The fifty-five delegates who met in Philadelphia between May 25 and September 17, , would not only reject the Articles of Confederation altogether, but they would produce the first written constitution for any nation in the history of the world. Those gathered in the Assembly Room of the Pennsylvania State House during the summer of faced a formidable task. Yet somehow, in the space of slightly less than four months, they managed to pull off an extraordinary accomplishment.
The Constitution they drafted has been successful for most of U. And it has brought remarkable stability to one of the most tumultuous forms of political activity: popular democracy. The challenge that all nations in the world have faced not only in drafting a constitution, but also creating a form of government that both provides stability to its nation and sufficient civic responsibility and liberty to its people, is enormous.
Indeed, among the more than constitutions presently operating in the world today, few have been as successful in creating that delicate balance between governmental power and personal liberty among the citizens ruled by their government. The remarkable achievement of the fifty-five men gathered in Philadelphia during the summer of was by no means inevitable. Looking back on their work that summer, we can identify a few factors that enabled them to achieve their success. Certainly among the most important was the quality of leadership among those most committed to strengthening the American government.
The ringleader was the thirty-seven-year-old James Madison. Standing only a few inches over five-feet tall, scrawny, suffering from a combination of poor physical health and hypochondria, and painfully awkward in any public forum, Madison nevertheless possessed a combination of intellect, energy, and political savvy that would mobilize the effort to create an entirely new form of continental union.
The Pennsylvania and Virginia delegates then met frequently during the days leading up to May Together these men would forge a radical new plan, the Virginia Plan, which would shape the course of events during that summer of By seizing the initiative, this small group of nationalist-minded politicians was able to set the terms of debate during the initial stages of the Convention—gearing the discussion toward not whether , but how —a vastly strengthened continental government would be constructed.
On May 28, , the state delegations unanimously agreed to a proposal that would prove invaluable in allowing men like Madison, Wilson, and Morris to move their plan forward. But the rule of secrecy gave to delegates the freedom to disagree, sometimes vehemently, on important issues, and to do so without the posturing and pandering to public opinion that so often marks political debate today.
And it also gave delegates the freedom to change their minds; on many occasion, after an evening of convivial entertainment with one another, the delegates would return the following morning or even the following week or month, and find ways to reach agreement on issues that had previously divided them. The rule of secrecy helped make the Constitutional Convention a civil and deliberative body, rather than a partisan one.
It helped make compromise an attribute of statesmanship rather than a sign of weakness. It also became immediately clear that, however bold and innovative the plan may have been, there were many delegates in the room who had grave misgivings about some aspects of it.
For nearly four months, the delegates attempted to work through, and resolve, their disagreements. The most divisive of those issues—those involving the apportionment of representation in the national legislature, the powers and mode of election of the chief executive, and the place of the institution of slavery in the new continental body politic—would change in fundamental ways the shape of the document that would eventually emerge on September 17, The delegates haggled over how to apportion representation in the legislature off and on for more than six weeks between May 30 and July Those from large, populous states such as Virginia and Pennsylvania—supporters of the Virginia Plan—argued that representation in both houses of the proposed new congress should be based on population, while those from smaller states such as New Jersey and Delaware—supporters of the New Jersey Plan—argued for equal representation for each state.
As the political situation grew more turbulent and dangerous in the fall of , the revolutionary government became suspicious of the Society of Revolutionary Republican Women. The society had aligned itself with critics of the government who complained about the shortage of food. It also tried to intervene in individual cases of arrest and imprisonment. But the club did not readily give in to its opponents.
One of its leaders, Claire Lacombe, published a pamphlet defending the club. Her pamphlet opens a window onto club activities. Despite attempts to respond to the charges of its critics, the club ultimately fell victim to the disapproval and suspicion of the revolutionary government, which outlawed all women's clubs on 30 October The immediate excuse was a series of altercations between women's club members and market women over the proper revolutionary costume, but behind the decision lay much discomfort with the idea of women's active political involvement.
On 3 November , Olympe de Gouges, author of the Declaration of the Rights of Woman , was put to death as a counterrevolutionary, condemned for having published a pamphlet suggesting that a popular referendum should decide the future government of the country, not the National Convention. Two weeks later, a city official, Pierre Gaspard Chaumette, denounced all political activity by women, warning them of the fate of Marie-Jeanne Roland and Gouges, two of several prominent women who went to the guillotine at this time.
The Queen was executed on 16 October , after a short but dramatic trial before the Revolutionary Tribunal. Roland, one of the leading political figures of —93—she was the wife of a minister and hostess of one of Paris's most influential salons—went to her death on 8 November , even though she was a convinced republican. Her crime was support for the "Girondins," the faction of constitutionalist deputies that included Condorcet. After the suppression of women's clubs, ordinary women still had to make their way in a difficult political and economic climate.
The Terror did not spare them, even though it was supposed to be directed against the enemies of the Revolution. A letter from a mother to her son illustrates the problems of provisioning and the haunting fear of arrest; the son of this woman was, as she feared, arrested as a "counterrevolutionary" an increasingly vague term and guillotined not long afterward. Many ordinary women went to prison as suspects for complaining about food shortages while waiting in line at shops, for making disrespectful remarks about the authorities, or for challenging local officials.
After the fall of Robespierre in July , the National Convention eliminated price controls, and inflation and speculation soon resulted in long bread lines once again.
The police gathered information every day about the state of discontent, and they worried in particular about the increasing shortages of February and March Women egged men on to attack the local and national authorities. These disturbances came to a head in the last major popular insurrections of the Revolution when bread rations dropped from one and a half pounds per person in March to one-eighth of a pound in April—May and rioting broke out.
