Godwin must have been transposing something of what he witnessed in 1796 to 1793. No matter; it has the ring of absolute truth about it.
Mary boasted of her freedom from formal marriage ties to Ruth Barlow; but in her heart she regarded her relationship with Imlay as involving ‘sacred’ principles and emotions.6 The same Mary who had written off Rousseau's adulteries so breezily, excusing them on the grounds of his wife's negative character, could not imagine that her lover might treat her in the same way without the same justification. Women who have gone to great lengths to raise themselves above the ordinary level of their sex are likely to believe, for a while at any rate, that they will be loved the more ardently and faithfully for their pains.
‘I slept at St Germain's, in the very room (if you have not forgot) in which you pressed me very tenderly to your heart,’ she wrote to Imlay later. Perhaps it was in an hotel room on the left bank she first allowed herself the happiness of those ‘sensations that are almost too sacred to be alluded to’.7 The use of the word sacred is charming: lacking a religious sanction, the relationship took on a holy nature of its own.
But if her private dream was beginning to seem the most important thing in the world, the course of the Revolution still determined much of what happened to her and Imlay. On 30 May the streets of Paris filled with soldiers once again, the tocsin began to ring and the Girondins, no longer able to fight off their accusers, went into hiding, fled, or stayed to be arrested. Paine's letters to Danton and Marat, begging them to try and stem the ‘mania for denouncing’ and suggesting that the Convention might move out of Paris, did no good at all. Madame Roland visited the Convention, dramatically veiled and clothed in black, to see what was happening. Her husband and child were in the country, but she made no effort to join them, and on 1 June she was arrested.
The Convention had moved the guillotine to the Place de la Révolution, beside the Tuileries gardens; the trees were in leaf, not yet whitened by the summer dust of the city. The Fillietazes were now anxious to shut up their house and leave town, and Mary, helpless and perhaps unwilling to witness more in Paris for the moment, decided to do likewise. She was offered the use of a small house at Neuilly, not far beyond the new Longchamps toll-gate. The northwest has always been the prettiest way out of Paris; Neuilly then was a tiny country village; the Bois de Boulogne, a wild tangle of trees, stretched away to meet more belts of forest around St Cloud and Versailles. The house lent to Mary stood in a garden, and an old gardener acted as part-host and part-servant. He took a fatherly interest in her, and warned her against going into the woods of an evening on account of the robberies and murders that were supposed to take place. She took no notice and one day walked as far as the palace of Versailles itself, wandering alone through the empty rooms and vast gardens. Like most visitors she found the place slightly eerie, a deserted stage awaiting its actors; but she encountered no ghosts.
All through June, July and August Imlay visited his mistress at Neuilly, and they enjoyed a delicious secret happiness. The old gardener brought Mary grapes when she entertained; he also made her bed for her, she told Godwin innocently when she recalled this time. She and Gilbert had a lovers' joke about the toll-gate through which he had to pass every time he came to see her: la barriére was its French name, and Mary was to call her baby ‘the barrier girl’ and Imlay's good moods his ‘barrier-face’.
The three months provided a honeymoon for which she had prepared with years of curiosity, expectation, disappointed hopes and - probably - fantasies of ideal happiness. From the way in which she had spoken of other couples in her earlier letters she obviously envied their experience, and from her way of writing afterwards it is clear that she was intensely happy with Gilbert, so happy indeed that it became almost impossible for her to write him off later when she should have done. If you believe, as she did, that love derives first of all from a mental and spiritual sympathy, it becomes very difficult to acknowledge to yourself that you have been wrong in your estimate of your partner. Mary could not say to herself that although Gilbert was physically attractive and delightful to her, he was not really very clever, congenial or interesting once the excitement of hearing his stock of ideas and experiences was complete. He had to be idealized into a worthy recipient for her love.
The pressure of circumstances helped her to do this for a while. Cut off from most of her friends, living alone in a hidden spot in a foreign country and suffering the strain of hearing frightening accounts of what was happening in Paris, the temptation to adore and cling to him was even greater than it would have been otherwise. In any case, a woman brought up as Mary had been would have found it difficult not to be serious about her feelings. She knew that depravity could exist in women, but found it hard to believe that it might be enjoyable, or that she might be capable of anything like it herself; and it certainly never occurred to her that what she felt for Gilbert was the simplest of physical yearnings.
For him too the pleasure was considerable at first: there was a feeling of triumph about transforming a clever and strong-willed woman who did not normally suffer fools gladly into a creature eager, dependent and trembling. Even the most cynical of men may be touched by effecting a change of this kind; it is a powerful form of flattery, the sensation that in procuring his own pleasure he is doing a supreme favour too. Mary, charming and loving and deferential, with her serious plans for the future, probably did for a while win him over to a genuine disposition to regard her as his ‘best friend and wife’. Only the role of wife was to be docile, not imperious; to await love eagerly, not to attempt to command it; and Mary, though tender, was not meek. Charming as their stolen meetings were, she began to long to live with him permanently.
Soon there was a reason for insisting on setting up house together. Mary must have considered the possibility that she might become pregnant, even though she may have regarded her age as a certain protection. But in August she did conceive her first child. When she began to suspect it might be so, she refused to stay in Neuilly and moved determinedly back to Paris. The idyll had not lasted long.
