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The French Revolution promised to go along with a vast movement of female emancipation in establishing the place of women within a public sphere from which they had long been banned. The virulence of the parliamentary controversy about arming women was the result of a strategy of reassigning gender roles and of sexual discrimination in military activity. By law, if not de facto, it brushed aside for a long time the revolutionary citizens who took part in movements of popular insurrection and also on the battle fields. And yet the figure of the female fighter became a veritable obsession in the symbolic imagination, contributing to the perpetuation of a misogynous cultural unconscious. Stigmatization of the firebrand, intended to exhort the masses to cruelty, and the caricature of the virago, supposed to have appropriated the attributes of masculinity and grounded in an eroticization of a troubled gender confusion, testify to a prevailing fantasy: that of the inversion of power relations between men and women.