A Vice Contrary to Nation: The Emerging Heteronormative Nationalism of the French
Revolution
Bailey Troth
History 196I: The French Revolution
March 15, 2020 Bailey Troth
Introduction
In his Reflections on the Revolution in France, Edmund Burke valorized the conservatism of English political attitudes over the radicalism of the French revolutionaries, arguing that “we are generally men of untaught feelings; that instead of casting away all our old prejudices, we cherish them to a very considerable degree, and, to take more shame to ourselves, we cherish them because they are prejudices.”1 In this instance, Burke’s use of the word prejudice refers more to political traditions than bigotry. However, the question bears asking: to what extent did the French revolution challenge discrimination against groups and practices that were marginalized in old regime society? To my mind this question gets at the heart of whether the revolution was worthwhile. If the revolution broadly enshrined new rights and liberties for those who had borne the greatest oppression under the old regime, it demonstrates that whatever harm it did and whatever flaws it had, the revolution made progress towards creating a more inclusive and just society. On the other hand, if the revolution instead perpetuated old or inaugurated new forms of oppression, it provides an example of how appearances or claims of liberation can cloak the prerogatives of power.
This question has been well explored in the last several decades of historiography of the
French revolution. In Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution, Joan
Landes argued that the key contribution of the revolution to women’s history was its invention of the notions of gendered public and private spheres. Under the old regime, she argued, women had played a key role in the nascent public sphere as précieuses and salonnières--the gatekeepers of elite intellectual life.2 With the revolution, however, a new gendered discourse of nature
1 Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. Conor Cruise O’Brien (New York: Penguin, 1984). 2 Joan Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), 24-25. Bailey Troth gained ascendency which argued that it was unnatural for women to engage with the public sphere, and which associated “public women '' with sexual depravity and the degenerate political life of the old regime.3 This argument was supported by Lynn Hunt in her article “The Many
Bodies of Marie Antoinette,” where she argued that Marie-Antoinette’s body was portrayed as deceitful, sexual, and monstrous because she represented the “public” aristocratic woman of the old regime. Therefore, her debasement in pornography and political rhetoric was key to the assertion of this new gendered public/private model.4
However, these two analyses of the impact of the French revolution shared a minor theme which was underexplored in both: the association between homosexual behavior and political degeneracy in French revolutionary discourse.
Several relatively recent articles have explored the impact of the French revolution on same-sex relations. Though it focuses on the eighteenth century more broadly, “The
Enlightenment Confronts Homosexuality,” Bryant T. Ragan explored the new understandings of same-sex relations that developed in the eighteenth century. According to Ragan same-sex sexual activity had previously been considered a vice that anyone was capable of. Homosexual practices had not been tied to a sexual identity. However, in the 18th century a shift occurred that created the exclusively homosexual sexual roles of the sodomite and the tribade for men and women respectively.5 The authors of the enlightenment then wrestled with these categories.
Pornographic literature offered one space to frankly discuss matters of sexual politics. They often included arguments for or against the emerging “sodomites” and “tribades,” presented with an
3 Landes, Women and the Public Sphere, 3; 147. 4 Lynn Hunt, “The Many Bodies of Marie-Antoinette,” in The French Revolution: Recent Debates and New Controversies, ed. Gary Kates (New York: Routledge, 2006), 214-215. 5 Bryant T. Ragan, “The Enlightenment Confronts Homosexuality,” in Homosexuality in Modern France, ed. Jeffrey Merrick & Bryant T. Ragan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 12. Bailey Troth element of plausible deniability through the mouths of fictional characters. Some authors appealed to classical and cosmopolitan motifs to argue for the naturalness of same-sex attraction, while others presented characters who were uncomfortable with the “new sodomite.”6 In philosophical and political works, the discussion of homosexuality was often tied to enlightenment anticlericalism. Some authors criticized the church for its barbaric burnings of
“sodomites,” but anti-clerical tracts also often stereotyped ecclesiastics as “sodomites” themselves.7 Some philosophes advanced a more social constructivist view of sexuality which questioned the privileging of heterosexuality over homosexuality and other forms of sexual
“deviance” by appealing to representations of non-western homosexuality and historical acceptance of same-sex love.8 Others took this argument still further and claimed that same-sex love was just as natural as heterosexuality.9
Regarding the revolution proper, Brian Joseph Martin’s Napoleonic Friendship explored how the armies of the French Revolution and Napoleonic era created a new model for loving relationships--both platonic and sexual--between men through the ideology of military fraternity.
According to Martin, French revolutionary military reforms were carried out on the basis of fraternal ideology, which drew upon a discourse of “battle companions and warrior lovers” that dated to classical times and was continued in the medieval period in chivalric literature. The new model of military fraternity, though it was based on these older models of male intimacy among warriors, contrasted with the ideology guiding the old regime military, which emphasized privilege and hierarchy at the expense of fraternal bonds between soldiers and officers.10
6 Ragan, “The Enlightenment Confronts Homosexuality,” 16-17. 7 Ragan, 20. 8 Ragan, 21. 9 Ragan, 23. 10 Brian Joseph Martin, Napoleonic Friendship: Military Fraternity, Intimacy & Sexuality in Nineteenth-Century France (Lebanon: University Press of New England, 2011), 4-5. Bailey Troth
Therefore, according to Martin, the French Revolution introduced a new theater for same-sex intimacy: the battlefield.
