Liberty: The Lives and Times of Six Women in Revolutionary France

by Moore, Lucy

  We have consoled ourselves for our inability to contribute to the public good by exerting our most intense efforts to raise the spirits of our children to the heights of free men. But if you deceive our hope, then indignation, sorrow, despair will impel and drag us into public places…Then we shall save the Fatherland, or, dying with it, we will uproot the torturous memory of seeing you unworthy of us.

  Like Germaine de Staël, these women made a point of accepting feminine political passivity as essential to society’s greater good; but they were utterly committed to the revolutionary cause. They did not want rights for themselves, but they wanted rights for all Frenchmen. If men failed to deliver the new liberties they had promised, they insisted, women would not be afraid to step on to the public stage as they had in October 1789.

  All over France, common women gathered together in clubs of different types to demonstrate their patriotism and their devotion to the revolution. Some dared call for girls to be better educated; others demanded the privilege of fighting for the patrie, or rights of consent over marriage and inheritance. In Saint-Sever, a Mme Lafurie argued that custom did not prove the law: contrary to popular belief, she declared, women were neither too weak to work nor too depraved to play a role in public life.

  Twenty-seven cities had auxiliary clubs of the Fraternal Society of the Friends–calling themselves Amies rather than Amis – of the Constitution. In Breteuil in August 1790 a group of unmarried ‘Sisters of the Constitution’ offered a hand-sewn national flag to the town; the women of Alais formed a Patriotic Club which met to read the decrees of the National Assembly to their children. Female companies of the National Guard were formed across the country: at Creil, at Angers, at Villeneuve-la-Guyard, Aunay, Bergerac and Limoges. In the summer of 1791, the women of Les Halles, Paris’s central market, donated to the National Assembly their guild treasure, in silver plate and cash, amounting to almost fifteen hundred livres. Before the revolution, they said, ‘all politics and all refinements’ had been foreign to them; since then, ‘the idea of liberty [had] enlarged souls, inflamed spirits, electrified hearts’, and they were willing to make any sacrifice to acquire and safeguard it.

  Most rural Frenchwomen were not revolutionaries; all they wanted was bread to feed their children and fuel for their fires. Counterrevolutionary sentiments were strong in the west of the country. In September 1790, women protesting at the price of bread cried, ‘We want to save the monks! Long live the clergy! Long live the nobility!’ A royalist newspaper, L’Ami du Roi, reported in 1791 that ‘a Frenchwoman inflamed with love for her country’ had suggested forming a club of female ‘Amazons’ to defend France and the king.

  Louis-Marie Prudhomme, editor of the left-wing Révolutions de Paris, wrote in November 1791 that many of his female readers were complaining of being excluded from participating in the revolution. Some claimed that in ancient Gaul women had had a voice in government and questioned why these rights were not returned to them. Prudhomme responded savagely: ‘we do not venture to come and teach you how to love your children, spare us the trouble then of coming to our clubs and expounding our duties as citizens to us’. His chauvinism was not unusual, and would only become more widespread. Jacobin Clubs across the country increasingly resisted women’s attempts to participate in their activities, fearing what they saw as their corrupting influence; in Tonneins, the local Jacobins succeeded in segregating the men and women watching their debates and in banning women and men from conversing with each other on their premises.

  The month after the women of Saint-Germain addressed the Cordeliers, Pauline Léon presented to the National Assembly a petition bearing over three hundred signatures. In the event of a foreign war, she argued, women would be left defenceless at home; they needed weapons in order to defend the patrie from its hidden, internal enemies. ‘Your predecessors deposited the Constitution as much in our hands as in yours,’ she argued. ‘Oh, how to save it, if we have no arms to defend it from the attacks of its enemies?’

  Women did not want to abandon their homes and families, she insisted, but having been ‘raised to the ranks of citoyennes [citizennesses]’, having ‘sampled the promises of liberty’, they could never again submit to ‘slavery’; the irony of her argument was that the ‘rank’ of citoyenne carried with it neither civic liberties nor political rights. Politicized by the march to Versailles in October 1789, Léon and her associates claimed not the vote but a greater role in the defence of the nation. She demanded ‘the honour of sharing their [men’s] exhaustion and glorious labours and of making tyrants see that women also have blood to shed for the service of the fatherland in danger’.

