The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft

by Claire Tomalin

  In January 1793 an article in Révolution de Paris alleged that the women's clubs had become the bane of domestic happiness. A Madame Blandin-Demoulin of Dijon was so angered by this that she sat down and composed an answer, which the editor had the grace to print. It was thoughtful and articulate; she was a republican, and well-read, and she quoted Montesquieu and called on her countrymen to renounce despotism towards women, since no virtue could be expected of slaves. Some of her expressions suggest that she had been reading Wollstonecraft as well as Montesquieu.9

  Unfortunately her voice was an isolated one. It may have been she who had urged that the women's clubs should work together (in September 1791), but she was barred from leadership geographically: any provincial who wanted to make a real mark had to go to Paris. In Paris, the aristocratic and bourgeois women lacked the will (Madame Roland) or the stamina (Madame de Condorcet) to lead a feminist movement. Most of them also despised their social and intellectual inferiors. Madame de Staël believed in the rights of the exceptional individual but was quite uninterested in the condition of the majority. Madame de Genlis went so far as to ridicule the spectacle of women joining in debates at the Société fraternelle (a mixed club with a petty-bourgeois membership):

  Curiosity carried me once only to a public sitting of the Société fraternelle. As a scene it was odd, frightening and ridiculous. The women of the people spoke there, although they did not actually go up to the platform, but they frequently interrupted the speakers, and uttered long speeches from their places.10

  To Madame de Genlis the absurdity was self-evident; to us it suggests something more hopeful, a concern with public affairs and self-education to be encouraged rather than scorned. But the class rift was not to be bridged, and when royalist satirists linked the names of the great ladies of the revolution with the plebeian Olympe and Théroigne it probably exacerbated their dislike of the pretensions of all uneducated women. They were unable to reflect that each of them was struggling equally against a sense of confinement, and that society offered few forms of advancement to women beyond selling themselves in one way or another, so that it was scarcely surprising if some of the women who made feminist claims had started life at a lower social level than de Genlis or de Staël.

  Both Théroigne and Olympe showed a vehement desire to be taken seriously for their ideas and to escape from their pasts, but in both cases it proved too difficult in the long run, and the strain of leaving behind a way of life and a reputation wore them down. Olympe was reviled by royalist and sans-culotte press alike: ‘De quoi se mèle-t-elle? Qu'elle tricote plutôt des pantalons pour nos braves sans-culottes!’ or ‘Qu'on imagine, à la Convention, deux cents femmes de l'espèce d'Olympe de Gouges, assises à côté de l'évêque Fauchet…’11

  Well, we may ask, why not? Olympe's mixture of flamboyance and real courage might have made her a good politician, irritating and eccentric. Later militant feminists have shown similar traits and deployed them successfully.

  Olympe was born Marie Gouze in 1748. Her mother was a butcher's wife in the Midi; she believed her father was a marquis and resented his failure to acknowledge her or give her any inheritance. (This personal grievance gave her a particular interest in the treatment of illegitimate children, a much debated subject during the Revolution.) Olympe married young, a cook called Aubry, bore two children and then ran away to Paris to live by her wits. She found men to keep her, and though she was only semi-literate she began to dictate plays and pamphlets. Big, handsome, high-spirited and full of ideas, she was soon on quarrelling terms with the whole of the Comédie française.

  By 1789 Mirabeau had heard of her and complimented her on her pamphlets. She was indefatigable in composing appeals for good causes: the abolition of the slave trade, the setting up of public workshops for the unemployed, a national theatre for women. And she was not merely jumping on a revolutionary bandwagon; she prided herself with some justice on her individuality.

