Before The French Revolution

In the years before the revolution, French women enjoyed virtually no civil or economic rights. As Darline Gay Levy, Harriet Branson Applewhite, and bloody shame Durham Johnson explain in the introduction to Women in basal Paris, 17891795: By and large, women were legally totally subservient to their husbands or fathers in virtually all areas of marriage contracts, inheritance laws, property and measure laws, and child custody arrangements. Marriages were indissoluble. Noblewomen were not permitted to rule on disputes on properties they held. Meanwhile, working women lacked economic rights and protections; many were concerned about the watch of men into traditionally female occupations such as milliner and embroiderer. These women feared that unless such employment was restricted to females, the fairer sex would have to number for less respectable jobs.

Women were not the only people in France who were denied basic human rights, of course. Indeed, Frances peasants lived under the worst conditions. Although fabrication was becoming a more important part of the terra firmas economy, France was still largely dependent on the feudal system in which powerful feudal lords (seigneurs) owned utile farmlands on which peasants lived and worked.



Some peasants had managed to earn enough money from their crops to buy their own small plots of land, but the vast majority lived in poverty, completely under the thumbs of seigneurs. In his book The Old politics and the French Revolution, nineteenth-century historian Alexis de Tocqueville details the burdens of the typical farmer:

everyplace the resident seigneur levied dues on fairs and markets, and everywhere enjoyed exclusive rights of hunting. . . . [It] was the oecumenical rule that farmers must bring their wheat to their lords mill and the grapes to his wine press. A universal and very taxing right was that named lods et ventes; that is to say an impost levied by the lord on transfers of land within his domain. And...If you want to get a skilful essay, order it on our website: Orderessay



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