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

by Moore, Lucy

  Louis looked more dignified than Wollstonecraft had expected, ‘in a hackney coach, going to meet his death’. The sight made her cry. ‘I want to see something alive; death in so many frightful shapes has taken hold of my fancy,’ she wrote that night. ‘I am going to bed–and, for the first time in my life, I cannot put out the candle.’

  As soon as the blade fell on Louis’s neck, a cheer went up, students lifted their hats up into the air, and the crowd rushed forward to dip their pike tips, handkerchiefs, and even their fingers into his blood. The executioner sold little packets of the king’s hair and pieces of the rope that had bound his hands. Germaine de Staël’s friend Mathieu de Montmorency, at the head of his band of National Guards, had witnessed the execution. Having made remarks that would incriminate him in revolutionary eyes, the once-liberal former aristocrat fled Paris, going into exile a confirmed royalist.

  To many, it was hardly even an event. ‘At half past ten, the gates were opened and the life of the city resumed its course, unchanged,’ wrote Lucy de la Tour du Pin. After the execution Louis-Sébastien Mercier saw the onlookers, apparently unmoved, walking about arm in arm, talking and laughing as if it were a holiday. One city official said that many women were sad to see Louis die, explaining that ‘it would be unreasonable of us [men] to expect them immediately to grasp the significance of political events’. ‘There were perhaps a few tears shed; but we know that women abound in tears,’ he continued. ‘There were some reproaches also, and even some insults. All this is quite excusable, in a frail and light-headed sex, which has seen the radiant last days of a brilliant court.’

  Louis had not been the only one to face the National Convention in December 1792. Manon Roland appeared before it on the 7th, accused of corresponding with French refugees–including, improbably, Germaine’s friends Talleyrand and Louis de Narbonne–and of masterminding a royalist conspiracy. Her defence was eloquent, patriotic and restrained and her name was cleared; she received an ovation and was accorded the honours of the session.

  But Manon’s moment of glory did not guarantee their security. Even before Roland gave up his portfolio, on 22 January, the Rolands had begun to fear arrest or assassination. Roland had his bed moved into Manon’s chamber so that they would share the same fate if someone tried to murder them as they slept. Manon kept a pistol beneath her pillow ‘to protect my honour if need be’. She tried to be stoical, writing to a Swiss friend the week before Roland resigned that ‘if we did not possess that peace of conscience that resists everything, we might very well be weary of life. But…one becomes accustomed to the most painful thoughts, and courage becomes only a matter of habit.’

  Roland had become an object of controversy and public derision; the very mention of his name before the Convention provoked an uproar; he could no longer make his voice heard. When he decided to resign, it was ‘because he was not prepared to share the blame for crimes and follies which he could not prevent’. Idealistic Helen Williams, who had known the Rolands since 1791, said that he ‘retired from office for no other reason than that he was too pure to hold it’.

  The Rolands moved back into their rooms at the rue de la Harpe and returned to their formerly modest existence. They arranged for her governess to take responsibility for eleven-year-old Eudora if anything were to happen to them. Although their friends advised them only to venture on to the streets in disguise, and to sleep away from home to avoid a midnight arrest, Manon scorned such defences. ‘I am ashamed to have to act like this,’ she declared. ‘If they wish to murder me they can do it in my own house.’

  According to her best friend Sophie Grandchamp, in the weeks following what Manon called not Roland’s but ‘our’ removal from office, the inverse of her defiance was an all-consuming languor. The secret ambitions she had nourished of one day finding a ‘theatre where she could deploy all her talents’ had failed her. Sophie said Manon deplored ‘the success of men who did not value her husband, [and] the unimportance to which she found herself reduced’ and feared she would never ‘recover her empire’.

  For his part, Roland was devastated that his associates among the Girondins had not stood up before the Convention to support him against fabricated charges of treason. Still worse was a piercing private betrayal. The only man who dared defend him publicly was his friend François Buzot–with whom Manon had just dramatically informed her husband she was desperately in love.

