Gender, the Secular, and the Image of the Marianne in the French Revolution

Abstract

She represented the virtues so desired by the new order: the transcendence of localism, superstition, and particularity in the name of a more disciplined and universalistic worship. She belonged to no group, to no particular place. She was the antithesis of those “ridiculous usages, gothic formulas, absurd and puerile etiquette, and the right usurped by the clergy,” which radicals had already denounced in 1790.