It would be a mistake, however, to think that these popular images of the Revolution, for all their drama and tragedy, provide a complete picture of the events. The story of the French Revolution as we know it is above all the story of French men during the Revolution. As for the other half of the country, their actions and experiences during this momentous era are rarely told and poorly understood. It’s revealing that of the two women commonly associated with the Revolution – Marianne, symbol of the nation and Marie Antoinette, Queen of France – one is a bare-chested male fantasy while the other is a two-dimensional caricature of effeminate ditz.

Unsurprisingly, such portrayals are far from accurate. Whether it was as thinkers, writers, reformers, or activists, women played a number of important roles that shaped the course of the Revolution. It was a woman, after all, who assassinated Marat. The political activist Charlotte Corday was horrified by the journalist’s bloodthirsty support for the guillotine and calls for mass executions, and claimed that she ‘murdered one man to save one hundred thousand.’ And it was a woman, Marie Gouze, who first criticised the sexist and contradictory nature of Robespierre’s beloved Declaration of the Rights of Man.

However, their accounts – their revolution – and those of many other women have all too often been ignored, sidelined, or actively silenced – dismissed as decoration or as incidental anecdotes of history.

When it comes to the French Revolution, we’ve only heard half the story.



The Declaration of Rights of Women



The other half of the French Revolution could be said to begin, appropriately enough, with an angry crowd. On a rainy Monday morning in October 1789, an extraordinary sight could be seen in the French capital. Thousands of women were marching through the boulevards of Paris armed with pikes, hunting knives and even a few cannons. They were heading to Versailles, the seat of royal power.

This remarkable scene began just a few hours earlier, when a few working-class women in the markets of eastern Paris were protesting the scarcity and cost of bread. This in itself was unremarkable: food shortages were a serious and perennial concern for much of France at this time. A single loaf of bread, if one could be found, could cost as much as four-fifths of a woman’s daily earnings.

In the febrile, uneasy streets of Paris (only three months had passed since the storming of the Bastille) the number of protesters soon began to swell. After ransacking the city hall for bread and weapons, they turned their sights on the palace of Versailles, determined to get an audience with Louis XVI. And so, in the pouring rain, they began the thirteen mile trek to the King.