  3

  CLUBISTE

  Théroigne de Méricourt

  JULY 1789–AUGUST 1790

  [Théroigne] crossed the Assembly floor with the light pace of a panther and mounted the tribune. Her pretty, thought-filled head seemed to shine among the depressing, apocalyptic figures of Danton and Marat.

  CAMILLE DESMOULINS

  ONE WOMAN popularly thought to have been willing to shed her own blood on behalf of the fatherland, as Pauline Léon hoped to, was the former courtesan Théroigne de Méricourt. Although she was mentioned only five times, in contradictory reports, in the nearly four hundred official depositions on the women’s march to Versailles in October 1789, Théroigne was described again and again by nineteenth-century historians of the revolution as having been at the vanguard of the mob storming the palace, astride a jet-black charger and dressed in a riding-habit ‘the colour of blood’, with her sabre unsheathed – as the poet Baudelaire later put it, ‘amante de carnage’. For these romantics, she represented all that was most savage and most noble about the revolution: passionate and untamed, and ultimately crushed by the forces she had helped unleash. Michelet called her ‘the fatal beauty of the revolution’, ‘la belle, vaillante, infortunée Liégoise’; and so she was, although he exaggerated most of the facts of her life.

  Anne-Josèphe Terwagne (or Théroigne) was born into a family of prosperous peasants in 1762 in Marcourt (or Méricourt) near Liège, in the Ardennes region of the Low Countries, at the time just over the French border in Austria. Anne-Josèphe’s childhood was a desperately unhappy one. Her mother died when she was five, and the little girl was initially sent to live with an aunt in Liège, a hundred kilometres from her home, where her two younger brothers remained. The aunt sent her to a convent to learn dressmaking, but soon stopped paying Anne-Josèphe’s keep there and took her in as a maid, treating her cruelly. Anne-Josèphe returned home when her father remarried, but her stepmother, busy with children of her own, did not make her welcome; her father’s fortunes were also declining rapidly.

  At thirteen, Anne-Josèphe sent one of her brothers to one branch of her mother’s family and she and her other brother went to live with her mother’s parents. Again she found herself unloved, forced to do heavy work, the victim of injustice and neglect. She returned to her aunt’s, but received the same ill-treatment as before, and ran away once more.

  This time she set out alone, working as a cowherd and then as a nursemaid before finding a post as companion to a woman in Anvers. Mme Colbert was the first person to show the sixteen-year-old Anne-Josèphe any kindness. She taught her to write, encouraged her to read, and arranged for her to study singing and the pianoforte, at first so that she could accompany her daughter and then because she showed talent. In an atmosphere of affection and comfort, Anne-Josèphe blossomed, and dreamed of a glorious musical career.

  When she was twenty, a young English army officer seduced her and then reneged on his promise to marry her when he came of age, instead making her his mistress and living with her between London and Paris. He did provide well for her, giving her 10,000 louis which she invested carefully, but, in the language of the day, she was ruined, and could no longer hope for marriage and respectability. For the next few years Anne-Josèphe lived uneasily, as her modern biographer puts it, ‘suspended between literary bohemianism, polite soci
ety and moral degradation’. Although she knew she would never change her lover’s libertine ways, their liaison continued; she was also kept in some style by the rich, elderly and unpleasant marquis de Persan, whose advances she later insisted she had evaded. She called herself Mlle Campinado, after a branch of her mother’s family, and regularly attended the opera alone, ‘covered in diamonds, in a large box’.

  Her air of melancholy mystery was not contrived. She gave birth to a daughter, whom her English lover refused to acknowledge and who died in 1788 of smallpox. An affair with an Italian tenor ended badly; then she fell in love with another Italian singer, a celebrated castrato and, somewhat surprisingly, seducer, called Ferdinand-Justin Tenducci, who encouraged her hopes for a musical career. She followed him to Genoa, and although their connection ended in the courts, stayed there alone for a year.

