Citizenship as a ‘Technology of Government’ in Revolutionary France, 1789–92

Introduction

In early 1790, the semi-satirical royalist newsletter Les Actes des Apôtres remarked drily: ‘Louis XIV was, six months ago, master of 24 million French people; today, he is the sole subject of 24 million kings’ (Jourdan, 2018, p. 72).1 The phrase captured a general sentiment that, for better or for worse, the people of France had undergone a profound transformation. Once obedient servants, they were now proud legislators in their own right, full of a sense of their own mastery – and more than a little vindictive in their triumph.

For revolutionaries in the young National Assembly, the popular politics to which Les Actes des Apôtres alluded was both an opportunity and a threat. The Parisian streets had played a vital role in overthrowing the established order, yet could just as easily consume the new one. As one pamphleteer wrote darkly in 1793, ‘did the people take up arms on the 14th of July 1789, to return only by turns and at the caprice of the legislator to the rights that it has from nature?’ (Anonymous, 1793, pp. 5–7).2 Revolutionary legislators quickly became convinced of the need to co-opt the urban mass movements, retaining their strength but clipping their wings to forestall further violence and preserve the revolutionary state. One essential ideological tool in this task was the concept of citizenship.

Today, ‘citizenship’ is generally associated with the status of an active and empowered member of a community. However, as recent developments in citizenship studies have revealed, it also represents a particular habitus, or way of being subjectivated. Citizenship is therefore more than just a legal status with regard to the state: to make someone a citizen is also to impose a particular mode of subjecthood on them. In this chapter, I make use especially of the Barbara Cruikshank’s (1999) description of citizenship as a ‘technology’ of government whose purpose is to secure voluntary compliance from the masses and pass much of the burden of governance on to the individual, examining the ways in which French revolutionary governments sought to make its own use of the ‘technology’ of citizenship.

After all, the same attitude defined the revolutionary French understanding of citizenship. Susan Maslan (2006, p. 75) argues that it was an animating purpose of the Revolution to bring into being a new kind of subject, one bifurcated between the political and the social, between a cultivated public image, on the one hand, and a rich, feeling inner life on the other. In this regard, citizenship, and specifically the more limited status of ‘active citizenship’, could be made to serve several ends for the nascent post-1789 government. It extended a stake in the res publica to a broad swathe of the population while excluding undesirable elements from political life. At the same time, it held out to those marginalised the promise of a continually expanding franchise, meaning that it could be used to incentivise good civic and moral behaviours (Crook, 1996, p. 32). And it allowed the effervescent urban masses to be marshalled into militias, their energies directed against the enemies of the nascent regime rather than their own state.

However, the use of active citizenship to subjectivate individuals in a particular way was dependent upon old and new forms of knowledge production. The state needed to bring into existence records of who was and was not eligible for ‘full’ voting citizenship, which in turn required the amassing of proof of taxes paid, of a year’s residency in the local area, of membership of the National Guard (including purchase of the equipment associated with it), and of the taking of the civic oath. But state capacity in early modern France was not sufficiently developed to gather and maintain all of this bureaucratic knowledge. For the most part, it was reliant on its own citizens to produce and maintain it themselves. This gave ordinary people an opening to challenge the state and define citizenship for themselves. This was part of what Pierre Rétat (1993, pp. 6–7) describes as the paradox at the heart of revolutionary citizenship. The purpose of citizenship was to represent and guarantee social unity. Yet this very fact vested citizenship with such political importance that its character and boundaries immediately became the subject of fierce contestation between different factions.

In what follows, I will first outline why revolutionaries regarded the production of ‘citizens’ in place of existing monarchical subjects as vital for guaranteeing the stability of the new state. I will then explore the bureaucratic complexity of this task and show how ordinary citizens could use the resulting loopholes to devise their own forms of citizenship.

