Exacting Change

After the Assembly overhauled the currency system and issued assignats in denominations too large for retail trade, a small change shortage rocked the nation. To facilitate marketplace exchanges, the Dames, their suppliers, their clients, and other merchants turned to promissory notes. These bills were inadequately backed by local financial societies and contributed to rapid inflation. Beginning in 1790, the lack of practical cash spurred market actors to innovatively ally across guilds and occupational boundaries. Vegetable merchants formed coalitions with carpenters to demand new assignat denominations, retailers joined forces with brokers to protect promissory notes, and clients and merchants rallied to support overlapping credit networks. Thus, the Dames and their allies forged novel socioeconomic associations before the Le Chapelier law and d’Allarde decree legally dismantled the corporate world in 1791. Money thus became a concrete conduit for effecting the core social transformations at the heart of the Revolution. While spurring the state to protect the monetary networks of productive citizens, the Dames and their allies also changed the trajectory of national currency reform.

Introduction

This chapter introduces the over 1,000 Parisian market women known as the Dames des Halles and outlines how Politics in the Marketplace changes understandings of work, gender, and citizenship in the French Revolution. First, this book insists that marketplace actors shaped the nature of nascent democracy and capitalism through their daily commerce. As the revolutionaries overhauled Old Regime privileges in les Halles, they confronted the tensions between socially egalitarian projects and free market aspirations in everyday trade. Second, this book expands recent non-Marxist inquiries to reconsider the socioeconomic issues at the heart of the Revolution. It proposes the concept of economic citizenship to consider how an individual’s economic activities such as buying goods, selling food, or paying taxes position him/her within the collective social body and enable him/her to make claims on the state. Third, Politics in the Marketplace intervenes in the dominant narrative of gender and modern democracy. Instead of defining citizenship by electoral rights, this book explores how the Dames and fellow revolutionaries invented multiple notions of citizenship in its embryonic stages, some of which did not immediately divide citizenship by gender. Fourth, this book argues that, in their words and actions, the Dames conceptualized their citizenship through useful work. According to the market women, their occupational, civic, and gendered work served society and earned them the right to make claims on the state in return. The Dames’ notion of citizenship thus included gendered components but did not take gender as its cornerstone. Finally, the introduction describes the sources used to tap into the Dames’ world.

Occupying the Marketplace

This chapter analyzes the economically crucial and conceptually volatile debates over public space in the marketplace. It traces how the king’s public domain became national domain and how this transformation affected the ways that citizens pursued particular interests in les Halles. During the Old Regime, the king had issued an edict that permitted some especially indigent Dames to secure market spots before other retailers. He had also granted one company the privilege of renting shelters to these qualified Dames before others. However, when the private company attempted to renew its royal contract during the Revolution, clashes arose over the right to and regulation of public domain. During the disputes, the Dames who were not advantaged by the king’s edict seized new practices of citizenship to claim shelters and trading places. They harnessed revolutionary discourses to mark the earth as national property, attack monopoly-holders as privileged leeches, and secure economic exemptions based on their work’s public utility. As they justified their personal profits on public space, the Dames staked out their place in the body politic.

Embodying Sovereignty

From 1789 through 1793, the Dames reinvented their place in the nation through their activism, which they framed as civic work, and through their maternal initiatives, which they framed as gendered labor. The Dames reacted to local problems en masse and varied their response by situation. They bolstered their image as communal guardians by marching on Versailles during the October Days, by insisting that the municipal government assist citizens during food crises, and by sending a delegation to Italy to fetch the Comte d’Artois. As republican mothers, they reminded the National Assembly of its paternal responsibilities, spanked counterrevolutionary nuns who misled children, and sought to free imprisoned parents who defaulted on wet nurse payments. However, as Louis XVI proved an unwilling constitutional monarch, and bourgeoning clubs and assemblies grew into institutional venues for politics, the Dames’ sporadic interventions became less powerful.

The Dames des Halles

This chapter examines how the Dames des Halles derived their influence from their roles as retailers in the food trade and as traditional representatives of the Third Estate. It draws on evidence from 151 market women to situate them in les Halles and to establish their relationships with clients, brokers, inspectors, and wholesalers. It also demonstrates how the Dames’ ritual relationship with the king and Old Regime literary precursors positioned the Dames as the voice of the people. Revolutionary propagandists drew on the prerevolutionary “genre poissard” to appropriate stock characters of the market women. From 1789 to 1792, political pamphleteers from rival parties channeled the poissard style and deployed fictive Dames to personify popular sovereignty. Thus, the living market women’s political influence hinged on their commercial and ritual activity as well as others’ cultural constructions.