Martin’s analysis of the new opportunities for state-sanctioned male intimacy in the revolutionary army contrasts with Michael David Sibalis’ thesis in “The Regulation of Male
Homosexuality in Revolutionary and Napoleonic France, 1789-1815.” He argued that although there is a large apparent difference in the legal treatment of homosexuality between the
Revolutionary-Napoleonic and Ancien Regime periods, in fact records show continued police harassment and legal punishment of men engaged in same-sex relations after their decriminalization in 1791.11 This was justified through vague laws about public indecency and the corruption of youth, but legal and police officials also often appealed to homophobic discourses no longer represented in the legal code to justify their attacks on those involved in male homosexuality.12 This culminated in a Napoleonic era ruling that precisely because homosexuality was not criminalized in the legal code, legal proceedings were not necessary to punish it. Instead it would be unilaterally regulated and punished by the police on their own authority.13 Still, the policing of homosexuality was less pervasive than even the half-hearted measures of the old regime, and arrests remained extremely rare compared to the likely prevalence of homosexuality in France.14
However, these works leave the question open of how precisely homosexuality was construed in the discourse of the French Revolution, and to what extent revolutionary attitudes toward homosexuality were continuous with or a break from those existing under the old regime.
11 Michael David Sibalis, “The Regulation of Male Homosexuality in Revolutionary and Napoleonic France, 1789- 1815,” in Homosexuality in Modern France, ed. Jeffrey Merrick & Bryant T. Ragan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 80. 12 Sibalis, “Regulation of Male Homosexuality,” 83-84. 13 Sibalis, 91-92. 14 Sibalis, 95-96. Bailey Troth
This Paper’s Contribution
This paper will examine the ways that the newly dominant discourses of nationalism and citizenship impacted attitudes towards homosexuality during the French Revolution. While older forms of opposition to homosexuality as unnatural and a source of social disorder endured, the newly dominant discourses of nationalism and citizenship also led several revolutionary thinkers to articulate views on homosexuality that opposed it on the more modern grounds of public health and population theory.
The terminology used in this paper attempts to reflect the differences in the social construction of sexuality between the eighteenth century and the present day. Terms like gay, lesbian, bisexual, queer, and LGBT did not exist or carried different meanings in eighteenth- century France. The primary word I will be using to refer to same-sex love, relationships and sexuality--homosexual--did not exist in this period either. In eighteenth-century France, while a person’s preferred gender for sexual partners played a role in their identification as a “sodomite” or “tribade,” these identities are not strictly equivalent to the modern terms lesbian and gay.15
Furthermore, since this paper is more focused on the stigmatization of and efforts to control same-sex relations and attraction rather than the sodomitical and tribadic identities, which don’t even figure in some references to same-sex relations and relationships from this period, the term
“homosexual” will be used in a general sense to describe things pertaining to sexual activity and relationships between people of the same sex.
Even in our modern liberal republics, public displays of same-sex affection are a bone of contention in everyday life. Following recent legal victories on LGBTQ issues, such as the legalization of same-sex marriage, same-sex couples have continued to face discrimination in
15 Ragan, “The Enlightenment Confronts Homosexuality,” 12. Bailey Troth everyday life. Indeed, public attitudes seem to be more hostile to the cultural visibility of same sex love than to legal rights like marriage. According to a study by Long Doan, Annalise Loehr, and Lisa R. Miller in 2014, Americans were more likely to support formal legal rights for gay and lesbian couples than the informal privilege to engage in public displays of affection.16 This conforms with anecdotal accounts of criticism, harassment, and violence directed at same-sex couples over even mild displays of affection in public space.17 Although the enduring prejudice against the LGBTQ community in countries like America, Britain, and France can partly be explained as a function of religious conservatism or a simple dislike of difference, I would argue that same-sex love, and public displays of same-sex affection in particular, remain enduring areas of political contention because of the implications they have regarding citizenship, the nation, and the public sphere.
An analysis of Old-Regime and French-Revolutionary attitudes towards homosexuality is a useful avenue for exploring the ways that ideas about citizenship, the nation, and the public sphere make homosexuality politically salient, because it is analogous in some ways to the present moment. The decriminalization of sodomy in 1791 increased the nominal legal rights of those engaged in homosexual activity, and some forms of tolerance towards “sodomites” and
“tribades” gained traction, but this was accompanied by continued homonegativity and heteronormativity. Writers of pamphlets and pornography used accusations of homosexuality to discredit their political opponents, political and legal thinkers expressed negative views of same sex relations, and several men even faced arrest and punishment for committing the “crime
16 Long Doan, Annalise Loehr, and Lisa R. Miller, "Formal Rights and Informal Privileges for Same-Sex Couples: Evidence from a National Survey Experiment," American Sociological Review 79, no. 6 (2014): 1172-195, accessed March 15, 2020, www.jstor.org/stable/43187584. 17 Steven Petrow, “Civilities: What’s so Upsetting about a Gay Couple Kissing in Public?” Washington Post, Oct. 12, 2015, https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/civilities-is-kissing-the-next-big-milestone-in-lgbt- rights/2015/10/10/87fae9a2-6ed2-11e5-9bfe-e59f5e244f92_story.html. Bailey Troth against nature” in spite of the legal change. To explain these contradictions, it is useful to look at the problems that homosexuality presented within the newly dominant discourses of nationalism, citizenship, and the public from the perspectives of legislators and political theorists.
