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

by Moore, Lucy

  Rat-infested, damp and filthy, La Force was one of the most feared of the revolutionary gaols; the princesse de Lamballe, Marie-Antoinette’s friend, had been taken from there, killed, disembowelled and mutilated in September 1792. Its only equal in notoriety was Sainte-Pélagie, where Manon Roland had been held. Eight guards watched greedily as Thérésia was strip-searched and given a rough, sleeveless shift to put on. Her clammy stone-walled cell contained a straw pallet instead of a bed. For twenty-five days she was held there alone, not allowed to see the sky, not allowed to wash or to change her clothes. When Robespierre was informed about how dreadful the conditions were in which the celebrated beauty was being held, he is said to have said, ‘Let her look in a mirror once a day.’

  On 8 June, Robespierre presided over the Festival of the Supreme Being, his rebuttal of the moves towards dechristianization and official atheism made at the end of 1793 by his political enemies, several of whom were already dead. Robespierre disapproved of violence against religion almost as strongly as he disapproved of the Catholic Church’s former abuses, and he passionately believed that republican morality was incompatible with godlessness. ‘The true priest of the Supreme Being is Nature itself; its temple is the universe; its religion virtue,’ he had declared a month earlier, when he announced that the fête would take place. ‘Its festivals [are] the joy of a great people assembled under its eyes to tie the sweet knot of universal fraternity and to present before it the homage of pure and feeling hearts.’

  It was rumoured on the streets of Paris that Robespierre was planning to use the festival to ‘proclaim himself king, open the prisons and re-establish order and religion’, but in the event he contented himself with leading the procession of white-clad girls and deputies carrying bouquets (handy for masking the stench of blood and rotting flesh that permeated the city) and playing a central role in the symbolic tableaux devised by David. Like the king on his last official public appearance in July 1792, Robespierre was conspicuous in a sea of unpowdered heads by the old-fashioned formality of his hairstyle.

  David’s decorative scheme for the celebrations re-emphasized the exclusively domestic, maternal role that Robespierre expected of female republicans. Women taking part in the festival were explicitly defined as mothers. Pregnant women and breast-feeding mothers with their babies were specifically invited to walk in the procession supported by their husbands, and unmarried girls wore ribbons embroidered with the motto, ‘When we are mothers’. In Le Puy, at a similar celebration in honour of the Supreme Being, when an old woman gave a signal during the ceremony in the deconsecrated church every woman in the congregation turned round and lifted their skirts at the altar as a raucous mark of disrespect for the new idol.

  Liberty herself had been officially demoted by David, for here she was represented not by a statue of an idealized female figure or a red-capped actress, as in previous festivals, but by an oak tree. The figure of Hercules, cipher for the French people, held a tiny statuette of Liberty in his mighty fist. She was no longer a goddess before whom the French nation bowed down: Liberty had become its plaything.

  After Thérésia’s arrest, Paul Auguste Taschereau-Fargues saw a devastated Tallien on the Champs-Élysées. He did not need to ask why he looked so sad. Tallien’s mother rented an attic room opposite La Force so that her lovesick son could sit close to where Thérésia was being held, and breathe the air she breathed.

  Robespierre’s agents visited Thérésia at La Force and tried to persuade her to betray Tallien, promising her her freedom and a passport, but she replied that she would prefer to die. Only Taschereau’s intervention kept her from being brought before the Revolutionary Tribunal. Finally, hoping that she might incriminate herself or Tallien if she was placed in less severe conditions, Robespierre ordered Thérésia put into the common cells.

  Prisoners, expecting every day to die, tried to live as normal a life as possible in their confinement. About fifteen gaols–called maisons de santé–were, until the high point of the Terror, reserved for the richest inmates, who were held without locks on their doors or bars on their windows and guarded, in the Luxembourg, by a famously kind turnkey. Men and women ate together at large, communal tables; people sang and formed musical groups; games of cards, charades and epigrams were played, as they had once been played in gilded salons. Conversation was still highly prized. ‘You may kill us when you please,’ was the philosophy, ‘but you cannot prevent us from being civilised.’

