Convents And Nuns In Eighteenth Century French Politics And Culture PDF Download

This dissertation explores how between 1740 and 1794, a variety of writers, ranging from lawyers to Enlightenment philosophes, used the female convent to criticize Bourbon absolutism and to articulate a new vision of French society based on male equality and gendered spheres. By examining sources ranging from political pamphlets to social treatises, from legal briefs to novels, from debates on education to works of pornography, this study synthesizes the social history of women religious with the symbolic, discursive construction of the convent. The image eighteenth-century readers had of the female cloister resulted from the efforts of writers to negotiate between their own polemical needs and the attempts of nuns to assert themselves and maintain a certain autonomy. The result was a dualistic representation, one in which nuns were both victims of authoritarian forces and villains acting against social order. During the French Revolution, the uneasy co-existence of such depictions of nuns and their independent actions collapsed as a majority of female religious refused to comply with the wishes of revolutionaries, therefore rendering the manichaean framework prerevolutionary lawyers and men of letters had crafted, untenable. This dissertation argues that an examination of this framework sheds light on a significant transition in the critique of the Old Regime: the shift from attacks on despotic individuals, attacks that were nonetheless consistent with the traditional paradigm of patriarchal authority, to an overarching assault on the paradigm itself. For the convent, this meant nothing less than its destruction during the French Revolution, a destruction hastened by the counterrevolutionary resistance of women religious.