The Revolution reconfigured the French state from an absolutist model, where the wellbeing and legitimacy of the state centered around the body, family, and court life of the king, to a liberal, nationalist, and eventually republican model, under which the sovereignty and strength of the state as dependent upon the activity and virtue of the nation as a whole. This promised to transform ordinary Frenchmen from subjects into citizens and asserted universal rights in place of the particular privileges of the old regime. But citizenship carries responsibilities as well as rights, and the ability of ordinary people to fulfill those responsibilities inspired new anxieties about the health of the body politic. The decriminalization of sodomy needs to be seen in the context of a broader effort to create good citizens through education and public norms and a rejection of the need to control the populace through brutal and punitive laws. The revolutionary model of good citizenship, however, included meeting the reproductive and military needs of the nation. Many authors asserted that homosexuality ran counter to these duties of citizenship. This demonstrates how the longstanding stigmatization of homosexuality as a “vice contrary to nature” remained embedded in the concept of citizenship in the nation which became so prominent during French Revolution.
Procreation and education were key aspects of the concepts of citizenship and nationalism as they existed in enlightenment and French Revolutionary thought. Education was deeply tied to citizenship, because under the enlightenment view of the state as a social contract between individual citizens, the wisdom and prudence of citizens in public life was crucial to the success of the state. This is evident in the attention paid by political theorists like John Locke and Bailey Troth
Jean Jacques Rousseau to education. Locke’s “Thoughts Concerning Education” argued for the need to instill self-control and restraint in children, and in his popular novel Emile, Jean-Jacques
Rousseau sought to draw public attention to “the very first of all the utilities—that of forming men.”18 Their emphasis on the need for education to create the virtuous individuals necessary for a well-functioning republican polity was taken up by reformers like Talleyrand and Condorcet, who presented plans for public education systems that were considered during the French
Revolution.19
Procreation was important to enlightenment views of nation and citizen for similar reasons, which had especially problematic implications for women. During the French revolution, this took form in the feminist discourse of republican motherhood, which posited that women’s reproductive and child-rearing capacities were extremely important to the civic wellbeing of the nation.20 Joan Landes has argued that the effect of this discourse for women was to ultimately exclude women from the public life of the French Revolution and of later liberal republics.21 Indeed, as Nira Yuval-Davis argued in Gender and Nation, the importance placed by nationalist rhetoric on the reproductive obligations of women as “bearers of the collective” often defines and delimits women’s reproductive rights.22 However, during the French Revolution the role of education and procreation in constructions of citizenship in the nation also justified the continued marginalization and stigmatization of homosexuality, even if they provided subtler avenues for policing it.
18 John Locke, “Thoughts Concerning Education,” in The Portable Enlightenment Reader, ed. Isaac Kramnick (New York: Penguin, 1995), 223; Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile, trans. W. H. Payne (New York, Appleton, 1892), https://www.google.com/books/edition/%C3%89mile/CbglAAAAMAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0, xiii. 19 Roberta J. Park, “Education as a Concern of the State: Physical Education in National Plans for Education in France, 1763-1795,” Research Quarterly. American Association for Health, Physical Education and Recreation 44, no. 3 (1973): 331-345, accessed March 14, 2020, DOI: 10.1080/10671188.1973.10615211, 339-340. 20 Landes, 129. 21 Landes, 7. 22 Nira Yuval-Davis, Gender and Nation (Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1997), 26. Bailey Troth
Primary Source Analysis
Prior to the revolution, calls for enlightened legal reform that addressed homosexuality had already begun to formulate justifications for the suppression and homosexuality that were predicated concepts of citizenship and nationalism.
Thinkers as early as Voltaire had hinted at the connection between homosexuality and the reproductive needs of the nation. In his Philosophical Dictionary, Voltaire suggested that instead of the punishment of burning (which he insisted was based on a misreading of a law intended to criminalize heresy) “Messieurs the nonconformists should be sentenced to present a child of their own making to the police every year.”23 He also argued that no government could have encouraged homosexuality because “it is not in human nature to make a law that contradicts and offends nature, a law that would destroy the human race if it were followed to the letter.”24 These statements suggest that the crime of sodomy is in rejecting one’s natural obligation to perpetuate the human race by producing offspring. However, Voltaire appeals to the need for the reproduction of humanity as a whole, rather than to the specific needs of the nation-state or the duties of citizenship. His was a universalist, rather than nationalist pro-natalism.