  Gossip and flirtation were the pleasures of prison life, and lasting attachments were often formed. At the Luxembourg, in particular, there were so many aristocratic detainees that the atmosphere was that of a house-party. Some inmates could not resist using their forbidden titles, continuing to address one another in whispers as ‘Madame la duchesse’ or ‘Monsieur le comte’–increasingly often with fatal repercussions.

  Women who had once changed their clothes three times a day with the help of several maids preserved these habits as a matter of pride, despite having to do their laundry themselves and having been allowed to bring with them to prison when they arrived only as much clean linen as they could tie up into a handkerchief. In the morning these ladies came down in a ‘coquettish demi-toilette…arranged with a freshness and grace that by no means suggested they had spent the night on a pallet, and oftener still on fetid straw’. At midday for exercise they reappeared in full dress, with their hair elegantly done and their manners ‘more decided and dignified’ than earlier. The yard of the Conciergerie at noon was, according to Jacques-Claude Beugnot, like a garden ‘adorned with flowers, but fenced round with iron’. At night they changed once again into relaxed ‘undress’.

  The spirit of camaraderie was pervasive. ‘United by the strong bond of common calamity, the prisoners considered themselves as bound to soften the general evil by mutual kind offices.’ Gallows humour also helped cut the tension. At the Conciergerie prisoners play-acted the Revolutionary Tribunal and the execution, adding a final scene in hell attended by ghosts swathed in sheets and the Devil tugging at the victim’s feet.

  Each evening, the list of the names of the following day’s victims arrived, and summonses from the Revolutionary Tribunal. To be called to the Conciergerie was to receive a death sentence: no one left there except in a tumbrel. After the laws of Prairial were passed the pace of the killings increased dramatically. One hundred and fifty-five people had been guillotined in the month of Germinal (March–April); 354 died in Floréal (April–May); 509 in Prairial (May–June); and 796 in Messidor (June–July).

  Great fournées, or batches, of prisoners were taken off at once to the guillotine. At the height of these events, known as the Great Terror, 149 people left the Luxembourg in a single night. Some went mad. One girl whose entire family had been killed remained in prison motionless, refusing to eat, clutching her pet parrot to her bosom. When her friends tried to persuade her to eat, telling her that her parrot was hungry, she would say only, ‘No, he wants nothing–my parrot is like me, he wants nothing.’ Others were inspired to extraordinary acts of courage, selflessness and dignity. When a fifty-year-old prisoner heard the guards shout out his twenty-one-year-old son’s name, which was almost the same as his, he answered the call ‘with uncommon alacrity’ and went in his son’s place ‘with a look of exultation to the scaffold’.

  There were so many headless bodies to dispose of, and so little time, that the corpses were simply stripped, thrown into a mass grave-pit and covered with quicklime to staunch the sickly smell of rotting flesh and prevent the dogs and rats from feasting on the bodies.

  It was not just the rich who were imprisoned during this period, but anyone associated with the former ruling class; they seldom had access to advice on their cases or money to ease their time in prison. The female gardener employed at Lucy de la Tour du Pin’s house in Paris was arrested in the autumn of 1793 for making remarks ‘unworthy of a citizen’ and held in the Abbaye for eight months. When she was interrogated the following May, she ins
isted that she had never ‘allowed herself to be dragged into involvement in any political matter’, and later supplied the ward officials with letters detailing her honesty signed by thirty-three known patriots. Her case was far from unique.

  Rose de Beauharnais, the future Empress Joséphine and a friend of Tallien’s, was held in Les Carmes, a former convent whose walls were still stained with the blood from the September massacres eighteen months earlier. Most of the women there, packed as many as eighteen to a cell, wore short shift dresses called pierrots, saving their best clothes for the journey to the scaffold. They might be called to the guillotine at any moment, and they wanted to be ready; they also kept their hair short to avoid having it cut by the executioner. Rose had been arrested on April 20. Her twelve-year-old son Eugéne rushed to ask Tallien to come to their aid. But ‘he who would have been willing to help us was already powerless to do so,’ remembered her daughter, Hortense.

