Page 11 - E-MAGAZINE

France. But the allies failed to take advantage of French disunity,
and by the autumn of 1793 the republican regime had defeated
most of the internal rebellions and halted the allied advance into
France itself.

This stalemate ended in the summer of 1794 with dramatic French
victories. The French defeated the allied army at the Battle of
Fleurus, leading to a full Allied withdrawal from the Austrian
Netherlands. They pushed the allies to the east bank of the Rhine,
allowing France, by the beginning of 1795, to conquer the Dutch
Republic itself. The House of Orange was expelled and replaced by
the Batavian Republic, a French satellite state. These victories led to

the collapse of the anti-French coalition. Prussia, having effectively
abandoned the coalition in the fall of 1794, made peace with
revolutionary France at Basel in April 1795, and soon thereafter Spain
also made peace with France. Britain and Austria were the only
major powers to remain at war with France.

Historians since the late 20th century have debated how women
shared in the French Revolution and what long-term impact it had
on French women. Women had no political rights in pre-
Revolutionary France; they were considered "passive" citizens; forced
to rely on men to determine what was best for them. That changed
dramatically in theory as there seemingly were great advances in

feminism. Feminism emerged in Paris as part of a broad demand for
social and political reform. The women demanded equality for
women and then moved on to a demand for the end of male
domination. Their chief vehicle for agitation were pamphlets and
women's clubs; for example, a small group called the Cercle Social
(Social Circle) campaigned for women's rights, noting that "the laws
favor men at the expense of women, because everywhere power is
in your hands. However, in October 1793, the country's all-male

legislative body voted to

ban all women's clubs. The movement was crushed. Devance
explains the decision in terms of the emphasis on masculinity in a
wartime situation, Marie Antoinette's bad reputation for feminine
interference in state affairs, and traditional male supremacy A