In his 1781 “Means of Mitigating the Severity of the Penal laws in France without
Jeopardizing Public Safety,” Joseph de Bernardi argued that “it is the large cities that are usually the stage for [the crime against nature], those opulent cities filled with lazy citizens, whom debauchery, and this satiety that is born of too much usage of pleasure, moves incessantly to seek new ways to stimulate dulled senses.”25 Under this view, wealth inequality and excessive
23 Voltaire, “Philosophical Dictionary,” in Homosexuality in Early Modern France: An Edited Collection, ed. Jeffrey Merrick and Bryant T. Ragan (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 158. 24 Voltaire, “Philosophical Dictionary,” 157. 25 Bernardi de Valernes, “The Means of Mitigating the Severity of the Penal Laws in France without Jeopardizing Public Safety” in Homosexuality in Early Modern France: An Edited Collection, ed. Jeffrey Merrick and Bryant T. Ragan (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 164. Bailey Troth urbanization lead people to develop sexual tastes that they would not have otherwise. He thus proposes a structural solution. “Let marriages be facilitated, let the inhabitants of the provinces be prevented from going to bury themselves, along with morals, in huge capitals, let exorbitant wealth be amassed in the hands of lazy and unmarried men, and one will soon see nature restore its rights.”26 Bernardi’s argument draws on the physiocratic call for national moral regeneration on rural lines, and so presents a critique of the “bad citizenship” of aristocratic urbanites, which manifests in their homosexuality. A good citizen is married, employed in productive labor, and only has a moderate amount of wealth. A bad citizen is so wealthy that he need not work or marry, giving him more time for sexual pursuits, which will lead ultimately to sodomy. This articulation of citizenship as connected to both social class and sexuality presages the use of similar rhetoric in the libelous pamphlets of the revolutionary period. But his advocacy for more subtle and structural rather than legal and punitive solutions to the “problem” of homosexuality also places him close to the enlightened calls for decriminalization of the early revolution.
Also in 1781, future revolutionary leader Jacques-Pierre Brissot expressed a natalist opposition to homosexuality in his subversive pamphlet “Theory of Criminal Laws.” Brissot dispensed with other perspectives on homosexuality to present this population-oriented vision: “I do not discuss whether this crime is against nature. I do not discuss whether great men have committed it, whether it has even been permitted in certain circumstances. It harms the population; it should therefore be prohibited.”27 His use of the phrase “harms the population” has an important element of ambiguity to it. Population can be read in the more obvious sense, as the quantity of people. Although Voltaire had attacked homosexuality on the grounds that it could
26 Valernes, “Penal Laws in France,” 164 27 Jacques-Pierre Brissot, “Theory of Criminal Laws,” in Homosexuality in Early Modern France: An Edited Collection, ed. Jeffrey Merrick and Bryant T. Ragan (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 162-163. Bailey Troth
“destroy the human race” by preventing procreation he hadn’t taken the step that Brissot takes towards arguing that population growth is a good thing and laws should contribute the increase of population.28 This sort of pro-natalism has deep ties to nationalism through what Yuval-Davis called the “people as power” view of national reproduction. In chapter two of Gender and
Nation, she explored how, by presenting a nation’s strength as dependent on the size of its population, this discourse justifies pressuring and coercing women to have more children.29
Brissot’s thoughts on homosexuality show that in addition to its impacts on women’s bodily autonomy, the pro-natalist concept of “people as power” can also serve and encourage a heteronormative agenda. In fact, the liberal reformers of the French Revolution actively employed this discourse against sodomites and tribades.
However, “population” could also be read as referring to a collective body of people who are being physically harmed by the practice of homosexuality. In this reading, Brissot is expressing a similar public health anxiety as Samuel-Auguste Tissot, whose 1760 book Onanism condemned masturbation as the cause of a wide array of physical ailments. In Onanism, Tissot also explicitly condemned sex between women as a kind of masturbation which likewise harmed the body.30 If read in this sense, Brissot’s use of the word population represents an expansion of the health rationale against homosexuality from the individual to the body politic. The laws should prohibit sodomy and tribadism on the grounds that they weaken not just the individual, but the national community. This argument would be laid out more explicitly by the National
Assembly delegate Anacharsis Cloots in the same year that sodomy was decriminalized, 1791.
28 Voltaire, 156 29 Yuval-Davis, Gender and Nation, 1 30 Samuel-Auguste Andre Tissot, “Onanism,” in Homosexuality in Early Modern France: An Edited Collection, ed. Jeffrey Merrick and Bryant T. Ragan (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 28-29. Bailey Troth
In “The Orator of Humankind” Anacharsis Cloots epitomized the complex relationship between the revolutionary ideologies of citizenship and nationalism and homosexuality. He began his argument by stating that “Everything that is useful to society is a virtue, everything that is harmful to it is a vice.”31 Then, Cloots tackled the question of the relationship between homosexuality and this framework of virtuous and corrupt citizens. Cloots argued first that the virtue of homosexuality is relative to the population needs of the nation, claiming that “The laws of the Chinese in favor of infanticide, those of Minos and the counsels of Plato in favor of pederasty (homosexuality), and those of the popes in favor of celibacy should be placed in the same category. They will be judged by different nations only according to the different measure of their respective populations.”32 This is similar to Brissot’s perspective, but more explicitly connects the notion of population to the national interest. On the other hand, he also argued that when new laws on sexuality are published he doubted that “any real crimes will be found with the exception of rape, abduction, seduction, and adultery.”33 In the context of his discussion, of course, this amounts to endorsing the decriminalization of sodomy, so at least in the French context Cloots did not take the same natalist view that Brissot espoused. However, even if this utilitarian view of sexual morality could be used to justify the decriminalization of sodomy in the
French context, it left open the possibility that if the nation needed more citizens, it could still justifiably proscribe homosexuality as detrimental to society.
