoric. In a letter to the Convention congratulating it on the execution of the queen, the popular society of Rozoy (Seine-et-Marne department) referred to "this tigress thirsty for the blood of the French . . . this other Messalina whose corrupt heart held the fertile germ of all crimes; may her loathsome memory perish forever." The popular society of Garlin (Basses-Pyrenies department) denounced the "ferocious panther who devoured the French, the female monster whose pores sweated the purest blood of the sans-culottes. Throughout these passages, it is possible to see the horrific transformations of the queen's body; the body which had once been denounced for its debauchery and disorderliness becomes in turn the dangerous beast, the cunning spider, the virtual vampire who sucks the blood of the French. The use of bestial metaphors seems to have been particularly characteristic of denunciations aimed at a popular audience. The more restrained Jacobin newspapers-whose audience was probably constituted by Jacobin officials rather than by popular militants - avoided the explicit bestial metaphors and concentrated instead on sexual debauchery. The Journal des hommes libres, for example, published a long editorial celebrating the execution of the queen, which was taken up and republished by some local newspapers. It denounced the crimes of Marie-Antoinette and gave 113 great prominence to "her lascivious self-satisfaction," her "lewdness," her adultery, her "devouring" of state funds, and her determination to "bathe in the blood of the French" - without, however, an explicit comparison to a tiger or she-wolf. The paper praised her execution as a "purification" of the globe. Explicit in some of the more extreme statements and implicit in many others was a pervasive preoccupation with genealogy. For example, the post-1789 pamphlets constantly raised questions about the paternity of the king's children (they were often attributed to the king's brother, the comte d'Artois). In a fascinating twist on the charge of false genealogy, Le Pere Duchesne denounced a supposed plot by the queen to raise a young boy who resembled the heir to the throne in order to take the heir's place. The culminating charge, of course, was incest: in the trial, this was limited to the queen's son, but in the pamphlet literature the charges included incest with the king's brother, the king's grandfather Louis XV, and her own father, who taught her "the passion of incest, the dirtiest of pleasures," from which followed "hatred of the French, aversion for the duties of spouse and mother. in short, all that reduces humanity to the level of ferocious beasts." The reductio ad absurdum of these charges was the following verse, which loses most of its effect in translation: Ci-gît l'impudique Manon, Qui, dans le ventre de sa mere, Savait si bien placer son c. . . , Qu'elle f. . . avec son pere. [Here lies the lewd Manon / Who, in the belly of her mother / Knew so well how to place her c. . . / That she f. . . with her father.] Bestialization and accusations of disorderly sexuality and falsification of genealogy were all linked in the most intimate way. Promiscuity, incest, poisoning of the heir to the throne, plots to replace the heir with a pliable substitute - all of these charges reflect a fundamental anxiety about queenship as the most extreme form of 114 the invasion of the public sphere by women. Where Rousseau had warned that the salon woman would turn her "harem of men' into women "more womanish than she," the radical militant Louise de Keralio would warn her readers that "a woman who becomes queen changes sex." The queen, then, was the emblem (and sacrificial victim) for the feared disintegration of gender boundaries that accompanied the Revolution. In his study of ritual violence, René Girard argues that a sacrificial crisis (a crisis in the community that leads to the search for a scapegoat) entails the feared loss of sexual differentiation: "One of the effects of the sacrificial crisis is a certain feminization of the men, accompanied by a masculinization of the women." A scapegoat is chosen in order to reinstitute the community's sense of boundaries. Girard himself considered the queen an example of his more general theories. In his study of scapegoating and collective persecution, Le Bouc émissaire, he claimed that the French Revolution had all the characteristics of a great crisis that facilitates collective persecutions. Marie-Antoinette was accused of incest, according to Girard, in order to blame her for the dedifferentiation that was felt as a collective threat. The crime had to be a "dedifferentiating crime" in order to make the scapegoat an appropriate victim for the community's violence. Incest is a particularly striking example of dedifferentiation because it threatens the boundaries defining difference within the family and threatens the general establishment of exogamy and the boundaries between family and society. By invoking Girard, I do not mean to suggest that the French Revolution precisely followed his script of sacrificial crisis or scapegoating. In fact, the Revolution did not single out a particular scapegoat in the moment of crisis: it was marked instead by a constant search for new victims, as if the community did not have a distinct enough sense of itself to settle upon just one (the king or the queen, for example). Nevertheless, Girard's suggestion that an intense crisis within a community is marked by fears of dedifferentiation is very 115 fruitful, for it helps make sense of the gender charge of revolutionary events. The charge of incest against the queen was only the most striking example of the connection of the fear of dedifferentiation with