  By the time the Revolution was under way Olympe had saved enough money to print her pamphlets at her own expense and have her plays put on, if only to be hissed from the stage. She was established as a Parisian personality: she challenged people to duels, regretting that she was not a man to bloody more noses. Marat she loathed but had not a good word for Corday either. She had a rough wit: she invited Robespierre to go swimming with her in the Seine, both parties to wear weights on their feet. A republican until she saw the king in danger of his life, she then at once published a plea for him. This, and her general nuisance value, cost her her own head. ‘Le sang, même des coupables, souille éternellement les révolutions,’ she said; and ‘les échafauds, les bourreaux, seraient-ce donc là les résultats d'une révolution qui devait faire la gloire de la France, s'étendre indistinctement sur les deux sexes et servir de modèle à l'univers?’12

  Michelet credits Olympe with founding more than one women's club during 1790 and 1791, but what these clubs involved and who their members were is now quite obscure; they kept no surviving records of their activities and aims. Accounts of street processions led by Olympe sound depressing: the women were dressed up, girls in white, matrons in pink and widows in black – evidently even Olympe felt obliged to divide her own sex in terms of their relationship with men. What she wore herself is not stated. But both sexes were keen on fancy dress during the Revolution.

  Théroigne was also involved in founding a mixed club with Gilbert Romme, a Frenchman employed as tutor by a Russian prince who had travelled to Paris to enjoy the Revolution. Théroigne's club set about translating the Rights of Man declaration into the dialect of the Auvergne and, less interestingly, proposed to distribute civic crowns to the most patriotic members of the government; it seems to have had no serious political or feminist object, and did not last long. But later, after an episode in which she left Paris and was imprisoned by the Austrians, Théroigne returned full of ideas about women working as propagandists and being in charge of educational projects. In 1792 she sought to ally herself with the Girondins and was accused in the press of being one of a triumvirate of women – Théroigne, Roland and de Staël – who precipitated the break between the Gironde and the Montagne.

  Today Théroigne's energies might well have gone into public relations or fund-raising activities, relatively harmless and safe pursuits, but she was in a more dangerous business, and she was attacked by a band of citoyennes in the Tuileries gardens in June 1793. They stripped her and beat her about the head with large stones, with the intention (presumably) of establishing that they were the true revolutionaries whilst she was only lukewarm, like the Girondins. After this she began to suffer from headaches and then to show symptoms of derangement; in the autumn she was arrested and her brother pleaded madness to save her life. The rest of that life was spent in confinement in stone-flagged asylum cells, scratching about in her straw and pouring cold water over her feet. At first she would sometimes ask to be released, but then she became withdrawn. She was very rarely violent, and sometimes talked of the Revolution.*

  Olympe was already in prison by the time of the attack on Théroigne. She tried to escape the guillotine by pretending, at the age of forty-five, to be pregnant. Michelet could not resist a joke at her expense: ‘un ami lui aurait rendu, en pleurant, le triste office, dont il prévoyait l'inuti-lité’. Doctors declared it impossible to diagnose so early a pregnancy and the public prosecutor, Fouquier-Tinville, claimed that prison conditions ruled out the possibility, a startling assertion given the actual state of the prisons. In spite of this farcical atmosphere Olympe died bravely when the time came. Her adult son wrote a careful letter to the Convention dissociating himself from his disreputable mother.

  Both Olympe and Théroigne tend to be written off as something of a joke, allocated special little subsections in the history of the Revolution if they are mentioned at all, eulogized by the sentimental and scorned by the serious: unbalanced tarts who got above themselves and meddled with things they could neither understand nor cope with, and which
finally and dramatically proved their undoing. Around Théroigne especially legends gathered; imaginary (and erotic) portraits were painted by nineteenth-century artists, and Carlyle devoted some fine writing to her brown-locked, fluttering figure in the madhouse. What has been forgotten is their genuine and legitimate excitement over the prospect of contributing directly to the world of action and ideas, even though they were women, and women of doubtful repute.

