The everyday lives of Parisian women and the October Days of 1789 (French Revolution)

The October Days, a sudden, vast, and gender-specific political action with enormous consequences, cannot be explained simply in terms of the political education of 1788-89. This paper argues that the march to Versailles was an extension of the long-accepted role of ordinary women in eighteenth-century Paris. The nature of women's paid and unpaid work, of female religious observance, and of the individual and collective identity that these created, gave women a key role in defending the local community. This led them to act politically well before the Revolution. Their action in October 1789 was consistent with patterns of behaviour shaped by everyday life in the city. Yet the scale of the action and its city-wide character were quite unlike anything that had happened before. In this, the lesson of July 1789 was important, but so were long-term changes in Paris. The city was becoming more integrated, both economically and administratively, and this gave working women a new relationship to urban space. It widened their horizons and allowed them adapt well-established patterns of behaviour to the new political context, and thus permitted a city-wide action that deliberately targeted the new centres of power.