ABSTRACT
The last two years of Jodin’s life coincided with the early days of the French Revolution. Life in Paris must have been, depending on one’s point of view, exhilarating, terrifying, or for the poor, a continuing saga of deprivation punctuated by moments of collective excitement. Public order crumbled. The crowd, always a potent force in Paris street scenes, came to life. The fall of the Bastille in July 1789 and, the series of street demonstrations, as well as uprisings in the provinces, constituted a kind of living theatre, but one with unpredictable consequences. A central impression we can gamer from Marie Madeleine Jodin’s Vues legislatives pour les femmes, published in 1790, and reflecting the excitements of the early revolutionary events, is ambivalence. On the one hand, everything seemed possible, including the emancipation of women; on the other, freedom brought with it the fear of licence and mob mle. What would that liberty, which Rousseau had argued was Man’s natural state, produce on its restoration to the society of late eighteenth-century France?
