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

by Moore, Lucy

  He advised that unmarried women and widows should be granted the vote and called for all women to use their talents to benefit the society in which they lived.

  Not every member of the Fraternal Society or the Social Circle shared Condorcet’s unusually egalitarian views, but most were progressive thinkers committed to improving women’s status in society through legislation, to legalize divorce, to provide protection for battered wives, and to reform inheritance and property laws. A committee was established by Etta Palm d’Aelders’s club, the Confederation of the Friends of Truth, to distribute aid to ill and indigent women and children in Paris.

  Most men tolerated their wives’ and daughters’ new-found interest in politics, but the Jacobin Club was wary of women from the start. The Fraternal Society met in 1790 in various rooms of the same former monastery as the Jacobins, and the two clubs shared some members, many of whom also had connections with Théroigne, Germaine de Staël, Thérésia de Fontenay and Manon Roland: Condorcet, Brissot, the Lameth brothers, Mirabeau, Georges Danton and Jean-Lambert Tallien. Despite these links, however, the Jacobins displayed their reluctance to treat the Fraternal Society seriously from the start. In the autumn of 1790, they told the Society that they would only receive a deputation from them if it were composed entirely of men. The journalist Marat used the Fraternal Society to attack the Jacobins that December, snidely saluting ‘the club of women which providence seems to have placed beneath the Jacobins [the Society sometimes met in the monastery’s crypt] to repair their faults’.

  It was this type of revolutionary misogyny that prompted Théroigne to leave Paris at the end of the summer of 1790. The idealism with which she had greeted the early months of the revolution had been disappointed. It was becoming clear to her that her fellow-revolutionaries were campaigning for the rights of men, not the rights of humanity; her struggle was unimportant to them. In prison in Austria the following year she said it had been her dearest wish to have been able to destroy ‘the tyranny which men exercise over my own sex’, but her efforts had been in vain.

  Neither of the progressive associations she had formed had taken off as she had hoped. The Society of the Friends of the Law had disbanded in the spring of 1790. In February Théroigne had watched the deputies of the National Assembly process to Notre Dame to hear a mass celebrating their oaths of citizenship. She recognized some of them, and they asked her to join them; the honour of walking with them and of seeing such a spectacle made her say yes, but when onlookers exclaimed at there being a woman in the deputies’ midst she was forced to withdraw, even though many others marching were not deputies either. What the people had found so curious, she said, was the thought that a woman should wish to be a part of the procession.

  Théroigne acknowledged that her lack of talent and experience hindered her efforts to play an active political role, but her greatest weakness in the eyes of her fellow-revolutionaries was her sex. She was hassled in the Assembly’s tribunes, mocked on the streets and lampooned in the press, but her most bitter disappointment stemmed from the men with whom she hoped to work. ‘The patriots, instead of encouraging me and treating me justly, ridiculed me,’ she said; this was why she became disenchanted with politics, despite her devotion to the cause of reform, and left Paris ‘without too much regret’. For the moment, Théroigne’s hopes of being allowed to participate directly in France’s new government had been dashed.

  4

  MONDAINE

  Thérésia de Fontenay

  MAY 1789–APRIL 1791

  We continued to dance,

  as they do in camp on the eve of a battle.

  AUGUSTE-FRANÇOIS DE FRÉNILLY

  IF FOR THÉROIGNE DE MÉRICOURT the revolution was a sacred event, regenerative and transformative both publicly and privately, for Thérésia, marquise de Fontenay, seventeen years old and three years married, it was just the new backdrop to her normal life. Instead of attending dull court parties in stiff tight-laced dresses, she wore frilled chemises to picnics in the woods; otherwise, eighteen months after the Bastille had fallen, not much seemed different. ‘The tranquillity of France is but little disturbed, notwithstanding the wonderful changes that have of late happened,’ Lady Sutherland, the English ambassadress, wrote home in January 1791, complaining that Paris had grown very dull.

