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

by Moore, Lucy

  On the same day the Commune’s Surveillance Committee, headed by Marat, issued warrants for the arrest of Roland, Brissot and other leading Girondins whom Robespierre had denounced, without naming them, in front of the Commune. Marat was especially determined to destroy Roland, who had in the past month refused him state funding for his newspaper. Danton recalled the warrants, saying, ‘You know that I do not hesitate at such things when they are necessary, but I disdain them when they are useless.’ Although she knew it was Danton himself who had countermanded the orders of what he called ‘that fanatical cabal’, still Manon attributed to him the worst of motives.

  She was convinced that Danton, Robespierre and Marat had orchestrated the September massacres and that the mob that converged on the Hôtel de l’Intérieur on the 2nd had been sent to kill Roland. It is true that Danton, and perhaps most of France, saw the murders as an unfortunate but inevitable explosion of popular feeling–an exigency of revolution. Danton and his friends’ incendiary words in the last few days of August had inflamed public fears. When he was informed that the massacres had begun, Danton responded, ‘I don’t give a damn for the prisoners. They can go to the devil.’ Brissot recorded him saying, on 3 September, that the executions were the expression of common will and ‘necessary to appease the people of Paris’. Danton made no effort to staunch the flow of blood; but then, neither did anybody else.

  Roland, sallow, unable to eat or sleep and nursing a stress-induced rash, was in no position to condemn Danton. When he was told a week later that a warrant had been issued for his arrest (Manon had kept the news from him), the way he spoke of ‘this personal predicament…enabled his enemies to suggest that his opposition to the executions was due to fear for his own neck’.

  It must have been hard for Manon, so brave and spirited, to have been married to a man who so completely lacked her charisma and drive. Roland was upright, diligent and devoted to his wife and the revolutionary cause, but he could also be petulant, affectedly grave, suspicious, inflexible and timorous. As General Dumouriez, his former colleague, observed, he would have been better suited to a minor bureaucratic position than to the great office of state he held. Although she defended him loyally in her account of their life together and of his career, and declared she wanted nothing more in writing her memoirs than to ‘see my husband’s glory intact’, Manon’s frustration is at times almost palpable. Her husband’s most glorious or courageous deeds resulted from courses she had advised him to take or letters she had written in his name; when he acted alone, he was always less than inspirational.

  The sole man on whom she felt she could rely, after the horrors of early September, was François Buzot, one of the three Incorruptibles from her petit comité of spring 1791. Pétion was compromised by his vanity and Robespierre had distanced himself from the Rolands; Buzot alone remained to make Manon’s political dreams a reality. He had spent the previous year, since September 1791, as president of the local criminal court at his home town in Normandy, but had kept in regular touch with the Rolands. On 13 September Manon wrote to beg him to get himself chosen as a deputy to the new National Convention and return to Paris so as to save Roland from the Commune; implicit in her appeal was her own desire to have him near her in such terrifying times. A week later, Buzot was in the capital.

  Manon saw the Girondins, who held the majority in the National Convention, as true representatives of France, while the Paris Commune, ever more powerful, were a group of opportunistic villains who ‘had nothing to lose and everything to gain by the revolution [and]…felt the imperative need to commit new crimes in order to cover up the old’. Through Roland, Manon began to press for a federal system like that in the United States in order to deprive the Commune–and the Parisian mob–of its power. Robespierre and his allies presented this as counterrevolutionary treason.

  As Bertrand Barère said the following spring, the Girondins believed the revolution was achieved, whereas the Montagnards wanted to push it still further. As for Germaine and her friends in 1789-90, for the Girondins the revolution had been accomplished when they were granted access to power. The historian Alexis de Tocqueville described ‘the unfortunate and almost ridiculous situation of the sincerely republican party [the Girondins], that honest third party, running after an ideal and ever receding republic, caught between those who wanted the Terror and those who wanted the monarchy’.

