The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft

by Claire Tomalin

  Apart from Miss Wollstonecraft I have made the acquaintance of Mr Christie, a clever Scotsman… His wife and sister are with him; their manner, unlike that of most Englishwomen, is pleasant and affable. The sister in particular is graceful and gay, intelligent and well educated… Christie has invited me to spend the evenings at his house whenever I wish and I confess I find it refreshing to be among English people and enjoy their quiet love of freedom rather than the exaggerated fanaticism that is current here. Warm feelings and cool thinking are the attribute of these happy people, while with most Frenchmen the heart is ice and only the head glows.14

  Forster coached Jane Christie in French, and her brother suggested he might consider learning the printing trade and settle in England later. It became quite clear to Forster that Christie was trying to make a match between him and Jane, and though he liked her very much he had absolutely no wish to marry her; quite apart from her engagement, he was already married himself and deeply devoted to his wife.

  Christie may have heard that Mrs Forster was living with another man in Forster's absence, and assumed there would be a divorce; but in fact his letters to his faithless wife express his love and understanding and his hope that he might be reunited with her and her lover and children. A gentle and brilliant man, he saw none of his hopes fulfilled, but died suddenly the following winter in Paris; had illness not carried him off, he would almost certainly have gone to the guillotine.*

  Jane did indeed jilt her French officer after a time, not for Forster but for another foreign philanthropist with better prospects, Gustav von Schlabrendorf, a Swede. He was not married; and he became a close friend and admirer of Mary's too. It is possible that she met him through the Schweitzers, to whom Fuseli must have given her an introduction; Johann Carl Schweitzer was a Swiss banker with an unbankerly enthusiasm for the Revolution and his wife Madeleine was Fuseli's old flame, Maddy. Mary and Maddy eyed one another with interest and sympathy, tinged in Maddy's case with a certain amount of malice, since they had both burned their wings at the same candle. Still, they became good friends and Herr Schweitzer always regarded Mary with the greatest respect; it was said that he had been seriously annoyed by his wife's flirtation with Fuseli, so he may have been prepared to listen sympathetically to Mary's troubles, of which she seems to have made no secret. After her death he wrote some lines to Fuseli accusing him of hardheartedness:

  Ich meld es zum Elysium

  Wollstonecraft und Lavatern, es sei

  Das hart'ste Erz zu deinem Bild – dein Hertz! *15

  It seems unlikely that sexual and marital complications were any commoner at this period than at all others, but there was at least a sudden outburst of candour about them in Paris that Mary had not come across before. In her world it had been understood that the aristocracy and the lowest classes indulged themselves in vices of all sorts, but the middle classes professed on the whole to support strict virtue. Mary's Dissenting friends insisted on the importance of chastity for both sexes, and even in freethinking France, Manon Roland's bourgeois self-respect would not allow her to follow her own sexual inclinations. But now for a while there was a definite movement to release sexuality from its Christian straitjacket: nuns and priests were urged to marry on the grounds of the unhealthiness of celibacy; unmarried mothers were to be assisted and not shamed, and divorce, as we have seen, easily and sensibly arranged, whether by mutual consent or unilateral demand. In Paris, though not in the rest of the country, it flourished.16

  Diderot's attack on traditional Christian attitudes to sexual behaviour in his Supplément au voyage de Bougainville suggested an approach to sex involving nothing but simple enjoyment; the value of chastity and the institution of marriage were both brought into question by the philosopher. Diderot's fable confronted a flustered missionary with some cheerful South Sea Islanders who pressed their daughters on him and were grievously insulted by his attempts to fend them off. Since the act itself is both natural and pleasurable, why should it not be enjoyed without regard to other considerations? asked Diderot. And since children are a blessing to society, why should society not love them all, asking no questions about their parentage, and rearing them in common?*

  Diderot's attitude to children and society in the Supplément was very close to the one Godwin was working out in Political Justice, with the difference that the Englishman, reared in the Dissenting tradition, could not dissociate sexual pleasure from guilt as Diderot could. Godwin tried to deal with it by suggesting that the human race might outgrow the need for sex altogether as things improved. Mary had also adopted a largely censorious attitude to sexual activity in the Vindication; but in France she began to learn an attitude closer to Diderot's. Von Schlabrendorf reported an exchange between her and a Frenchwoman who boasted of her complete lack of sexual desire: ‘Pour moi, je n'ai pas de tempérament’ (tempérameant libido or sexual appetite). To which Mary answered at once, ‘Tant pis pour vous, madame, c'est un défaut de la nature.’17 This no longer sounds like the author of the Vindication. Under the combined pressures of a different intellectual approach and the flagrant examples of so many of her friends, that severe and somewhat innocent lady was disappearing.

