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Marilyn Yalom
Blood Sisters
The French Revolution in Women's Memory
London 1995
Stron xii+308; format: 13x21 cm
13 czarno-białych ilustracji
Książka jest używana: bez defektów, stan bardzo dobry minus.
Blood Sisters finally restores to history the voices of the women who witnessed the French Revolution. They left us an invaluable legacy - some eighty accounts of what they saw and experienced. From the sixteen-page testimonial of the Widow Bault, wife of the concierge in Marie-Antoinette's prison, to the ten-volume memoirs of the prolific writer Mme de Genlis, their stories describe how they participated, individually and collectively, in the revolutionary saga, and how they sometimes succeeded in manipulating a political system designed to exclude them. The memoirists of Blood Sisters portray themselves as active participants cheering the Revolution on its course or, more frequently, resisting it.
Marilyn Yalom singles out those who authored the most unforgettable chronicles: the governess of the royal children; the servant attending Marie-Antoinette in her last days; Robespierre's sister, Charlotte; the peasant woman from the Vendee who fought as a soldier; and, of course, Mme Roland, whose autobiography has enchanted readers for centuries. Aristocrats and bourgeois women, royalists and republicans, even the few peasant and working-class women who left accounts of their experiences, all were bound together by a common nightmare. Their writings eloquently attest to the human costs of radical social change.
Marilyn Yalom is a senior scholar at the Institute for Women and Gender at Stanford University. She is the author of Maternity, Mortality, and the Literature of Madness and Le Temps des Orages; Aristocrates, Bourgeoises, et Paysannes Racontent. In 1992, she was decorated by the French government as an Officier des Palmes Académiques.
CONTENTS
Preface ix
1 Introduction: Memory and Memoirs 1
2 The Year 1789, in Women's Words 15
3 The Fall of the Royal Family: Witnessed by the Duchesse de Tourzel 35
4 The King and the Queen in the Face of Death: Witnessed by Madame Royale and
Rosalie Lamorliere 57
5 The Republic Vindicated and Violated: Starring Madame Roland 75
6 The Other Robespierre 99
7 The Widow Le Bas 115
8 Germaine de Stael's Considerations of the French Revolution 133
9 Plights and Ploys in the Provinces: Madame Vallon and Alexandrine des Echerolles 165
10 The Women of the Vendee 191
11 Exile: London, St. Petersburg, and Upstate New York 209
12 Reflections, Personal and Political 237
Notes 245
Annotated Bibliography of French Women's Eyewitness Accounts of the Revolution 267
Index 299
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