#‘Citizenification’

In the idiom of the eighteenth century, the ‘citizen’ was not simply a man who happened to live in a republic: he was in some sense a denatured man, one who had to be educated and disciplined into a sense of civic duty and virtue (Jaume, 1987, p. 526). Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1999, p. 76) had set the scene here, describing the primordial legislator as someone who must ‘feel himself capable of changing, so to speak, human nature; of transforming each individual, who in himself is a perfect, isolated whole, into a part of a larger whole from which the individual receives, in some sense, his life and being; of altering man’s constitution in order to strengthen it’.3 Revolutionaries were thus well aware that simply establishing a republican constitution would not in itself turn the French people into French citizens. It would be necessary to change their very natures.

The ‘citizenification’ of the French people was a priority because it was linked with the security of the nation and the new regime that ran it. In a very serious sense, the long-term viability of the revolutionary experiment was believed to rest on its capacity to produce a society of ‘good’ citizens. As Jean-Joseph Mounier put it, ‘it is from the virtue, it is from the courage of good citizens, that we must hope for the safety [salut] of the homeland’ (Archives parlementaires, vol. 8, 1875, p. 422).4

This was because the citizen was understood not simply as a legal resident of the state but as someone who put the public interest before their own – an idea developed partly in opposition to the variegated social structure of the ancien régime in which private interests were thought to reign (Rétat, 1993, pp. 3–6; Fitzsimmons, 1993, pp. 29–30; Jaume, 1987, p. 530). Citizenship thus served to identify the people (or, more accurately, to have them identify themselves) with the public good. This was based on a genuine faith in the nation-securing power of ‘the people’, a category that sometimes blended into that of the Parisian crowd, as a guarantor of the Revolution. At times they were treated almost as a talisman: when, in May 1792, the National Assembly was shaken by the announcement of a plot organised by the shadowy ‘Austrian Committee’, one response was to allow sans-culottes to parade through the legislature’s halls beating drums and singing, almost like an exorcism of the threat (Tackett, 2000, pp. 691–92).

‘Citizenification’ also had a more practical military component. Turning people into citizens was the surest way of averting foreign invasion and internal strife, because good citizens, imbued with the solid feelings of revolutionary exaltation, patriotic fervour and manly courage described above, would form the most solid possible barrier in the nation’s defence:

Remain then great like the people whom you represent; and you will rein in, by your energy, all spirit of ambition; and with a single look you will force back into the mire all the reptiles that crawl around you […]; and the kings that fight us, were they giants, would seem no more than pygmies in your presence. Let them all come with their hordes of slaves! Twenty-five million men stand upright to run to your call, if our legions should be insufficient.5 [Billaud-Varenne, 1794, p. 14]

Citizens, once made, would thus work in concert towards the long-term interests of the state and rally to defend it from foreign attack, guaranteeing its future.

But the ‘citizenification’ of the French also had a more negative justification. It was widely believed that despotic rule degraded the character of those who lived under it, because they had to adapt themselves to living as slaves. The worry was that this slavishness would persist in the French character and ultimately undermine the republic. Hence in the first issue of his journal Lettre à ses commettans in September 1792, Maximilien Robespierre offered this reflection: ‘It is not in the empty word itself that a republic consists, but in the character of the citizens. The soul of a republic is vertu – that is, the love of the fatherland, and the high-minded devotion that resolves all private interests into the general interest. […] You have hunted down kings, but have you hunted out the vices that their deadly domination has engendered among you?’ (quoted in Scurr, 2007, p. 210). ‘Citizenification’ was thus not a simple question of raising people to virtue. It was a means of healing wounds left by centuries of despotism, lest they fester under the surface and eventually destroy the new state.

One important tool for achieving this transformation was ‘active citizenship’, i.e. the kind of citizenship that included voting rights. Historical accounts of active citizenship have generally focused on those whom it excluded, seeing it primarily as a way of keeping women and destitute or dependent men from having a say in public affairs (Applewhite, 1993, p. 50; Baker, 2006, p. 640; Koekkoek, 2020, p. 54). But in fact, what is more telling is the size of the population that was included. Almost 60% of the adult male population wielded a vote, amounting to something like a quarter of the country at large (Crook, 1996, p. 39). This would represent an electorate of around six million, which is the number Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès estimated in 1789 (Garsten, 2016, p. 245). In contrast, the British franchise extended to only around 200,000 people at this time, or 3% of the population. As such, it seems more fruitful to ask why revolutionary France had such a relatively broad franchise.

