ABSTRACT
THE progressive exclusion of women from public life during the era of the French Revolution has become something of a commonplace in contemporary feminist historiography. It is widely argued that the patriarchalist political theory of the monarchy and the corporatist cultural and political institutions of the ancien regime that sustained it - the court, the salons, theatre, provincial political assemblies, etc. - accorded women a more central role in public life than the modern cultural and political institutions that emerged with the commercialisation of cultural life and the supplanting of monarchical political theory by republicanism at the end of the eighteenth century.