  Thérésia de Fontenay moved in the same worldly circles as Lady Sutherland and Germaine de Staël. Her father François Cabarrus was a successful Basque banker at the Spanish court, who in 1782 had founded the state bank, the Banco San Carlos. Thérésia had been brought up in rural Spain before joining her mother in Paris and attending, as girls of her class did, an exclusive Parisian convent. When she was fourteen she was married to twenty-six-year-old Jean-Jacques Devin de Fontenay who came from a family of recently ennobled merchants. Like Germaine Necker’s marriage to Éric Magnus de Staël, Mlle Cabarrus’s match with Fontenay was arranged – a union of new money with, in this case, new aristocracy. Thérésia’s dowry included a substantial chunk of Parisian real estate, but the young couple lived in the Fontenay hôtel on the Île Saint-Louis.

  Thérésia was married for the first time, according to her daughter long afterwards, ‘sans joie comme sans chagrin’. ‘Her good and tender soul’ would have grown attached to her husband’s, lamented Mme du Narbonne-Pelet, but for his ‘revolting behaviour, inconstancy and profound immorality’. Her parents, ambitious but inexperienced in Parisian ways, and according to Thérésia’s later descriptions of her childhood, neglectful, seem to have found Fontenay’s personal unsuitability for marriage less important than his title. He was a gambler and a roué, utterly debauched, who kept a mistress and travelled with a guidebook containing details ‘of all the filles de joie to be found on the road’. Thérésia, still a child, was ‘prostituted’ to an infamous rake.

  This, of course, was the way of the pre-revolutionary haut monde; all that was unusual was the degree of Fontenay’s dissipation, and the fact that his mistress was a lowly shop-girl rather than an actress or a friend’s wife. The same society that reviled the lonely, idealistic Théroigne de Méricourt as a prostitute sold the young Thérésia de Fontenay into an unhappy marriage and expected her to console herself with lovers.

  In Letters to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, written two years after her own marriage, Germaine de Staël lamented the hypocrisy that brought up young girls in the closest seclusion only to marry them off to men who had no intention of forming an emotional attachment to them, thrusting them unprepared into a world where everything they had been taught to value was denigrated. ‘Even the men, with their bizarre principles, wait until a woman is married before they speak to her of love,’ she observed. ‘At that point, everything changes: people no longer seek to exalt their minds with romantic notions but to soil their hearts with cold jests on everything they have been taught to respect.’ Custom only legitimized these practices. ‘What social disaster for a husband to consider himself invited to a house simply because his wife was invited!’ remembered Lucy de la Tour du Pin of the habits of her pre-revolutionary life. Corruption had become natural. ‘Virtue in men and good conduct in women became the object of ridicule and were considered provincial.’

  Many husbands encouraged their brides to take lovers, aware that if their wives were busy elsewhere their own activities would escape attention. Accomplished libertines were masters of amorality. ‘There is nothing in love but the flesh,’ held the naturalist Buffon, and Rousseau’s Confessions substantiate the ancien régime’s institutionalized cynicism. His independent, older mistress, Mme de Warens, was taught by her first lover that the moral importance of marital fidelity lay only in its effect on public opinion. According to this argument, ‘adultery in itself was nothing, and was only called into existence by scandal…every woman who appeared virtuous by that mere fact became so’.

  Perhaps because her husband was so unlovable, Thérésia made little effort even to appear virtuous. Although she produced a son, Théodore, in May 1789, she was mo
re interested in social than domestic life and quickly became part of the louche, liberal circuit of Germaine de Staël and her friends. By the summer of 1790, in an aptly revolutionary analogy, Thérésia was said to have ‘dethroned’ the ‘delicious’ blonde Nathalie de Noailles as the most beautiful woman in Paris.

  Thérésia’s dark loveliness and foreign riches made her a celebrity. Raven-haired, with flashing eyes, she was much in the mould of Germaine de Staël, ‘but extremely en beau’. Mme de la Tour du Pin compared her to the goddess Diana – though no doubt in her aspect as huntress rather than virgin – enthusing that ‘no more beautiful creature had ever come from the hands of the Creator’. Thérésia’s statuesque looks were enhanced by ‘matchless grace’, ‘radiant femininity’ and a peculiarly charming voice ‘of caressing magic’, husky, melodious and slightly accented.

