[Peine de mort pour tout citoyen surpris en fausse patrouille ou déguisé en femme] Decret n° 1341 de la convention nationale du 7 août 1793

Marseille edition of decree no. 1341 of the National Convention. Decree no. 1395 was added by hand, written in ink on the third page.

Bifolium printed on the first two pages and manuscript on the third page, lightly browned and creased at the margins, minute losses without affecting the text.

A curious decree, situated both within the climate of political suspicion of the summer of 1793 and within a longer history of the repression of cross-dressing that runs, in unequal forms depending on sex, through two centuries of French law.

Decree no. 1341 of the National Convention prohibited, on the one hand, "fausse patrouille" (false patrol) - that is, the usurpation of a public law-enforcement function - and, on the other, the offence of a man being caught disguised as a woman within a gathering, both offences being punishable by death. This severity reflects the climate of heightened surveillance that took hold as the Committee of Public Safety rose to power: from the spring of 1793 onward, the Convention multiplied surveillance committees and exceptional laws, in a context in which the young Republic felt threatened by enemies both foreign and domestic.

The repression of cross-dressing was not a new phenomenon: under the Ancien Régime, it was already punishable by death, deemed harmful to public order and morals. This prohibition, however, appears to have lost its legal basis amid the legal upheavals of 1789-1791, which abolished privileges and much of the old regulatory apparatus without immediately substituting a complete penal code. The decree of August 7, 1793 thus seems less a continuation of an unbroken tradition than a reactivation, in the context of revolutionary suspicion, of a prohibition that had fallen into disuse since the beginning of the Revolution.

The choice to target specifically the disguise as a woman, rather than other forms of social impersonation (ecclesiastical dress, uniform, the costume of another estate), appears to answer several distinct logics. On the one hand, the usurpation of an official or professional dress already fell under other legal categories, whereas crossing the boundary of sex corresponded to no existing offence. On the other hand, since women escaped military conscription and much of the police surveillance weighing on suspect men, disguising oneself as a woman offered a practical means of moving about or blending into a crowd without arousing the same suspicion.

This anxiety takes on particular significance when related to the October Days of 1789: the women's march on Versailles, a founding episode of the Revolution, gave rise to a rumour - echoed by part of the historiography of the period - that men had mingled with the procession in women's clothing. More than a mere transposed memory, this rumour betrays a refusal: the refusal to admit that so decisive a movement could have been led by women alone, and thus to grant a gathering of women its own capacity for action and danger. By systematically making the danger of a crowd of women contingent on the supposed presence of disguised men, the social imagination of the Revolution thus seems to deny, rather than commemorate, the properly feminine origin of its own founding narrative - and the decree of 1793, in legislating precisely on this scenario, might be read as the legal inscription of that denial.

The decree of August 7 concerning male cross-dressing is soon followed by a new law addressing both sexes. As Sylvie Steinberg notes in La confusion des sexes : le travestissement de la Renaissance à la Révolution (pp. 265-266), a decree of the Convention issued on October 29, 1793 forbade anyone from compelling a citizen, male or female, to wear a particular form of dress. Applied following a conflict between the Société des citoyennes républicaines révolutionnaires and the market-women of Les Halles over the imposed wearing of the Phrygian cap, it indirectly reaffirmed the prohibition of cross-dressing - for freedom of dress had to remain strictly within the norms proper to one's own sex.

"No person, of either sex, shall compel any citizen, male or female, to dress in a particular manner; each is free to wear such clothing and adornment of his or her own sex as he or she sees fit, under penalty of being regarded and treated as suspect, and prosecuted as a disturber of the public peace."

Nonetheless, a new measure shows a more lenient attitude toward female cross-dressing: the ordinance of the Prefect of Police Dubois of the 16th of Brumaire Year IX (November 7, 1800), made any woman wishing to wear trousers subject to prefectural authorisation. What had, for men, amounted to a capital offence enshrined in the exceptional justice of the Terror became, for women, a mere administrative formality  - but an extraordinarily durable one: never formally repealed, it was only recognised as implicitly obsolete by the Ministère des Droits des femmes in January 2013. The 1793 decree concerning men, by contrast, appears to have ceased to be applied with the end of the Terror, without any specific repealing text having been identified.

Male cross-dressing returned to the forefront of repression in the twentieth century, but this time linked directly to the policing of homosexuality: a ministerial circular of the Liberation extended, throughout Paris, the ban on "travesti" cabaret performances, and the law of July 30, 1960 classifying homosexuality as a "social scourge" belongs to the same climate, male cross-dressing being then perceived as a pathological symptom rather than a political offence.

On the third page of the bifolium is inscribed in ink the text of decree no. 1395, dated August 8, 1793, abolishing all academies and literary societies chartered or endowed by the Nation. The royal academies had already been weakened by the decree of 27 November 1792, which forbade them from filling the places of deceased academicians, with the sole exception of the Académie des sciences. A replacement structure, this one republican, could only be created in 1795. The Constitution of Year III laid down the principle of a National Institute of Sciences and Arts, divided into three classes but forming a single whole, intended to embody the intellectual order and political ideal of the Republic.

A remarkable testimony to the summer of 1793, in which the suspicion of the nascent Terror toward disguised bodies converges with a longer and more uneven history than it might appear - that of the policing of gender in France.