Table of Contents

List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Freedom of the Heart--Men and Women Critique Marriage 2. The Political Power of Love--Marriage, Regeneration, and Citizenship 3. Broken Bonds--The Revolutionary Practice of Divorce 4. "War between Brothers and Sisters"--Egalitarian Inheritance and Gender Politics 5. Natural Children, Abandoned Mothers, and Emancipated Fathers--Illegitimacy and Unwed Motherhood 6. What Makes a Father?--Illegitimacy and Paternity from the Year II to the Civil Code 7. Reconstituting the Social after the Terror--The Backlash against Family Innovations 8. The Genesis of the Civil Code Conclusion Appendix I: Communes in the Calvados Studied for Cases of Divorce Appendix II: Chronology of Revolutionary Family Laws Note on Archival Sources Abbreviations Notes Index

About the Author

Suzanne Desan is Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and author of the prize-winning Reclaiming the Sacred: Lay Religion and Popular Politics in Revolutionary France (1990).

Reviews

"Desan's deeply researched book tracks the debates about marriage, divorce, parenthood and inheritance in Revolutionary France. Through absorbing, well-told tales of people caught up in a redefinition of identities, Desan brilliantly demonstrates that the "social revolution" of the 1790s largely took place in the realm of family relations. This book is a crucial intervention in the scholarship of the French Revolution." - Sarah Maza, author of The Myth of the French Bourgeoisie: An Essay on the Social Imaginary "In The Family on Trial in Revolutionary France, Suzanne Desan brings together evidence of the lively struggles among lawmakers, judges, and ordinary women and men to remake family relations during the French Revolution. Marriage, divorce, inheritance, unwed mothers and their children - the Revolution redefined them all. Desan restores the optimism of a revolution which, even while foundering in the Terror and conservative backlash, bequeathed to the 19th century alternative ways of imagining how families might live together in equality and love. A riveting read." - Natalie Zemon Davis, author of The Gift in Sixteenth Century France"