Heroic Hearts examines how young women in nineteenth-century France, authorized by a widespread cultural discourse that privileged individual authority over domesticity and marriage, sought to change the world. Jennifer J. Popiel offers a recuperative reading of sentimental authority, especially in its relationship to religious vocabulary. Heroic Hearts uncovers the ways sentimental appeals authorized women to trust themselves as modern actors for a project of cultural restoration. With their emphasis on sacrifice and heroism, these cultural currents offered liberatory potential.
Heroic Hearts examines not only general cultural currents but their adoption by particular women, each of whom was privileged with access to money and social influence. The words of three extraordinary women, Philippine Duchesne, Pauline Jaricot, and Zélie Martin, offer powerful testimony to their agency. These women’s rejection of “traditional” domesticity, believed to be a formative influence for their class, demonstrates how women understood the imperative to change the world outside of their natural families. Their writings, which demonstrate the appeal of sentimental virtue, show us how women’s public lives could exist not in opposition to prevailing religious and social ideals but because of them.
List of Illustrations
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Pastel Saints and Powerful Women
1. Shaping the Sentimental Order: Martyrdom, Marriage, and Catholic Heroism
2. Contesting Oppression: Love, Suffering, and Sentimental Literature
3. Seeing the Path to Heaven: Sentimental Virtue and Visual Culture
4. Preferring Jesus Christ to Any Man: Chastity, Sacrifice, and the Religious of the Sacred Heart
5. Changing the World: Pauline Jaricot, Social Reform, and the Power of the Heart
6. Becoming a Saint: Zélie Martin, Suffering, and Heroism in a Consumer Society
Conclusion: Roses, Elevators, and Modern Heroism
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Jennifer J. Popiel is an associate professor of history at Saint Louis University. She is the author of Rousseau’s Daughters: Domesticity, Education, and Autonomy in Modern France and a coauthor of Rousseau, Burke, and Revolution in France, 1791: Reacting to the Past, 2nd ed.
