This book views Jacques-Louis David's pre-Revolutionary Oath of the Horatii as the realization
of political and cultural gender struggle and goes back to antiquity and to Pierre Corneille's
seventeenth-century play Horace to trace major antecedents of David's work. The play begins
with Livy's account of gender strife in the Roman family of the Horatians. As Horace returns
from battle against Alba he is bitterly reproached by his sister Camille for slaying her Alban
fiancé. Outraged Horace kills her and is subsequently tried by the Roman state and freed.
Corneille's 1640 version of the tale Horace appeared during the regency of Queen Anne of
Austria a time that favored the emergence of proto-feminist literature. Written in this
atmosphere Camille plays a powerful role: she thunderously denounces war and state power. Alas
this pro-woman ambiance did not last. As eighteenth-century France's sense of moral crisis rose
gender relations became more embattled. The greater presence of women in society evoked a
reaction toward gender separation as medical theorists circumscribed women's «nature» within
sexual and maternal roles. As hysteria and the vapors became common female afflictions
Enlightenment philosophes puzzled over the paradox of women's condition. The conflict over
«effeminate» rococo and «masculine» neo-classical art illustrates these tensions. David's
milieu embraced a severer Roman less feminocentric aesthetic. His preparatory sketches for The
Oath exhibit hesitation as to how to frame his version of the story but his final work
diminishes women's stature not only in the myth but for the revolutionary generation's
conceptualization of the republic. The work's huge impact reinforced a gender history in which
women's place in the modern state was decisively relegated to its margins.
