Visualizing the Nation by Joan B Landes

Landes, Joan B. Visualizing the Nation: Gender, Representation, and Revolution in Eighteenth-Century France. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 2001.

One of the central cultural images of French republicanism is that of the symbolic feminine figure Marianne, the bare-breasted woman, leading the people to revolution in Eugene Delacroix's 1830 "Liberty Leading the People." Yet in another painting, created by an artist of the French Revolution itself, Jacques-Louis David, "The Oath of the Horatii" (1785) two brothers, in classical attire, take a solemn vow upon swords held by their fathers. Women sit in the background, draped to the point of immobility, in shadows. Their function is unimportant in this masculine display of excellence, except to weep. What can a viewer make of these two complex, yet seeming contradictory images, one of explicitly feminine, revolutionary power in the public sphere, the other that of retiring, gentle femininity in contrast to classical male nobility?

In her first book Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca.: Cornell University Press, 1988) Joan B. Landes argued that the French Revolution, rather than being a time of purely liberating discourse for women, had a far more complicated legacy. True, during the French Revolution, for the first time, the idea of extending rights to traditionally disenfranchised individuals, such as the Third Estate, and women, began to be openly discussed in the public discourse. However, according to Landes, although there may have been more female advocates discussing politics and arguing that women deserved full enfranchisement and political rights, the discourse of the Revolution simply reinforced the association of women and 'the feminine' with the private sphere.

From the beginning, representatives of the bourgeois condemned the reigning aristocrats as decadent because the nobility did not work. Criticisms of the inequities of the Old Regime suggested that the aristocracy was more of part of the feminine schema of values that the bourgeois and the ideals of the revolution were working to subvert. Thus, to be masculine and part of the public discourse was to be revolutionary, to be feminine was to be the opposite. Femininity became counterrevolutionary in this ideological paradigm of political values.

Despite the importance of the female image in rallying support for the revolution's policies and constructing a new image of the good citizen, in policy, aristocracy and artifice were associated both with femininity and the dominance of the nonworking elite. Thus, Landes argues the new bourgeois republic was politically radical in some of its elements, but fundamentally conservative, even reactionary at times, in its real-world gender relations. The public women of the salons were yet another element of aristocratic political rule to be rooted out of the public sphere. The image was safe, even when feminine, but in practice, women retreated from the political sphere, gradually, over the course of the revolution. Liberal and republican political thought linked its rejection of aristocracy to the domestication of women.

In other words, the predominant ideological tenor of the Revolution, based upon Enlightenment ideals, excluded feminine participation in politics, by and large. Rationality, science, and labor were all conjoined, as was political participation -- all masculine ideals in the thinking of the newly articulate bourgeois femininity was the handmaiden, not the tool of a new order. True, Landes admits that during the revolution, women played a critical role, creating women's clubs, marching on Versailles, and even during the Terror, but such efforts were silenced when the Terror began to close women's clubs and stress that the right of the natural woman was home, not in power, for the good of the republic. For the nation to succeed, women had to remain and home and subjugate their individualism to the needs of the collective. While even before the Revolution women had excised power in the salons, through courtly influence, and by other social means, by eliminating the aristocratic element from politics, ironically, the revolutionary men made France less participative for women, despite the early flowerings of revolt and the Enlightenment view was less revolutionary in its view of gender. Women became symbols, not full-fledged participants of government.

Landes does not deny that the community of "citizens" did not possess the power to construct liberty has having universal quality, in contrast to royalist ideology and its emphasis on the masculine persona of the king. It did offer a vantage point of critique of the current structure of power. But the language of feminism during this period was full of paradoxes. On one hand, French Revolutionary feminists craved and demanded equality with their male counterparts. On the other hand, they stressed the unique position of women as mothers. Revolutionary feminists claimed that women as mothers of the republic demanded that they have a special place in the public sphere, they were a group of individuals historically excluded now deserving of their time in the sun. But by basing claims to voting rights upon a role usually regarded as womanly and private their claims were tenuous. This doctrine of the uniqueness of women also reinforced the idea of the separate spheres, or that there was a so-called 'natural' division of labor based on sex.

In her companion sequel to her first book, Visualizing the Nation, Landes switches from the more textually-based earlier work to that of the image, which can, she believes, be even more persuasive in showing the paradoxes of female power and the feminization of the private sphere since artists, unlike writers, often feel less a responsibility for teasing out the contradictions inherent in their works. She also stresses women's historical location as a subject of painting, as the object of the gaze rather than the gazer herself.

Visual works do not merely depict history, but reflect cultural assumptions -- and impact those assumptions. During the revolution images "worked sometimes independently and sometimes in tandem with words to affect the preferred sexual positions of men and women in the new society" (Landes 2001, p.12). Images affect words, and words affect images, and one should not automatically assume that 'the word' is more important than the image.

In republican France, old images were condemned as encapsulating old ideologies, and there was a call for new works of art that could depict republican ideals while there was also an Enlightenment strain of thought in the new government that distrusted art as artificial and aristocratic, and contrary to the Enlightenment celebration of science and empiricism. The ideal of citizenship was visually offered a female image as the ideal citizen and republican, and the republic itself was seen as a woman, yet real women were increasingly relegated to familial roles, and the images of women were often those of mothers, victims, or martyrs -- or eroticized beings.

Real women were never absent from the public sphere but "their presence was registered within the public sphere in a manageable way -- trapped within a picture" (Landes 2001, p.133). Women were liberated in the image as symbols, or symbolized concepts of liberty, but often these conceptual symbols were erotic, or showed women as mothers of the new republic, or in other traditional feminine roles and poses. As to the question of whether the Revolution advanced female progress, Landes is ambivalent. There is no question that the stasis of the Old Regime would not have propelled any political change in a positive way, and things would have likely remained as they were, with aristocratic women enjoying the liberating pleasures of class and money via the court and salons, and women of the other estates entirely subjugated to the control of a patriarchal system. The Revolution, for all of its imperfections, interjected fluidity into the calcified social and political system of France.