  Eugène and Hortense, unable to visit their mother in Les Carmes, used to send her irascible pug, Fortuné, past the gaoler with notes for Rose tucked into his collar. Letters were smuggled into the cells hidden in pies or roast chickens, sewn into coat linings or scrunched around fruit and vegetables. One day towards the end of June, after she had been moved out of solitary confinement, a stone wrapped in paper fell at Thérésia’s feet. She picked it up and kissed it, knowing at once that it was from Tallien.

  Théroigne de Méricourt and Pauline Léon were further victims of the atmosphere of intensifying crisis. Léon was arrested on 3 April 1794, less than six months after her marriage to Théophile Leclerc and the dissolution of the Société des Républicaines-Révolutionnaires. ‘A natural sentiment and an irresistible one for young married persons’ had led her to visit Leclerc at the front in March, where they were both arrested without charge and taken to the Luxembourg.

  It is possible that Léon had gone to the front to fight alongside her husband, as she had always hoped to do. In 1793 the patriotic Élisabeth Dubois, wife of Pierre Favre, was one of several women who testified to having joined the army where their husbands were serving. Her husband’s regiment of gunners granted her the rank and uniform of capitaine en second, the same as her husband, and she fought and was taken prisoner alongside him. When the Austrians discovered she was a woman her life was spared, although all her companions were slaughtered.

  Also in the spring of 1794, Théroigne de Méricourt’s brother Joseph had written to his local ward informing them that she was in a ‘state of madness’ and requesting judicial intervention in her case. Since her beating at the hands of the républicaines-révolutionnaires in May 1793, The Éroigne had slipped from the official gaze but had been gradually descending into madness. Joseph’s attempts to forestall her arrest were unsuccessful, and, having been heard making ‘suspect remarks’, she was taken into custody on 27 June.

  During her confinement in early July she wrote to Antoine Saint-Just, though she had apparently not met him, begging for his help. Her letter reveals her encroaching psychosis. ‘If you are unable to visit me where I am now, if you simply do not have the time, could I not arrange to be accompanied to your house?’ she wrote. ‘We must establish union.’ She needed money, light and paper, she told him, so that she could carry on her work. ‘I have great things to say…[but] I must be free in order to write.’ If she remained in prison, patriotism would be degraded, but if she were released she ‘could still put everything to rights, if you would second me’.

  Young, handsome and famously chaste, Saint-Just was the perfect focus for Théroigne’s fantasies: powerful enough to help her and austere enough not to frighten her. But although her letter reached him, in the chaos of the first days of Thermidor, he did not even have time to open it. It was found among his papers, still sealed, after his death.

  Saint-Just was Robespierre’s henchman in the fight to defend his vision of the revolution against an ever increasing party of opponents who knew that his triumph would mean their certain deaths. Robespierre’s enemies–many of whom had once been his friends and allies–were made up of several disparate groups, united by their resentment of his dictatorial pretensions and their concern about the direction in which the revolution was heading: the few surviving dantonistes; members of the Committee of General Security, whose power Robespierre was seeking to undermine (he had stopped referring business to the Committee of General Security in June); rebel members of the Committee of Public Safety itself; and former représentants en mission who had been chastised by the Committee of Public Safety either for the repressive severity of their measures (like the atheist Joseph Fouché in Lyon) or for suspected corruption (like Tallien himself). According to Paul Barras, a former représentant accused of embezzlement and bribery, Robespierre had said he wanted to rid the revolution of men who were full of plunder and blood.

  Several of his opponents approached Robespierre during this period, hoping to come to terms with him. Barras and Stanislas Fréron, two ex-représentants, paid him a surprise visit at his rooms in the rue Saint-Honoré, while he was undergoing his morning toilette. White with hair-powder, his lips tight-clamped together, Robespierre ignored his visitors; then brushed his teeth, washed his face and hands in a basin and finished dressing. He neither looked at Barras or Fréron nor addressed a word to them before they eventually left. As Barras commented, it could hardly be called an interview.

