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

by Moore, Lucy

  Less than a month later, on 17 July, a crowd of fifty thousand men, women and children met in the Champs de Mars to deliver petitions demanding a referendum on the monarchy and declaring the people sovereign. Versions of similar petitions were circulated by different fraternal societies. On one, forty-one ‘women, sisters, and Roman women’ signed separately from the men. François and Louise Robert circulated another declaring that Louis’s desertion of his ‘post’ was, in effect, an abdication.

  Confirming all Pauline Léon’s suspicions of him, Lafayette, who had persuaded the mayor to declare martial law in Paris, ordered the National Guard to open fire on the demonstrators. Perhaps fifty people were killed. There was talk of Robespierre being put on trial because of his role in writing the Jacobin Club’s petition, which had been withdrawn by the Jacobins the day before, at the last minute, for being too radical. Late that night the Rolands had themselves driven to his house in the Marais to offer him asylum, but he was already in hiding.

  Pauline Léon, her mother, and Constance Évrard were among the hundreds of people arrested in the aftermath of the massacre. Évrard was twenty-three, a few years younger than León, and lived in the same street as Léon and her mother; she had been working as a cook in the household of a former aristocrat since 1788. She was arrested for insulting the wife of a National Guardsman, and asked why she had been on the Champs de Mars. Évrard replied that she and the Léon women, ‘comme tous les bons patriotes’, had been there to sign a petition calling for the reorganization of executive power.

  Her interrogator wanted to know whether she attended political meetings and clubs, and what newspapers she read. Évrard’s replies show the high level of politicization among working-class Parisian women. She answered that she did go sometimes to the open spaces of the Palais Royal and the Tuileries gardens, which became rallying points for protestors at certain crucial moments such as before the destruction of the Bastille; although she was not a member of the Cordeliers’ she had sometimes watched sessions there – perhaps with Léon, who elsewhere declared she attended it ‘without interruption’; and she read the incendiary newspapers of, among others, Jean-Paul Marat and Camille Desmoulins.

  Léon’s response to the Champs de Mars massacre was one of indignation. Just as during their demonstration on the day of the king’s flight, she, her mother and Évrard were threatened by Lafayette’s Guardsmen and, when they returned home, insulted by their neighbours and threatened with imprisonment by their local ward. Like Évrard, and along with Anne Colombe, the publisher of Marat’s L’Ami du Peuple; a female cousin of Georges Danton; and the wife of the president of the Cordeliers’ Club, Léon was arrested and interrogated in the days following the demonstration as part of a government crack-down on popular radicalism – made all the more terrifying, to the authorities, when women were the radicals.

  The Dutch writer Etta Palm d’Aelders, who had spoken so passionately on behalf of women’s rights at the Social Circle in 1790, was another woman arrested on 19 July, accused of subversive behaviour. Her arrest was seen as an effort to intimidate the club, and it was successful: within days the Social Circle’s Confédération des Amis, and its female equivalent (des Amies) had shut down. Repressive measures taken against other popular societies like the Cordeliers’ effectively declawed them too. ‘I need to see my trees again after watching so many fools and scoundrels,’ wrote Manon. By mid-August, an illusory calm had settled over Paris. ‘Paris is as still as the surface of a pond,’ wrote Rosalie Jullien de la Drôme, wife of the Jacobin deputy, ‘apart from the individual fights that occasion tragic scenes every day.’

  The Rolands left Paris in September when Roland’s job was finished, returning to Le Clos, their home outside Lyon, to oversee the grape harvest. During their absence a rumour had spread that Roland had been arrested as a counterrevolutionary, and the once friendly villagers there initially greeted Manon with cries of ‘Les aristocrates à la lanterne!’ Boundaries were being blurred: the word ‘aristocrat’–like ‘patriot’, ‘virtue’ and ‘popular will’ – took on new meanings. Language was being used ritualistically, with totemic words invoked ‘as absolute, moral concepts’ that would somehow guarantee and preserve the revolution’s integrity. Germaine de Staël was aware of this development, in 1791 attacking democrats (another word whose meaning was transformed in the 1790s) ‘who desecrate words merely by using them’.

