The Virtuous Marketplace: Women and Men, Money and Politics in Paris, 1830–1870. By Victoria E. Thompson. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. Pp. viii, 229. $32.00.

Extract

Victoria Thompson's study of the French market begins with the Richard Terdiman's premise that societies faced with rapid change engage in “semiotic activity” (Discourse/Counter Discourse: The Theory and Practice of Symbolic Resistance in Nineteenth-Century France. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985). In other words, the tensions surrounding political, economic, and social upheaval send individuals scurrying to categorize and explain the new world confronting them. Certainly, the boom-and-bust economy of nineteenth-century France generated such anxieties. Interestingly, many of those fears focused on female sexuality, a topic that might seem remote from the debates over living wages for working-class men or the appearance of new credit mechanisms. The problem that interests Thompson is twofold. First, how did French society cope with the potentially destructive power of early capitalism, a power that could dissolve familial bonds and up-end social hierarchies? Second, how did new gender norms work within the new market framework? The French answer to both problems was the creation of a “virtuous marketplace,” one in which honor and self-control shaped men's economic practices, and in which distinct gender roles kept women a respectable distance from the temptations of material gain.