  The Rolands’ friendship with Buzot and his wife dated back to the spring of 1791, when, newly arrived in Paris, they met a wide circle of like-minded people through Jacques-Pierre Brissot. They saw the Buzots a ‘great deal’ until both couples left Paris in September that year, although Manon commented that she did not think Buzot’s wife good enough for him. For the next year, they corresponded from their respective homes–Buzot in Normandy, Manon near Lyon–until meeting again the following September when Buzot returned to Paris at Manon’s request.

  In the early winter of 1792 Manon and Buzot admitted their feelings to one another. While she was resolved to sacrifice herself by staying with Roland, in January 1793, like the heroine of a novel, she confided her passion to him, promising that she would not surrender to her feelings. But although she would be faithful to her wifely duties and was determined to be governed by virtue, having long since abandoned any hope of experiencing romantic love she could not hide her exultation at having found her soulmate. Roland was broken by her confession, rather than grateful for her selflessness. ‘He adored me, I sacrificed myself to him, and we were miserable,’ she wrote.

  Roland wrote to his old friend Bosc d’Antic in January about his fear of death being worse than death itself, adding, ‘and this is the least of my worries’. He asked Bosc to burn the letter, but if he had hoped to conceal his private heartbreak from his political enemies he was unsuccessful. Jérôme Pétion told Georges Danton who told Camille Desmoulins of Roland’s ‘chagrins domestiques’.

  The events of spring 1793 dealt a death blow to the political hopes not just of the Rolands, but of all the Girondins. After the king’s death, even the most prominent of them seldom got to their feet in the Convention. Freedom of the press was suspended and Girondin printing presses were smashed. Although France had begun to make headway against her foreign enemies, these enemies were multiplying as she invaded Holland and declared war against Britain. In March the French army chief General Dumouriez, to whom the Girondins had publicly pledged their support, tried to march on Paris and declare the dauphin king; his treachery was another nail in the Girondin coffin.

  Long-anticipated civil war–what Manon Roland had once believed would regenerate the nation–became a reality as the royalist region of the Vendée, on the central west coast of France, rose against the revolution. Food was scarce and everyone was afraid. In March, the Girondin Pierre Vergniaud spoke prophetically before the Convention: ‘it must be feared that the revolution, like Saturn, successively devouring its children, will engender, finally, only despotism’.

  Extremism had become normal. In the popular newspaper Père Duchesne in February, Jacques Hébert had written that if a God existed, ‘he is evidently a republican sans-culotte. If a [G]od does not exist, which is most probable, let us continue without interruption our pretended career of wickedness with renewed energy, and an increase of sacrilegious excesses; and within a short time, both the reigns of gods and kings will be at an end, and the universe will contain nothing but a regenerated and enlightened family of atheists and republicans.’

  In late February, the women of the streets began protesting against the rising cost of necessities like soap, sugar, coffee and candles. Fights broke out outside bakers’ doors. People were dying of starvation in the faubourg Saint-Antoine. Hostility towards shopkeepers and merchants who were accused of hoarding ran high, and a deputation of laundresses petitioned the Jacobin Club, the Commune and the Convention to try and get stringent measures passed against hoarders, and price maximums set on essential items. Their rallying cry was ‘Br
ead and soap!’

  The Jacobins refused to allow the women to use their meeting-rooms, arguing that ‘repeated discussions about foodstuffs would alarm the republic’. If the women were allowed to use the room, argued one member, ‘thirty thousand women might assemble together and incite in Paris a movement disastrous to liberty’. First tyranny must be vanquished, they said, then food would be affordable; their work on the constitution was far more important than a bread shortage. At the Convention, Jean-Lambert Tallien declared that rumours of an impending famine were unfounded and stirred up by aristocrats. Women were merely their tools. ‘To provoke trouble, women are placed in the front ranks; they are pushed into crying out, then the men appear who instigate the uprising.’ The laundresses were then admitted into the manège: apart from food, they said, bleach had become so expensive that the poor would soon be unable to afford white underwear. They demanded the death penalty for speculators and hoarders.

  The next day a group of women overran several warehouses, seizing their goods and selling them at pre-revolutionary prices. Well dressed women were seen on the streets, ‘influencing people and stirring up trouble’. Protesters claimed that the Girondins were responsible for the high prices.