  From Le Clos, Manon initiated a correspondence with two of her so-called Incorruptibles, François Buzot and Maximilien Robespierre. To Robespierre she wrote in a deliberately classical, selfconsciously historical style, addressing him as ‘one whose energy has not ceased to offer the greatest resistance to the claims and schemes of despotism and intrigue’ and predicting for him a brilliant career. She tried to engage him in a discussion of political and philosophical theory, tacitly presenting herself as a correspondent with whom he could debate ideas and policies, his partner in the fight for France’s liberty. ‘One should work for the good of the species in the same manner as the Deity,’ she wrote, ‘for the satisfaction of being true to oneself, of fulfilling one’s destiny and earning self-esteem, but without expecting either gratitude or justice from individuals.’ Manon signed her name with republican austerity: ‘Roland, née Phlipon’. There is no record of any response from Robespierre.

  Buzot was more receptive. Manon ‘had already singled him out in our little circle for his breadth of vision and confident manner’; she admired his compassion, integrity and courage. Although she did not think his wife deserved him – he had married a cousin some years older than himself – the Rolands and the Buzots lived close to each other in Paris and saw each other frequently in the spring and summer of 1791. Their relationship grew closer while the Rolands were in Villefranche, and Buzot back at home in Évreux, that autumn. Through their letters, recorded Manon later, ‘our friendship became intimate and unbreakable’. Buzot came to represent for Manon a revolutionary ideal, vigorous and full of integrity. Beside his passion her worthy, pedantic husband faded to grey.

  Louis XVI signed the constitution and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen on 30 September 1791, while the Rolands were away from Paris. It created a constitutional monarchy in which only propertied men were active citizens. All women were passive citizens, although the laws governing marriage, divorce and inheritance were made fairer; early proposals to allow wives property rights equal to their husbands’ had been rejected outright.

  At the end of the last meeting of the Constituent Assembly, which was dissolved by Louis’s signature on the constitution, Robespierre and Pétion were garlanded with oak-leaf wreaths and carried on the shoulders of the people from the manége to their lodgings. Pétion became the new mayor of Paris, defeating Lafayette in the election in October with the covert support of the queen, who had long despised the general. Félicité de Genlis, last seen in a tricoloured dress and dancing to the ‘Ça Ira’ as Citoyenne Brûlart, had decided that the time had come to flee France. Emigration was, after all, as much the fashion for aristocrats as revolution. Pétion, whom Genlis had befriended when popular politics were à la mode, found time to escort her, her adoptive daughter Pamela, Henriette de Sercey and the duc d’Orléans’s daughter into exile in London in October.

  The radical pamphlet-writer Olympe de Gouges published her own Déclaration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne as a response to the new constitution. ‘Women are now respected and excluded,’ she wrote; ‘under the old regime they were despised and powerful.’ The first article stated unequivocally, ‘Woman is born free and lives equal to man in her rights.’ Gouges demanded that women share with men both the burdens and the privileges of public services, taxation and representation. ‘Woman has the right to mount the scaffold; she must equally have the right to mount the rostrum,’ she wrote.

  Gouges’s appeal was passionate, but marred by her over-identification with her ideas and a lack of intellectual focus. ‘Woman, wake up; the tocsin of reason
is being heard throughout the whole universe; discover your rights,’ she exhorted in her postscript. ‘Having become free, he [man] has become unjust to his companion. Oh, women, women! When will you cease to be blind? What advantage have you received from the revolution?’ Her claims that women deserved rights because they were superior to men in beauty and courage; her unfashionable devotion to the queen, to whom she dedicated the document; and her insistence on demanding equal rights for children born outside wedlock (Gouges herself was illegitimate, so it was a cause close to her heart) clouded her message, diluting her call for equality and her lucid analysis of the prejudice of most male revolutionaries.

  Gouges’s pronouncements made little impact on her contemporaries. Later, when the walls of Paris were plastered with her posters, the government spies said they produced no effect on the public. ‘One sees them, stops for a second, and says to oneself, “Ah, c’est Olympe de Gouges.”’