The answer is that granting people active citizenship would give them a stake in the public good and thereby fold them into the social order. This widely held principle had a classical pedigree: in his influential Histoire ancienne of 1737, Charles Rollin had praised the Athenian legislator Solon for having secured liberty and equality by ‘also giving to the poor a certain part in the government from which they were excluded’ (Payen, 2018, p. 154).6 Giving people a share in the chose publique as active, participating citizens was a way of turning their collective strength into a bulwark of the state.

The corollary to this idea was that excluding people from the franchise was a potential threat to civil peace, insofar as it risked weakening consensus within the nation (Gueniffey, 1989, p. 576). This was essentially Robespierre’s argument when he claimed that giving some citizens the vote and not others violated the principle, enshrined in the Declaration, that all citizens held a share in the sovereign power (Applewhite, 1993, p. 51). But it was by no means only a radical idea: Robespierre was anticipated here by the more conservative Mounier, who as early as September 1789 warned that ‘[i]f you demand for elections qualities that limit the number [of voters], you render all those who will be excluded strangers [étrangers] to their homeland, indifferent to liberty’ (Archives parlementaires, 1867, vol. 8, p. 556).7 The same notion also influenced some of the rare calls for female suffrage. Deputy Pierre Guyomar wrote: ‘The coming of a new order of things will leave women in the old, and they will reckon from this moment their assumption of the role of helots to the republic’ (Gutwirth, 1993, pp. 83–84).

Giving a vote to chunks of the French people was thus understood as a way of giving them a stake in the new order that would encourage them, as citizens, to focus on the public good. It would, furthermore, prevent the emergence of large disenfranchised groups that might threaten the state, in the same way that many revolutionary intellectuals themselves, like Jacques Pierre Brissot, had sought to prise open the gates of ancien régime civil society institutions.

There was, then, a consensus in favour of enfranchising a relatively broad swathe of the population. At the same time, withholding the vote from others was not only understood as a means of permanently preventing unreliable elements of the population from participating in politics, but could also be used as a means of incentivising ‘good’ civic behaviours on their part. The very aim of society, after all, as Sieyès (1789b, p. 24) put it, was to ‘ennoble’ and ‘perfect’ men. Citizenship was thus closely associated with one’s moral fibre.

Accordingly, the vote quickly came to be understood as a means of promoting moral virtue. The abbé Grégoire put the distinction between the morally ‘good’ and ‘bad’ citizen at the service of the franchise in 1790, arguing that to have the vote it should ‘suffice to be a good citizen, [and] to have sound judgement and a French heart’ (Applewhite, 1993, p. 51). One express function of the status of active citizen was to encourage a good work ethic in the poor, as Jean-Paul Rabaut Saint-Étienne stated in December 1790:

The title of active citizen is not difficult to acquire. You have wisely wished that it become an object of emulation for all the French, a motive for work, a goad to industry; you have wished to destroy, by a principle of morality, the tendency that certain men have to give themselves up to idleness and frivolity […]. Property characterises the citizen; work is one of the foremost civic virtues, and your decrees on the activity of citizens have eliminated in advance, more than could have done so any repressive laws, vagabondage and idleness.8 [Bacot, 2006, pp. 83–84]

The promise of suffrage, or the threat of withdrawing it, could additionally be used to condition people’s moral behaviour in more specific ways. In 1792, Pierre Bernard d’Héry proposed a new law under which any active citizen with impoverished parents who refused to support them financially would be struck off the list of active citizens (Archives parlementaires, 1879, vol. 47, p. 234). Only those who abided by moral norms could expect to enjoy full membership of the state.

