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

by Moore, Lucy

  In early September Leclerc was denounced as a counterrevolutionary by one of the rebel républicaines-révolutionnaires, Citoyenne Govin (the testimony of only one person being enough by this time to secure a warrant). Rose Lacombe sprang to Leclerc’s defence. She demanded an explanation from Govin and ordered her expulsion from the Society if she could not prove her allegations; she accused the Committee of Public Safety of arresting all the best patriots.

  Lacombe was present in her usual place in the tribunes of the Jacobin Club on 16 September when they debated the issue of Govin’s denunciation of Leclerc and her subsequent removal from the Society. A Citoyen Chabot took the floor to describe how Lacombe had become a counterrevolutionary menace, demanding the release of political prisoners being held without trial and threatening him with the wrath of her army of women.

  A few days earlier, Lacombe had gone to Chabot’s house to argue the case of the former mayor of Toulouse, held for some months without charge because he was rich, popular, of noble blood–and had offended Chabot’s vanity when the latter was commissioner to his region. ‘She claimed that one didn’t keep men in prison like that; that Revolution or no Revolution, they had to be questioned within twenty-four hours, released if they were innocent, and sent to the guillotine at once if they were guilty–in short, all the remarks that you hear aristocrats mouthing all the time when we arrest one of their friends,’ Chabot said. His views on guilt were very much in line with his leaders’: the day after this speech, the Law of Suspects was passed, ordering the arrest of all those who by their own or their associates’ words or behaviour showed themselves to be ‘advocates of tyranny or federalism and enemies of liberty’.

  Lacombe’s brave defence of a victim of injustice was enough to incriminate her in Chabot’s ‘cockroach eyes’ (as she described them). ‘I told him that we didn’t get rid of the tyrant [Louis XVI] in order to replace him with others,’ Lacombe reported. She accused Chabot himself of being an enemy of the revolution and insisted that she had not insulted Robespierre, but merely tried to warn him against his evil associates.

  Chabot’s distrust of Lacombe in particular was aggravated by a more general misogyny. ‘It’s because I like women that I don’t want them to be forming a body apart and calumniating even virtue,’ he protested to the Jacobins. He had taunted Lacombe by insisting he could never refuse anything to a woman; she retorted that she pitied her ‘country because the counterrevolutionaries also had women, and it wouldn’t be difficult for them to obtain pardons by sending [their] women to him’.

  ‘It is these counterrevolutionary sluts who cause all the riotous outbreaks, above all over bread,’ stormed Chabot. ‘They made a revolution over coffee and sugar, and they will make others if we do not watch out.’ Others confirmed that Lacombe meddled everywhere and encouraged her followers to speak scornfully about ‘Monsieur Robespierre’. Her liaison with Leclerc was raised, of note as much because of Leclerc’s supposedly aristocratic background as for any depravity implicit in their living together: ‘Citoyenne Lacombe, or Madame Lacombe, who likes nobles so much, is sheltering a noble in her house.’

  Just as the Club turned its attention to the case of Leclerc–who had declared in his newspaper that ‘if they wanted to arrest him, he would stab both the person who issued the arrest warrant and the person who executed it’–Lacombe stood up and demanded the chance to speak. Cries of ‘À bas la nouvelle Corday!’ greeted her request; the women in the galleries nearby hissed, ‘Intriguer!’ and ‘Get out, miserable woman, or we will tear you to pieces!’ Lacombe stood her ground, loudly protesting that she would speak or perish. ‘The first one of you who dares to come forward, I am going to show you what a free woman can do!’

  ‘The tumult and disorder became so great that the president donned his hat [to call for order],’ recorded the minute-taker. ‘It was only at the end of a considerable period that calm returned.’ The president pointed out to Lacombe that causing turmoil in a group of people trying calmly to debate a point concerning the interests of the people was counterrevolutionary in and of itself.