  Important as this particular change of attitude was to Mary, she was living through a frightening political crisis which still absorbed most of her attention. At the end of December came the news of Paine's sentence in the English courts; he was outlawed. This was not much of a surprise or worry, but reports that the people of England were now burning him in effigy were more alarming. There was some talk of burning Miss Wollstonecraft too, according to Eliza, but the project was put aside, in her county at any rate, with a ‘Damn all politics’ from her stout neighbours.18

  The next blow to the expatriates was the passing of the death sentence upon Louis XVI. Paine tried his utmost to persuade his French friends to vote for mercy, but was hampered by his ignorance of the language. Miss Williams also did her best with her political friends. Thomas Muir, the Scots radical on a sedition charge, skipped his bail in order to come to Paris to plead for Louis's life but, arriving a day too late – the execution took place on 21 January – returned sorrowfully and honourably home to face his trial, only stopping at Dublin on the way to visit the United Irishmen. And now Frost also decided to leave; the fire went out of the dinners and Monro, the government spy, decided there was little point in remaining on the wrong side of the channel. He went home too.

  Only Barlow the irrepressible greeted the guillotining with a verse of his own composition, intended to be sung to the tune of God Save the King:

  Fame, let thy trumpet sound

  Tell all the world around -

  How Capet fell.*

  And when great George's poll

  Shall in the basket roll

  Let mercy then control

  The Guillotine.19

  For an avowed opponent of capital punishment, this was less than tactful; it was also the clearest possible indication that he had thrown in his lot irrevocably with the French. His Ruthy was still in London, patiently awaiting a summons and listening to Johnson's warnings that her husband's pamphlets were making no money. She complained that she had been pointedly dropped on her husband's account, and that Burke was denouncing him sarcastically as ‘the prophet Joel’.20 Soon she would pack her bags too and join him; they were never to return to England.

  Mary did not spend all her time with her fellow-expatriates. According to Godwin, she knew ‘the majority’ of the French leaders and as she had crossed the channel with the intention of writing about the political scene for the English public she made an effort to understand it. France had been a republic since September, ruled by the National Convention, a body of deputies elected by what was called universal suffrage, though in fact it excluded all women, and most men were reluctant to vote, since the ballot was not secret.* There were no such things as political parties in the English sense, and loyalties in the Convention shifted from issue to issue and week to week in a manne
r that confused contemporaries and still confuses posterity. But by the winter of 1792 two loosely formed groups had emerged and were increasingly opposed, each trying to bring about the downfall of the other. The Montagne was accused of aiming at dictatorial powers, the Girondins (or Brissotins) of conspiring with the king and the monarchists.†

  The Montagne was prepared to adopt ruthless tactics in order to ‘safeguard’ the Revolution; they were the men with the glowing heads and hearts of ice noted by Forster. Robespierre emerged gradually as their leader; Mary detested him. Her friends were mostly amongst the Girondins; we have Godwin's authority for her intimacy with Madame Roland, whose salon was a meeting place for many of them; her husband remained a minister until the end of January 1793. French historians of this century have dealt harshly with the Girondins and preferred to extol Robespierre for his economic policies and his singlemindedness, but Mary, during her brief acquaintance with them, found the Girondins congenial and admired them for their idealism and courage. The majority of them came from backgrounds similar to her own; they were the same generation (few of them were over forty), lawyers and writers for the most part, believers in religious toleration, sympathetic towards women's advancement, deeply concerned with social questions. If they were inclined to political romanticism and susceptible to the pleasures offered by the salons of Paris, these were things she could sympathize with easily enough. They vacillated, but they did not murder; they failed to control the mob, but did not use its worst instincts to serve their ends.

  Paine, Christie and Helen Williams were all in a position to introduce Mary amongst the Girondins. They included Brissot, the best known, who had made his way from an obscure background (he was a pastrycook's son) as a radical pamphleteer; he had tried to organize resistance to the despotic government of France from abroad during the Eighties and been imprisoned and released through the efforts of Madame de Genlis, one of whose protégées he married. He was prominent in the anti-slavery movement, and this had brought him into contact with Condorcet, whom he revered, saying: The most durable monument to our Revolution is philosophy. The patriot par excellence is a philosopher.’21 Condorcet and Brissot were often allies in the Convention.

  Another of this circle was the lawyer Pétion, who became Mayor of Paris, a childhood friend of Brissot; he and his wife were particularly friendly with Helen Williams. Other lawyers were Gensonné, Guadet, Vergniaud, the great orator from Bordeaux, Lanjuinais from Brittany, Buzot, and the young Barbaroux from Marseilles who denounced Robespierre and Marat with particular ferocity. Louvet was another writer who had been a bookseller's clerk.

  As a group they were anglophile; it was their intellectual heritage from the philosophes – Voltaire, d'Alembert, Rousseau had all helped to create this admiration for England and its institutions – but it was one of the things that was held against them by the Montagne, with its passion for closing the French ranks against the outside world: La Révolution, Une et Indivisible. Paine, though officially American, was suspect to Robespierre because he advocated the plan of a federal republic for France, on American lines, and he was influential with the Girondins. Two of Paine's close friends, who spoke English well and translated his speeches and writing for him, were also of Madame Roland's inner circle: the doctor François Lanthenas,* and Bancal des Issarts, a brave and thoughtful man but an ineffectual politician. Most of his colleagues objected to the death penalty in theory, but he was almost alone in voting against the execution of the king on these grounds. Bancal had published a book called Le Nouvel Ordre social in which he set forth his ideas about the state's obligation to provide work and sustenance for all its subjects; he had known Christie and Catherine Macaulay as well as Paine in London in 1791, and he was also close to Condorcet. His ideas were certainly congenial to Mary.