the queen's fate. The charge of lesbianism (tribadism was the term of the time) served the same purpose. In the pornographic pamphlets written against her, Marie-Antoinette is shown as a creature whose voracious sexuality knows no limits and no gender differentiation (or, for that matter, class differentiation). She was often denounced as a whore, that is, as a public woman whose sexuality destroyed any possibility of tracing paternity. In a violent pamphlet against prostitutes, for example, the queen was reviled as la reine des garces, the queen of whores (and the word garce itself clearly connotes gender blurring, since it has the same root as garçon, boy): "abominable garce, execrable model of incurable lewdness . . . you who by your incestuous examples, your perpetual adulteries, never cease to insult virtue." The evidence for a feared loss of sexual differentiation in the Revolution is in fact quite extensive. A fear of gender reversal can be seen in a lewd poem printed in May 1790 by the satirical royalist newspaper, Journal general de la tour et de la ville: Nous sommes transportés aux temps miraculeux. Tandis que d'Aiguil . . . en femme se déguise, Antoinette devient un homme courageux, Et digne d'honorer le noble sang de Guise. [We have been transported to miraculous times. / While d'Aiguil . . . [the duc d'Aiguillon] disguises himself as a woman, / Antoinette becomes a courageous man [presumably an attack on her supposed tribadism], / Worthy of honoring the noble blood of Guise.] This poem is addressed to the royalist side, which is being undermined, according to the paper, by its own internal scandals. The problem of dedifferentiation was not limited to the queen, and worries about women in politics were shared by men of every political stripe. In the early years of the Revolution, counterrevolutionaries ridiculed women who tried to take some role in politi- 116 cal discussion; Théroigne de Méricourt (her real name was Anne-Joseph Terwagne) was denounced in royalist newspapers as a "slut," an "amazon" in red, a libertine willing to sleep with any of the deputies, the fantasized image of a liberated woman who enjoyed "the rights of men." The march to Versailles in October 1789, in which women played such a prominent part, prompted cries of outrage on the right: the market women who had participated were "assassins and savages," according to one French commentator. Edmund Burke portrayed the market women in lurid terms and contrasted them explicitly with the "delightful vision" that had been the queen before the pollution of the October days: [The heads of two of the king's bodyguards] were stuck upon spears, and led the procession; whilst the royal captives who followed in the train were slowly moved along, amidst the horrid veils, and shrilling screams, and frantic dances, and infamous contumelies, and all the unutterable abominations of the furies of hell, in the abused shape of the vilest of women. Women acting in the public sphere - whether the market women as portrayed by Burke or Marie-Antoinette as depicted by her republican critics - were likened to beasts; they lost their femininity and with it their very humanity. If the veil of social constraints that shielded them from the public eye was rent, their dangerous and presocial nature as furies was revealed. In February 1792 a royalist newspaper advertised an engraving that captured the fear of dedifferentiation in a satirical vein. The engraving, titled "Grand Débandement de l'Armée Anticonstitutionelle" (Great disbanding of the anticonstitutional army; figure 26). shows various aristocratic women known for their revolutionary sentiment displaying their bare bottoms to the Austrian army. They are led by Théroigne de Méricourt, who shows her "Republic" (her res publica, public thing) to the army, which is caught in a pose of virtual Freudian sexual fright at the sight. The Jacobins and sans-culottes hide behind the row of bare bottoms and present pikes with dangling hams, sausages, and other charcuterie. 117 This engraving is filled with layers of ambiguity, but what interests me here is its expressed worry about gender roles. The gesture of the aristocratic patriot women, for example, is both a carnivalesque expression of debasement (of the anticonstitutional army) and a reference in this specific context to homosexuality. The women are showing their "Villette," according to the text - a reference to the marquis de Villette, a defender of women's rights and known homosexual and pederast. Théroigne de Méricourt carries a rifle while also exposing herself. Her gesture, backed up by the rows of dangling sausages and hams, clearly threatens castration along with gender reversal (a woman carrying a rifle, the men in back reduced to presenting the representations of their virility on their pikes). The castration threat is underlined by the pun in the title of the engraving; debander means both "to disband" and "to lose an 118 erection." In the engraving as in the poem quoted earlier, we can see that homosexuality and the masculinization of women are linked in a general fear of the blurring of gender boundaries. This fear animated counterrevolutionaries and revolutionaries alike. At every critical moment during the Revolution, whenever women were prominent in some way, their participation elicited the same kinds of remarks. In the struggle between the Montagnard and Girondin deputies in May 1793 over the future direction of the Revolution, some women, in particular the members of the Societe des Republicaines Revolutionnaires, played an active role in the conflicts within local assemblies. Girondin journalists denounced them as devotees of Robespierre, bacchanalian followers