ABSTRACT
In denying political rights to women, the revolutionaries made no secret of their own preoccupation with the need to draw clearly delineated boundaries between the realm of the public and the realm of the private. On the other hand, they did not ignore the private sphere as one unworthy of the legislator’s interest. On the contrary, hypersensitive to the ways in which private interests might clash with their own notions of the public good, they did not hesitate to enact legislation which affected areas of private life such as the family and the practice of religion. 1 In the process, however, they provoked widespread anxieties about the stability of the gender order: excesses in politics, epitomised by the bloodshed of the Terror, seemed to have their counterpart in revolutionary legislation such as the law on divorce, which threatened male authority in the family. To appreciate the eventual backlash against what were deemed to be dangerous experiments with the ‘natural’ order of gender relations, it is necessary first to review the extent to which the Revolution, drawing on those elements of Enlightenment thinking which stressed the importance of sentiment and emotional ties, broadened its agenda to include the pursuit of happiness in marriage and family life.
