Introduction

This chapter introduces the over 1,000 Parisian market women known as the Dames des Halles and outlines how Politics in the Marketplace changes understandings of work, gender, and citizenship in the French Revolution. First, this book insists that marketplace actors shaped the nature of nascent democracy and capitalism through their daily commerce. As the revolutionaries overhauled Old Regime privileges in les Halles, they confronted the tensions between socially egalitarian projects and free market aspirations in everyday trade. Second, this book expands recent non-Marxist inquiries to reconsider the socioeconomic issues at the heart of the Revolution. It proposes the concept of economic citizenship to consider how an individual’s economic activities such as buying goods, selling food, or paying taxes position him/her within the collective social body and enable him/her to make claims on the state. Third, Politics in the Marketplace intervenes in the dominant narrative of gender and modern democracy. Instead of defining citizenship by electoral rights, this book explores how the Dames and fellow revolutionaries invented multiple notions of citizenship in its embryonic stages, some of which did not immediately divide citizenship by gender. Fourth, this book argues that, in their words and actions, the Dames conceptualized their citizenship through useful work. According to the market women, their occupational, civic, and gendered work served society and earned them the right to make claims on the state in return. The Dames’ notion of citizenship thus included gendered components but did not take gender as its cornerstone. Finally, the introduction describes the sources used to tap into the Dames’ world.