of Marat, and the "group of shrews." Women were said to have armed themselves because they were "excited by the furies" and drunk with the prospect of blood. After Charlotte Corday assassinated Marat in July 1793, leading Jacobins began to turn their attention to public women. One of the leaders of the Société des Republicaines Révolutionnaires, Claire Lacombe, was attacked in the newspaper Feuille de salut pubique on 4 September 1793. On 7 October she protested the assimilation of her activities with the crimes of Catherine de Médicis, Elizabeth of England, Marie-Antoinette, and Charlotte Corday: "Our sex has only produced one monster, whereas for four years we have been betrayed, assassinated by innumerable monsters produced by the masculine sex." Hostility to women's political clubs had been growing for some time. Women had formed political clubs in Paris and in at least fifty provincial towns and cities between 1791 and 1793, and they were often supported at first by local men's clubs. Although most women in the clubs proclaimed their adherence to the ideal of patriotic and republican motherhood, the very fact of their politicization eventually provoked attacks. As early as January 1793 Prudhomme in his newspaper denounced the provincial women's clubs as a "plague to the mothers of good families." Jacobins in the provinces reminded women of their natural characteristics of irrationality, credulity, and 119 flightiness. They never tired of reminding women, as one Bordeaux group insisted, that "your sex is different from ours." When the Jacobins turned against women's clubs in the fall of 1793, they used the same language of denunciation first pioneered by the rightwing press. Just two weeks after the execution of the queen on 16 October 1793, the Convention discussed the participation of women in politics, in particular the Société des Républicaines Révolutionnaires. The Jacobin deputy Fabre d'Eglantine insisted that "these clubs are not composed of mothers of families, daughters of families, sisters occupied with their younger brothers or sisters, but rather of adventuresses, knights-errant, emancipated women, female grenadiers." Deputy Jean-Baptiste Amar, speaking for the Committee on General Security of the Convention, laid out the official rationale for a separation of women from the public sphere: The private functions to which women are destined by nature itself are related to the general order of society; this social order results from the difference between man and woman. Each sex is called to the kind of occupation which is proper for it. . . . Man is strong, robust, born with great energy, audacity and courage. . . . In general, women are not capable of elevated thoughts and serious meditations, and if, among ancient peoples, their natural timidity and modesty did not allow them to appear outside their families, then in the French Republic do you want them to be seen coming to the bar, to the tribune, and to political assemblies as men do? To reestablish the "natural order" and prevent the emancipation of women from their familial identity, the deputies solemnly outlawed all women's clubs. In response to a deputation of women wearing red caps that appeared before the Paris city council two weeks later, the well-known radical spokesman (and city official), Pierre Chaumette, exclaimed: 120 It is contrary to all the laws of nature for a woman to want to make herself a man. The Council must recall that some time ago these denatured women, these viragos, wandered through the markets with the red cap to sully that badge of liberty. . . . Since when is it permitted to give up one's sex! Since when is it decent to see women abandoning the pious cares of their households, the cribs of their children, to come to public places, to harangues in the galleries, at the bar of the senate? Chaumette then reminded his audience of the recent fate of the "impudent" Olympe de Gouges, author of The Declaration of the Rights of Woman and Citizen (1791), "who was the first to set up women's societies, who abandoned the cares of her household to get mixed up in the republic." He also denounced the "haughty" Madame Roland, "who thought herself fit to govern the republic and who rushed to her downfall." Olympe de Gouges went to the guillotine on 3 November, Madame Roland on 8 November. They were held up as examples of femmes-hommes, "mixed beings" who transgressed the boundaries of nature. Even after these actions of repression, newspapers still complained that women were spending too much time attending meetings of popular societies and local assemblies. On 19 November 1793 the Moniteur universel commented on the recent executions of Marie-Antoinette, Olympe de Gouges, and Madame Roland. It amalgamated them under the rubric of unnatural women. The former queen was denounced for being a "bad mother, debauched wife"; Olympe de Gouges for "wanting to be a man of state" and for "having forgotten the virtues suitable to her sex"; and Madame Roland for "having sacrificed nature by wishing to elevate herself above her station" and forgetting "the virtues of her sex." The Feuille de salut public advised women "never to follow the popular assemblies with the desire of speaking there." Marie-Antoinette was certainly not in alliance with the women of the Societe des Republicaines Revolutionnaires, or with Madame 121 Roland or Olympe de Gouges. But even political enemies, as Louise de Keralio discovered, shared similar political restrictions, if they were women. Keralio herself was accused of being dominated bv those same "uterine furies" that beset the queen; by publishing, Keralio too was making herself public. Her detractors put this desire for notoriety down