  Although neither group was especially cohesive, and both were made up of men from similar backgrounds and professions, increasingly the Montagnards (who dominated the Jacobin Club, and whose power base was in Paris rather than the provinces) were a more effective political coalition than the Girondins. The latter were united by their political moderation, romantic devotion to liberty and high-minded principles–they saw themselves as ‘honnêtes gens’–but lacked the increasingly ruthless, focused energy of the Montagnards and their willingness to champion and harness the popular energy of the people on the streets.

  Those people saw Robespierre as the epitome of fundamental revolutionary concepts such as patriotism and virtue. As the historian François Furet observes, while the Girondins, who had not identified so deeply and personally with the stylized language of revolution, could not find a way to attack him, Robespierre was able to ‘dispatch them in advance to a guillotine of their own making’. Monopolizing this new language and imagery made it easy for Robespierre, and Marat to a lesser extent, to portray the Girondin fears of popular involvement in politics as elitist and their moderation as faint-hearted and hypocritical.

  One of the obvious differences between the Montagnards and the Girondins in the first weeks of the National Convention was that while the Montagnards were content to draw a veil over the events of early September, the Girondins wanted to bring the perpetrators to justice–hoping in doing so that they would implicate their political opponents. Many Girondins, like Roland, believed that they had barely escaped cold-blooded murder. Both sides cried conspiracy. When Roland stood up in the Convention on 22 September, its second day in session, and demanded an end to arbitrary power exercised by revolutionary committees, his words were applauded but nothing was done.

  When the Convention was asked to punish the perpetrators of the massacres, the Montagnards justified their decision not to pursue them on the grounds that during revolutions ‘very vigorous measures were necessary’. Jean-Lambert Tallien, secretary to the Commune’s council and member of the Surveillance Committee during the massacres, insisted that existing laws were sufficient to protect people. The Girondins took the line that all those who would not condemn the murders were implicated in them. ‘There can be neither esteem nor union between the heroes of August 10 and the assassins of September,’ cried Buzot. ‘There can be no union between virtue and vice.’

  Buzot’s first speech to the Convention, on 24 September, demonstrated his commitment to Girondin, and more particularly Manon Roland’s, ideology. He proposed three resolutions: a reconciliation between the capital and the rest of the country; a law condemning the instigators of death and murder; and a project to create a new domestic force at the Convention’s command and drawn from each of the Republic’s eighty-three departments–a national rival, in effect, to the gangs of armed sans-culottes roaming the streets of Paris.

  When the issue of Roland continuing as Interior Minister was brought before the Convention on the 29th–no government minister could also be a deputy to the Convention, so Roland (like Danton, if he was to remain as Minister of Justice) would have to choose between the two responsibilities–Buzot introduced the motion inviting him to stay on in office. Danton pushed back his chair and roared, ‘No one is more fair to Roland than I, but I suggest that if you invite him to be Minister, you should also extend the invitation to Mme Roland, for everyone knows he was not alone in his department!’ Buzot replied that he was proud to call Roland his friend.

  Roland was reconfirmed as minister in late October, after more efforts on Danton’s part to undermine him and a campai
gn of public accusations against him throughout the autumn. Tallien criticized his policies in L’Ami des Citoyens; Jean-Paul Marat went further in Père Duchesne. ‘It was past midnight and the “virtuous” Roland slut was relaxing in the arms of the nigger Lanthenas from those pleasures which her bald old husband has to procure for her…’ He called Manon a modern Circe, compared her to Lucrezia Borgia, accused her of seducing every Girondin associate of her husband’s and, still worse, of running his ministry.

  Roland’s speeches were thought pompous and laboured by many younger deputies. Dr Moore overheard two of them discussing his rhetoric. The first said peevishly, ‘His only object is to make us admire the beauty of his style.’ The second replied, ‘In which he sometimes succeeds, with the help of his wife.’