  She was self-centred, but generous and passionate, taking delight in pleasing others as much as herself. The secularism of the early days of the revolution, its philosophical and political exaltation of liberty and the pursuit of happiness, had loosened private moral strictures; high-spirited Thérésia enjoyed these new freedoms to the full. The personal philosophy she would develop combined the worldliness and sexual licence enjoyed by married noblewomen before the revolution with the secular amorality of the new republic. Pleasure was her only responsibility, and Thérésia was as happy to find it in 1791 at revolutionary fêtes as she had been at royal receptions in 1788. Although she was not at first personally transformed by the revolution in the way that her friend Germaine, or Théroigne de Méricourt, were, Thérésia’s entire adult existence was coloured by the revolution and its upheavals. Fifteen years old in 1789, she knew nothing but change. The great lessons of her youth were opportunism and adaptability.

  Thérésia’s whirl of parties and gossip continued, but imperceptibly every aspect of daily life, private as well as public, assumed political overtones. ‘When they converse, liberty is the theme of discourse; when they dance, the figure of the cotillion is adapted to a national tune; and when they sing, it is but to repeat a vow of fidelity to the constitution.’ Even the slang reflected the changing times, according to Helen Maria Williams. ‘Everything tiresome or unpleasant, “c’est une aristocracie!” [sic] and everything charming and agreeable is, “à la nation”.’ Jean-Jacques Devin de Fontenay may have been debauched, but he was sufficiently fashionable to keep up with politics, attending meetings at the Jacobin Club in December 1790.

  Since it was stylish for women to take an interest in politics too, it is likely that Thérésia attended the National Assembly’s opening session in Paris, after the women’s march to Versailles, in the late autumn of 1789. Théroigne de Méricourt must have been present, taking the place in the tribunes of the manège that she had claimed as her own in Versailles; Germaine de Staël was sitting in the front row of the women’s galleries; nearby was Rose de Beauharnais, wife of a progressive aristocratic deputy and the future Empress Joséphine, and Félicité de Genlis, mistress of the liberal duc d’Orléans and governess to his children, one of whom, the future King Louis-Philippe, sat beside her.

  The Assembly’s meetings were chaotic. Every deputy seemed ‘more inclined to talk than to listen’, recorded Helen Williams, but that did not stop women of all classes crowding the galleries at every session. Rosalie Jullien, wife of one of the deputies, went so regularly that she only mentioned not attending the Assembly in her letters. English visitors like Williams, Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Berry rushed to request tickets when they arrived in Paris. Lucy de la Tour du Pin said her sister-in-law, the former marquise de Lameth, watched the Assembly’s sessions every day.

  Thérésia attended meetings of the Fraternal Society of Patriots of Both Sexes, branches of which counted among its members Théroigne and Pauline Léon. She also became a sister at the Olympic Lodge of freemasons, following in her friend Lafayette’s footsteps, and was a member of the liberal Club of 1789 whose patron was the duc d’Orléans. Like other women of her background, Thérésia probably observed the early proceedings of the Jacobins many of whom, in 1790 and early 1791, were her friends.

  A list of putative members of a 1790 Club of the Rights of Man* numbered not Thérésia herself but several of her most intimate friends, and demonstrates the milieu in which she lived. Members were said to have included Thérésia’s best friend from convent days, Mme Charles de Lameth, and her husband; his brother Alexandre, close to both Thérésia and Germaine de Staël; Mathieu de Montmorency, also linked to Germaine; and the brilliant, lecherous comte de Mirabeau, with whom Thérésia toured the ruins of the Bastille.

  True salonnières like Germaine de Staël and Félicité de Genlis had little time for popular societies. Their interest in politics was strictly personal and entirely exclusive. Genlis went just once to watch the Jacobins, and thought the more radical Cordeliers’ Club, because ‘women of the lower orders spoke in it’, was ‘a sight at once striking, shocking and ridiculous’. The young chocolate-maker Pauline Léon was a regular attendant of the Cordeliers’ sessions; she was exactly the kind of loud-mouthed working woman who would have offended Genlis’s elitist sensibilities. The political involvement of the lower classes of either sex worried Germaine de Staël, whose steady advocacy of a constitutional monarchy became less and less radical as the goal-posts shifted past her. ‘The Revolution naturally descended lower and lower each time that the upper classes allowed the reins to slip from their hands, whether by want of wisdom or their want of address,’ she lamented.

