For her–as for Robespierre, Marat and many other revolutionaries–one of the defining characteristics of the ancien régime’s immorality was its domination by women. As the historian Dorinda Outram observes, ‘to the degree that power in the Old Regime was ascribed to women, that meant that the discourse of the Revolution was committed to anti-feminine rhetoric’. The revolution became a crusading instead of a destructive force: it would replace the unnatural world of boudoir politics with virtue–government by men alone, whose intrinsic qualities (so the argument went) made them the natural
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