The Turban and the Axe
This chapter traces the crisis of representation through the October Days: the march of women on Versailles. The march had unleashed a further revolutionary split over the fragmentation of monarchical sovereignty, accompanied by burgeoning anxieties around gender and the patriarchal stability of the ancien régime model. The chapter shows how, in the midst of a mounting political and financial crisis, the court at Versailles tried to promulgate a form of religious tolerance which ended up launching the imaginary “Muslim minority” in France. It was needed as a means of universalizing the notion of “natural rights” to which the monarchy appealed in order to defuse Catholic opposition. Far from a radical or revolutionary notion, this conception of rights inherent in human nature was here set against the rights accorded by citizenship. In doing so, the monarchy opened for a moment a gap between citizenship and Catholicity, and then slammed it shut again.