  On 11 June, a week and a half after Thérésia’s arrest, Tallien had written to Robespierre, swearing that he had altered ‘neither in his principles nor in his conduct. Not for a moment have I ceased to be a true friend of justice, truth and liberty.’ He knew that the Committees saw him as an ‘immoral man’, he said, but if they could see him at home, with his aged, respectable mother, they would find that there luxury was banned. Tallien insisted that he had never profited from the revolution; everyone in Bordeaux would confirm that his actions there had been governed by energy, wisdom and justice. ‘These are my sentiments, Robespierre,’ he concluded, echoing the tone of virtuous self-justification that Robespierre himself employed. ‘They will never change. Living alone, I have few friends, but I will always be one of the true defenders of the rights of the people.’ Robespierre responded by banning Tallien from the Jacobin Club.

  As the realization that he was the focus of an amorphous conspiracy grew upon him throughout June and July, Robespierre became more paranoid, more controlling and more isolated. Robespierre ‘was the Terror itself’, Barras wrote later. As Germaine de Staël pointed out, the people had respected him because they believed him ‘incapable of personal views’: the ‘Incorruptible’ was their mouthpiece, the embodiment of their revolutionary will. But as soon as his impartiality was called into question, wrote Staël, ‘his power was at an end’.

  Afterwards, Robespierre’s challengers would each try to claim the distinction of having formed the plot that brought him down. Fouché wrote: ‘Tallien contended for two lives, of which one was far dearer to him than his own: he therefore resolved upon assassinating the future dictator, even in the Convention itself’; he added that it was he who had persuaded Tallien to abandon this foolhardy idea and stand united with the others. Barras also claimed credit for telling his allies that they would all perish if Robespierre did not.

  Thérésia believed that it was for her sake that Robespierre fell. On 25 July (7 Thermidor) she claimed to have smuggled a letter out of La Force to Tallien, with whom she had been in communication since her release from solitary confinement. She had just been told that she was to be brought before the Revolutionary Tribunal the following morning, ‘that is to say to the scaffold’. It was so unlike the dream she had just had, she continued, in which Robespierre did not exist and the prison doors had been opened. ‘But, thanks to your great cowardice, there is no longer anyone capable of making my dream a reality.’ Tallien is said to have replied, ‘Madame, rest assured that I will have the courage; calm yourself.’ Another version has Thérésia sending her letter wrapped around a knife destin
ed either for Robespierre’s heart or for Tallien’s, and ending dramatically, ‘I will go to my death despairing that I belonged to a coward like you.’

  It is unlikely that either of these versions is scrupulously accurate. None of Thérésia’s correspondence to Tallien while she was in prison survives, and she was always happy to embroider the truth if it would make a better story. But it seems clear that she knew Tallien was the only person who could save her and that Tallien had, as Fouché observed, a double reason for desiring Robespierre’s end.

  On 8 Thermidor Robespierre appeared at the National Convention, immaculate in the same sky-blue silk coat and daffodil-yellow breeches he had worn at the Festival of the Supreme Being. He warned the deputies against tyrants and the enemies of the revolution, many of whom, he declared, were hidden among their number. The men he accused, whom he refused to name, knew exactly who they were. Jean Dyzez said two days later that on 9 Thermidor Tallien’s head was ‘almost touching the guillotine’.

  Next day, Saint-Just took the tribune at the Convention and began to speak–‘I am from no faction. I will fight against them all’–but after only a few sentences he was interrupted by Tallien, who stood up to condemn Robespierre for making a speech in his own name the day before, rather than on behalf of the government. Others followed behind him. Robespierre tried to speak in his own defence, but was prevented from doing so by the session’s president Collot d’Herbois, one of the discontented members of the Committee of Public Safety, who rang his bell to drown out Robespierre’s voice. ‘À bas le tyran!’ shouted the deputies. One described him as the leader of a cult; another was heard to call, ‘It’s the blood of Danton that chokes him!’

  ‘Until now I have kept silent because I knew that the man who was close to becoming the tyrant of France had formed a list of proscribed persons…[but yesterday] I trembled for my country; I saw the army of the new Cromwell forming, and I armed myself with a dagger to pierce his breast if the National Convention should not have the courage to accuse him,’ cried Tallien, brandishing a knife, perhaps the one given to him by Thérésia. ‘I demand that we stay in session until the sword of the law has safeguarded the Revolution, and that we order the arrest of the traitors.’