“Um bom decreto”

o papel das mulheres parisienses a partir da representação de uma imagem durante a Revolução Francesa (1789)

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to analyse the image The Democrat - ah, the good decree (1790) in order to understand the role of Parisian women in 1790 during the French Revolution. The work involves a twofold hypothesis: firstly, this image served as a possible guide to behaviour for women of the time; secondly, the choice of using political words to characterise the characters drawn there is a way of giving credibility or not to the figure and the idea it represents - in this case, democracy. The representation that many of the men with political power wanted to establish of Parisian women between 1790 and 1792 was that of mother, wife and housewife, in other words, of domestic, private life. However, even though this was the desired and propagated role for women, they appropriated and used revolutionary ideas to participate in political actions and became part of the change in the period. The different characterisations of women during the French Revolution, whether they were militants, mothers, wives, fishmongers, sans-culottes or tricoteuses, showed the diversity of roles they played, so that most of them were part of more than one profile. For the first time, women's participation was so significant that the French government felt the need to discuss the role of women and systematically justify the exclusion of women from the public arena - justification being negative evidence of the importance of what was being excluded.