  At the Jacobins’ orders, Lacombe was prevented from speaking in her own defence and seized by guards, who took her to the Tuileries to be questioned by the Committee of Public Safety. After two hours waiting in the Committee’s antechamber, one of her guards took pity on her and escorted her back to her lodgings near the Palais Royal. When they got there they found the commissaires of the local sectional committee had placed seals on all her belongings and on the doors, so she could not enter. As it was late at night and the streets were dangerous, her kindly guard offered her a bed for the night. Just then appeared two members of the Société des Républicaines-Révolutionnaires, who had ventured out into the dark streets to find word of Lacombe, and took her home with them. Meanwhile the Jacobins had voted to order the Society to expel her and to recommend that all female agitators be arrested as counterrevolutionaries.

  The following day, at Lacombe’s request, the commissaires returned to inspect her papers. ‘We found nothing suspect,’ they reported. ‘On the contrary, we found nothing but correspondence of fraternal societies, which breathes the purest patriotism, and different personal letters where the public good and patriotism were beautifully expressed.’ The seals were lifted and, for the moment, Rose Lacombe was safe.

  Soon afterwards a furious, defiant Lacombe gave the Société des Républicaines-Révolutionnaires her own account of the Jacobins’ session and her argument with Chabot. ‘All the ills that are befalling Paris are attributed to us,’ she lamented, decrying ‘these monsters, who are strong only when they oppress the weak’.

  One of the most important elements of the threat that Lacombe posed to the Jacobin elite was her eloquence. They accused her of using ‘hypocritical and Feuillant [by extension, aristocratic] language’ and seeking to undermine the constitution. For her part, Lacombe understood that controlling the language of the revolution was the essence of the Jacobins’ political mastery. A large part of her rage at their treatment of her stemmed from frustration at the way they distorted the meanings of potent words and twisted the charges of their accusers back at them. ‘Be careful, Robespierre,’ she had warned on 16 September. ‘I noticed that those accused of having lied believe they can side-step the denunciation by accusing those who denounce them of having spoken ill of you.’

  Within days the undaunted Lacombe was petitioning the Convention once more, this time demanding the arrest of the wives of émigrés and urging the rehabilitation of prostitutes. As an actress–actresses were viewed by most people as little more than whores–Lacombe empathized with the plight of prostitutes. She saw them as victims rather than criminals and recommended that they be given honest employment and state housing, and made to listen to patriotic lectures intended to save them from the error of their ways.

  The robustly respectable market women of Les Halles, like the austere revolutionary government, viewed ‘public women’ as agents of counterrevolution whose corrupted morality would contaminate the Republic. Like gambling, fancy dress and pornography, prostitutes represented an aristocratic libertinism that was thought to ruin virtuous citizens. It was even rumoured that they were paid agents of the British prime minister, William Pitt. Several times in September police spies reported that women working in the Palais Royal were speaking out against the revolution and, ‘by their rudeness [incivisme] and other vices’, were contributing to the atmosphere of unrest and dissatisfaction that continued to prevail there. To the marchandes, if women who wore cockades defended and protected prostitutes, then women who wore cockades were little more than prostitutes themselves. Lacombe’s petitions on their behalf only underlined her personal immorality and political deviance.

  Despite Lacombe’s brush with the Jacobins, on 21 September the républicaines-révolutionnaires succeeded in persuading the Convention to pass a law compelling women as well as men to wear cockades. The first failure to display one would result in eight days in prison; the
second would provoke an enquiry into the offender’s politics.

  A police report described how the issue of the cocarde inspired women with the disquieting ‘desire to share the political rights of men. They say, when women have the cockade, they will demand civic cards, they will want to vote in our assemblies, to share our administrative offices, and from this conflict of interests and opinions will result a disorder favourable to their projects.’ Wearing the cockade would be a statement of active citizenship. However, the report added, despite their ambitions the militant women did not appear to be counterrevolutionaries: in general, they showed the deepest respect for the nation and the government.