  Anne-Josèphe returned to Paris in May 1789, just before the Bastille fell. Although as yet she knew no one involved in the coming revolution and was unfamiliar with the ideas behind it, her unhappiness with her lot in pre-revolutionary France had prepared her to love liberty instantly and instinctively. She was enthralled by the ‘general effervescence’ she sensed around her, recognizing that her chance to change her own life could come at this moment of crisis and opportunity.

  While the nineteenth-century poet Lamartine described her ‘descending into the streets’ on 14 July, ‘her beauty like a banner to the multitude’, in fact she said she did not witness the main events of those days. On the evening of the day the Bastille fell, she and her maid went down on to the streets of Paris – her lodgings were a five-minute walk from the Palais Royal – and saw the crowds of men, some armed, some searching for arms. Afraid of attracting their attention, she returned to her rooms, unaware of what had taken place on the other side of the city. The next day she heard the news, and first saw people with green cockades. She immediately began wearing one herself, tucking the green leaves into her hat-band as a mark of support for Desmoulins and then, when leaves were replaced by the tricolour rosette as the sign of reform, she took the tricolour instead.

  When the king came to Paris on 17 July and pinned the tricolour cockade to his hat outside the Hôtel de Ville, demonstrating his surrender to the forces of change, Anne-Josèphe walked in the rapturous crowd ahead of him. She was wearing the costume that was to make her famous, a white riding-habit, or amazone, and round-brimmed hat. This choice of severely masculine dress was deliberate: she wanted ‘to play the role of a man, because I had always been extremely humiliated by the servitude and prejudices, under which the pride of men holds my oppressed sex’.

  Anne-Josèphe’s resentment was not unusual. Even Germaine de Staël, an only child, an heiress, a member of the most progressive society in the land, as privileged and free as a woman could be in eighteenth-century France, railed against the discrimination that restricted her; many others, like Anne-Josèphe, had more to complain about. In 1788, the teenaged Lucile Duplessis, before her marriage to the journalist Camille Desmoulins, had expressed her frustrations in her journal: ‘How the months, the days, seem long to me, what a sad fate is woman’s and how much do we suffer! Slavery, tyranny, that is our lot…Nothing is fair for us! Ah! That they [men] would worship us less and set us free!’ An unhappily married Mme Morel from Choiseul had ‘set up the tricoloured cockade and preached liberty before her husband’s face’ in 1789, explicitly associating public with domestic tyranny. For women, the revolution’s rejection of the paternal authority of the ancien régime state carried within it an implicit rejection of the private injustices they endured in their own lives.

  For Anne-Josèphe, whose family had not wanted her, whose lovers had abandoned and betrayed her, the impression of being trapped by her sex was doubly strong. She was a fallen woman, living outside society and despised by decent women like the workers who had petitioned the king at the start of 1789. Men had tried only to buy or to use her. Her adored daughter’s death and her own struggle, while she was in Genoa, with severe venereal disease, can only have increased her antipathy to her former life.

  From the summer of 1789, Anne-Josèphe Terwagne, formerly Mlle Campinado, became simply Théroigne, using her real name as if to express a sense of coming into her true self. She sold some shares she had and pawned her jewels to fund her newly modest existence, proudly recoiled from any suggestion of impropriety – even, according to one report, scorning personal cleanliness, a mark of the ‘professional coquette’, as a political statement – and turned her back on her past. The revolution offered her a new life: ‘the kept woman,’ as Simon Schama phrases it, ‘had become a free person’.

  Nearly every day Théroigne walked in the Palais Royal, absorbing the new ideas of liberty and equality that she heard there. ‘What most impressed me was the atmosphere of general benevolence; egoism seemed to have been banished, so that everyone spoke to each other, irrespective of distinctions [of rank],’ she marvelled. ‘During this moment of upheaval, the rich mixed with the poor and did not disdain to speak to them as equals.’ Her private transformation was mirrored on the faces of the people she saw around her. ‘Everyone’s countenance seemed to me to have altered; each person had fully developed his character and his natural facilities,’ she wrote. ‘I saw many who, though covered in rags, had a heroic air.’ Heroism seemed possible even for a woman with a past like hers; humiliation had been displaced by equality and opportunity.