A more extensive one broke out 20—23 May 1—4 Prairial. In both, women precipitated the action by urging men to join demonstrations to demand bread and changes in the national government.
On 20 May a large crowd of women and men, armed with guns, pikes, and swords, rushed into the meeting place of the National Convention and chased the deputies from their benches.
They killed one and cut off his head. As soon as the government gained control of the situation, it arrested many rioters, prohibited women from entering the galleries of its meeting place and from attending any kind of political assembly or even gathering in groups of more than five in the street. Even as the fortunes of women's political activism were rising and falling, women began playing another kind of role, as symbols of revolutionary values.
Most of the major revolutionary values—liberty, equality, fraternity, reason, the Republic, regeneration—were represented by female figures, usually in Roman dress togas.
The use of female figures from antiquity followed from standard iconographic practice: artists had long used symbols or icons derived from Classical Roman or Greek sources as a kind of textbook of artistic representation. French, like Latin, divided nouns by gender. This led to one of the great paradoxes of the French Revolution: though the male revolutionaries refused to grant women equal political rights, they put pictures of women on everything, from coins and bills and letterheads to even swords and playing cards.
Women might appear in real-life stories of heroism, but they were much more likely to appear as symbols of something else. Although women had not gained the right to vote or hold office and indeed would not do so in France until !
At the end of the decade of revolution, a well-known writer, Constance Pipelet, offered her views on its impact on women. Although she stopped short of repeating Condorcet's or Olympe de Gouges's demands for absolutely equal rights for women, she did insist that the Revolution had forced women to become more aware of their status in society. She also argued that the Republic should justify itself by offering women more education and more opportunities.
Her writing shows that women's demands had been heard and that even if they had gone underground, they had not been forgotten. Women participated in the French Revolution in many ways: they demonstrated at crucial political moments, stood in interminable bread lines, made bandages for the war effort, visited their relatives in jail, supported their government-approved clergyman or hid one of those who refused to take the loyalty oath , and wrote all manner of letters and petitions about government policies.
As symbols, however, they did not appear in their normal guise in ordinary life at the end of the eighteenth century. To take but one example, an early allegorical painting by the artist Colinart of a woman dressed like a Roman goddess is a far cry from the actual mother of wearing ordinary clothes and depicted with her children in another painting. Although no one has completed a statistical study of female figures in revolutionary art, even a cursory review shows many more depictions of women as allegorical figures than of women in their actual roles of the time.
The most popular figure was Liberty, who became, in effect, the preferred symbol of the French Revolution. Called Marianne by her detractors to signal that she was nothing but a common woman perhaps even a prostitute , Liberty nonetheless became indelibly associated with the French Revolution, so much so that she still appears prominently on French money and in patriotic paintings and statuary.
Liberty usually appeared in Roman dress, often in a toga, holding a pike, the people's instrument for taking back their liberty, with a red liberty cap perched on its tip the liberty cap too came from Roman times—it was supposedly worn by recently freed slaves. Liberty was often joined by another revolutionary virtue such as truth, as in the painting Allegory of Truth by Nicolas de Courteille.
After the Republic was proclaimed in September , depictions of the Republic as a female allegorical figure sometimes took over from Liberty. Liberty, Reason, Regeneration—as in this engraving of the Festival of Reunion of 10 August —Wisdom, and of course Equality and Fraternity, were all represented as women. These allegorical figures sprouted on every surface. Festivals featured them prominently, but so did the new republican calendar and the new revolutionary playing cards, which used Roman figures, both male and female, to replace the kings, queens, and jacks of old.
Why did women appear so frequently in these allegories and symbolic depictions? Although the picture is filled with ordinary people of the time, including many women, it emphasizes symbolically "the country in danger" through a gigantic female figure with her breasts exposed.
The figure stands for "the country," which in French is a female noun la patrie. As noted, it was iconographic tradition to depict virtues as female, but not as contemporary women. Are we at the beginning of a revolution that has yet to be named? Do we want to be? That we are on the verge of a major transformation seems obvious.
The onset of the next Depression, a challenge akin to World War II, a national midlife crisis —these comparisons have been offered and many more. As a historian of 18th- and 19th-century France, I think claims like these are mistaken. An urgent desire for stability—for a fast resolution to upheaval—is in fact absolutely characteristic of any revolutionary era.
In short, life never went back to how it had been before Read: The social-distancing culture war has begun. The United States may not be having a revolution right now, but we are surely living in revolutionary times. If we do not perceive them as such, it is because news coverage and everyday conversations alike turn on nonhuman agents. Instead of visionary leaders or outraged crowds, viruses, markets, and climate change seem to shape events today.
History feels like it is out of our hands. Instead, revolutions are periods in which social actors with different agendas peasants stealing rabbits, city dwellers sacking tollbooths, lawmakers writing a constitution, anxious Parisians looking for weapons at the Bastille Fortress become fused into a more or less stable constellation. The most timeless and emancipatory lesson of the French Revolution is that people make history. Likewise, the actions we take and the choices we make today will shape both what future we get and what we remember of the past.
Analogies between the first months of the French Revolution and our current moment are easy to draw. The recent spike in American gun and ammunition sales recalls the Parisians who stormed the Bastille Fortress in the hope of finding weapons and gunpowder.
What it does mean is that everything is up for grabs. The United States of America can implode under external pressure and its own grave contradictions, or it can be reimagined and repurposed. Life will not go back to normal for us, either, because the norms of the past decades are simply no longer tenable for huge numbers of Americans.
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