The Citoyenne Tallien: Women, Politics, and Portraiture during the French Revolution

Portraiture dominated visual culture in France after 1789 because it addressed the central challenge of the Revolution: how to turn subjects into citizens. Women, however, were rarely included in Revolutionary definitions of citizenship. Jean-Louis Laneuville's 1796 portrait of Theresia Cabarrus, better known as Mme Tallien, negotiates female subjectivity and political participation in radically new ways, inserting its sitter into debates about the place of women in the new republic. The ambitions and failures of Cabarrus's likeness speak to the ambitions and failures of French portraiture after 1789.