  Price-fixing became one of the most important issues of early 1793. The Girondins, arguing that it would be impossible to standardize prices, let alone enforce them, resisted any efforts at new legislation. Their opposition to the price maximum, to regulation of trade and to more radical demands like a special tax for the rich, made them seem unsympathetic to the needs of the people, and the Montagnards pressed their advantage. ‘I believe that the people are never wrong,’ said Robespierre. ‘The people suffer…they are still persecuted by the rich, and the rich are what they always have been, that is to say hard and unpitying.’

  In March 1793, the Convention decreed the formation of a revolutionary court, the Revolutionary Tribunal. Its public prosecutor, Antoine Fouquier-Tinville, was given permission a few weeks later to have any citizen arrested, charged and tried on the grounds of a single denunciation. Trials could be neither appealed against nor quashed.

  The man who seemed to best capture the popular mood of savage, almost jubilant resentment of the spring and summer of 1793 was the tireless Montagnard deputy and journalist Jean-Paul Marat. Marat was a short, ugly, nervous man in a threadbare coat who took revolutionary disregard for his appearance so far that Danton had to remind him patriotism did not preclude a clean shirt. Because of his chronic herpes and psoriasis he did not shave; he scorned not merely stockings but socks and tied his shoes with string; he sometimes wore a collar of ratty ermine fur and carried a pistol in his belt, which he used as a dramatic prop in front of the Convention when he threatened (rhetorically) to kill himself for his principles.

  Marat’s newspaper (L’Ami du Peuple) was violent, crude and passionate. Desmoulins called him Cassandra Marat because he had predicted that Mirabeau would take the king’s money, that the king would flee, that Lafayette would desert France and Dumouriez betray her. Marat’s devotion to his work of exposing counterrevolutionaries was so great that he had lived in hiding for weeks at a time so as to avoid arrest and continue publishing. To the sans-culottes his radical patriotism was unimpeachable: ‘he will always prevent the counterrevolution from masking itself in red cockades,’ said Desmoulins. His political opponents, however, thought his conviction that he was the only patriot in France a delirium.

  One of the most interesting aspects of the Marat cult was his appeal to women. Like Robespierre, he attracted an ardent following of female supporters who, far from being repulsed by his appearance and the stridency of his opinions, venerated him. In his private life, too, Marat was surrounded by women, and seems to have treated them as his equals. His much younger common-law wife–in true sans-culotte fashion Marat had no need for ‘notary and curé’–Simone Évrard devoted her savings to L’Ami du Peuple and helped Marat bring out each issue. Marat’s publisher was also a woman, Anne Colombe, one of those arrested alongside Pauline Léon and her mother following the massacre on the Champs de Mars in July 1791.

  In April the Girondins, who had so often been a focus of Marat’s fiery tirades, succeeded in indicting him for abuse of his position and forcing a trial in front of the National Convention. Marat took the stand on 24 April like a persecuted victim of Girondin paranoia. His supporters cheered so loudly that he himself had to ask them for silence. A sympathetic Revolutionary Tribunal acquitted him and, triumphant, he was wreathed in laurel and roses and carried round the Convention on the shoulders of the crowd.

  Their failure to destroy Marat only hastened the Girondins’ fall. At the end of May a warrant was issued for Roland’s arrest, and this time Danton neither could nor would recall it.

  The Rolands had stayed on in Paris after he left office in January in an unhappy state of fear, resignation and despair. Roland, heartbroken at his wife’s betrayal, became obsessed with publicly clearing his name. He published detailed accounts of his administration and vainly wrote to the Convention, eight times in four months, demanding that they examine his report, but ‘the Jacobins and their supporters continued to scream that he was a traitor’.

  By mid-May, Manon had decided to take Eudora back to Les Clos. In her memoirs she wrote that she had decided to leave Paris for many reasons, chief among them that it would be easier for Roland to avoid arrest if he were alone; for herself, innocent and courageous, she had no fear. She added in an oblique marginal note that another, ‘entirely personal’ reason had been the most important factor in her decision to go: her love for Buzot.

