Chapter 5 - Femmes soldats and Militarized Domesticity: Women at War in French Revolutionary Theater

Summary

This chapter shifts from male soldiers and issues of masculinity to the role of women in military plays. Described are the multiple and overlapping roles of women in the military–theatrical endeavor, which presents an alternative to traditional gestures such as contrasting active (male) citizenship with passive (female) domesticity. This chapter continues an examination of totalizing processes in Revolutionary-era theatricalized conflict by including French citoyennes in the military–theatrical endeavor. Interrogated here are three main categories for women and war in 1790s drama: female soldier (femmes-soldats; filles-soldats) plays, works about vivandières and cantinières (women providing service roles to combat units), and plays about the Revolution’s “militarized domestic sphere,” a wartime home front where armed conflict created specific forms of violent domesticity. With attention to military plays penned by women about their fellow citoyennes, as well as to recent feminist scholarship on women and war, this chapter explores a dramaturgical practice whereby women sought to reimagine citizenship after efforts to assert their rights in the political sphere ran asunder.