  The market women were furious. Although they were vitally interested in politics when it affected their ability to make a living or to feed their children, they saw the political world as an exclusively masculine domain and the women trying to enter it as perverse and unnatural. Their energies were concentrated on survival; having time to fight for new rights would have been an unimaginable luxury. Wearing the cockade, they argued, would bring with it the responsibilities of full citizenship, including the obligation to bear arms in defence of the patrie. These they stoutly rejected.

  Consternation greeted the new edict. ‘One can put it on the right, the left, in front, behind,’ wrote one government spy. ‘This frivolous question, which has already excited violent brawls, is not yet decided.’ On its first day the law caused a fracas on the rue des Petits Champs, around the corner from Lacombe’s lodgings and not far from Les Halles, in which a group of dandies were seen encouraging some market women as they attacked a group of ‘citoyennes patriotes’. Elsewhere fishwives snatched rosettes from breasts, and trod them into the mud.

  Marchandes and républicaines-révolutionnaires were not the only people embroiled in the drama. One middle-class woman who was accosted for refusing to wear the cockade was defiantly anti-revolutionary. A man appeared before the Committee of Public Safety to testify that he had stopped a Citoyenne Guérin for not wearing one, asking her if she was a republican. She replied that on the contrary, she was ‘very much an aristocrat’ and, though she finally gave in and bought one from a street seller, she said as she fastened it to her hat that ‘she would never betray her own way of thinking’. Called up before the Committee to explain her words, Guérin said that she understood ‘being an aristocrat’ to mean ‘not doing evil to anyone, living off her revenue, doing good when she was able to, and bearing everything they might want her to bear’. Two of her neighbours were summoned, who declared that Guérin had been acting oddly for some weeks; after three days in custody she was released on grounds of mental instability. Only madness could have explained such a reckless disregard for revolutionary dress and vocabulary.

  Their triumph over the cockade inspired the républicaines-révolutionnaires to press for their rights to bear arms and to hope to force women to wear the bonnet rouge as well. Hitherto only sans-culottes and the républicaines-révolutionnaires themselves, as they patrolled the capital’s streets, had worn the red Phrygian cap, ancient symbol of freedom. For these latter women, the cocarde was a simple badge of patriotism, but the bonnet rouge was laden with more potent meaning. Militant women who donned the cap, an explicitly masculine item of clothing, were implicitly claiming the rights and responsibilities of active revolutionary citizenship–they were claiming the rights of men.

  Almost everyone except the républicaines-révolutionnaires viewed women wearing red caps as a terrifying threat to masculine authority and an augury of more violence and upheaval on the city’s streets. The républicaines-révolutionnaires insisted they were as free to wear the bonnet rouge as a cockade, and openly paraded in their bonnets, provoking angry retaliation–they were snatched off their heads and trampled underfoot, and the women were called bitches and whores. ‘Pull off their bonnets,’ people cried, ‘because the only people who have them are prostitutes and women paid off by the aristocracy to wear them.’

  At the end of October, after almost a month of unrest and escalating scuffles on the streets, a group of drunken market women stormed a meeting of the Société des Républicaines-Révolutionnaires in the crypt of Saint-Eustache. Crying, ‘Down with red bonnets! Down with Jacobin women! Down with Jacobin women and cockades! They are all scoundrels who have brought misfortune upon France!’, they attacked the group’s members, beating them up and knocking several unconscious, and tried to destroy the Society’s symbols, an oeil de vigilance, a tricolour flag and four pikes. A man who tried to intervene on behalf of one citoyenne, who was being battered senseless with a wooden clog, was stabbed.

  It did not take the revolutionary government long to realize that this violence–even though the républicaines-révolutionnaires were its victims–provided them with an excuse to disempower these tiresome women for good. The following day, a deputation of poissardes petitioned a sympathetic National Convention with their complaints against the républicaines-révolutionnaires and demanded the right to wear what they pleased. Fabre d’Églantine, Jacobin deputy and member of the Committee of Public Safety, stood up to attack female societies, declaring that if women were allowed to wear the red cap, they would soon demand the right to carry pistols. He argued that the groups were composed not of mothers, daughters or sisters, ‘but adventurers, knights errant, emancipated girls [meaning whores] and female grenadiers’. Women must be defined by their relation to men; their autonomy would threaten the very foundations of the Republic. At the end of the session, possibly prompted, the market women returned to the bar of the Convention to request that all female clubs be abolished.