  The satire Mére Duchesne was published at about the same time as Gouges’s Déclaration. It echoed the popular new journal Pére Duchesne, published by Jacques Hébert, in its use of colourful street slang and coarse language, and its style, as if straight from the mouth of its speaker. ‘Although I am ignorant and not lettered, like former judges or the deputies, I don’t lack a brain when it comes to political matters,’ held the fictional Mére Duchesne stoutly. ‘Can you believe in good faith that I would hesitate to stuff some good reasons up the noses of aristocrats?’ Although she stopped short at demanding political rights for her sex, she praised women for their readiness to fight for liberty, and called for them to be better educated. ‘Women have imagination and penetration; they are fertile in resources and expedients…Women aren’t doomed, damn it, to be geese.’

  Germaine de Staël spent the summer of 1791 at her father’s house, Coppet, in Switzerland, arriving back in Paris in September in time for the opening session of the new Legislative Assembly. A motion proposed by Robespierre, that no deputy who had sat in the Constituent Assembly should be eligible for election to the Legislative, had been adopted, and so all the deputies were new to their responsibilities. The majority of them were Feuillants, constitutional monarchists who, by virtue of France’s new constitution, considered the revolution over. The Feuillants’ club, which had broken away from the increasingly radical Jacobins earlier in the year. They commanded 360 seats on the right of the hall; on the left sat 130 Jacobins, Manon’s friends; in the centre sat the undecided remainder.

  On her return, Germaine began agitating anew for the promotion of her lover, Louis de Narbonne. After the king’s flight and subsequent arrest, Gustavus of Sweden had demonstrated his sympathy for his fellow-monarch by ordering the embassy on the rue du Bac closed to all social functions. Germaine was forced to use her friend Sophie de Condorcet’s influential salon as her base – giving rise to rumours that Narbonne had seduced Mme de Condorcet as well as Mme de Staël – but their alliance in Narbonne’s cause was successful. Mary Berry, visiting Paris that autumn, was disappointed to find Germaine so preoccupied (as she thought) with Talleyrand that she had no time to spend with her old friend; in fact it was Narbonne who was distracting her. The newspapers reported Germaine in her petticoats, ‘rushing around from nine o’clock in the morning to all the journalists to give them the official papers; the letters and reports which she herself has dictated to her darling lover’.

  In December, Narbonne was made Minister for War. ‘What a triumph for Mme de Staël and what a pleasure for her to have all the army at her disposal,’ wrote the queen bitterly. ‘What a happiness it would be if one day I might be powerful again to prove to all these rogues that I was not their dupe.’

  A rapturous Germaine watched Narbonne address the Assembly for the first time on 7 December. Although she praised his talents and his love of honour, she entertained no illusions about the uphill struggle that Narbonne, a courtier and an aristocrat, faced before the increasingly populist Assembly, distrusted by the royalists for being too radical and by the radicals for being too moderate. He once made the mistake, she said, of appealing ‘to the most distinguished members of this Assembly’. The radical deputies were enraged: all the Assembly’s members, they yelled back at Narbonne, ‘were equally distinguished’.

  The Rolands returned to Paris from Lyon in the same month that Narbonne was promoted. Roland had missed the Legislative Assembly’s elections in Lyon, and needed a job; with their friends increasingly prominent politically – Brissot as deputy to the Assembly, Pétion as mayor, Robespierre as public prosecutor – they saw more opportunities in Paris than Lyon, and Roland could also pursue his claims to a pension.

  They took rooms at the Hôtel Britannique again, but this time a smaller, cheaper apartment on the fourth floor, and they did not resume their salon. The Brissotin group was meeting instead in the Place Vendôme, at the home of Mme Dodun, mistress of another member of the circle, but Roland attended only rarely and Manon never. Instead she was said to have gone occasionally to the home of Julie Talma, wife of the great actor, whose salon was another important meeting-place of the left-wing; but on the whole she kept herself to herself.

