France after Revolution

Denise Davidson's France After Revolution: Urban Life, Gender, and the New Social Order discusses the way in which French society came to define itself after political and social uprisings. She examines the ability of the public to help shape the social hierarchies that define them. The book also argues against the belief that women were forced out of the public in the post-Revolutionary age.

In the first part of the book, Davidson discusses political festivals as they formed after the Napoleonic period and the Bourbon Restoration. She discusses the importance of working-class women to festivals in the Napoleonic period as well as the connection between the state and the private family, and then studies the change between the Napoleonic period and the Bourbon Restoration by showcasing the different status of women within the festivals. The changes in the social sphere of France between the two time periods involved the change in perception of women for the better because of their support of and involvement with the Church. The public, in gathering for these festivals, became part of the spectacle they themselves came to observe, and women became an integral part because of their increasingly positive social appearance based on their religious involvement.

Davidson goes on to speak about the transformation of theaters into a public platform for political opposition, particularly in rural theaters where the state's oppressive presence was less pervasive. Also interesting in this section is the dichotomy between public and private space, and the ability of a space to be both public and private, depending on one's perception. The example Davidson gave was that of a woman watching a show from a theater box – to the woman, the box is a private space, having separated her from the rest of the theater. However, to the theater at large, she is still visible, thus making the space also a public space. The box gives the woman status above the theatergoers around her and yet makes her part of the crowd at large.

The construction of social hierarchies among the classes and sexes was particularly helped, Davidson states, by the general public's associational lives – group situations that were separated by class and gender to make these divisions clearer, like clubs and charities. These associational divisions gave class and gender more divisions by which to define people. These gatherings gave the classes opportunities to observe one another and create their own social hierarchies, emphasizing Davidson's point that ordinary people had the agency to create their own social trees, despite pressures from authorities such as the Church and state.

Overall, Davidson's work is a compelling argument that social settings are just as important in defining a society as the political and institutional processes that created the environment in which the society flourished, providing a thorough look at how French society perceived itself and its surroundings during the time.