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France: Women in the Revolution

Open access digital resources are listed here. Resources specific to individuals may be cross listed in Key Figures in the Revolution.

Digital Resources

Walter Montgomery, author. Stories of the French Revolution. 1883. Library of Congress Digital Collections.

The digital resources listed in this guide are freely available to the public and require no academic affiliation. Material is continually being added to resources such as Internet Archive External and HathiTrust External. To find the full range of documents available it is highly recommended to try your own searches.

The subscription databases at the Library of Congress will have journal articles on this subject but the majority are onsite access only. In this guide, links to specific titles of primary and secondary sources are grouped together while links to academic institutions, libraries, digital libraries and museums are listed in the External Websites section of this guide. In some instances works by individual women are cross referenced on their profile pages: Key Figures in the Revolution.

Select images of Revolutionary Women and Satirical Images of the French Revolution are on separate pages in the guide. All images are publicly available to download and are held in the Prints and Photographs Reading Room of the Library of Congress. Digitized primary source images can be found by searching across all image collections at the Library of Congress and include hundreds of freely available photographs, illustrations and political cartoons. A search in the Library's Digital Collections can also bring up digitized books with lesser-known images hidden among the pages. For example, Stories of the French Revolution by Walter Montgomery (1893) is a short history, in English, of the French Revolution but it contains approximately 20 etchings chronicling the events discussed including the Women marching to Versailles, the King and Queen kneeling after the Flight to Varennes, and several tender acts of Marie Antoinette such as the image (right) "The Queen putting a red cap on her little son's head" in the face of an armed crowd of jeering onlookers. These images are not just nicely rendered illustrations, but also give some indication of the sympathies and points of view in the narration.