by KEVAN HARRIS
The French revolution in 1789 not only set the template for what a revolution is supposed to look like, it also created most categories of understanding contemporary social change. Our notions of left v. right come from it, as do our notions of reform/reaction/revolution.
A common interpretation of the Iranian revolution in 1979 is that it was the first revolution which was categorically different from all of the revolutions that had taken place after 1789. If the French, Russian, Chinese, etc, revolutions moved history “forward,” the Iranian revolution was something else entirely. The interpretive debate over the meaning of the 1979 revolution between Michel Foucault and his various critics is a good example of this. Because the social outcomes of the French revolution of 1789 forged so many of the categories we still use to look at the world, the outcomes of the Iranian revolution of 1979 seem confusing, bizarre, or out of step with the patterns of global social change that the date of 1789 marks as the beginning of our “modern” world.
So it was with much surprise that I came across several curious passages concerning the outcome of the French revolution for women in Immanuel Wallerstein’s recent fourth volume of his reassessment of global history in The Modern World-System (2011). In his third volume (1989), Wallerstein revisits the two great events of the “age of revolutions” of the late 18th century – the Industrial revolution and the French revolution – and submits them to a serious debunking. That book remains deeply controversial (if not ignored) in the history field, but subsequent revisions to East Asian scholarship – specifically the extent of market relations in 16th-18th century China – suggest that we do exaggerate the importance of the “age of revolutions” on world history. In Wallerstein’s new volume, he discusses the contradiction between the ideological claims of equality through citizenship in liberal thought and the actual implementation of unequal relations by excluding individuals from these promised rights throughout the 19th century. And he begins with the French revolution (pp. 149-153):
In the case of women, the whole matter started out badly. The royal decree summoning the Estates-General specified that women who held seigniorial fiefs had to choose male proxies to represent them in the Electoral College — nobles for laywomen, clergy for nuns. …Nonetheless, women (religious communities, societies of tradeswomen) did write cahiers de doléance.
It is well known that women played a major role in various popular demonstrations during the French Revolution, most crucially in the so-called October days in 1789, when the Parisian market women (along with national guardsmen) marched on Versailles and forced the royal couple to come to the capital to reside. …[T]wo months after these riots, on December 22, 1789, the National Assembly formally excluded women from the right to vote.
The Constitution of 1791 renewed the exclusion, and this was reiterated in a vote of the Convention on July 24, 1793, specifying that women were excluded from all political rights, which actually was something that at least aristocratic women had had in the ancien régime.
Wallerstein quotes historian Steven House in a footnote here:
The Thirsty Fish for more