[13]
La Liberté des Femmes
WHILST Mary remained at Neuilly, life inside the gates of Paris took on the inconsequence of a feverish dream. Festivities and arrests succeeded one another faster and faster. By day there might be parades under the brilliant sky (it was a hot summer), doves released in the air to symbolize freedom, fleurs-de-lys ceremonially burned, fountains in the form of breasts gushing republican nourishment; by night the police tramped, rapped on suspect doors and searched from cellar to attic for the republic's enemies. There were repas républicains for enthusiasts who liked to picnic in the streets, and the theatre did huge business. Other gatherings took place at the foot of the guillotine. It was as though adrenalin were pumping fear and excitement through the bloodstream of the entire city, its clubs and committees, its packed prisons, the Convention chamber, the very streets in which each house now bore the required inscription: Liberté, Égalité, République Une et Indivisible.
In June Robespierre proposed that all foreigners should be expelled from France in the interests of this indivisibilité: the idea was obviously impractical, but things grew nastier for foreign businessmen who did not know how to efface themselves or lacked connections with the new men in power. Both Christie and Stone were denounced.1 Imlay must have had his anxious moments too. The collapse of the Louisiana plan had left him dependent on what he could pick up through commercial dealings. As an American he was at least less suspect than the British, and it may have been now that he began to be useful to Christie; early in August the whole Christie family was arrested and imprisoned, and though they were released after a few days, Thomas was scared and took them all off to Geneva. Stone felt secure enough to remain in the rue Jacob, and Helen Williams continued to brave it out too, but more and more of their French friends escaped if they could, Madame de Genlis amongst them.
On 24 June the new constitution was proclaimed, a hur
riedly revised version of the one Condorcet and Paine had worked on so painstakingly together. It lacked the balances and safeguards they had devised, and Condorcet at once protested; he was denounced, police were sent to arrest him at his summer house in Auteuil, and he just had time to escape into Paris, though it was generally assumed that he had managed to make his way to safety abroad.
The proscription of Condorcet meant the end of any publicly proclaimed support for feminism in France. A few days after his disappearance, Charlotte Corday dealt it a further blow by stabbing Marat to death. She was hoping to produce a reaction in favour of the Girondins by this piece of heroism (she had been brought up on the works of her ancestor Corneille), but the effect of the killing was the exact reverse of what she had intended, and it also gave impetus to the anti-feminism that already existed amongst the Jacobin deputies and sans-culotte journalists. Now that one woman had appeared as an assassin, they could claim that this was the logical outcome of allowing any woman to leave their proper sphere between cradle and pot-au-feu, and meddle in the affairs of men. Charlotte was sent precipitately to the guillotine, and the news sheet Répertoire du Tribunal révolutionnaire printed the following account of her:
Cette femme, qu'on a dite forte jolie, n'était point jolie; c'était une virago plus charnue que fraîche, sans grâce, malpropre, comme le sont presque tous les philosophes et beaux esprits femelles. Sa figure était dure, insolente, érysipelateuse et sanguine. De l'embonpoint, de la jeunesse et une évidence fameuse: voilà de quoi être belle dans un interrogatoire. Au surplus, cette remarque serait inutile, sans cette observation généralement vraie, que toute femme jolie et qui se complaît à l'être tient à la vie et craint la mort.
Charlotte Corday avait vingt-cinq ans; c'est être, dans nos mœurs, presque vieille fille, et surtout avec un maintien homasse et une stature garçonierre… Sa tête était farcie de livres de toute espèce; elle a déclaré, ou plutôt elle avouait, avec une affectation qui tenait de la ridicule, qu'elle avait tout lu… cette femme s'était jetée absolument hors de son sexe; quand le nature l'y rappelait, elle n'éprouvait que dégoût et ennui; l'amour sentimental et ses. douces émotions n'approchent plus du cœur de la femme qui a de la prétention au savoir, au bel esprit, à l'esprit fort, à la politique des nations, qui a la manie philosophique et qui brule de se mettre en evidence. Les hommes bien pensants et aimables n'aiment pas les femmes de cette espèce; alors celles-ci s'efforcent de parvenir à mépriser le sexe qui les méprise; elle prennent leur dédain pour du caractère, leur dépit pour de la force, et leurs goûts, leurs habitudes ne tardent point a dégénérer en extravagance et en licence prétendue philosophique.*
The course of the feminist movement in France during the Revolution was confused and, though it began hopefully enough, tragic in its outcome. Much of the theoretical discussion of women's rights had come from men initially, in their capacity as legislators. Even apart from Condorcet, the early work of the Comité de législation had been inspired by a wish to give women equality before the law. The patriarchal family, emblem of the monarchical system, was to be recast, and women were to have the same property rights as men, and an equal voice in family matters. There was talk of their ‘natural’ rights being restored to them, from men such as Danton, Desmoulins and Couthon as well as Condorcet.3
Amongst the women themselves feminist activities had taken place outside any official framework.4 Early in 1790 a Dutch baroness, Etta d'Aelders, who had come to Paris to report on conditions to her government, became an enthusiast for various aspects of the Revolution. She addressed a mixed debating club (the Cercle social, in which Condorcet and Bancal were both active) on the subject of women's rights, and though her French was halting her sentiments were applauded. In July 1791 she published an Appel aux françaises sur la régénération des mœurs et nécessité de l'influence des femmes dans un gouvernement, suggesting that clubs for women should be established in each section of Paris, and a system of correspondence set in motion between all the Parisian clubs and such provincial clubs as were already in existence.*
The initial aim of all these clubs seems to have been to offer services to the community rather than exert political pressure. Hospital inspection, school supervision, the making of bandages for the army and the organization of welfare projects (such as the protection of young girls newly arrived in cities) all suggest the sort of non-political activities that bourgeois women traditionally go in for when their men depart for the wars. They were supporting, not demanding; responding to a crisis, not aggravating it by asking for more education or political power. There are indications however that some of them felt they might be rewarded when times grew easier again. Etta d'Aelders's idea of correspondence amongst the clubs suggests that she may have been thinking of forming a pressure group; and in September 1791 the Dijon club also suggested that all eighty-three départements of France should organize similar societies so that they could collectively play a real part in the events of the post-emergency period when it arrived. But of course they did not achieve any of this. It would have been a marvel if they had: their failure can be compared with that of the (masculine) English corresponding societies in the face of persecution.