  This group probably made up her chief acquaintances, but she managed to meet some obscurer figures too. François-Noël Babeuf, a young surveyor from Picardy who arrived in Paris in January 1793 (he was on the run from a prison sentence for a Robin-Hood-style fraud), had written a book advocating common ownership of land and other measures to raise the countryside above its present misery; he found a job in Paris as a civil servant, working in food distribution, and began to see the problems of urban misery too. He is chiefly remembered for his later ‘conspiracy of equals’ in 1796, an unsuccessful plot inspired by communistic ideals which led to his execution; but clearly he made a great impression on Mary in person long before that. She said that 'She had never seen anyone of greater ability or strength of character’ than Babeuf.* They seem to have indulged in some utopian dreaming together, foreseeing the disappearance of urban life and the spread of small farms and villages all over the land; it was a prospect that appealed to Bancal too.22

  While the Girondins were still in the ascendant, during the winter of 1792–3, the Convention was occupied with organizing armies to face the increasing threats of foreign invasion, trying the king and pursuing its internecine strife. It was also at work on something more directly interesting to Mary, no less than an attempt to re-create the whole fabric of French civil life. Committees of various kinds were set up, their task to examine existing institutions and propose reforms. Paine was at work on the constitution with Condorcet. The legal committee was preparing the machinery to break the power of the patriarchal family and give a much greater degree of independence to wives and children. The education committee, on which Condorcet and Bancal both served, was also very active, and this body invited Mary to present a paper. She was working on it in December and January, but in the end it was not delivered.23 The declining influence of those who had invited her contribution, and the ascendancy of the chauvinist and (one might add) male chauvinist Montagne, prevented it.

  On the matter of women's rights the Gironde was markedly more progressive than the Montagne: if no one else went as far as Condorcet, and Madame Roland rejected the idea of equality in theory, in practice she was too obvious an example of ability in her sex to be ignored. Women with feminist ideas tended to associate themselves with the Gironde; the divorce laws were enacted during their period in power, and as late as the spring of 1793 Lanjuinais spoke in the Convention about the possibility of granting civil rights to women once their education had caught up with that of men.24 But the Jacobins and the sans-culotte journalists waged a ferocious war on the role and pretensions of the women connected with the Gironde.*

  The friendship between Mary and Manon Roland can have lasted only a few months, but must have given both women cause to think furiously. Manon had spent her life in conscious devotion to the duties of daughter, wife and mother, opposed to any idea of emancipation for women. She had published nothing, and her power had come to her almost by chance, through her husband, but by the time she met Mary she was deeply dissatisfied and resentful of that husband, and her insistence on mixing political and personal considerations was helping to bring his cause to grief. She was a woman who subscribed to the idea that her sex should find its fulfilment entirely through service to others, but in practice she was unable to contain herself within such a framework.

  She came, like Mary, from a modest background. She was born Manon Phlipon, her father being a Parisian engraver with a workshop full of apprentices; but, as the single surviving child of her parents, endowed with beauty and precocious intelligence, she was encouraged to enjoy life to the full and allowed in particular to read what she liked. She became a worshipper of Rosseau, formed a passionate attachment to a convent school friend, and lost her faith discreetly. She suffered agonies when her mother died and her father took a mistress he felt he could not introduce to his daughter. Manon disguised herself and called on the woman to size her up, then retired to a lodging in a convent, continuing to visit her father once a week to make sure his darning was properly done. Her self-control was as great as her ability to project herself into dramatic roles: perfect daughter, perfect friend, perfect wife.

  She was attractive enough to subjugate many men and th
oughtful enough to ask herself how she could use this particular power, but she never came up with any very satisfactory answer. Marriage should mean the total subordination of wife to husband, she said, but she also wrote to her confidante: ‘Qu'il est triste de se dire: Je connais assez les hommes pour ne plus pouvoir les estimer beaucoup désor-mais.’25 She was in a classic dilemma, wanting to adore a higher species but face to face with creatures who struck her as dismally unsatisfactory. When she was twenty-six she married Roland, whom she had known for some years, in a spirit of filial respect (and possibly to get away from her convent lodging); and whatever her principles, in practice her marriage took on the aspect of a remodelling of Roland in the mould required by Manon. She seems constantly to have imagined how much better she would have handled things if she had been the man in any given situation. In her Memoirs she speaks of the pain and disappointment of her wedding night not once but twice, adding for good measure that it was not due to any lack of sensuality on her own part: ‘Je doute que jamais personne ne fut plus faite pour la volupté et l'ait moins goûtée.’ (The revelation was spared to Roland, who was dead by the time the Memoirs appeared, though not at the time they were written.)