The promise of active citizenship was, additionally, used to encourage military service. It is notable how many of the special dispensations from the tax requirement for active citizenship were for soldiers and the National Guard. In February 1790, soldiers with sixteen years’ service were exempted from the requirement, and in August National Guard members with ten years’ service. In the same month, active citizenship was extended to all ‘defenders of liberty’ (Bacot, 2006, pp. 51–52). Soldiers who had served for sixteen consecutive years were also given both a vote and the ability to be named an elector by their commune, but only provided they had their own residence there. Sailors could achieve the same thing by serving ‘sans reproche’ for seventy-two months on a war vessel or sixteen years in a harbour (Archives parlementaires, 1879, vol. 18, p. 12). The effect was to link active citizenship with a readiness to defend the nation, both ensuring that a preponderance of those who could vote had demonstrated this, and creating an incentive for others to serve in order to acquire a vote.

The allocation of the vote thus consisted in a balancing act. The franchise should be used to give a broad range of the population a stake in the res publica and its future. It should also marginalise unreliable elements of the otherwise eligible population while holding out the constant promise of a vote as a reward if they should acquire the necessary moral and civic qualities. This was the technological function of active citizenship: both to secure a reliable electorate and to incentivise non-voters to make themselves worthy of full membership of the body politic by behaving morally and fulfilling their duties to the state.

#The Need for Knowledge

The use of active citizenship as a ‘technology’ of government rested on various kinds of specialist knowledge. The first of these was knowledge within political science about the character of rights. One significant expedient in this respect was the distinction between ‘civil’ and ‘political’ rights. Sieyès, who popularised this idea, argued that society had been created in order to preserve civil rights, while political rights existed for the sake of preserving society (1789b, p. 36). This meant that civil rights were inviolable and inalienable, whereas political rights were within the gift of political authority and subject to the demands of social utility. In other words, fundamental rights to property and life were placed within the realm of nature and thus made unarguable, while the right to vote was placed within the social realm so that it could be denied to some people on grounds of political expediency.

The second was biological knowledge. The link between bodily and mental health and citizenship was formed in the earliest stages of the Revolution, when Brissot argued that universal equality and civil freedoms were a cause of good health, asserting as evidence the claim that the Americans were peculiarly physically fit (Darnton, 1968, p. 111). As the Revolution progressed, it became common to refer to madness in the people as a means of stigmatising its ‘bad sections’ and explaining popular violence. The effect was to limit the right to political influence solely to those who were considered sufficiently endowed with reason. Parisian doctor and proto-psychiatrist Philippe Pinel frequently linked unbalanced passions with political events. For example, in one case, he described ‘a citizen of esteem, having lost his fortune through the events of the revolution, was soon led, in a state of deep sadness, to a state of obvious mania’; in another ‘a young man, dismayed by the toppling of the Catholic religion in France, and dominated by religious prejudices, became maniacal’ (Chappey, 2013, pp. 56–58).9 Psychological knowledge, wielded to limit the right to political influence solely to those who had cultivated their rationality, was thus key to the disciplining of the political individual under the rubric of citizenship.

Such knowledge was also employed to uphold the masculine character of citizenship while still affording women a supplementary, indirect political role. The preconception of women’s minds being disordered and hysterical in the same way as those of lunatics functioned as grounds for their exclusion from full citizenship (Douville, 2014, p. 27). Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Condorcet, certainly, seems to have felt it necessary to demonstrate that women had the same reason as men in order to prove that they must enjoy the same rights (Condorcet, 2012, p. 156). Biological knowledge regarding women’s psychological capacities thus served to exclude them from direct participation, but it did at the same time afford them a lesser role that, it was hoped, would still serve as a stake in the long-term future of the republic: revolutionaries argued that women had an innate sensibilité that would soften the heart of their husband and give them the right political feelings (Cage, 2015, p. 119). In this way, revolutionaries used biological knowledge to found citizenship on a specific ideal of the household, with men facing outside into the public, and women sustaining them from the inside (Heuer, 2002, pp. 53–54).

But the most important form of knowledge with regard to citizenship was bureaucratic knowledge, to keep track of who was and who was not a full, voting, ‘active’ citizen. Although some historians, notably Jacob Soll (2016, pp. 29–30), have identified this era as the beginning of the process of bureaucratisation in politics, the revolutionary state still had quite limited capacity for producing and archiving information. This created problems for the revolutionaries, whose ambitions required large amounts of information. In the remainder of this section, I will explore the production of reams of bureaucratic knowledge required by the invention of citizenship as a governing technology, and the ways in which this too produced a complex interplay of power relations.

