Women's Memoirs of the French Revolution

Of the more than one thousand people who published memoirs of the French Revolution of 1789, about eighty were women. And of these eighty women memoirists, two thirds were members of the upper class, a proportion that might be attributed solely to privilege—at the time of the Revolution, only half of all monarchy’s aegis; in contrast, republican memoirists, who supported the Revolution, risked political sanctions against their work.

Because the memoirs were written so long after the events they describe, some historians question their reliability. Certainly, memory is subject to the loss or confusion of facts and, more to the point in these partisan accounts, to the distortions of a mind intent on preserving its particular picture of the past. the writer’s character? Or is the narrative voice so pervaded by self-justifications that it forfeits credibility?

Denis Bertholet, in a study of nineteenth-century French autobiography, states that the women memoirists of this period defined themselves “in relationship to their sex”—i.e., they conformed to socially prescribed feminine roles of the time, fulfilling obligations as daughters, wives or mothers. Nonetheless, instances of social activism by women abounded during the Revolution. one would not expect to find until the French Feminist movement more than a century later.