Politics in the marketplace : work, gender, and citizenship in revolutionary France

"Politics in the Marketplace integrates politics, economics, and gender to ask how the Dames des Halles invented notions of citizenship through everyday trade during the French Revolution. As crucial food retailers, traditional representatives of the Third Estate, and famed leaders of the march on Versailles, these Parisian market women held great revolutionary influence. By abolishing Old Regime privileges, the National Assembly threw centuries of commercial and social relationships into disarray. Parisians struggled to reconcile egalitarian social aspirations with free market principles as they remade the marketplace. While haggling over price controls, fair taxes, and acceptable currency, the Dames and their clients negotiated tenuous economic and social contracts in tandem. In this environment, the Dames conceptualized a type of economic citizenship in which individuals' activities such as buying goods, selling food, or paying taxes positioned them within the body politic and enabled them to make claims on the state. The Dames insisted that their work as merchants served society and demanded that the state pass favorable regulations, like allowing them to sell on public domain, in return. In addition, the Dames drew on their patriotic work as activists and their gendered work as republican mothers to compel the state to provide practical currency and assist indigent families. Thus, the Dames' notion of citizenship portrayed useful work, rather than gender, as the cornerstone of civic legitimacy. Consequently, this book challenges the interpretation that the Revolution launched an inherently masculine trajectory for citizenship and reveals how the revolutionaries crafted multiple definitions of citizenship in its embryonic stages."