Under the voting qualifications introduced in 1790 and 1791, a would-be voter had to be a man over the age of twenty-one who could prove that he paid an amount in tax equal to three days’ average wages. Furthermore, voters could not be bankrupt or under indictment. In addition, there was a residency requirement: the censitaire decrees required that a voter have lived for one year in the canton where they hoped to vote. As mentioned above, voters also needed to enrol in the National Guard. Many of these requirements would be quite long-lasting: although the status of non-voting ‘passive citizen’ was abolished in 1792, would-be voters still had to provide documents proving they had a basic level of income and a year’s residency (Gueniffey, 1989, pp. 572–73). The stakes in this matter were high. If votes were accidentally cast by passive citizens, and this were pointed out by other attendees of a primary assembly, the election could be invalidated (Archives parlementaires, 1879, vol. 18, p. 12).

Yet the revolutionary state did not have the capacity to produce or maintain knowledge about who was and was not eligible for itself. As such, the burden of proof for these requirements was shifted on to individual citizens, who had to provide the documentation showing that they met these requirements in order to be added to the lists of active citizens, and also had to take the civic oath (‘Constitution française (1791)’, 2009, p. 40). There was simply no guarantee that people would be able to produce these documents, regardless of their actual eligibility. Moreover, the voting requirements could produce anomalies. One interesting case presented to the Constitution Committee concerned the application of the tax requirement to the clergy. In many places, local artisans took on the burden of paying taxes on behalf of vicars and parish priests. However, this raised the question of whether or not the clergymen could be considered active citizens. The Constitution Committee ruled that they could – without offering any opinion on the status of those who were actually paying (Décisions du comité, 1790, p. 5). In theory, then, there were citizens who could sign up as active citizens upon showing evidence that another person was paying their taxes, while those who had provided the evidence languished in passive citizenship. The need to outsource the production of bureaucratic knowledge to ordinary citizens thus risked undermining the revolutionaries’ own aim of using the franchise to fold the deserving into the social order and incentivise good citizenship.

To make matters worse, successive constitutions and pieces of constitutional legislation introduced bewildering new provisions which communal administrations had to take into account. For example, decrees of spring and summer 1790 specified that monks who remained in their monasteries could not vote in any circumstances, whereas bishops and curés were exempted from the requirement of a year’s residency in their district and thus could vote in all circumstances, while vicars could vote but only if they had completed the year’s residency. However, all of this was invalidated in the case of curés and vicars who refused to include notice, ‘à haute et intelligible voix’, of decrees from the National Assembly in their sermons, provided that a ‘procès-verbal’ had taken official notice of this refusal, in which case they were not permitted to act as active citizens (Archives parlementaires, 1879, vol. 18, p. 11). Keeping track of all these requirements was a mammoth task.

The military dispensations described in the previous section created their own bureaucratic headache. To ensure that they would not be disenfranchised whilst on the front line, a decree of 26 June 1790 dictated that soldiers were considered to conserve their residency in the period of their service, meaning that proof of active service could act as a substitute for proof of residency (Archives parlementaires, 1879, vol. 18, p. 11). This was yet another document thrown into the mix. From 3 August 1792, it was decreed that anyone who had fought in a ‘war for liberty and [who] would have remained under the flag and in active military service until the war’s end’ or who had been ‘removed from any fit state to continue [their service]’, provided they were at least twenty-five years old or once they had attained this age, would become an active citizen. This decree also required the creation of a special register of those admitted to political rights on grounds of being ‘defenders of the patrie’, a register that needed to be drawn up by their commune under the supervision of its general council (Archives parlementaires, 1879, vol. 47, p. 421).10 In the event, this hardly mattered, since three days later the Assembly voted to admit all men with a year’s residency and a self-sufficient income to the primary assemblies (Archives parlementaires, 1879, vol. 47, p. 614). In doing so, it completely overhauled two years of already chaotic practice. Communes also had to keep track of criminal penalties, some of which, notably the punishment of dégradation civique which was introduced in 1791, led to a loss of voting rights (Code pénal, 1790, Titre premier, article XXXI‑XXXIII). With so many provisions and exceptions that might either enfranchise or disenfranchise prospective active citizens, communes simply could not be expected to keep track.