  A day later, on behalf of the Committee of Public Safety, the lawyer André Amar delivered a theatrical report on the disturbances at the National Convention that revealed the depth of the Jacobins’ fears of women involving themselves in public life. On 28 October, he said, six thousand women had gathered in Les Halles to protest against the ‘violence and threats’ of a group of women wearing pantaloons and red bonnets whom they accused of trying to force them to wear an outfit intended for men. The riots that ensued, he said, were believed by the local ward to have been fermented by ‘malevolent persons [who] have put on the mask of exaggerated patriotism’ hoping to bring about counterrevolution in Paris. The ward requested that female societies be banned and freedom of dress be re-established.

  Amar said that the Committee’s investigation of these events had prompted it to ask itself some basic questions: ‘Can women exercise political rights and take an active part in affairs of government?’ and ‘Can they deliberate together in political associations or popular societies?’ To both questions, the Committee had decided the answer was no.

  Participating in government, declared Amar, required ‘extensive knowledge, unlimited attention and devotion, a strict immovability, and self-abnegation’–qualities most women did not possess. Nor did they have the physical and moral strength necessary to debate, to deliberate, or to resist oppression. Even meeting in popular societies was wrong, since doing so would require women ‘to sacrifice the more important cares to which nature calls them’ as well as their ‘natural’ modesty and timidity. Nature and morality had granted women certain immutable functions: looking after the home and family, educating their children in republican ideals and elevating the souls of those close to them through their softness and moderation. ‘We must say that this question is related essentially to morals, and without morals, [there is] no republic,’ said Amar, making explicit the link in Jacobin patriarchal, bourgeois philosophy between women leading a purely domestic life and greater civic virtue. He recommended that women’s groups should be banned.

  Only one deputy dared to question Amar’s conclusions. ‘Unless you are going to question whether women are part of the human species,’ asked Citoyen Chalier, ‘can you take away from them this right [to assemble peaceably] which is common to every thinking being?’

  ‘Here is how the suspension of these societies can be justified,’ responded De
puty Basire, with typically Jacobin disregard for the rights of the individual when they conflicted with his party’s power. ‘You declared yourselves a revolutionary government; in this capacity you can take all measures dictated by the public safety.’

  The measure was passed.

  A jubilant article in the Révolutions de Paris reported that women were no longer permitted ‘to organise in clubs; they will be tolerated as spectators, silent and modest, in the patriotic societies; in effect women can no more go searching for news outside their homes; there they will wait and receive it from the mouths of their fathers or their children or from their brothers or husbands’. Women could and still did observe the proceedings of all-male public associations–continuing to heckle the speakers, cheer their favourites, clatter their knitting-needles, eat and drink, scream insults across the floor and refuse to leave when asked to. But they could no longer comment independently on public affairs.

  At first, some former républicaines-révolutionnaires vainly tried to challenge the law that had dissolved their society. A group of them reached the bar of the Convention a few days later and tried to protest against the law ‘occasioned by a false report [which] forbids us to assemble’, but their voices were drowned out by the scornful hooting and laughter of the deputies, and they left the hall ‘precipitously’.

  On 17 November, in front of the General Council of Paris, the last defiant républicaines-révolutionnaires made a final bid to be heard. The galleries erupted when the women appeared in their red caps, and the president of the Commune, Pierre-Gaspard Chaumette, launched a furious attack. ‘Impudent women who want to become men, aren’t you well enough provided for?’ he thundered, to warm applause. ‘What else do you need? Your despotism is the only one our strength cannot conquer, because it is [the despotism] of love, and consequently the work of nature. In the name of this very nature, remain what you are, and far from envying us the perils of a stormy life, be content to make us forget them in the heart of our families, in resting our eyes on the enchanting spectacle of our children made happy by your cares.’