Little wonder that these reformers regarded the revolutionary family as both touchstone and taboo.

As in so many other arenas, the French Revolution left behind bitterly contested questions. But it had also created a dynamic repertoire of political practices, legal innovations, and potent ideologies of liberty, equality, and self-fashioning. The Revolution had made it impossible to remake state and citizenship without also debating and reshaping gender dynamics, the meaning of intimacy, and the rights of individual women and men.

Suzanne Desan, The Family on Trial in Revolutionary France, (University of California Press, 2004), 318.