#saint-just

This quote has stayed with me for many years and motivates me when I’m feeling down

I’ve gathered all I could find regarding Robespierre view on and relationship to the opposite sex in this post. There are mainly two times he is recorded to have said something more substantial on women and their role. The first is when he in 1787 wrote a speech welcoming two femmes de lettres as honorary members to the academy of Arras and in the process argued for letting more women into such environments. Part of his reasoning here is the idea women are in fact just as capable of learning as men – “Their sex does not cause them to lose any of the rights gained by their merit. [---] If we only grant women reason and intelligence, can we deny them the right to cultivate them?” Another part of the argument was simply that ”lovable” and ”beautiful” women will be able to lighten up the sessions for the men, since ”women make a conversation where nothing is said, an assembly where nothing is done, more than bearable. Beauty, when it is mute, even when it does not think, still interests; it animates everything around.” Finally, Robespierre also underlined he did not think women suited to study ”the depths of the abstract sciences,” but that they should rather be allowed ”the advantage of picking the flowers of literature, of listening to the pleasant and useful lessons of history, the touching instructions of morality.” This is because ”nature has given each sex its own talents. The genius of man has more strength and elevation; that of the woman more delicacy and amenities.”

The second time Robespierre speaks more on women as such is in an undelivered speech written in the fall of 1793. In the passage of interest, he begins with praising the participants in the women’s march to Versailles in October 1789, as well as the many women who have since visited the revolutionary clubs ”eager to hear, from the mouths of their brothers and their husbands, the interesting lessons of patriotism that they had to engrave in the souls of their children.” To this, he unfavorably compares the Society of Revolutionary and Republican Women, which consists of ”some female Demosthenes” who are ”sterile like vice” and ”declaim against the founders of the republic, and slander the representatives of the people.” The idea that each sex has its own set of talents and occupations that they should stick to returns here, with Robespierre arguing the Revolutionary Women spread the idea that this fact ”is nothing other than an invention of the aristocracy, that men must abandon the tribune and the seats of the senate to women.” He also unfavorably compares them to Cornelia and Porcia, who contented themselves with giving birth to ”jewels” and then teaching them to defend the homeland, without feeling a need to play any public role.

Other than that, Robespierre does not really speak much about women in the conserved material left behind by him. During the revolution, he is not recorded to have taken part in any debate on women’s rights (be that property rights, right to divorce, voting rights, etc etc) to express himself either for or against it. The rest of the places he says anything regarding women are presented in the post linked above, so you can go check that out if you want to see more.