He went on to argue that same-sex love could in fact enhance virtuous, armed citizenship, citing greek examples: “The charms of Briseis would have made the siege of Troy fall if not for
Patroclus. And the Athenians would have languished for a longer time under the tyranny of the
31 Anacharsis Cloots, “The Orator of Humankind,” in Homosexuality in Early Modern France: An Edited Collection, ed. Jeffrey Merrick and Bryant T. Ragan (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 217. 32 Cloots, “The Orator of Humankind,” 217-218. 33 Cloots, 218. Bailey Troth sons of Peisistratus, if not for the intimate union of the two virtuous lovers who were declared the liberators of the country.”34 Here he invoked the classical trope of warrior lovers, which according to Brian Joseph Martin would have an ideological influence on the culture and performance of male intimacy in the Napoleonic armies.35 This is significant, however, because
Cloots was suggesting that same-sex relationships should be tolerated because within certain narratives of armed citizenship, they can advance the interests of the state. According to him, citizens’ sexual relationships could be turned towards the betterment of society and the defense of liberty.
If Cloots granted that same-sex relationships could be a source of civic virtue, however, he also suggested the need for sexual self-control as a part of citizenship. Regarding accounts of homosexuality in ancient gymnasiums, Cloots wrote, “There is nothing unfortunate about all these rubbings, throughout this whole mechanism, except the exhaustion and collapse of the machine. They believed they could stop this overexcitement of the blood through the commandments of God or the church, but an unwarranted prohibition nourishes the pursuit of pleasure. It is the immortal Tissot who must be invoked. It is his Onanism that should be the first classic book of national education.”36 Cloots’ invocation of Tissot as the basis of a future national sex education confirms that Cloots was not simply arguing for sexual liberation, but rather for a different, more internalized mode of managing sexuality in society. His use of the phrase “national education” connects his argument about the role of homosexuality in a liberal polity to the broader enlightenment consensus on the central importance of education.
34 Cloots, 218 35 Martin, 4-5. 36 Cloots, 218. Bailey Troth
Overall, Cloots was arguing that a certain kind of homosexuality was acceptable, but that it needed to be subordinate to the needs of the nation and the self-control demanded of citizens.
Even if he was arguing for the decriminalization of sodomy in France, Cloots suggested that the reproductive needs of the nation come first. With allusions to classical stories of homoerotic citizenship, he laid out examples for how same-sex love could inspire and serve civic virtue.
Homosexual relationships could be virtuous, as long as they inspired men to serve the needs of their community. Likewise, his elevation of Tissot as a solution to the problem of physical degradation through sexual excess placed the need of the national community for healthy citizens before sexual self-determination. This position is more nuanced than earlier reformist proposals like Brissot’s which sought to substitute public censure for legal punishment,37 but precisely because of his adherence to the revolutionary discourses of citizenship and nationalism, Cloots ended up endorsing new methods for controlling homosexuality as often as he opposed old ones.
With the establishment of the republic in 1792, François Chabot (a delegate to the
National Convention also noted by Joan Landes for his 1793 denunciation of women’s clubs)38 would take this connection between the supposedly deteriorating public health of the nation and homosexuality in a more explicitly anti-homosexual direction. In his Discourse to the National
Convention on the Finances of the Republic, Chabot argued that the age of consent for marriage should be lowered in order to encourage heterosexual marriage. Lamenting the plight of young men made feeble in their twenties by sexual excess, he demanded: “What has vitiated the human species? It is these solitary or antiphysical pleasures, by which children compensate themselves for the difficulties which the laws have imposed on natural enjoyments.”39 This is a more strident
37 Brissot, “Theory of Criminal laws,” 163. 38 Landes, 142. 39 François Chabot, Discours de François Chabot, Député de Loire & Cher, à la Convention Nationale de France, sur les Finances de la République: Deuxieme Partie (Paris: L’impremerie national, 1792-95), 60. Bailey Troth broadening of Tissot’s anti-masturbatory thesis to position masturbation and homosexuality as opposite the interests of the nation. In order to protect the health of the public from the dangers of homosexuality and masturbation (which, following Tissot, are only barely differentiated), the natural sexual order of marriage should be encouraged at as early an age as possible. This medicalized opposition to homosexuality is notably not associated with a call to bring back the sodomy law of the old regime, but rather employs the power of “nature” against homosexuality by removing legal barriers to heterosexual marriage.
This call for marriage reform was explicitly tied to rhetoric about the preparedness of the nation for war. To justify this Chabot points to an unspecified nation of early-marriers: “At 12 and 14, the children were always married there, and never was a nation more bellicose, more vigorous, or more warlike.”40 He associates the youthful heterosexuality of this nation with its prowess in battle. Unlike Cloots, who recognized that same-sex relationships could strengthened armed citizenship despite the risks they posed to public health, Chabot saw the health and
“vigor” of a nation as intrinsically tied to citizens’ heterosexuality and physical health. Chabot settled tension between the procreative and military needs of the state and the toleration of legitimate difference in a somewhat more statist direction than Cloots.
