During the spring and summer of 1792, delegates from the forty-eight neighborhoods of Paris created a popular congress made up of men and women who discussed matters ranging from local administration to how to shape a new state. Taking participatory democracy seriously, they organized garbage collection and formed police battalions. Later, as fears of invasion intensified, they generated surveillance committees. They pondered local, regional, and national need, and relayed their opinions to the successive legislatures: the Constituent Assembly, the Legislative Assembly, and finally the National Convention, which declared a republic in late September 1792. Whole families, their boarders, and women inside and outside their clubs participated in the nightly debates in the local general assemblies, spreading the news, partly derived from hearsay and rumor, partly from radical newspapers and pamphlets written and published by radical journalists.
In 1793, as anxiety about imminent foreign invasions and counter-revolutionary activity increased, the need for security also led to repression of dissent. On one hand, the clubs and general assemblies in the local districts continued to meet, but fear of subversion increasingly made reasoned argument and honest disputes more difficult to pursue. Women, who ranged from those who took in washing to those who did piecework at home, to servants who lived on their own, to skilled workers, teachers, and midwives, joined in the discussions in cheap cafes. There, for the price of one drink, they could argue about the news as reported in the radical press and effectively join in commentary about the articles that were read aloud.
Radical women like the actress Louise Lacombe and the chocolate maker Pauline Leon pursued an even more innovative course. In 1793, they organized the single-sex Society of Revolutionary Republican Women and welcomed working-class women to join in.
Under the pressures of the revolution, many of those in the Society of Revolutionary Republican Women became increasingly violent in their rhetoric and denounced anyone who opposed them. Their list of enemies ranged from the market women of Les Halles, who had helped lead the street action that succeeded in launching the revolution, to the increasingly hated Girondin Party, made up of largely middle-class representatives, whose alleged moderation seemed to threaten the republic. When Girondin supporter Charlotte Corday assassinated the radical journalist Jean-Paul Marat in July 1793, many of the fears of the radical women were realized, and they increasingly called for tighter security and suppression of moderates, including the Girondins.
Helping to drive the Girondins from power, the Society of Revolutionary Republican Women, the working-class washerwomen whose livelihoods were constantly under the threat of rising soap prices, and numerous poor women who endured the fluctuating price of bread continued to make extra-parliamentary claims on politicians. Aching to make their ideas known, women from the Society joined municipal government meetings during the day and clubs and societies at night in 1793. And, as the central government cracked down on popular meetings and limited assemblies to twice a month, the local people reorganized as clubs, causing at least one woman to remark that they would have been "very aggravated if we had to miss the popular assembly even just once. At least there we improve our knowledge."7 When, in October 1793, women were excluded from belonging to the clubs, they participated from the sidelines. For the next two years, as
The Society of Revolutionary Republican Women, one of the more radical of the many political clubs and associations that functioned during the French Revolution, was unique in that it was open exclusively to women. Although its members were committed to maintaining order in their own proceedings, they often verbally attacked less radical delegates to the National Convention, and acted as vigilantes against anybody they thought was hoarding supplies or price gouging. Musee de la Ville de Paris, Musee Carnavalet, Paris. Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY
most assemblies were suppressed, these clubs were the only popular political centers to remain open. Without any certified political rights, seamstresses and unemployed women, washerwomen, and women peddlers moved around from meeting to meeting, exercising their rights to create a popular democracy that existed only when they practiced it.
The American and French Revolutions, with all their faults and shortcomings, raised the possibilities for wider participation in democratic decision-making, a potential that was not lost on people in Latin America. In Brazil, which represents fully half the land area of the continent, democratic aspirations emerged before and after the revolutions in the United States and France. Enhanced by Free Masons and guild-like confradias, associations dedicated to the worship of special saints and madonnas, artisans of different races organized to gain more power over their daily lives through democratic political transformations. Two uprisings demonstrate desires for widespread democratic changes: The Mining Conspiracy (or Inconfidencia Mineira) of 1788 and 1789 in Vila Rica de Ouro Preto, in Minas Gerais northwest of Rio de Janeiro, and the 1798 Tailors' Conspiracy, led by mulattos or mixed-race people in the northeastern city of Salvador do Bahia. Though very different, each of these programs for change point to a political theory in formation, some elements referring to improving economic conditions and others to interpretations of freedom. In Minas Gerais in 1788 and 1789, a group came together through various friendship networks and possible social ties. It was made up of local businessmen, mine operators, a soldier passed over for promotion, a poet and intellectual, several priests, some landowners, and a group of tax collectors who could not afford to pay the revenues for which they were responsible. They hatched a plan known as "the Conspiracy of the Province of Minas Gerais" to create a democratic republic in their home region. Some of the conspirators, including the priests, were influenced by their extremely liberal educations at the University of Coimbra in Portugal. They seemingly wanted to create a democratic country divided into municipal assemblies and a national legislative body that would share authority with a head of state who would hold office for only one year. They must have imagined threats from other regions or from the Portuguese government itself since the revolutionaries planned to form a national militia for protection.8 Their rather moderate demands were for a university, since none existed in Brazil, and a legislature made up of local male leaders familiar with local economic and social conditions in the country. But they never really grappled with what such a regional government would mean for the nation as a whole.
In the late seventeenth century, massive gold reserves had been discovered in the Brazilian province of Minas Gerais, close to the mountainous town of Vila Rica de Ouro Preto. The gold first appeared as dust in the rivers and then as veins in mining shafts that from the late seventeenth to the mid-eighteenth centuries yielded a huge proportion of the gold reserves appropriated by European governments. The Portuguese, who dominated the slave trade and had already brought huge numbers of slaves to the sugar plantations of northeastern Brazil, transported more Africans, largely from the Portuguese colony of Angola, to work in the mines. Seeking slaves of short stature who could allegedly stand up in the low mining shafts, the mine owners—knowing the relative ease of importing more slaves—literally worked the miners to death. Although the rich veins lasted only for half a century or so, the mines created financial fortunes for their owners and delivered twenty percent of the wealth of the Portuguese Crown. But as profits declined in the mid-eighteenth century, the Marques de Pombal, prime minister of Portugal, attributed declining revenues to recalcitrant taxpayers and demanded a fixed tax rather than a percentage of production. This threatened the financial survival of many of the businessmen who were deeply in debt. Seeking greater revenues, Pombal confiscated church tithes, leaving churches, the poor, and even the clergy destitute. The poverty and insecurity of the church may be one reason several priests decided to join the plot. At the last moment, the Crown cancelled the tax and averted the uprising. But just before this occurred, one of the conspirators denounced the poet, various businessmen, and several priests. The alferes or second lieutenant Joaquim Jose da Silva Xavier, a career soldier and part-time dentist, known as Tiradentes (or tooth-puller), was the poorest of the conspirators, and he ultimately took responsibility for the scheme. Often passed over for promotion because he lacked family connections, his ties to elite co-conspirators seems to have had less to do with social aspirations than with hopes for creating a more comprehensive political system that would unite