  Moore was an admirer of Roland’s, describing him, in his drab suit lined with green silk, as a thorough republican, scrupulous, modest and trustworthy. Although he had not met Manon, Moore had heard she was an agreeable woman of good taste. He thought Roland’s fatal flaw was to show his enemies how shaken he was by the attacks made on him: ‘this is one reason perhaps for their being continued with such spirit’. Some of these disputes were marked by mutual misunderstandings and small-mindedness. Moore reported in October that Roland protested to the Commune that a list of the addresses of the Convention’s deputies had been approved for publication by a forgery of the mayor’s signature. The Commune responded that Roland’s complaints diminished public confidence in the government.

  The Girondins, losing ground in Paris, were heartened by the news from the frontiers. The war had begun to go in France’s favour. By 8 October, all foreign troops had been pushed back over the border, and at Jemappe on 6 November the French army won another significant victory. But in the Jacobin Club, Jean-Paul Marat croaked out criticism of the Girondin General Dumouriez, according to Moore, with ‘affected solemnity’ and ‘eyes of menace, or contempt’.

  On 29 October the editor of La Sentinelle, Jean-Baptiste Louvet–unlike Marat, one of the editors to whom Roland had granted government funds–accused Robespierre in print of creating a personality cult and conspiring to set himself up as dictator. Robespierre counterattacked by turning Louvet’s criticisms on their head. He managed to make his obsessive personal identification with the popular will a virtue rather than a fault–he was simply the agent of France’s destiny–and defended the recent surge of violence by explaining that the revolution required it and must not be judged by ordinary standards of morality. ‘Do you want a Revolution without a revolution?’ he asked dramatically.

  Dr Moore, an eyewitness of the debates, observed that although many people like speaking about themselves Robespierre was exceptional, seeming ‘as much enlivened by the eulogies he bestows upon himself, as others are by the applause of their fellow citizens’. The dispute had come to perhaps the worst possible conclusion for the interests of the nation, wrote Moore, ‘for the parties remain too nearly equal in force, and likely to ruin the common interest by their mutual animosity’.

  Once again, Moore commented on the heavy preponderance of women cheering Robespierre on from the visitors’ galleries–five or six hundred women as opposed to perhaps two hundred men watched him defend himself against Louvet on 5 November. Some of these women admitted they were paid to be there; most simply worshipped his stance as impartial defender of the poor and the weak. When Robespierre had dinner at the home of Rosalie Jullien a few months later, despite his powdered hair and stiff silk coat, she found him simple and natural–the loftiest revolutionary praise–and, although a thinker, as ‘sweet as a lamb’. ‘I would like to believe that he wants the best for humanity, more from justice than from love,’ she wrote. As Condorcet said, Robespierre was like nothing more than the leader of a sect: the high priest of the holy revolution.

  Moore agreed with Condorcet. He thought Robespierre was a zealot, ruled by his craving for popularity rather than avarice, and an arch-manipulator of events. ‘He retires before danger, and nobody is so conspicuous as he when the danger is over,’ said Moore; he ‘refuses offices in which he might be of service, takes those where he can govern; appears when he can make a figure, disappears when others occupy the stage’. It was only with difficulty, he added, that Robespierre concealed ‘the hatred and malice which is said to exist in his heart’.

  In November 1792 the National Convention turned its attention to the problem of the king. With what some deputies found an infuriating smugness, Roland declared that incriminating documents had been found in a safe in Louis’s former apartments in the Tuileries. His air of mystery–Roland hinted darkly that several deputies might also be compromised by the papers–caused rumours to fly. Roland was suspected of tampering with the evidence, because he had taken no witnesses from the Convention with him when he went to open the safe. The papers’ most dramatic revelation was that before his death Mirabeau had been accepting money from the king for advice about how to regain his power. More damningly for Louis, they also showed he had had dealings with France’s enemies and had unwillingly accepted the constitution he privately described as detestable in order to buy himself time.

  The Convention began to debate the procedures for the trial of France’s former king. Robespierre argued that he needed no trial–that, as the ‘solitary rebel’ of the Republic, he already stood condemned. ‘Louis must die that the country may live,’ he declared. His young follower, Antoine Saint-Just, echoed Robespierre: ‘There is no innocent reign…every king is a rebel and a usurper.’ Tallien also called for Louis’s death, but with a slightly different emphasis: ‘He knows that he is condemned…to keep him in suspense is prolonging his agony. Let us, in tenderness for his sufferings, decree his immediate execution and put him out of anguish.’

