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

by Moore, Lucy

  An hour later the deputation returned, this time with a warrant for Manon herself. As with the mandate issued against Roland the previous afternoon, it came from the Commune but gave no grounds for the arrest. Although laws prohibited nocturnal arrests, and although no law had sanctioned the creation of the committee at whose authority she was to be taken, Manon knew resistance would be fruitless: ‘a “law” was now little more than a word which was being used to deprive people of their most widely recognised rights’.

  Dozens of men, their breath stinking of garlic and rough red wine, milled around the fifth-floor apartment’s two rooms as Manon packed a night-case and some books for herself and took out the things Eudora would need; plans for her to stay with friends had already been made for just such an eventuality. The Justice of the Peace appeared and set about placing seals on the windows, drawers and cupboards. When the man trying to put a seal on her pianoforte was informed it was a musical instrument, not a cabinet, ‘he pulled a foot rule from his pocket and measured it as if he had some fairly good idea of where it might go’.

  At seven that morning Manon was taken downstairs and out to the waiting carriage through a double row of armed men. A crowd had gathered. ‘One or two women cried, “to the guillotine”.’ Inside the coach, on the way to the prison, her guards asked her if she would like the windows closed to protect her from the mob’s stares. Manon was defiant: ‘Innocence, however sorely oppressed, will never adopt the posture of the guilty.’

  The next day, the besieged Convention voted to indict twenty-nine of their number. As Vergniaud had predicted three months earlier, the revolution was beginning to devour its own children.

  9

  MARIÉE

  Juliette Récamier

  FEBRUARY–APRIL 1793

  There is in her the seed of virtues and principles that one rarely finds so developed at such a young age…[Juliette is] tender, sensitive, loving, charitable and good, dear to everyone who knows her.

  JACQUES-ROSE RÉCAMIER

  IN FEBRUARY 1793, a middle-aged banker in Paris named Jacques-Rose Récamier wrote home to his brother-in-law Delphin in Lyon that he was planning to get married. Read carefully, it was a strange letter for a prospective bridegroom–Récamier took care not to reveal the girl’s name, which would have been well known to his brother-in-law, until he was halfway through the letter–but, given the times, nothing was normal any more.

  Récamier opened by saying that his decision had been made not out of blind passion, but with ‘all the calm of reason and the discrimination of the wise’. The girl, he said, was ‘unhappily, too young’ (she was just fifteen, twenty-six years younger than him) but he had ‘never seen anyone who answered better to my heart’s desire’. Others might be more beautiful, but in her, ‘candour, modesty and sweetness are joined to all the charms of youth’ and, although he was not in love, he was convinced that she would make him happy. As well as all her advantages of education, accomplishments and temperament, she was an only child and an heiress. It would be difficult, he told Delphin, to find a girl ‘more happily born’.

  When he had asked the girl’s parents for permission to marry their daughter, they seemed delighted with the idea, as long as she approved. The girl herself was moved to tears to discover the affection in which Récamier held her, and from his subsequent visits Récamier said he was sure that his feelings were reciprocated. ‘My dear friend,’ he wrote, ‘have you already guessed the charming subject I must reveal to you? It is Mlle Bernard.’

  Juliette Bernard had been born in Lyon on 3 December 1777. Her flirtatious mother was ‘singulièrement jolie’ and had a sharp head for business. She had helped Juliette’s weak, elegant father become a successful notary. Juliette was brought up by her mother to ‘play some great part’ in the world: Mme Bernard was very conscious of the power that came with beauty.

  The Bernard household was an unusual one. Jean Bernard had an inseparable friend, Pierre Simonard. He and Bernard had known each other since childhood, married at the same time–Simonard was one of the witnesses at the Bernards’ wedding in 1775–and had their children at the same time. When Simonard’s wife died, Simonard and his son came to live with the Bernards. Simonard was the brains and the leader in their relationship: occasionally Bernard rebelled against his tyranny, but they were always reconciled within a few days, ‘to the great satisfaction of them both’. In 1786 the Simonards, père et fils, went with the Bernards to live in Paris.