Conclusions
These views are perhaps characteristic of the period Chabot was writing in. Published in
1792 and directed at the National Convention, Chabot’s Discourse was written after the fall of the monarchy after the insurrection of August 10 1792. This was a period of great anxiety for supporters of the revolution. The fall of 1792 saw continued popular fear in Paris around the war
40 Chabot, Discours à la Convention Nationale, 59-60. Bailey Troth with Austria and Prussia, which found its most extreme expression in the September Massacres, an eruption of popular violence against prisoners over suspicions of treasonous activity.41 In this context, it’s possible to understand why Chabot saw the anxieties about public health and procreation associated with homosexuality in enlightenment medical and political thought as more urgent than Cloots. However, it demonstrates the conditionality of a toleration of sexual difference that coexists with the idea that citizens who procreate and maintain their physical health through sexual moderation are more worthy members of the nation than those who don’t.
Although some reformers and revolutionaries, like the ones mentioned above, may have proposed plans for the sexual regeneration and education of the nation, there is little evidence of these plans ever being put into effect. Depictions of homosexuality had a more immediate effect in the pornographic and pamphlet literature of the revolution, where accusations of sexual deviance often reinforced accusations of political corruption.42 However, these assertions of new, more modern methods of controlling sexuality through education and medicine, as well as the fundamental opposition they draw between individual homosexuality and faithful citizenship in the nation provide early examples of the logic that would underwrite many homophobic practices and institutions in the modern era. Although as Michael Sibalis noted in “The Regulation of
Male Homosexuality,” the revolution was a period of relative relaxation in the state surveillance and persecution of sodomites and tribades, the revolutionary ideologies of nationalism and citizenship unleashed by the revolution held the potential to justify even more pervasive forms of
41 Jack Censer and Lynn Hunt, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001), 64. 42 See Elizabeth Colwill, “Pass as a Woman, Act like a Man,” in Homosexuality in Modern France, ed. Jeffrey Merrick & Bryant T. Ragan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); Lynn Hunt, “The Many Bodies of Marie- Antoinette,” in The French Revolution: Recent Debates and New Controversies, ed. Gary Kates (New York: Routledge, 2006). Bailey Troth coercion and control against those who engaged in homosexuality than had been employed under the old regime. 43
43 Sibalis, 96. Bailey Troth
Annotated Bibliography
Brissot, Jacques-Pierre. “Theory of Criminal Laws.” In Homosexuality in Early Modern France:
An Edited Collection. Edited by Jeffrey Merrick and Bryant T. Ragan. New York: Oxford
University Press, 2001.
In this excerpt on sodomy from his pamphlet Theory of Criminal Laws, Brissot argued
that sodomy should be prohibited because it “Harms the population” but that it should be
punished by public humiliation rather than burning. During the 1780s, Brissot was a
noble critic of the monarchy whose subversive pamphlets got him imprisoned in the
Bastille in 1784. He later became the leader of the Girondin faction during the French
Revolution and was executed following the purge of the Girondins. This source provides
an example of enlightened reformist views on homosexuality, which generally criticized
the harshness of burning as a punishment but remained hostile to homosexuality in
general. His use of rhetoric around population also makes this pamphlet an example of
the connection between public health, pro-natalism, and opposition to homosexuality
which I criticize in this paper.
Burke, Edmund. Reflections on the Revolution in France. Edited by Conor Cruise O’Brien .New
York: Penguin, 1984.
In Reflections on the Revolution in France, Burke criticized the French Revolution on the
grounds that it had overturned all the political and cultural traditions which make
government work. For this attachment to tradition and criticism of radical change, Bailey Troth
Burke’s pamphlet is often cited as the foundational text of modern conservatism. Burke
was a Irish politician and writer and this open letter was intended to vindicate and stir up
English sentiment against the revolution in France. His defense of “prejudice,” although
it was not necessarily intended to vindicate bigotry, is a useful entry point into the
broader question of whether the French revolution challenged prejudice or reinforced it.
Chabot, François. Discours de François Chabot, Député de Loire & Cher, à la Convention
Nationale de France, sur les Finances de la République: Deuxieme Partie. Paris:
L’impremerie national, 1792-95.
Chabot’s Discourse to the National Convention addressed the financial situation of the
newly founded republic in 1792 in its first part, but also included more general ideas for
political and legal changes that could be undertaken by the republic in part two. Chabot
was a left wing deputy of the National Convention who eventually executed for his
implication in the East India Company Scandal. His proposal to lower the age of consent
for marriage on the grounds that it would prevent “solitary and antiphysical pleasures”
from sapping the life out of the nation constitutes a clear use of public health and
nationalistic rhetoric to oppose homosexuality.
Censer, Jack and Lynn Hunt. Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. University Park: Pennsylvania State
University Press, 2001.
Bailey Troth
In Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, Censer and Hunt provide an overview of the history of
the French Revolution along with many primary source documents from the
Revolutionary period, with an emphasis on topics pertaining to women’s and gender
history and colonial experiences of the French revolution in addition to political history.
This book provides information about the context in which the authors I examine were
writing.
Cloots, Anacharsis. “The Orator of Humankind.” In Homosexuality in Early Modern France: An
Edited Collection. Edited by Jeffrey Merrick and Bryant T. Ragan. New York: Oxford
University Press, 2001.
In this excerpt from The Orator of Humankind, Anacharsis Cloots argued that
homosexuality should be decriminalized, since it does not clearly harm society, and in
fact can be beneficial to the state. He tempered this, however, with an appeal to educate
children on the dangers of sexual excess using Tissot’s Onanism, which terrorized him
into preserving his sexual energies to spend on the revolution. Cloots was a German
immigrant to France who was elected to the National Assembly, and earned the moniker
of “orator of humankind” for his defense of universalist principles. This excerpt
demonstrates the tension between nationalism and citizenship and homosexuality in
French Revolutionary ideology, since he judged the costs and benefits of permitting
homosexuality on the basis of their contribution to the nation and the state.