  Olympe de Gouges, irrepressible champion of lost causes, offered to defend Louis and demonstrate that women were as capable of generosity of spirit and heroism as men. Although she said she was a republican, she saw Louis as a victim. ‘The blood, even of the guilty, eternally defiles a revolution,’ she said, arguing that deprived of his crown, Louis was no longer guilty of the faults he had committed as king. Furthermore, if he were executed he would become a martyr. ‘To kill a king, you need to do more than simply remove his head, for, in such circumstances, he will live a long time after his death; he would only be really dead if he were to survive his fall.’

  On the streets of Paris, where signatures (including Pauline Léon’s) were being added to petitions calling for Louis’s death, Gouges’s plea for humanity provoked outrage. Her lodgings were besieged by a furious mob, and when she went downstairs to reason with them, she was grabbed by the waist and her distinctive white headdress knocked off. ‘Who’ll bid me 15 sous for the head of Olympe de Gouges?’ cried her assailant. Her bold reply–‘I’ll bid you 30, and I demand first refusal’–may have saved her life. The crowd’s mood switched from menace to laughter, and they dispersed.

  Gouges posted placards all over the city, calling for a referendum on Louis’s fate and condemning all the Montagnard leaders but Danton, whom she admired. She called Robespierre an ‘amphibious animal’ and described the invalid Marat as having ‘neither the physique nor the morals of a man’. As with Théroigne de Méricourt, her energetic, eccentric attachment to their cause only harmed the Girondins, whose tolerance of political women was criticized by the misogynist Montagnards and whose reluctance to condemn Louis to death was seen as weakness.

  In early January 1793, having heard the arguments, the deputies to the Convention began to cast their votes on Louis’s fate. At Marat’s insistence, each man was required to stand before the bar and state aloud his judgement as to whether Louis was guilty and whether or not he should be killed. No one defended his innocence. Three hundred and sixty-one votes were cast for unconditional death; 319, for imprisonment followed by exile. Philippe Égalité voted for his cousin’s execution.

  The evening before Louis was killed, one of the best known of the Convention’s Jacobin dep
uties was fatally stabbed in a café in the Palais Royal. Michel Lepeletier was a rich former marquis who from 1789 had become a committed reformer, drafting an impressive plan for free compulsory elementary education and contributing to the new penal code drawn up by the Constituent Assembly. Out of principle, Lepeletier had voted for the king’s death; his murderer was a former royal bodyguard who believed that as a ci-devant noble Lepeletier had betrayed his former master. Lepeletier’s last words were said to have been, ‘I die content that the tyrant is no more.’

  Jacques-Louis David painted Lepeletier as a revolutionary pietà and planned his funeral so as to present him as a martyr to the fatherland, happy to die if it furthered the causes of liberty and equality. The cortège paused outside the Jacobin Club, where Lepeletier’s daughter was declared a ward of the nation. Walking at the head of the mourners was his younger brother Félix, Thérésia de Fontenay’s first great passion.

  Young aristocrats like Félix and Thérésia who had ‘donned its [the revolution’s] costume and borrowed its language’ still believed that they were safe in Paris in the winter of 1792–3, but in most cases their sense of security would turn out to be illusory. Félix Lepeletier was one exception: he remained faithful to the Montagnard ideology espoused by his brother, and survived the Terror. Thérésia de Fontenay waited until her divorce came through in April and then, as Citoyenne Cabarrus, fled south towards Spain.

  Mary Wollstonecraft watched Louis’s carriage pass by her window on his way to the guillotine, which had been moved from the Place du Carrousel to the Place de la Révolution on a foggy January morning. The eerie silence of the empty streets was rendered more awful by the slow beating of drums. People ‘flocked to their windows’ to watch him go by, but at the Commune’s order ‘the casements were all shut, not a voice was heard’.