Sylvain Maréchal, le donne, una donna

Sylvain Maréchal (1750-1803), a late 18th century materialist, a revolutionary journalist and one of Gracchus Babeuf’s companions in the Conspiracy of Equals, was a representative of a patriarchal vision that was so extreme as to appear provocative. In other words, he was radically egalitarian, but only as long as women, or their inclusion in the public sphere, were not concerned. Recent scholars have considered his late pamphlet Projet d’une loi portant défense d’apprendre à lire aux femmes (1801) as the actual symbol of revolutionary anti-feminism. One of the chief polemical replies to this pamphlet was the work of Marie-Armande Gacon-Dufour, a friend and, most importantly, an intellectual partner of Marechal’s, who was an habitual visitor at his home, where he lived with his wife and other family members. After his death, she wrote his biography in his own cabinet, to feel his presence. Here we begin to trace the exchange between Sylvain and Marie-Armande, who emerges as an intellectual in her own right and in many ways a continuator of his ideas. This relationship is contextualized both through a consideration of earlier positions Maréchal took on women’s education and emancipation before or during the Revolution, and a critical account of the historiography calling attention in the last decades to the issue of the vision of woman in the French revolutionaries or Maréchal in particular (J. Landes, L. Hunt, G. Fraisse, F. Aubert).