These problems were exacerbated by the fact that, although some organs of the central state were set up to take on some of the burden of producing and archiving the bureaucratic knowledge that was produced by the citizenry – such as the Comité de contributions publiques, which in 1791 compiled departmental figures to produce a definitive nationwide number of active citizens – it mostly fell on lower levels of government, some of them small and unprofessional, others novel and untested. The most local form of administration, the communes, had the task of drawing up the lists of active citizens who had taken the civic oath and joined the National Guard. They were then expected, under a decree of 28 June 1790, to pass these lists to departmental authorities, which were then to inform the National Assembly. Where communal data was not available, they simply had to estimate it by taking the number of electors chosen in each department and multiplying it by hundred, on grounds that there should be one elector per hundred active citizens. The same decree required that each year, every municipality produce two duplicates of their table of voters, one to be deposited in their archives, and the other to be sent to the director of the department (Archives parlementaires, 1879, vol. 18, pp. 10–11; Gueniffey, 1989, p. 576).

The knowledge produced in this fashion for the sake of administering citizenship was inevitably patchy. Rural communes especially were slow to provide information and careless about its accuracy. Even when their intentions were pure, they often simply misunderstood the provisions laid out in the Constitution. For example, when the Constituent Assembly banned domestic servants from voting, it defined them as ‘waged servants’ (serviteurs à gages). The aim of this was to ensure that only those in personal service were disenfranchised, but, misinterpreting the language, electoral assemblies frequently and erroneously turned away a broader set of salaried workers: personal secretaries, private tutors, stewards, and employees working in manufacturing or agriculture (Gueniffey, 1993, p. 50).

It was also the responsibility of departmental administrations to determine the exact level of the tax requirement in their locality by calculating the value of three days’ labour (within a margin established by the Assembly), an expedient that effectively shifted the responsibility for determining who qualified to be inscribed on the lists to this novel level of government (‘Constitution française (1791)’, 2009, p. 40). The figure had to be recalculated frequently to adjust for fluctuation in wages and this could enfranchise and disenfranchise large swathes of the local population at a stroke: it is estimated that in the relatively poor department of Loire-Inférieure, around 50% of active citizens only narrowly met the tax requirement (Crook, 1996, p. 43). Little wonder, then, that lists of prospective active citizens threw up different results at different times, varying in some cases by as much as a third. Notably, the figure produced by the Comité de contributions publiques of 4,298,960 active citizens across the eighty-three departments was out by around this proportion (Crook, 1996, pp. 38–39).11

It is likewise unsurprising that the Constitution Committee found itself inundated with enquiries from municipalities asking how to apply the requirements for active citizenship. In some cases, the Committee had to bend the rules to accommodate more important principles, or simply because of the dictates of practicality, even when this meant admitting those who had not met the requirements into the ranks of the active citizens. For example, on 18 June 1790 it was determined by the Constituent Assembly that active citizenship would be contingent on enrolment in the National Guard, a measure coming into force on 6 August. But as the Commissaires of the Municipality of Paris pointed out, this left those names that had already been inscribed on the lists of active citizens in limbo: if they did sign up to the Guard only on 6 August, the process of enrolling them would hold up the elections. However, there was no provision in the decree that could require them to provide their proof of enrolment in the National Guard before this. The Committee determined that they could not be required to fulfil the terms of the decree before it came into force, and so those who had not done so by 6 August would simply have to be excluded from the election. Recognising that this risked angering eligible voters who might lose the chance to cast their ballot, it sought to forestall any criticism by assuring them that their rights had simply been suspended, not withdrawn (Décisions du comité, 1790, pp. 1–2). As this suggests, the process of producing knowledge about who was and was not a citizen was as often influenced by political considerations as it was by the strict application of the rules.

