"Patriotic Discipline"

Cloistered Behinds, Public Judgment, and Female Violence in Revolutionary Paris

Katie Jarvis

Two years into the French Revolution, just days before Holy Week of April 1791, the mood in Paris was far from peacefully contemplative. As Easter approached, rumors flew that counterrevolutionary nuns were colluding with priests who had refused to swear their loyalty to the Constitution. Journals painted pictures of "aristocrat-nuns" secretly attending "good" Masses with these refractory priests. Editors reported that the priests' sermons brazenly compared the counterrevolution to Christ, the government assemblies to tyrants, and the Revolution to Hell. However insulting this was to the nation, things truly exploded when the disgruntled nuns spanked their pupils for confessing to a pro-revolutionary priest. Unluckily for the nuns, their pupils happened to be the children of tenacious market women called the Dames des Halles.

The backlash would be remembered for "posterity" as one giddy witness put it. Fed up, the Dames des Halles literally took matters into their own hands and submitted the nuns to their own "correction." The market women dragged the counterrevolutionary nuns out of their cloistered convents into public streets. Swiftly lifting the nuns' skirts, the Dames struck the nuns' bare rears with bunches of straw and brooms. As the nuns prayed to endure the trial, the Dames exposed the nun's naked bottoms to the public gaze. The Dames boldly continued their rounds over two days to several counterrevolutionary convents throughout the capital. Most Parisians shared the Dames' anger. They worried that rebellious priests and nuns would undermine new religious reforms called the Civil Constitution of the Clergy. This controversial legislation subordinated the Catholic Church to the nation. As Parisians cheered on the Dames from the sidelines, they defended revolutionary reform.

The spanking spree generated numerous pamphlets and images that offer rich commentary on what the authors termed "patriotic discipline." In the aftermath the general public took delight in what one artist described as the "good lessons" that the "female citizens" gave to nuns who aided "fanatic priests." Most newspapers, pamphlets, and images satirically depicted the event but praised the market women's attack. The accounts burst with gendered tropes colored by sexual overtones. Citing an oft-repeated statistic, one watercolor proudly reported the Dames' accomplishment of "621 buttocks spanked; Total 310 and a half asses" since, as another pamphlet thankfully explained, "the Treasurer of the Miramionnes order only had one buttock."

The revolutionaries' endorsement of this collective violence among women stands in stark contrast to the deputies' condemnation of violent confrontations among women two years later. In 1793 officials lambasted fights that spilled out across the city's markets between the Dames des Halles and a women's political club. The two groups disputed price controls and patriotic clothing with their fists. The National Convention famously asserted that these massive brawls stemmed from women's irrationality, and, following this Rousseauian discourse, the deputies claimed women were unsuited for political participation. The National Convention then banned women's political clubs, which effectively blocked women from full citizenship until 1944. Led by Joan Landes, Joan Scott, Geneviève Fraisse, and Carole Pateman, scholars have built an enduring narrative of female citizenship across the longue durée based upon the gendered overtones of the deputies' 1793 ban. Modern French citizenship, they maintain, was inherently bifurcated by sex from the outset.

In contrast, by probing the Dames' violence in 1791 and other revolutionaries' reactions to it, this chapter overturns the notion that the revolutionaries immediately envisioned citizenship as masculine. During the nun spankings, no male or female revolutionaries blamed mass violence on natural feminine disorder. Far from condemning the Dames' assault on counterrevolutionary nuns as manifesting feminine deficiencies, public opinion celebrated the market women's violent attack as civic activism and explicitly championed the Dames as exemplary female citizens. The unexpected cleavage between the applause of 1791 and the ban of 1793 disrupts our historical starting block for modern female citizenship. How, then, did the revolutionaries conceptualize the relationship among gender, violence, and women's political action in 1791?

This chapter focuses on the slaps that echoed across the capital to ask two key questions: First, how did artists and pamphleteers use gender as a common key for portraying, judging, and re-disseminating the violence? I argue that the revolutionaries seized gendered tropes to denounce the nuns' moral and political failings. Writers spread rumors of convent lust and artists drew battered nuns in titillating poses to denounce them as counterrevolutionary plotters. For Parisian consumers, this well-worn imagery amounted to more than a sexual critique. Authors and illustrators relied on Parisians' understanding of gendered stereotypes to convey additional messages. They channeled their religious and political grievances across the nuns' beaten rears. Their tactics bring us to a second pivotal question: Why did male and female revolutionaries justify this collective violence among women in 1791? I argue that state officials could not condemn the Dames' attacks because the market women defended religious reform while thrashing the nuns. The Dames did not undercut their political legitimacy by lashing out at the vowed women. On the contrary, they strengthened it. The convent clashes suggest that the relationship between gender and violence was much more contingent than the deputies later maintained in 1793. The discrepancy reveals that the relationship between gender and citizenship remained uncertain in the formative stages of modern democracy. It forces us to reconsider the narrative arc that posits...