At first the women's clubs were not disapproved by the authorities. True, a rumble of anti-feminist protest was heard after the publication in September 1791 of the Déclaration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne, modelled on the declaration of the Rights of Man, by a pamphleteer called Olympe de Gouges: there is more to be told of her in a moment. A paper called Révolution de Paris took the opportunity to state its view that:
La liberté civile et politique est, pour ainsi dire, inutile aux femmes et par conséquent doit leur être étrangère. Destinées à passer toute leur vie renfermées sous le toit paternel, ou dans la maison maritale, nées pour une dépendance perpétuelle depuis le premier instant de leur existence jusqu'à celui de leur trépas, elles n'ont été douées que de vertus privées… Une femme n'est bien, n'est à sa place que dans sa famille ou dans son ménage. De tout ce qui se passe hors de chez elle, elle ne doit savoir que ce que ses parents ou son mari jugent à propos de lui apprendre.*
But this was not the official view; in the spring of 1792, about the time the Vindication appeared in French, both Etta d'Aelders and Olympe de Gouges were given the opportunity of addressing the Assemblée. Olympe spoke on a political matter unconnected with feminism, and the Baroness asked for divorce laws, equal educational opportunities and the same majority age for both sexes. During this same spring the Jacobin club gave an admiring reception to a notorious young woman called Théroigne de Méricourt who had decided to lend her support to the Revolution. She was attractive, and had a flair for publicizing herself; her lovers had made her rich, and now she took to going about Paris in a riding habit and making speeches to other women:
It is time at last that women should throw aside their shameful inactivity in which ignorance, pride, and the injustice of men have kept them for so long. Let us return to the times when our mothers, the Gauls and proud Germans, spoke in the public Assemblies, and fought beside their husbands.6
For a while things did indeed seem to move in the right direction. In September 1792 the age of marriage without parental consent was lowered from thirty to twenty-one for both sexes, and the divorce laws that interested Mary so much were passed.*
The Convention even seems to have planned to appoint women as civil servants; in June 1793 there was a woman amongst the employees of the Comité de salut public, according to Michelet. Lanjuinais, a Girondin deputy, gave his backing for the granting of civil rights to women once their education had been raised to the level of men's. Another conventionnel, Silvain Codet, proposed in the Comité d'instruction publique that girls should be educated to take up farming, banking, business and teaching.7
But the majority of the deputies were too busy with more pressing matters to devote much thought to feminist ideas, and by 1793 some who had been a little shamefaced about opposing
part of an ideal philosophical programme were beginning to find ammunition for their belief that it was dangerous to encourage women to participate in public life. Madame Roland was an easy target, Charlotte Corday another; there were also much rougher ones to contend with. The Société des républicaines révolutionnaires, a Parisian women's club of the extreme left, began to patrol the streets clad in red and white striped trousers and bits of military uniform, seeking entry to the Convention and the Jacobin club. In the latter they were at first well received, and the names of the citoyennes Lacombe, Lecointre and Léon are all in its minutes, but soon their unruliness made them generally unpopular. They attacked, physically, anyone they did not like the look of, and frightened a good many people, including Mary.*
The citoyennes certainly dealt a blow to the cause of their own sex, helping to build up male resistance to any idea of women's rights and giving pause even to better-educated women (a pattern that repeats itself in feminism whenever there is unruly behaviour from its adherents). Probably most men did want women to remain as they had always seemed, peaceful embodiments of continuity, during the period of confusion and rapid change they were living through. In the provinces as well as Paris, attacks on women's clubs and the behaviour of women in mixed clubs revealed some of the anxieties of the men: women were accused of talking too much, of immoral behaviour, of getting themselves up like actresses and (a really basic threat) of putting pins on the chair of the club president a man.8
The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft Page 18
