This post is a part of the 2023 Selected Papers of the Consortium on the Revolutionary Era, which were edited and compiled by members of the CRE’s board alongside editors at Age of Revolutions.
By William S. Cormack
When Tom Sosnowski asked me to act as commentator for this session, I was honoured to accept. Susan Conner was not just a friend. Although our research interests were very different, she was a mentor to me. I first met her in the summer of 1988 at the Archives Nationales in Paris. I was a lonely and nervous graduate student when Susan took me under her wing. She introduced me to other people working in Paris, but she also reassured me that I could do archival research. Happily, we kept in touch and, in the years that followed, she gave me valuable advice on completing my dissertation, on conferences, and on making an academic career. The three papers today demonstrate that Susan Conner was an outstanding scholar. She was also one of the kindest and most generous people I have ever known.
Susan Conner received her PhD from Florida State University in 1977 and her dissertation was entitled, “Laure Permon Junot, Duchesse d’Abrantès, 1784-1838.” As Tom Sosnowski’s discussion makes clear, Conner’s dissertation went beyond the biography of a fascinating woman to shed light on larger social, cultural, and political themes of a period that stretched from the end of the Old Regime into the July Monarchy. Madame Junot was a prolific author whose publications include eighteen volumes of memoirs. Sosnowski points out, however, that Conner used these memoirs critically and only in conjunction with archival evidence. This is an important observation. With links to the Bonaparte family even before her marriage to French army officer Jean-Andoche Junot in 1800, Mme Junot’s life was shaped by the Napoleonic Wars. She travelled to Portugal twice with her husband, first when he was made Napoleon’s ambassador to Lisbon and then when Junot was a commander under Massena. Conner’s dissertation examines her observations of the Peninsular War’s brutal realities. While her husband was military governor of Paris, Madame Junot’s salon was at the center of elite society in the capital. Among the regular attendees was Metternich, the Austrian diplomat and statesman who would shape European politics after the Restoration. Disillusioned with Junot as a husband, even before his estrangement from Napoleon in 1812 and his death in 1813, she pursued her own life. Conner viewed Madame Junot as a feminist, Sosnowski tells us, because of her efforts to establish her own career as a female writer in a male-dominated world. She published not only memoirs, but histories, novels, and essays that reflected the themes of Romanticism. It is in the dissertation’s examination of Madame Junot’s challenges as a widow, her struggles with debt, and her final sad descent into indigence, however, that we glimpse the next phase of Connor’s scholarship. Sosnowski’s reference to the addition of a stone marker to Madame Junot’s pauper’s burial place two years after her death reminds me of Susan’s visits to the Cemetery of Montmartre to lay flowers on her grave.
After completing her PhD, Susan Conner’s research shifted to marginalized women in revolutionary Paris, specifically prostitutes or “femmes publiques.” Rozzy Hooper-Hamersley’s paper surveys this scholarship and Conner’s emphasis on these women’s individual agency. Male authority denied women the exercise of power, limited their possibilities, and relegated them to gendered and controlled spaces. Within this context, Conner’s research demonstrated that prostitution played a significant role in the 18th and 19th-century urban economy and provided work for thousands of women who otherwise would have depended on public relief. Conner argued, as Hooper-Hamersley explains, that prostitution was an economic choice for women. The Old Regime regarded prostitution as a manifestation of licentiousness and sin. This perception began to change during the French Revolution. Although the Jacobins were reluctant to see prostitution as compatible with a Republic of Virtue (more on this later), popular militants in Paris came to see it as practical solution to an economic problem. Rather than condemning it, the Sans-Culottes began to regulate sex work and monitor hygiene. This trend continued through the Napoleonic Empire into the 19th century when the French state tolerated but closely policed prostitution. Public policy on prostitution ignored the voices or economic interests of these women and Conner argued that this continued in 20th-century debates between those favouring regulation of the sex trade and those seeking to abolish it. In her clear overview of key themes and arguments, Hooper-Hamersley points out that Conner overcame the difficulty of locating sources relevant to the experience of marginalized women and found evidence on the “marketplace of prostitution” in the police archives. I would like to give this even more emphasis. While many historians of the French Revolution turned increasingly to theory, Conner’s work was grounded in archival research, and she remained a careful empiricist.
If the first two papers provide summaries and analyses of Susan Conner’s research, the third paper is a piece of original research inspired by her interpretations. Corinne Gressang examines the meaning of “virtue” for both prostitutes and members of female religious orders during the French Revolution. Given that the Jacobins defined masculine virtue in terms of civic devotion and military service, Gressang asks how they regarded the ideals of feminine virtue associated with the convent: celibacy, prayer, Christian morality? In his speech on “The Principles of Political Morality” delivered on 5 February 1794, Robespierre justified Terror as the means necessary to establish a perfect democratic society: the Republic of Virtue. In that speech, he also defined female virtue as giving birth to and raising good citizens. Susan Conner argued that there was no room in this definition for poor women who chose prostitution and that it left femmes publiques“functionally outside the law,” neither protected nor permitted. Gressang argues that this was also the case for Catholic sisters and nuns, and she identifies parallels between revolutionary virtue’s impact on prostitutes and on religious women. Revolutionary authorities violated the privacy of both categories of women, subjecting prostitutes to inspections for venereal disease and removing nuns from their cloistered existence. Like prostitution, Gressang explains that the convent also represented a practical solution to economic problems. Since the Jacobins viewed any deviation from the model of the virtuous wife and mother as a threat to the state, revolutionary laws sought to control female sexuality. This applied to both prostitutes and nuns. Conner suggested that few femmes publiques faced severe punishment for “encouraging libertinage, “reflecting their ambiguity in the revolutionary order, and similarly Gressang argues that few of the sisters and nuns executed for counter-revolutionary sentiments or public disobedience were truly “martyrs of faith.” In laying out these parallels, Gressang presents a clear argument about the relationship between religious women and revolutionary virtue based on impressive archival research. I look forward to her future conference presentations and publications on this promising topic.
In conclusion, these three papers provide a fitting tribute to the quality and influence of Susan Conner’s scholarship. Tom Sosnowski introduced us to her PhD dissertation which, in its rich exploration of the social, political, and cultural world of Madame Junot, deserves a wider audience. Rozzy Hooper-Hamersley gave us an overview of her important research on the femmes publiques of revolutionary Paris and how it restored economic agency to these women. Finally, the fact that Corinne Gressang’s own research on the impact of revolutionary virtue on nuns and Catholic sisters was inspired and shaped by her work suggests the continuing legacy of the Susan Conner we knew and loved.
William S. Cormack is a Professor of History at the University of Guelph. He obtained his Ph.D. in History from Queen’s University in 1992. His fields of interest include impact of the French Revolution on France’s Caribbean colonies, especially in the Lesser Antilles, as well as the history of the French Navy during the Revolutionary period and French provincial politics during the Revolution.
Title Image: Portrait of Laure Junot, duchesse d’Abrantès, half-length, seated, looking to right, hands folded on lap, her dark hair curled and in an updo, wearing gown with bow at neck, and fastened with broad belt. 1836. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
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