Family and the Nation

The French Revolution transformed the nation's—and eventually the world's—thinking about citizenship, nationality, and gender roles. At the same time, it created fundamental contradictions between citizenship and family as women acquired new rights and duties but remained dependents within the household. In The Family and the Nation, Jennifer Ngaire Heuer examines the meaning of citizenship during and after the revolution and the relationship between citizenship and gender as these ideas and practices were reworked in the late 1790s and early nineteenth century.Heuer argues that tensions between family and nation shaped men's and women's legal and social identities from the Revolution and Terror through the Restoration. She shows the critical importance of relating nationality to political citizenship and of examining the application, not just the creation, of new categories of membership in the nation. Heuer draws on diverse historical sources—from political treatises to police records, immigration reports to court cases—to demonstrate the extent of revolutionary concern over national citizenship. This book casts into relief France's evolving attitudes toward patriotism, immigration, and emigration, and the frequently opposing demands of family ties and citizenship.

Heuer's interesting and insightful book stands at the intersection of several fields: the history of revolutionary law, the history of gender and the family, and the political history of the modern nation state., Heuer's imaginative and skillful research succeeds in overturning many unexamined clichés about gender and public life during France's transition into political modernity., The metaphorical connection between family and nation, embedded in the very notion of la patrie, was subjected to remarkable stresses and strains in the years which led from the French Revolution and Terror through the Restoration. Jennifer Ngaire Heuer's argument highlights the contradictions between independent citizenship status and dependence within the home, given that the Revolution's lawmakers did not address these domains together.... What does it mean, her book asks, to belong to a nation? It is both a cliché and an imperative to point out at the present moment that such quandaries remain not only live issues, but matters of life and death, in and beyond France., There is a fundamental contradiction between the republican conception of the citizen as an autonomous individual and the social and political realities of gender and family obligations. Jennifer Ngaire Heuer traces the implications of this contradiction during the first four decades of French citizenship.... Heuer exploits the rich discourse of petitions and court cases to move beyond legislation to ordinary experience and attitudes. Her research is convincing, and Heuer uses it deftly.... This is a thoroughly admirable book, broad in argument and chronological and geographic sweep.

Jennifer Ngaire Heuer is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.