to her ugliness and inability to attract men: Mademoiselle de Keralio. Ugly and already over the hill; even before the revolution, she consoled herself for the disgrace of her gray hair and the indifference of men by the peaceful cultivation of letters. Given over since the revolution to demagogic disorders and no doubt also dominated by uterine furies, she married Robert. . . . Abandoned by her family, scorned by honest people, she vegetates shamefully with this miserable man . . . [and] works by the page for the infamous Prudhomme. As Dorinda Outram has argued, women who wished to participate actively in the French Revolution were caught in a double bind: virtue was a two-edged sword which bisected the sovereign into two different destinies, one male and one female. Male virtue meant participation in the public world of politics; female virtue meant withdrawal into the private world of the family. Even the most prominent female figures of the time had to acquiesce in this division. Madame Roland recognized this: "I knew what role was suitable to my sex and I never abandoned it." Of course, she paid with her life because others did not think that she had in fact restrained herself from participating in the public sphere. Read from this perspective on the difference between male and female virtue, the writings and images about the queen as well as those about other prominent women reveal fundamental anxieties about the construction of a new social order. When they executed Marie-Antoinette, republican men were not simply concerned to punish a leading counterrevolutionary. They wanted to separate mothers from any public activity, as Carole Pateman argues, and yet give birth by themselves to a new political organism. In order to accomplish this, they first had to destroy the Old Regime link between the ruling family and the body politic, between the literal 122 bodies of the rulers and the mystic fiction of royalty. In short, they had to kill the patriarchal father and the mother. Strikingly, however, the killing of the father was accompanied by little personal vilification. Hebert's references to the pig, the ogre, or the drunk were relatively isolated: calling the former king a cuckold ("tete de cocu") hardly compared to the insistent denigration of Marie-Antoinette. The relative silence about Louis among the revolutionaries perhaps reflects an underlying sense that, after all, he represented the masculinity of power and sovereignty. The aim was to kill the paternal source of power and yet retain its virility in its republican replacement. The republican ideal of virtue was based on a notion of fraternity between men in which women were relegated to the realm of domesticity. Public virtue required virility, which required in turn the violent rejection of aristocratic degeneracy and any intrusion of the feminine into the public. By attacking Marie-Antoinette and other publicly active women, republican men reinforced their bonds to each other: Marie-Antoinette in particular was the negative version of the female icon of republican liberty, the bad mother in a republic that was supposed to be shaped by the lessons of good republican mothers. The opposing ideal of patriotic motherhood had always been implicit in revolutionary rhetoric. In June 1790, for example, a Madame Mouret presented a project to the city government of Paris for a "Confederation of Women," in which the women present would take an oath to bring up their children as good patriots. In February 1791 Prudhomme laid out the soon to be standard revolutionary view in his Révolutions de Paris. The Revolution depends on you, Prudhomme wrote to his women readers; "without leaving your homes, you can already do much for it. The liberty of a people is based on good morals and education, and you are their guardians and their first dispensors." A few months later he insisted that things should be as in republican Rome, where "each sex was in its place . . . men made the laws . . . and women, without allowing themselves to question it, agreed in everything with the wisdom and knowledge of 123 their husbands or their parents. " In this vision, widely shared by women as well as men, the most important role of women was as mothers, who would educate the new generation of patriots and, after 1792, republicans. Even the most militant women subscribed to the ideal of the republican mother. Women's clubs took oaths to "persuade on all occasions my husband, my brothers, and my children to fulfill their duties towards the country" as part of a general belief in the importance of women's functions within a family framework. Women's clubs, though they fostered women's independent political activity, almost always confined themselves to the pursuit of general revolutionary and republican objectives rather than to any explicit feminist program. Yet, despite their self-imposed limitations, the clubs prompted women to demand more participation for their sex, and their very existence alarmed many, indeed most, men whatever their political leaning. In other words, the problem that Freud saw emerging after the murder of the father - what to do with the women - proved very difficult to resolve. Republican men were no more misogynist than their predecessors, but they faced a new ideological challenge. If patriarchy, custom, and tradition were no longer adequate justifications for authority in the state or for the father's authority over his children, then just what was the justification for women's separate, different, and unequal roles in both the family and the state? In this implicit and often unconscious gender drama, the figure of Marie-Antoinette played a critical and crystallizing role. Haut | Retour