  In the summer of 1789 Thérésia held a dinner at the Fontenay château in Fontenay-aux-Roses just outside Paris. The theme and decorations were inspired by the Rousseauesque pastoral ideals of simplicity and nature so valued by liberals. Girls dressed in white handed guests bunches of flowers as they arrived, ‘comme dans une pastorale antique’; they dined on the grass beneath spreading chestnut trees, ‘comme en Arcadie’. Thérésia was toasted not as queen but as goddess of the fête. Her guests, she remembered later, were the progressive aristocrats of her circle, like Mirabeau, as well as a sprinkling of political radicals including Camille Desmoulins and his old schoolfriend Maximilien Robespierre; she lacked the elitist scruples of Mme de Staël. ‘That day was the true celebration of my youth,’ Thérésia recalled, years later. ‘They did not yet call me Notre Dame de Thermidor, but nor did the cowards call me Notre Dame de Septembre: I was simply Notre Dame de Fontenay.’

  These pastoral idylls were a fashionable way for the liberal elite to demonstrate their virtuous sentimentality and their solidarity with the ‘people’. In the 1780s, when the celebrated lawyer Guy-Jean Target had won back for the villagers of Salency in Picardy the right to choose their own rosière, or annual rose queen (instead of their lord, who claimed the right for himself), Félicité de Genlis had gone to Salency to play the harp at their fête. The song based on that popular victory, ‘La Rosière de Salency’, was played at Thérésia’s own fête champêtre.

  The following summer, a similar festival was held to celebrate the anniversary of the so-called Tennis Court Oath. The deputies of the National Assembly processed to Versailles bearing the oath of allegiance inscribed on a bronze tablet alongside stones from the fallen Bastille. They renewed their oaths in the palace’s tennis court, then returned to Paris, stopping in the Bois de Boulogne for a feast held under the trees at which they were attended by women dressed as shepherdesses. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen was read as grace. Georges Danton, crowned like the rest of the deputies with an oak-leaf wreath, proposed a toast to the liberty and happiness of the entire world. In one of the elaborately symbolic set-pieces so beloved of the revolutionaries, a model of the Bastille was set on the table and smashed, hopefully with great care, since revealed inside lay a real baby swaddled in white, representing oppressed innocence liberated by the revolution. A red Phrygian cap, modelled on those given to Roman slaves when they were freed, was placed on its head.

  In Paris, mean
while, rapturous preparations for the anniversary of the Bastille’s fall were under way, as men and women of all ages and classes, ‘inspired by the same spirit’, helped turn the Champs de Mars into a vast amphitheatre. Even the king took his turn with a spade. The worksite became the backdrop for scenes of revolutionary virtue and brotherhood as Parisians competed with one another to contribute to the cause of freedom and the patrie. Women and men saw themselves as equal contributors to the effort: ‘I honour no less that multitude of citizens and citizenesses who do not think that they have consecrated those works by their hands but their hands by those works,’ wrote Camille Desmoulins. The atmosphere was fervently emotional. It would have been impossible, wrote Louis-Sebastien Mercier, to have beheld the scene without being moved.

  Women of gentle birth were eager to be a part of Federation Day. ‘Ladies took the instruments of labour in their hands, and removed a little of the earth,’ wrote Helen Williams, ‘that they might be able to say that they had assisted in the preparations.’ Pauline de Laval – beloved by Thérésia’s and Germaine’s friend Mathieu de Montmorency – caught pneumonia after spending the whole night before the celebrations helping cart dirt on the Champs de Mars, and died a few days later, ‘victim to an excess of patriotic zeal’.

  Their unpowdered hair falling loosely on to their shoulders, wearing blue military-style jackets with red collars and cuffs based on National Guard uniforms, or straw bonnets and white muslin dresses trimmed with tricolour ribbons and sashes, or riding-habits à la Théroigne – all as expressions of their modish political sympathies – fashionable ladies like Thérésia de Fontenay brought drinks to the men toiling at the Champs de Mars. Even the colours of their clothes echoed the mood of the times: a shade of red known as ‘Foulon’s blood’ was named after an unpopular minister killed in the aftermath of the Bastille’s fall.