  A streak of wildness and exhibitionism undoubtedly helped Théroigne to make a success as a grande cocotte in the first place; it also allowed her to speak well in public. But the description left by Mary's friend, the gentle and scrupulously observant Georg Forster, seems to be the best eyewitness account of her. It occurs in a letter to his wife, dated July 1793:

  Imagine a five or eight and twenty year old brown-haired maiden, with the most candid face, and features which were once beautiful, and are still partly so, and a simple steadfast character full of spirit and enthusiasm; particularly something gentle in eye and mouth. Her whole being is wrapped up in her love of liberty. She talked much about the Revolution; her opinions were without exception strikingly accurate and to the point. The ministry at Vienna she judged with a knowledge of facts which nothing but peculiar readiness of observation could have given.

  She speaks nothing but French, fluently and energetically, though not altogether correctly. But who speaks it correctly now? She has a strong thirst for instruction; says she wishes to go into the country and there study to supply the deficiencies of her education. She wishes for the company of a well-informed man, who can read and write well; and is ready to give him his board and two thousand livres a year. She is no more than a peasant girl, she said, but has a taste for learning.13

  Forster may have been the dupe of his own idealism, but there is a truthful ring to his account of Théroigne; she appears as a recognizable human being rather than the picturesque harpy of legend, and her story is the sadder for it.

  This sort of waste and abuse of talent and courage was calculated to interest Mary as well as Forster, but she remained entirely silent on the subject of Théroigne and indeed the whole feminist movement in France. It was not surprising that she found it confusing and dismaying. Probably she knew nothing of the provincial women's clubs, and she does not seem to have attended any of the reputable ones in Paris either. She hated violence and had no wish to see women in uniform or street gangs. Her most admired French woman friend, Manon Roland, had set herself against feminism. Corday's heroics probably appealed to Mary no more than the Répertoire's remarks. There was also the question of her own position as a pioneer of high-minded sexual freedom; she was extremely sensitive in drawing a distinction between this and the positions of the merely disreputable. The reputations of women such as Olympe and Théroigne must have made her hostile.* But most important of all, by the summer of 1793 she was in no position, as an enemy alien under suspicion, to rally to the support of any man, woman or cause in any way whatsoever. France was by then a place in which courageous gestures or utterances exacted their utmost price.

  A few absurdities were enacted in the later stages of the feminist struggle. In 1793 Chaumette, procureur of Paris and one of Condorcet's denouncers, was making a serious attempt to suppress prostitution on the grounds that it had become an unnecessary activity in regenerated France. Not surprisingly, he brought down the rage of large numbers of self-supporting women on his head and failed in his mission. And in July he made his police suppress a play called La Liberté des femmes, with the remark that it would more aptly have been named La Licence du vice.14

  In the same month Robespierre put forward a plan in the Convention which would have revolutionized the position of women as drastically as Plato's proposal in his Republic: he suggested setting up a system of state-run boarding schools for all children from the age of seven upwards, which would remove them entirely from the care of their parents. His aim appears to have been the formation of patriotic and virtuous citizens rather than the liberation of women, and it almost certainly looked to them as though he was threatening to deprive them of the very thing that made most of their lives most worthwhile. At all events, in the name of family happiness the men of the Convention threw out Robespierre's plan. It would be interesting to know whether there were any women at all who saw it as an opportunity rather than an affront, but the record is silent.

  Before the end of 1793 the feminist movement was crushed. Only Condorcet, hidden in an upstairs room near the Sorbonne, continued to write on the subject of equal education and equal rights for women until the very last days of his life. His wife Sophie, who remained at Auteuil working on a translation of Adam Smith, visited him when she could and urged him to get on with the book he had been planning, a historical demonstration of the theory of perfectibility; and though he grew increasingly panic-stricken at the thought of what might happen to Sophie and his daughter as well as himself, he did complete his Esquisse d'un tableau historique des progrés de l'esprit humain. It owed a good deal to the influence of Price and Priestley, and described history in terms of a struggle between those who seek to control others by keeping them in superstitious ignorance, and those who wish to enlighten and thus set free the whole of humanity, including women and the supposedly inferior races. Condorcet did not think future improvements would solve all difficulties. He said man could hope to become ‘only as happy as it is permitted him to be in the midst of sufferings, needs and losses, which are for him the necessary consequences of the general laws of the universe’. But both in the Esquisse and in another fragment in which he sketched a plan for an improved society, he reverted to the feminist cause. This is from the Esquisse:

  Parmi les progréss de l'espirit humain les plus importants pour le bonheur général, nous devons compter l'entière destruction des préjugés, qui ont établi entre les deux sexes, une inégalité de droits funeste à celui même qu'elle favorise. On chercherait en vain des motifs de la justifier, par les differences de leur organisation physique, par celle qu'on voudroit trouver dans la force de leur intelligence, dans leur sensibilité morale. Cette inégalité n'a eu d'autre origine que l'abus de la force, et c'est vaine-ment qu'on a essayé depuis, de l'excuser par des sophismes.15*

  In the Atlantide ou projet de l'établissement d'une société perpétuelle pour le progrès des sciences he stated once again that nobody would be in a position to make a proper judgement as to the relative capacities of the two sexes until there had been an actual experience of equality. (He also suggested, at a practical level, that women might devote themselves to making scientific studies of infant behaviour and child development.)

  None of this was published at the time; in September Condorcet was officially condemned to death. His wife no longer dared to visit him and he agreed with her that she should divorce him under the new law for the sake of their daughter's inheritance rights, which would otherwise be lost. He wrote directions that the child should be taught English (she was only three) and sent either to Lord Stanhope or to America in the event of the deaths of both her parents. He also wrote her a letter to be read when she was old enough, urging her never to feel bitterly about what had happened. Sophie, to make money, took a shop and sold her paintings. Condorcet wrote: ‘Ja'i donné congé à la gloire; je ne veux qu'agiter doucement à des vents doux mon petit grain de poussière: folie d'aspirer aux siècles et de ne vivre rien de la vie présente et qui coule.’16 Life that is lived from day to day and slips through your fingers; no one in Paris could now afford to forget how precarious it was.

  Presently he lost his nerve, ran from the safety of his lodgings, was turned from the door of some nervous old friends and picked up by suspicious peasants. He poisoned himself on his first night in prison. Madame de Condorcet's divorce was granted when he was already dead, but she did not learn of his death until several months later. She had the Esquisse printed; Joseph Johnson published it in England; and little Eliza grew up to marry an exiled Irish revolutionary, Arthur O'Connor, nearly as
old though nowhere near as wise as her father.*

  Mary arrived back in Paris as the Terror was coming into full spate. From Lyons came reports of the frightful vengeance of the government upon its enemies there; from the Loire the noyades. On 9 October all the remaining English in Paris were arrested, including Helen Williams, Stone and his wife. Mary escaped only because Imlay had prudently registered her at the American embassy as his wife, to give her the protection of US citizenship.

  Schlabrendorf, most inoffensive of men, had been in prison since 6 September. Mary visited him, and he found her more charming each time; later he decided he had been in love with her without realizing it. He released Jane Christie from their engagement.

  On 16 October the Queen was guillotined; on the 31st Brissot and twenty other Girondins were executed, showing courage and grace to the end. Mary wept bitterly.

  She might have spared a tear for the abolition of all the women's clubs on the same day; only one member of the Convention spoke in their favour. The red and white trousers of the citoyennes were seen no more, and the voices of the provincial ladies fell quite silent. On 3 November Olympe de Gouges followed the Girondins to the guillotine, and on the 8th Madame Roland, in a glow of conscious virtue and true bravery, went the same way.

  The Convention rejected the civil code offered by the Comité de législation, which would have given married women a great measure of equality and independence; too many of the deputies were now ready to assert that the female sex was naturally inferior to the male, and incapable of administering its own affairs. This was the first real setback to the original philosophic ideal of the Revolution that all should be equal before the law.*