Doan, Long, Annalise Loehr, and Lisa R. Miller. "Formal Rights and Informal Privileges for
Same-Sex Couples: Evidence from a National Survey Experiment." American Bailey Troth
Sociological Review 79, no. 6 (2014): 1172-195. Accessed March 15, 2020.
www.jstor.org/stable/43187584.
Doan et. al. performed a survey of straight, lesbian, and gay Americans to ascertain their
willingness to grant formal rights and informal privileges to heterosexual vs. homosexual
couples, and found that all groups were more likely to be willing to endorse formal rights
like hospital visitation for same-sex couples than to allow them informal privileges like
kissing in public. They performed a nationally representative survey experiment where
respondents answered questions about a couple described in a “vignette,” with the
couple’s names being changed to represent a heterosexual, gay, or lesbian relationship.
This article demonstrates that those who favor legal rights for those in same-sex
relationships often still hold homophobic views in other areas, which is something that I
see as common between the French Revolutionary period and today.
Hunt, Lynn. “The Many Bodies of Marie-Antoinette.” In The French Revolution: Recent
Debates and New Controversies. Edited by Gary Kates. New York: Routledge, 2006.
In “The Many Bodies of Marie-Antoinette,” Lynn Hunt argued Marie-Antoinette had a
deep symbolic importance to the pamphleteers and politicians of the French Revolution
because she came to represent the debauched effeminacy and political degeneracy of the
old regime. She analyzed Marie-Antoinette’s depiction in the pornographic pamphlets
and speeches of the French Revolutionary era, as well as the attacks on her during her
trial, to tease out her importance in French Revolutionary discourse. This article is useful Bailey Troth
because Lynn Hunt examines the new forms of misogyny that emerged during the
revolution and their connection to views on “deviant” sexuality, and her brief mention of
accusations of homosexuality against Marie-Antoinette helped inspire this paper.
Landes, Joan. Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution. Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1988.
Landes argued that rather than increasing the rights of women, the French Revolution
introduced a dichotomy between a public sphere of male citizenship and a private sphere
of female domesticity that excluded women from public life in ways the Old Regime
hadn’t. To establish this, Landes examined the role of women in the French revolution, as
well as the works of many political theorists of the day, finding that writers from across
the political spectrum of revolutionaries endorsed the view of men as naturally more
suited to public, political life than women. Her work is important to this paper because
she demonstrates that the despite its progressive claims, the revolution increased
oppression based on gender, which raises the question of whether it increased or
decreased oppression based on sexuality.
Locke, John. “Thoughts Concerning Education.” In The Portable Enlightenment Reader. Edited
by Isaac Kramnick. New York: Penguin, 1995.
In this popular educational treatise, Locke argued for the need to instill internalized forms
of self-control in children for them to be successful later in life and opposed education Bailey Troth
based on corporal punishment and material incentives on the grounds that it weakened
the character of children and endorsed reactive behavior. John Locke was a doctor and
whig philosopher in late-seventeenth to early-eighteenth century England whose works in
political theory, education reform, and science offered early examples of enlightenment
principles. His “Thoughts Concerning Education” provide an example of the importance
of education within enlightenment thought and its connection to the project of creating a
population of self-reliant, self-regulating individual citizens.
Martin, Brian Joseph. Napoleonic Friendship: Military Fraternity, Intimacy & Sexuality in
Nineteenth-Century France. Lebanon: University Press of New England, 2011.
In Napoleonic Friendship, Martin argued that during the French revolution, the ideology
of fraternity and the reform of the military on more egalitarian lines led soldiers and
officers to develop intimate homosocial and homosexual relationships with each other
during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic periods, which had long-lasting implications
for French military culture. Martin used literary and cultural analysis to look at the
depiction of homosocial relationships in memoirs about the Napoleonic period, as well as
in nineteenth-century French literature. This book demonstrates how the French
Revolution opened new avenues for state sanctioned male intimacy, and how the classical
homoerotic discourse of “battle companions and warrior lovers” was tied to
Revolutionary notions of fraternity.
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Park, Roberta J. “Education as a Concern of the State: Physical Education in National Plans for
Education in France, 1763-1795.” Research Quarterly. American Association for Health,
Physical Education and Recreation 44, no. 3 (1973): 331-345. Accessed March 14, 2020.
DOI: 10.1080/10671188.1973.10615211.
Park argued that the educational plans of the French Revolution provide early precedents
for calls for physical education in public schooling. These demonstrate the growing
connection between ideas about education, public health, and citizenship during the
revolutionary period, and also provides information about the proposals for public
education during the French Revolution.
Petrow, Steven. “Civilities: What’s so Upsetting about a Gay Couple Kissing in Public?”
Washington Post. Oct. 12, 2015.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/civilities-is-kissing-the-next-big-
milestone-in-lgbt-rights/2015/10/10/87fae9a2-6ed2-11e5-9bfe-e59f5e244f92_story.html.