  Ambitious, pretty Marie Bernard had her own affairs to distract her from her husband’s closeness to his friend. One of her lovers was probably Alexandre de Calonne, Comptroller-General to Louis XVI (and rival of Jacques Necker), who gave Jean Bernard the job of receveur des finances that brought them to Paris. Another may have been Jacques-Rose Récamier, who was about five years older than her, and who also moved to Paris in 1786.

  For the first two years that her parents were in Paris, Juliette stayed in Lyon at the Benedictine Couvent de la Déserte. She left the innocent calm of the nunnery with regret, arriving in tumultuous Paris in about 1788. Her parents lived well in the opulent world of well-to-do merchants and financiers, taking a box at the theatre and giving lavish parties. Juliette, aged eleven, continued to read widely, in English and Italian as well as in French, and to study dancing, singing, the piano and the harp; she submitted to her mother’s assiduous attention to her toilette.

  Manon Roland, too, whose parents came from a similar background to Juliette’s, remembered her own mother taking great pride in her appearance, dressing her ‘little doll’ in elegant, expensive clothes and curling her hair with hot tongs so that she would look her best when the family took their Sunday stroll through the gardens of the Tuileries.

  In early 1789, Juliette visited Versailles, where the queen herself noticed her beauty. She was taken to the royal family’s private apartments and measured against Madame Royale, who was about her age. Juliette was a little taller than the princess.

  Throughout these years of Juliette’s childhood and young adulthood, Jacques-Rose Récamier was a regular visitor to the Bernards’ house on the rue des Saints-Pères on the left bank. Récamier was a tall, blond man with the classical learning, generosity and frivolous tastes of the ancien régime. Despite his legendary optimism, and despite his useful friendship with the respected revolutionary Bertrand Barère, the sight of Louis’s execution shook Récamier. He forced himself to watch the blade of the guillotine fall on the royal neck, and on the necks of his acquaintances, to prepare himself for a possible similar fate. In the Paris of 1793 no one could avoid suspicion. He knew as well that Jean Bernard, who had been in the service of the king, would only be able to deflect attention for so long.

  During the month after the king’s death, just days before the Parisian market women rioted over rising prices and when a brutal programme of Jacobin repression was being instituted in Lyon, Récamier made his offer of marriage. He was accepted–according to his account–first by Marie Bernard, then by M. Bernard, then by the fifteen-year-old Juliette herself. ‘It is just at this period of general upheaval that a man must look for happiness within his own home, and double his courage by gathering it together,’ he wrote to his brother-in-law, as if to explain why he was giving up his carefree bachelor existence, and at such a time. ‘The prevailing principles of liberty and equality allow more simplicity in life, and such simple habits bring one much closer to real and solid pleasures than the whirl and display of society.’

  Récamier acknowledged that some might question the ‘possibly somewhat warmer feelings’ he had had for Mme Bernard in times gone by, but he did not think public opinion could reproach him with anything. He insisted to Delphin that he no longer felt anything more for Juliette’s mother than friendship, and begged him to make sure the rest of the family joined him in welcoming Juliette into the family.

  Reconstructing events, against a backdrop of increasing danger, it is hard not to agree with Juliette’s most recent biographer (an
d the rumours throughout her life) that her fiancé was in fact her father. Her parents’ relationship was distant. Récamier had been a close friend of the family since before Juliette’s birth, and admitted that he had entertained tender feelings for Mme Bernard when they first met. ‘One could say that my feelings for the daughter correspond with those I had for the mother,’ he told his brother-in-law.

  The hazards of daily life at the start of what would become the Reign of Terror prompted him to offer his daughter, if such she was, the best protection he could. As his wife, Juliette would bear his name and have access to his wealth and extensive contacts. She could also take with her most of her parents’ money, as a dowry, and would receive Récamier’s fortune if he died; in this way the assets of both Récamier and the Bernards were safeguarded in her blameless hands. Juliette’s mother approved of his plans, he told Delphin. ‘The varying circumstances of her life have taught her, better than most women, the value of one’s own self-respect and of the respect of others.’

