Women, wives and mothers of citizens or family as a political category in the construction of citizenship: 1789-1848.

Summary When one seeks to situate women politically in the first half of the nineteenth century, the answer seems to be self-evident: deprived of the right to vote, they are excluded from the revolutionary, universal and individualistic citizenship as defined from 1789. The observation of their exclusion, of an irreproachable objectivity, does not however account for their political situation as it was thought at that time (from 1789 to 1848). Few historians or political scientists have examined the way in which the electoral franchise was calculated: everything happens as if it were paid individually, i.e. on the basis of the properties of the citizen alone. However, not only does the citizen, if he is married, pay the contributions in the name of the community of goods that he forms with his wife, but he can also, according to the electoral laws from the year X to 1831 included, have the contributions of other members of the family added to him, even if they are of age and male. The fact that the family is, during this whole period, thought of as a political unit leads to reconsider the situation of people, which can no longer be grasped through a univocal approach, in terms of "who votes" and "who does not vote". It is as members of the family that women remain outside political participation, just as it is as pater familias that the citizen is invested with the individual right to vote on behalf of the whole nation. Only by working on the implicit categories of political construction could what has been called a familialist conception of suffrage emerge, characteristic of the entire revolutionary period (1789-1848). Thus, in addition to the resolution of the so-called problem of the exclusion of women, our current conception of the revolutionary political individual is also modified, and it is more evolving than one might have thought.