ABSTRACT
THE POLITICAL HISTORY OF women in 1848 may be located at the intersection of several historical accounts and assessments, all continually being revised. It is difficult to say whether we should celebrate the richness of these various histories or deplore their inadequacies. Comparative history in this case has often been called for but is never really practiced, while political and social historical study, with its mass of documentation, constantly renews its approaches in accordance with the shifts in sensibility that accompany changes in our ideological perceptions and preferences, themselves more or less in synchrony with fundamental social developments. In the absence of comprehensive studies of the “missing woman” of 1848, attempting to assess her role is somewhat perilous. She is hard to follow, hard to grasp. Everywhere present and active, in the daily misery of poverty and the heat of the riots, these women believed for only one springtime that they had linked up with history: from February to June, between the fraternal hope with which the revolution began and the terrible massacres that put an end to it, as Louis Eugène Cavaignac's artillery returned the streets to republican order. Subsequent French political life (Louis-Napoleon's coup d'état) and even literary life cannot be understood without taking into account this terrible ending to the events of 1848, which crushed men and women alike. Yet that ending, in French historiography as in French minds, has always been repressed.