  The marriage was chaste; the adjective used to describe Récamier’s feelings for his bride was always ‘paternal’. Juliette’s niece and adopted daughter said that their marriage ‘was never anything but a nominal tie’: Récamier treated his innocent wife like nothing more than ‘a daughter whose beauty charmed his eyes’. The purity of their relationship made observers at the time speculate that either he was her father or she had a physical disability which prevented lovemaking. Whatever the truth, Récamier made no physical demands on his wife. As he put it, he ‘respected her sensibilities’ and, being a man of his times, he found his pleasures elsewhere.

  Whether Juliette guessed Récamier was her father when she married him, or whether she knew of his relationship with her mother, to whom she remained close all her life, is not known. She accepted him ‘without the least worry about the future he offered her’. Later in life, she spoke of him ‘as of a kind friend totally uncongenial to her’. Repugnance was the word Juliette’s niece used to describe her attitude to the physical side of her marriage. While on the one hand Récamier may have been seeking to protect his illegitimate daughter by marrying her, on the other he was concerned with the practical neccessities of their new life together. They wanted to marry quickly, he wrote. ‘There will be every household requisite to buy, from the first plate to the first tablecloth, stores of every kind, and so many other things,’ he told Delphin. Setting up home would be no easy matter, in such times, ‘when everything is so dear’.

  Récamier’s economic worries, at least, were unfounded. As a merchant and banker, with commerce in his blood–his father had been a successful Lyonnais hat manufacturer–he was ideally poised to exploit the revolutionary chaos by buying up abandoned or confiscated aristocratic property and manufacturing desirable items like ribbons, cloth, plates and buttons in patriotic designs. Nobody wanted anything associated with the ancien régime; quite apart from the desire to follow fashion, it might be incriminating. Although gambling in itself was considered ‘aristocratic’ by the most puritanical revolutionaries, even playing-cards, in 1793, had ‘sages’ like Brutus or Plato instead of kings, and ‘virtues’ like justice and prudence or the seasons for queens. For the canny (or unscrupulous), fortunes were waiting to be made.

  Strange times call forth strange expedients. Despite the unusual nature of their union, Jacques-Rose and Juliette’s marriage underlines the fact that, even as the Reign of Terror began, daily life carried on. Women married, bore children–giving them revolutionary names like Civilisation, Cérès or Phytogneâtrope, meaning ‘mother of warriors’–looked after their families, and hoped to survive. As the historian Richard Cobb writes, ‘we must not make too much of violence, at least in its crudest form: like Terror, like meat, it was a rare luxury, a weekend affair, or the accident of Feast Days and anniversaries’.

  10

  ACTIVISTE

  Pauline Léon

  MAY–AUGUST 1793

  Some women meet, undoubtedly excited by the Furies; they are armed with pistols and daggers; they make public declarations and rush to all the public places of the city, bearing before them the standard of licence.

  ANTOINE-JOSEPH GORSAS

  ON 13 MAY 1793, the Moniteur reported that a group of citoyennes had gone to the Hôtel de Ville to register the first revolutionary society solely for women. The group, which was to be called the Société des Républicaines-Révolutionnaires, was formed by two women: twenty-nine-year-old Claire (nicknamed Rose) Lacombe, an actress from the south of France who had arrived in Paris in the summer of 1792, and the thirty-five-year-old chocolatière Pauline Léon. They hoped the society would, in Léon’s words, hasten the revolution and bring on a ‘glorious’ new era.

  Rose Lacombe had become something of a celebrity since arriving in Paris the previous summer. Like Théroigne de Méricourt she had a gift for self-dramatization, and like both Théroigne and Pauline she repeatedly demanded for women the right to bear arms in defence of the patrie. She shared Léon’s loathing of Lafayette, demanding before the Legislative Assembly in July 1792 that he be replaced as head of the army. Alongside Théroigne, she was one of three women rewarded with a civic crown for her bravery during the storming of the Tuileries on 10 August 1792.

  Her speech to the Assembly in July 1792 reveals a little about her motivation and philosophy. As an unemployed actress, Lacombe said she regretted being unable to donate money to the fatherland, but she was still able to ‘pay it homage with my person. Born with the courage of a Roman and with the hatred of tyrants, I would consider myself fortunate to contribute to their destruction.’ As a single woman she declared that she was in a position to play an active role in ‘combating the enemies of the Fatherland’, but would condemn mothers for abandoning their children to follow her example. They ought to do their duty by staying at home and instilling in their children ‘a love of liberty and a horror of despots’. With their usual backhanded gallantry, the deputies congratulated one ‘made more for softening tyrants than for struggle against them’ for her patriotism, and awarded her the honours of the session.

