It isn’t easy to dig into the little details of everyday life of people living more than 200 years ago, but Kellogg Faculty Fellow and Associate Professor of History Katie Jarvis has dedicated many years to uncovering the mechanisms of nascent democratic community and citizenship in revolutionary France.
“You have to wade through archive boxes and look at nearly-impossible-to-read handwriting by people that didn't learn how to write well because they didn't have a position that required writing before the French Revolution,” says the sociocultural historian who has looked through hundreds of confessional manuals, pastoral letters, justice of the peace records and more. “It’s a glacial pace. You have to move mountains of archival material, and it requires a large commitment of time, but it also brings to light things that are impossible to get at otherwise.”
Reimagining Citizenship in the Marketplace
Published in 2019, her first book Politics in the Marketplace: Work, Gender, and Citizenship in Revolutionary France, integrates politics, economics, and gender to show how Parisian market women invented notions of citizenship through their everyday trade. Winner of the 2020 Louis Gottschalk Prize and Finalist for the Berkshire Conference First Book Award, the book’s French translation published in 2023, and soon after Jarvis was honored with an invitation to present her work in 2024 at Université Paris 1 – Panthéon-Sorbonne's doctoral seminar on "Femmes et Hommes en Révolution" at the Institut d'Histoire de la Révolution française.
“One of the big narratives is that, starting in the French Revolution, citizenship was coded as masculine, and that no other idea of citizenship could exist from a gendered perspective,” says Jarvis. “This book challenges that idea by showing how these market women, called Dames des Halles, shaped democracy and capitalism at this time.”
Forgiveness as a Democratic Practice
Her current book project, “Democratizing Forgiveness in Revolutionary France,” explores how the revolutionaries refashioned forgiveness through economic, judicial, gendered, and cultural venues. Last year she spent time in Paris digging through archives and presenting her research at Colloque Citoyennes sans citoyenneté and The Global Consortium for French Historical Studies.
“The Revolution is the moment when the power to pardon is redistributed,” says Jarvis. “The Pope is kind of losing his grip on the Church in France, so I ask how does this power to repair social conflict get re-diffused in new institutions in the Revolution, and how is that new approach to resolving interpersonal tensions really crucial to how we think through democratic relationships, in which you assume that society is not totally combative, but at some level fraternal, cooperative?”
New Institutions, New Ways of Living Together
This book project is unique in that it looks at the democratization of social repair in different areas – religious practice and law – two areas that aren’t typically paired together in research. On one hand Jarvis looks at this “democratization of forgiveness” where people were electing priests for the first time. On the other hand, she looks at the justice of the peace, which was new during the Revolution and allowed French citizens of any class to approach a judge to solve any type of dispute.
“The legitimacy for holding the office of parish priests now comes from below, and the priest was thought of and labeled as a civil servant,” says Jarvis. “In the 18th century you're only allowed to confess to your parish priest, which means that parish priests know all the conflict in all of the village, so they become a really important motor of social repair – the priest could actually delay absolution until you work through conflicts with the people you've wronged.”
The justice of the peace also helped everyday people resolve conflicts and even developed new types of credit among individuals.
“For the first time in history, instead of people just owing each other large sums of money for longer and longer periods of time, the justice of the peace allowed people to collect smaller sums, so you start to see retail credit, as distinct from personal loans,” says Jarvis. “We didn’t know this was happening before this research. Usually, we think about bankers and big merchants as the people controlling the credit systems, but we can actually see from how people are using the justice of the peace that they're actually managing their neighborly relationships in a non-confrontational way, while retailers are using the justice of the peace to pursue consumer debts more quickly and aggressively..”
Research with Global Impact – and Student Collaboration
After last year’s presentation at the Colloque Citoyennes sans citoyenneté, Jarvis was invited to write a chapter about archival research in a book tentatively titled Citoyennes sans citoyenneté. And the Journal of Modern History just published her article “How Parisians Transformed Popular Credit at the Revolutionary Justice of the Peace: A Hidden Groundwork of Nineteenth-Century Capitalism in France” in June.
In addition to providing research grants for her 2024 and 2025 trips to Paris, Kellogg has supported Jarvis throughout her research.
“I received interdisciplinary feedback from other scholars – what resonates with them, what doesn't resonate with them. I had some really interesting conversations about transitional justice, for example,” says Jarvis, who has also served on Kellogg’s Graduate Awards and Grants Committee and worked as an advisor in the International Scholars Program and the Kellogg Developing Researchers Program.
“It has been a pleasure to work with terrific undergrads through Kellogg and I frequently refer my own students to their programs,” says Jarvis. “I worked with Alix Basden for three years as part of the International Scholars Program. She helped me on my current book, working on things like searching databases, collecting/annotating digitized sources and reformatting footnotes. She also used her concentration in international economics to teach me how to make compelling visuals for my economic data. In fact, she helped me create the charts in my Journal of Modern History article that appeared in June.”
Finding Democracy in Everyday Life
For Jarvis, the slow work of moving through archive boxes, deciphering difficult handwriting, and piecing together scattered records is worth it for what those materials reveal: a fuller picture of how ordinary people shaped democratic life.
“What I show in my work is that we don't subdivide our daily life – you don't subdivide your work from your family, from your beliefs, right? So, if we can think holistically about all these things, and really investigate them within the communal setting, then we can understand how people process, incorporate, and affect notions of democratic community, citizenship, and participation,” says Jarvis.
In the small claims, confessions, debts, disputes, and acts of repair she uncovers, Jarvis finds evidence that democracy was not only built through laws and institutions. It was also practiced in marketplaces, churches, courtrooms, and neighborhoods – wherever people worked out what it meant to live together as equal citizens.
“I want to make sure we see these people not just as recipients of the law, recipients of sacraments,” says Jarvis, “but rather see them as actors and shapers of these things.”
The Kellogg Institute, part of the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame, is a leading center for interdisciplinary research dedicated to understanding, strengthening, and renewing democracy worldwide.