Often, these decisions only further complicated the task for municipal and departmental administration. For example, responding to pleas from Paris district assemblies, the Constitution Committee ruled that payment for a National Guard uniform could act as a substitute for the tax requirement. In theory, then, someone who turned up to the primary assembly with a uniform and a receipt could not constitutionally be turned away – even though there was often no guarantee that they had really bought it themselves for the full price, since the uniforms were frequently bought second-hand, improvised from bits and pieces of other uniforms, or shared between multiple men. It was also possible to bypass the requirement for active citizens to carry out their duty in the Guard by paying someone else to do it for them, which only added another layer of bureaucracy to the process (Clifford, 2001, p. 368).

Of course, the French revolutionary state did not come out of nowhere, and there was existing bureaucratic knowledge on which it could draw. But these could create still more problems. The use of tax rolls dating from the ancien regime to assign active citizenship, for example, produced results that were hardly fair. Because per capita taxes had consistently been higher in rural areas, many more people in the latter were enfranchised: one village near Toulouse found 96% of its adult men enfranchised, whereas in Toulouse itself 60% of them were denied the vote (Sutherland, 2003, p. 83). These old figures could also throw up stark individual anomalies. Before 1789, all taxation in Toulon had been levied indirectly, which meant that every adult man officially paid enough in tax to qualify for active citizenship. In the event, fully 90% of the town’s adult male population received active citizenship. Nobles were also left in an ambiguous position, since none of them had paid any tax on the old rolls. Some communes, like Dijon, insisted on the letter of the law and denied them a vote on these grounds, although others were willing to be more flexible (Crook, 1996, pp. 42, 50). The French state simply did not have the bureaucratic capacity to produce reliable and useful knowledge about who should and should not qualify for citizenship rights, and its attempts to shift the burden onto lower levels of government and onto citizens themselves contributed to widespread effective disenfranchisement, often for political reasons that could be at odds with its own intentions.

#Defining Citizenship from Below

This paper began by discussing the ways in which the state sought to use citizenship to remould the French people. But it is important to avoid the impression that the citizenry was an inert mass that the revolutionary state beat into shape with disciplinary practices. The state’s own investment in active citizenship as a safeguard for its future, and the opportunities opened up by its bureaucratic incapacities, gave ordinary French people some power to shape citizenship for themselves.

In citizenship studies in recent years, there has been growing focus on ‘practice-based’ citizenship, which goes beyond the strict legal and constitutional characteristics of citizenship to study the ways in which the status comes to be bound up in particular activities and relationships (Fortier, 2016, p. 1039). The French Revolution was certainly a time in which citizenship was defined by practices as much as, if not more than, by law (Clifford, 2001, p. 365).12 By acting like ‘citizens’, or indeed acting like ‘non-citizens’, ordinary people could produce their own version of citizenship. These practices should be regarded as a kind of knowledge production in their own right.

In the previous section, we painted a picture of the sheer weight and complexity of the bureaucratic demands imposed by the citizenship regime in the early Revolution. It should not surprise us, then, that amid all this confusion, many potential active citizens chose not to exercise their rights. In Paris, it seems that only around half of those who qualified for active citizenship even enrolled. According to Malcolm Crook (1996, pp. 51–58), national turnout in the 1791 elections to the Legislative Assembly was probably between 20 and 25%. Patrice Gueniffey (1989, p. 576; 1993, pp. 191–92) likewise finds plunging turnout in these years: in 1791 just 800 of the 1600 prospective citizens in the Luxembourg section were even inscribed on voter lists, and fewer than 400 participated in the elections. Without doubt, this was partly because many people could not or were not inclined to prove their qualifications to vote.

However, Gueniffey also finds that turnout did not rise after the abolition of the status of passive citizen, when the process of registering theoretically became much easier. This suggests that there was another reason for abstention. Crook thinks this reason was disillusionment with the course the Revolution had taken, particularly popular fury over the Civil Constitution of the Church. Those who opposed the course that the Revolution was taking could express their discontent by refusing to engage in the political process and, in doing so, indicate their disinclination to be considered citizens of revolutionary France. This became sufficiently common that in 1792 Pierre-Joseph Cambon felt obliged to warn the Assembly that because ‘there are many people who boast of not wanting to be active citizens’, threatening to withhold political rights could no longer be considered an effective criminal penalty (Archives parlementaires, 1879, vol. 47, p. 283).13 Turning down the opportunity to vote became a proxy for refusing the very title of citizen, and with it the revolutionary order itself.