Conclusion

The conclusion compares the Dames’ understanding of work, gender, and citizenship with other revolutionary and postrevolutionary imaginings. In contrast to citizenship couched in a priori rights and rooted in electoral practices, the Dames framed citizenship as contingent and grounded in social experience. Their vision of citizenship resonated with the symbiotic relationships and reciprocal duties at the core of the social contract. The market women asserted that they earned civic membership and the right to make claims on the state through useful work that served society. Their labor assumed occupational forms through their marketplace trade, civic forms through their political activism, and gendered forms through their contributions as republican mothers. However, by 1799, the deputies had conferred full electoral and economic citizenship on male heads of households with property. Nonetheless, the Dames’ early political influence and the deputies’ economic legislation overturn arguments that democratic citizenship emerged fully formed and masculine at the start of the French Revolution. Finally, the market women illustrate how, while transitioning from a corporate to capitalist world, individuals became autonomized and atomized in parallel arenas of work and politics. The Dames’ political emphasis on whom one’s labor serves rather than where one’s labor is performed complicates scholarly categories of a masculine public sphere and a feminine private sphere in the nineteenth century. From the revolutionary marketplace, the Dames force us to rethink the relationship among work, gender, and modern citizenship.

Commercial Licenses as Political Contracts

From 1791 to 1793 and again from 1795 to 1798, the deputies taxed work through occupational licenses called the patente. This chapter reveals how the revolutionaries refracted the relationship among work, property, and autonomous citizenship through this tax. To replace the revenue generated by guild fees, the deputies created graduated tax brackets to target the wealth generated by an individual’s occupation. By exchanging fees for permissions, the patente created a fiscal contract between citizens and the state that mirrored the social contract. Legislators assessed the patente according to criteria for full citizenship including independence and immobile property. From 1796 to 1798, the patente fashioned a type of economic citizenship not predicated on gender and enabled the Dames to form a fiscal contract with the nation, unlike all male wage laborers. In patente hearings before justices of the peace, the Dames articulated their trade as autonomous work. When the deputies reorganized taxes by familial unit and exempted food retailers in 1798, the Dames lost their licenses and fiscal autonomy. The Directory simultaneously reconsolidated political authority into male heads of households.

Selling Legitimacy

In November 1793, the Convention acknowledged that goods passed through multiple hands en route to consumers, and it began to reform the Maximum to include both wholesale and retail prices. This chapter dissects how the Dames, their brokers, and market police compelled the deputies to economically affirm and politically legitimize merchants as useful citizens in their revisions. During the five months it took the state to plan tiered prices, retailers like the Dames remained unable to legally sell at a profit. To protect retailers and the food trade, the Dames and market police urged the deputies to hasten their recalculations. From a pragmatic perspective, they highlighted marketplace practices to illustrate why retailers’ services were necessary for supplying Parisians. From an ideological perspective, they argued that symbiotic trading relationships between merchants and consumers naturally underscored fraternal bonds among cooperative citizens. They also insisted that the municipal government balance commercial relationships by enforcing ceilings on workers’ wages. Due to police reports and merchants’ interventions, the national political economy of the Terror ultimately bent to local realities of les Halles. When the Thermidorians abolished the Maximum in December 1794, crippling inflation created shared interests between previously opposed retailers and wage workers, which encouraged class-based political alliances.

The Cost of Female Citizenship

This chapter reveals how contests over commercial regulations ultimately prompted the National Convention to abolish women’s political clubs. At the outset of the Terror in 1793, the Convention passed a series of price controls called the Maximum. While legislating the controls, regulation-promoting Montagnards sparred with free market-defending Girondins over the political duties of buyers and sellers. Simultaneously, marketplace fights broke out between the Dames des Halles and the leading women’s club called the Société des Citoyennes républicaines révolutionnaires. The Dames, whose retail profits the Maximum initially outlawed, repeatedly brawled with the Citoyennes républicaines, who supported price limits to advantage consumers and sans-culottes. The Montagnard deputies seized the violence among women to silence the Citoyennes républicaines who criticized their attempts to accommodate merchant interests. Screening their factional attack, the deputies argued that irrational women had no place in politics and banned all female political assemblies. This chapter argues that the ban, long seen as a verdict on gendered citizenship, primarily emerged from disagreements over defining economic citizenship via commercial roles.