Cheryl B. Welch, "Beyond the Bon Ménage: Tocqueville and the Paradox of Liberal Citoyennes" in Feminist Interpretations of Alexis de Tocqueville, ed. Jill Locke and Eileen Hunt Botting. (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009)

Excerpt:

The theme of claustration–the cloistering of women in religious houses–was a staple of gothic literature in the first half of the nineteenth century.  Melodramas of incarceration tapped general fears about women’s divided loyalties and their potential entrapment by agents of a resurgent church.  At the same time, the authors of the Civil Code, the sacred writ of the new France, deliberately obliterated most traces of the revolutionary citoyenne as they attempted to sequester women safely in the alternate cloister of the patriarchal family.  Indeed, the extent to which political theory and practice became explicitly gendered after the French Revolution represents a momentous–and still insufficiently understood–shift in the political and cultural histoyr of Europe, and especially of France.  By the mid-nineteenth century, the husband’s pronouncement in Etienne Gosse’s popular stage play Les femmes politiques (1799)–“Government demands the silence of women”–had become a grand nostrum of conventional political thought across the ideological spectrum.

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In this chapter, I use the writings of Alexis de Tocqueville on the intersection of gender and politics to illuminate yet another dimension of women’s paradoxical absence and presence in the public life of France after the Revolution.  Tocqueville’s discussion of the role of the exemplary liberal citoyenne, I argue, indirectly reveals the fragility of the attempt by postrevolutioary liberals to construct a public/private distinction that denied female political agency.  At the same time, this father unfamiliar entree into Tocqueville’s thought may clarify the often vexing question of the relative importance accorded to widespread public participation in his conception of “la vie politique elle-même,” that is, genuine political life under a free government.

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