  So stirred was she by this spectacle that she decided to move to Versailles, where the National Assembly met, to watch their debates on the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen. She was overcome by the beauty and grandeur of the Assembly. Every day, wearing her amazone, Théroigne sat in the same seat in the visitors’ gallery, or tribune; every day she was the first to arrive and the last to leave. Although initially she could hardly follow the debates, little by little she began to understand the issues. ‘My devotion to the revolution increased as I grew better informed and became convinced that right and justice were on the people’s side.’

  Théroigne was in her usual place in the tribune of the National Assembly on the afternoon of 5 October 1789 when the market women entered Versailles. She left before the session ended, perhaps unamused by the sight of the marchers debasing the hall she so revered with their poissard banter; but, wanting to see what was going on, she walked with a friend to her street corner and saw the Flanders regiment, the royal bodyguard and the female marchers with their cannon pass by. On her way home she saw three or four unhappy people who had not eaten for several days; she brought them some bread, and then went back to her lodgings for the night.

  When she returned to the Assembly as usual at about six or half past the following morning and heard that it had been in session throughout the night, she went out into the crowds gathered in front of the palace to hear what they were saying. Dressed in a riding-habit, as usual – she had one in scarlet, one in white, and one in black – she mingled with the market women and soldiers before taking her seat in the tribune again.

  In 1791, when she was held prisoner in Austria, Théroigne was cross-examined about those October days. The Austrian government, fearful of upheaval in their own territories and keen to defend Marie-Antoinette, wanted to know whether the duc d’Orléans had paid the women to go to Versailles and cause trouble. Théroigne, surprised at the allegation, replied that although she did not know Orléans she believed him to be a good patriot. They were also curious about stories of men dressed as women, but Théroigne had not seen any. When they asked her what she thought had caused the demonstration, she replied the people’s enthusiasm for liberty and their devotion to it. It was clear from her deposition that it was not she who had led the bloodthirsty mob into the palace, bribed the marchers on behalf of Orléans or plotted to assassinate the queen, the crimes of which the Austrians and the French royalists, keen to find a scapegoat, suspected her.

  When the National Assembly reopened in Paris later in October of 1789, Théroigne was i
n the tribune. She was becoming acquainted with the men whose newspaper articles and speeches she admired so fervently: Camille Desmoulins, the progressive journalist Jacques-Pierre Brissot and the handsome lawyer Jérôme Pétion.

  Two other men now assumed a particular importance in her political life, neither of whom was likely to cause her to blush angrily, as she was known to do, at whispered insinuations. The Abbé Sieyès was a reserved, uncompromising intellectual much respected in the Assembly who bridged the gap, as did several of Théroigne’s friends, between the aristocratic liberals of Germaine de Staël’s salon and the more democratic milieu of men like Desmoulins, Pétion and Brissot. A passionate constitutionalist, his 1789 pamphlet What Is the Third Estate?, in which he argued that France’s prosperity was derived solely from the people while the nobility and the clergy were just parasites on the nation, sold three hundred thousand copies and became the battle cry of the early radicals. To Théroigne, Sieyès was of all the deputies ‘the most worthy of the recognition and esteem of the public’.

  But it was with the sober mathematician Gilbert Romme, whom Théroigne had met in the gallery of the Assembly and who became a quasi-father figure to her, that she founded the short-lived Society of the Friends of the Law in January 1790. The association, which never numbered more than about twenty members, was dedicated to disseminating the Assembly’s work to the people and teaching them their rights – exactly what Théroigne had had to learn herself when she began attending the Assembly’s debates. It met first in Théroigne’s lodgings near the Palais Royal and later in Romme’s larger apartment. Théroigne was its only female member and its secretary. While the National Assembly struggled to create a workable constitution from the principles established by the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, Théroigne and the Friends of the Law met to discuss the issues themselves.