Does love of the fatherland have a gender? The uneven distribution of revolutionary emotions in France (1790-1795)

This article considers the question of emotions during the revolutionary years 1790-1795. When faced with new desires on the part of women, men constantly called them to order. Women were rapidly bidden to remain in their place as wives and mothers, and to maintain their supposed attitude of gentleness and decorum so that it would be made manifest in the home. At best, they were to pass on love of the patrie to their children, and a longing for heroism to their sons. The prospect, followed by the experience of a disturbance in the old order of affect and place, might lead to desperation in men. In order to prevent the re-emergence of furies and female warriors, it was expected of men that they should be capable of restraining women’s drives, of binding them together in the same attitude of gentleness and decorum. We can say then that feelings have a gender, or can be seen as disreputable, symptoms of the differentiated political expectations as between men and women, rich and poor, the educated and the barely literate. They are symptoms too of the dissonance between prescription, demands from below, and the emotional real-life experience of everyone, man or woman, in a context where the possible had been opened up in every way.