  In March 1792, Brissot came to see Manon at the Hôtel Britannique. The Feuillants who dominated the current ministry, led by Lafayette and Alexandre de Lameth, among others, were in disarray. Narbonne, their Minister for War, had been dismissed for plotting (with Germaine’s help) to become prime minister in his own right and, when that failed, to steal the post of Foreign Minister.

  Rumour also had it that Narbonne, on the verge of bankruptcy because his wife’s estates in the Caribbean had been torched, was using the profits from selling military supplies to repay his debts. Germaine was told that Narbonne would be arrested unless he could find 30,000 francs at once. She asked her husband to advance her the money. ‘Ah! You overwhelm me with joy,’ he replied. ‘Judge of my happiness: I believe I have freed your lover!’ Neither he nor Germaine would have known, at this point, that he was also freeing the father of her unborn child, their second (their first, Auguste, had been born in August 1790). It was the kind of exchange that, had she needed any encouragement, would have made Manon Roland more determined than ever to rid France of corrupt aristocrats.

  Brissot told Manon that the court party, seeking to restore its popularity, had decided to appoint some Jacobins to government ministries. He asked her if Roland would consider joining the king’s council. Manon replied that she thought Roland would be interested. They discussed it, and agreed he would accept if he were offered a place. Roland was made Minister of the Interior the next day, 23 March.

  Manon’s friend Sophie Grandchamp described visiting the Rolands early on the morning after they heard the news of his promotion. She found them in bed, pale and exhausted after a sleepless night. Excited tears, kisses and vows of friendship were exchanged and Sophie went off to do some errands for Manon. On her return an entirely different scene greeted her. The Rolands’ small fourth-floor rooms were overflowing with callers: ministers, important deputies, other officials. Two lackeys were waiting outside the door. Roland looked on contentedly while a glowing Manon, who had seemed near death that morning, received their visitors’ compliments.

  When Roland made his first official call on the king, he wore his usual clothes: a shabby black suit, round hat, woollen stockings and plain laced shoes. The master of ceremonies was aghast: ‘Imagine, my Lord,’ he exclaimed to General Dumouriez, the Minister for Foreign Affairs, indicating Roland out of the corner of his eye, ‘no buckles on his shoes!’

  The Rolands moved out of their rented apartment into the magnificent Hôtel de l’Intérieur, the childhood home of Germaine de Staël. Venetian mirrors hung on panelled, painted and gilded walls; the Rolands slept chastely beneath a frothing canopy of ostrich feathers. Although Manon was obliged to give twice-weekly dinners for her husband’s colleagues and associates, still she invited no women, served her guests only one simple course and provided them with sugar-water rather than wine. Sh
e was determined that her behaviour should set the tone for a new republic of virtue.

  6

  AMAZONE

  Théroigne de Méricourt

  AUGUST 1790–AUGUST 1792

  And we would wish to earn a civic crown too, and court the honour of dying for a liberty which is dearer perhaps to us [women] than it is to them [men], since the effects of despotism weigh still more heavily upon our heads than upon theirs.

  THÉROIGNE DE MÉRICOURT

  THÉROIGNE DE MÉRICOURT had left Paris in the late summer of 1790, disillusioned by the revolution. Frustrated by her inability to make her voice heard, running out of money, the object of insults and ridicule, and afraid of arrest, she wanted to go home; but the revolution itself had been the closest thing she had ever found to a home.

  Her prospects were bleak. Although she had remained close to her two younger brothers, supporting them from her earnings as a courtesan, her father had shown no interest in her and her stepmother had never made her welcome. Her experiences since running away with an English soldier in the early 1780s – at first living in the demi-monde of London, Paris and Genoa, then trying to break into the world of music and theatre, finally seeking acceptance by radical revolutionaries – made her all the more unusual in the quiet farming community in which she had grown up. But Théroigne had nowhere else to turn.

  Returning to Marcourt, she found solace as the autumn progressed in the peaceful patterns of rural existence that she had turned her back on eight years before: the harvest, the village fairs – simple, pastoral, virtuous pleasures. She decided to buy a small plot of land and settle near Liége, pawning her diamonds – the diamonds once worn to the Paris opera by the mysterious Mlle Campinado – to fund her new life there.