At the same time, some passive citizens did the opposite and exploited the mayhem to slip through the cracks and claim a vote. They included the youthful Louis Antoine Léon Saint-Just, who voted in 1790 and 1791 despite being below the voting age because of the carelessness of the municipal clerk tasked with assessing his application for enrolment. It was a risky business for the primary assemblies, given the provision that the whole election could be annulled if a passive citizen were found to have voted, but in many cases they were simply unable to prevent them: in the first municipal elections at Gouy-sous-Belloune, the procès-verbal recorded mournfully that ‘all non-active citizens were anxious to attend and cast their votes with the other inhabitants and there was no way of stopping them’ (Crook, 1996, p. 49). Having taken such care to delineate the boundaries of the political nation, the revolutionary state now found that it simply lacked the bureaucratic wherewithal to police them. Worse was to come. In the summer of 1792, a number of Paris primary assemblies invited passive citizens to join their deliberations, in defiance of constitutional law. With this action, the passive citizens of the capital effectively claimed citizenship for themselves, and in doing so they moved the dial at the national level: soon afterwards the status of male ‘passive citizen’ would be abolished (Sewell, 1987, p. 113). Passive citizens had exploited the loopholes in the emergent citizenship regime to adopt citizenship practices for themselves and thereby lay claim to being full citizens. This was a way in which ordinary people could produce their own, often highly consequential, knowledge about the nature of citizenship, in opposition to that produced by the state.

Not that all such efforts by marginalised people to lay claim to enfranchisement were successful. Perhaps the most telling example of this was the tug of war that developed between the Assembly and women’s political clubs over the title of ‘citoyenne’. After the introduction of universal male suffrage in 1792, as William Sewell (1987, pp. 114–17) points out, ‘citoyenne’ became a contradiction in terms: ‘citoyen’ implied a dynamic force that took an active part in the sovereign power, whereas the feminine ending ‘-enne’ was associated with passivity and obedience. Involuntarily, then, in referring to women as ‘citoyennes’, revolutionaries seemed to recognise them as active members of the sovereign and participants in sovereign power. Women took advantage of this by attending political societies and forming their own, the Société des citoyennes républicaines révolutionnaires, which was instrumental in the purge of the Girondins. However, these citizenship practices proved less decisive than those of the male passive citizens. From October 1793 the Convention cracked down on the women’s societies and issued a definitive rejection of the idea that women should enjoy political rights. Notably, this statement did not use the term ‘citoyenne’ anywhere, referring to its subjects instead by the more self-consciously neutral ‘women’ (femmes).

In sum, the ‘technology’ of citizenship proved to be a double-edged sword. While the state sought to use it to ‘subjectivate’ individuals in a way that would make them useful to the nation, ordinary people, especially those disenfranchised by the state’s own conception of citizenship, could exploit the ambiguities created by this new citizenship regime to assert their own visions of what citizenship should mean. From this arose forms of citizenship defined from below, some of which, in 1792, managed to vanquish the official conception of citizenship.

#Conclusion

For elite French revolutionaries, the technology of citizenship served to fix and legitimate the boundaries of political participation, and also to instil the people with a sense of what it meant to be a ‘good’ member of the civic community. Yet the weak bureaucratic capacity of the state prevented it from fulfilling this end: it simply proved impossible to produce the kind and weight of knowledge that would be needed to maintain this citizenship regime. The gaps that resulted gave ordinary people space to offer their own definition of a ‘citizen’, one often in conflict with that of the Assembly. We live in an age in which peoples around the world have risen up to demand the right to call themselves ‘citizens’: it is therefore worth our while to think about how this term has been used historically in the contest between those who govern and those who are governed.