  By the time they registered their society, Lacombe, Léon and their associates were already familiar figures in the visitors’ galleries of the Commune, the Jacobin Club and the National Convention. Léon later said that she spoke before huge crowds at the ward assemblies and in popular societies during this period: there, she ‘manifested my love for the Fatherland, propagated the principles of a sweet equality, and supported the unity and indivisibility of the Republic’. The scholar Dominique Godineau estimates that in 1793 Paris there were only a few hard-core militantes, many with links to one another. They included Léon and her mother; their neighbour Constance Évrard; Jean-Paul Marat’s publisher Anne Colombe; and a woman known in police reports as la Mère Duchesne, one Femme Dubouy, an ardent Robespierrist who was famous for shouting and making crude gestures in the tribunes of the Commune, the Jacobins and the Convention.

  Common men active in Parisian political life were more numerous than women, but still formed only a modest proportion of the population. From August 1792, each of the city’s forty-eight wards had an elected assembly which in turn elected the powerful municipal government, the Commune. (Pétion had become mayor of Paris with only 14,137 votes in a city of 550,000.) But on average only a tenth of the eligible voters turned out.

  Paris’s radicalization was thus engineered by a small percentage of committed activists, generally men with a little education–clerks, tradesmen or shopkeepers rather than true sans-culottes, who struggled to survive hand to mouth and lacked the time to devote to organized political protest. The activists packed sectional assemblies, persistently petitioned the Convention, intimidated voters at elections and took to the streets bearing arms when they saw trouble ahead. During the spring of 1793, the leaders of these militants–known as enragés–developed a radical programme of reform which the Société des Républicaines-Révolutionnaires supported wholeheartedly.

  The ré
publicaines-révolutionnaires met in the library of the Jacobin Club rather than the main chamber, which had been deemed off limits for women’s meetings when the laundresses tried to use it in February. Their official regulations–one of the few extant documents concerning their activities–stated that the group’s aim was ‘to instruct themselves, to learn well the Constitution and laws of the Republic, to attend to public affairs, to succour suffering humanity, and to defend all human beings who become victims of any arbitrary acts whatever’; its purpose was ‘to be armed to rush to the defence of the Fatherland’.

  Each month, a new president, vice-president and four secretaries, whose responsibilities included taking minutes and dealing with club communications, were elected. An archivist, a treasurer and their respective assistants were chosen every three months. Three committees were formed: Administration, Relief and Correspondence. New members had to be introduced by an existing member and seconded by two others; their names were then inscribed on the register and they were given a membership card. All had to swear an oath on joining the Society: ‘I swear to live for the Republic or die for it; I promise to be faithful to the Rule of the Society as long as it exists.’

  During their sessions, the president was distinguished from the rest of the républicaines-révolutionnaires by her red Phrygian cap. This was a potent appropriation of masculine attire. Since the previous year, sans-culottes men had been wearing these bonnets rouges as demonstrations of their symbolic emancipation from the servitude of the ancien régime. Until this point, women had seldom worn them: the figure of Liberty on the Republic’s seal had hers draped over the point of her pike, more as decoration than as a declaration of citizenship.

  Pauline Léon–along with the rest of the members–‘vowed to execrate the scoundrels Roland and Brissot and the whole gang of federalists and…undertook the defence of all persecuted patriots such as Robespierre [and] Marat’. Part of what the républicaines-révolutionnaires called attending to public affairs involved stalking the streets of Paris in search of counterrevolutionaries, conspicuous in their bonnets rouges and the red and white striped trousers of the sans-culottes, with pistols or daggers tucked into their belts. Their tricolour cockades were always prominently displayed. They were the new bullies of the streets, replacing the poissardes as the city’s most aggressive activists and ‘exclusively’ occupying the tribunes of the Convention and the political clubs. As Pauline Léon had hoped, they saw themselves as agents of liberty, hunting down the nation’s internal enemies.