In eighteenth-century France a literary genre grew out of ridiculing and caricaturing women who sold fish at the market: le genre poissard.  The women’s speech, manners, and social class were targeted.  Fear and admiration of these women also played a role.  In 1640 the word poissarde was already a term of disdain.  By 1690 poissarde was used as an insult.  Poissard / poissarde then broadened to include sellers at the market other than these women and then even to anyone who had rough manners and speech.  A bit of respect with ulterior motives at times was extended to the “less coarse” market women when the term Dames des Halles became used more often instead.  Around the start of the French Revolution (1789), propaganda was built on the economic and political sway that these women had, as France was trying to operate with an ineffective monarchy and then without a monarch (click here for more about political usages of the term poissarde).

 

Instead of writing plays, songs, poems that mock women who sell fish at the market, why not create art that invites audiences to think about the work of fishing done by women and girls?  For example, when Saint-Pair-sur-Mer (Manche, Normandy) became a second home for the painter Eugénie Alexandrine Marie Salanson (1836-1912) in the 1880s, with Paris as her original base, she produced numerous well-regarded paintings that did not depict fisherwomen and fisher-girls in harmful ways.  Here are a few to consider:

 

At Low Tide (A marée basse). Page 228. Women Painters of the World, from the Time of Caterina Vigri, 1413-1463, to Rosa Bonheur and the Present Day (1905) by Walter Shaw Sparrow. Project Gutenberg. → https://www.gutenberg.org/files/39000/39000-h/images/illus155lr.jpg

 

 

 

Page 428. Dictionnaire Véron, ou mémorial de l’art et des artistes de mon temps / par Théodore Véron. 1881. Bibliothèque nationale de France. → https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k96900015/f850.item.r=Dictionnaire%20Véron

 

 

 

Pages 616-7. Catalogue général des reproductions inaltérables au charbon d’après les chefs-d’oeuvre de la peinture : dans les musées d’Europe, les galeries et collections particulières les plus remarquables. 1896. → https://www.google.com/books/edition/Catalogue_général_des_reproductions_in/BLSEAAAAIAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&bsq=Eug%C3%A9nie%20Salanson

 

 

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References & Suggested Reading

 

 

Jarvis, Katie L. Politics in the Marketplace: The Popular Activism and Cultural Representation of the Dames des Halles during the French Revolution. 2014. University of Wisconsin – Madison, PhD Dissertation.

 

– – – . Politics in the Marketplace: Work, Gender, and Citizenship in Revolutionary France. United Kingdom, Oxford UP, 2019.

 

Marion, Rene S. The Dames de la Halle: Community and Authority in Early Modern Paris. 1995. Johns Hopkins University, PhD Dissertation.

 

Moore, Alexander Parks. The Genre Poissard and the French Stage of the Eighteenth Century. New York: Institute of French Studies, 1935.