Olympe de Gouges’s trial and the affective politics of denaturalization in France

Article 25 of the French civil code grants the state the possibility to deprive French citizens of their nationality, unless denaturalization results in making them stateless. This article contends that the contemporary politics of denaturalization reactivates an affective principle of control and exclusion already at play from the French Revolution, when citizenship became, for the first time, a decisive category in the new national juridical and political system. More specifically, the article explores the case of Olympe de Gouges’s trial in 1793, where the Revolutionary Court’s interpretation of ‘love for the patrie’ distinctively shaped the limits of citizenship. Based on the idea that ‘love for the patrie and for the truth’ demarcated between friends and foes, the Court’s verdict established the meaning of ‘love for the patrie’ as the requirement of consent, and specified that affective interpretive practices were to be considered a juridical political means of inclusion and exclusion.