Petrow argued that public displays of affection are a remaining area of discrimination against same-sex couples in American, and that since many states lack protections against discrimination based on gay PDA, this could be a future frontier of political struggle in the realm of LGBTQ rights. Petrow is a journalist and author whose articles about health and LGBTQ issues have frequently been featured in papers such as the Washington Post and the New York
Times. His article is useful for establishing the problem of continued discrimination against Bailey Troth same-sex couples despite the recent legal victories for the LGBTQ community in many western countries.
Ragan, Bryant T. “The Enlightenment Confronts Homosexuality.” In Homosexuality in Modern
France. Edited Jeffrey Merrick and Bryant T. Ragan. New York: Oxford University
Press, 1996.
Ragan argued that enlightentment authors met the advent of the new homosexual social
roles of the “sodomite” and “tribade” with a mixed response, with some authors
criticizing these new types of people, but others arguing that perhaps homosexual tastes
were just as natural as heterosexual ones. He examines the spectrum of works from
pornography to philosophy and political theory-categories which were not completely
distinct in eighteenth-century France. This article provides some context about the
broader shifts in sexual identity that were occurring in the era leading up to the French
Revolution.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Emile. Trans. W. H. Payne. New York: Appleton, 1892.
https://www.google.com/books/edition/%C3%89mile/CbglAAAAMAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0
In Emile, Rousseau detailed the education of an idealized man and woman—Emile and
Sophie—and argued that education should emphasize the natural development of man as
an individual, while teaching women to inhabit a subordinate role in the private sphere.
Rousseau was an enlightenment philosopher and political theorist whose ideas were Bailey Troth
deeply influential in the politics and gender norms of the French Revolution. Emile
demonstrates the importance of education within enlightenment discourse.
Sibalis, Michael David. “The Regulation of Male Homosexuality in Revolutionary and
Napoleonic France, 1789-1815.” In Homosexuality in Modern France. Edited by Jeffrey
Merrick and Bryant T. Ragan. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.
In this article, Sibalis argued that although the revolution saw the decriminalization of
sodomy and was an improvement for sodomites and tribades over the old regime, it also
saw some continued legal persecution on the basis of homosexuality, which should not be
ignored by contemporary commentators on LGBTQ issues in France. Sibalis used court
records to examine instances in which men faced legal punishment for committing the
“crime against nature,” noting that this was often in contravention to established law.
This article is useful because it demonstrates that opposition to homosexuality continued
to permeate the legal system even after the decriminalization of sodomy, which raises
questions about why homosexuality was seen as a concern of the state in spite of the
absence of laws against it.
Valernes, Bernardi de. “The Means of Mitigating the Severity of the Penal Laws in France
without Jeopardizing Public Safety.” In Homosexuality in Early Modern France: An
Edited Collection. Edited by Jeffrey Merrick and Bryant T. Ragan. New York: Oxford
University Press, 2001.
Bailey Troth
In this excerpt from an edited collection of legal writings compiled by Jacques-Pierre
Brissot, lawyer Joseph de Bernardi de Valernes argued that instead of being punished by
burning or left to public opinion, the problem of homosexuality should be resolved by
restructuring society on more rural and egalitarian lines, which would eliminate the
debauched cities full of depraved and wealthy inhabitants which he saw as the main
source of homosexuality. This source is useful because his condemnation of “opulent
cities filled with lazy citizens” demonstrates how homosexuality was connected with bad
citizenship by legal reformers leading up to the revolution.
Voltaire, “Philosophical Dictionary,” In Homosexuality in Early Modern France: An Edited
Collection. Edited by Jeffrey Merrick and Bryant T. Ragan. New York: Oxford
University Press, 2001.
In this excerpt from Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary, he argued that homosexuality
was unnatural and downplayed its prevalence in the ancient world, but nonetheless
argued that the punishment of burning was out of proportion with the crime of
homosexuality was in fact based on a misreading of a law against heresy. Voltaire was a
French enlightenment philosopher known for his anti-clerical activism who was big in the
salon scene and took authoritarian positions in some areas that brough him into conflict
with more radical philosophers like Rousseau. This excerpt is useful because Voltaire
presents an early example of the sort of pro-natalist opposition to homosexuality which
would take on a more nationalistic flair during the revolution.
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Tissot, Samuel-Auguste Andre “Onanism,” In Homosexuality in Early Modern France: An
Edited Collection. Edited by Jeffrey Merrick and Bryant T. Ragan. New York: Oxford
University Press, 2001.
In his Onanism, The Swiss doctor Samuel-Auguste Tissot presented evidence that linked
masturbation with a vast array of physical ailments. This argument seems to have
influenced much of the homophobic rhetoric of the French Revolutionary era, which
tended to see masturbation and homosexuality as causing similar physical issues, which
threatened public health and therefore the wellbeing of the state.
Yuval-Davis, Nira. “Women and the Biological Reproduction of the Nation.” In Gender and
Nation. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1997.
In this chapter of Gender and Nation, Yuval-Davis argued that nationalist discourses
around women as “bearers of the collective” who play the key role of reproducing the
nation by having children have played an important role in the social construction of
procreation within many modern nation states, with negative implications for the
reproductive rights of women. To make this point, she pulls examples from numerous
contemporary and historical nationalist politicians, policies and political systems. This
chapter is useful for establishing the link between nationalist discourse and discourses
around reproduction, which were linked in the Revolutionary period as much as in the
modern era and the present day.