  Illness delayed their departure. By the time Manon had recovered it was 31 May. Five days earlier at the Jacobin Club, Robespierre had called on the people to rise up against the ‘corrupt deputies’ of the National Convention. Paris was preparing for another crisis: the city gates were closed, several wards had armed themselves in readiness for any sign of trouble and fights were breaking out on the streets. The tocsin sounded continually, producing ‘a confusion of sounds inexpressibly horrible’.

  That morning, under pressure from a band of armed activists, the Commune’s General Council agreed to a tax on the rich; to the arrest of the Girondin deputies and former ministers, including Roland; and to the creation of a paid sans-culotte army that would enforce revolutionary laws like the price maximum. When the demands were brought before the Convention later in the day, the Girondin deputies resisted them. The proposals were referred to the Committee of Public Safety.

  Some friends came to the Rolands’ rooms to wish them well, and advised Roland to go into hiding. At five that evening six armed guards arrived with an order from the Commune’s revolutionary committee for Roland’s arrest. Roland protested that the committee did not have the authority to arrest him, and the leader of the guard agreed to return to the Commune to investigate the matter. He left his men with Roland.

  Manon ‘saw at once that we must denounce this occurrence to the Convention with as much publicity as possible’. Still wearing her morning gown and seizing a black veil as she left, she ran downstairs, jumped into a hackney coach and ordered it to take her to the Tuileries. The Place du Carrousel was thronged with menacing sans-culottes bearing rifles and pikes. When she entered the Convention building (which had moved from the manège into the Tuileries palace itself) she found every door barred by armed guards and a ‘fearful uproar’ coming from the main chamber. Using language she imagined a follower of Robespierre might use, Manon handed an usher a letter begging for an audience, but received no response. ‘There is nothing to be done at present,’ she was told. ‘The Assembly is in indescribable tumult.’ Sans-culottes petitioners at the bar were calling for the arrest of the principal Girondins; some deputies had escaped, others were being threatened, ‘and nobody knows what is coming next’.

  Finally she managed to get a message through to Vergniaud, who appeared after a long time. Wearily, he said he might be able to get her admitted, ‘but the Convention
is no longer capable of doing any good’. Frustration and desperation made her argue. ‘Boiling with indignation, void of all fear, passionate for my country whose ruin I could see before my eyes, conscious that all I loved in the world stood in mortal peril,’ Manon felt herself ‘at the height of my powers and in a unique situation’. ‘If I am admitted I shall have the courage to say things which you cannot safely say,’ she told Vergniaud, who knew there was no hope. ‘I am afraid of nothing. Even if I cannot save Roland I shall proclaim truths which the Republic ought to hear.’

  Vergniaud convinced Manon that she would not be seen for at least several hours, and she rushed off to the lodgings of Jean-Baptiste Louvet, the man who had accused Robespierre of setting himself up as a dictator the previous autumn. Not finding him at home, she jumped again into a carriage but found the ‘wretched horses’ too slow. She paid off the driver and ran across the river, through packs of armed men, arriving home sweating and out of breath. The guards who had come to arrest Roland had left; Roland was in hiding nearby. She saw him briefly–not knowing it would be for the last time–and set off again for the Tuileries. It was past ten and the lamps were being lit in the empty streets.

  When she reached the Place du Carrousel she found the Convention had closed for the night. Outraged that they were not in permanent emergency session, she asked a group of sans-culottes loitering around beside a cannon, ‘Did everything pass off well?’ ‘Marvellous well,’ they replied. ‘They were all embracing one another and singing “La Marseillaise”, over there under the tree of liberty.’ The ‘sovereign’ Parisian Commune would arrest the Girondins, they told her, ‘sort out the fucking traitors and defend the republic’.

  When Manon returned home, she found a man there who warned her that Roland would be arrested that night. As she sat down to write her husband a letter, a deputation from the Commune knocked at her door. It was past midnight. She told them that Roland was not there, and that she did not know where he was. Leaving a guard at the door, they withdrew. Manon ate some supper and went to bed; there was nothing else she could do.