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

by Moore, Lucy

  Although the Commune made a half-hearted attempt to mobilize the wards in Robespierre’s defence, sounding the tocsin and marching a small force of National Guards to the Convention, for the first time since August 1792 they lacked momentum and support. Late that night, Barras led the troops under his control to the Hôtel de Ville, where Robespierre and his associates had fled earlier that afternoon.

  As Barras and his men approached, it seems Robespierre and his friends resolved to kill themselves rather than be captured. Robespierre’s younger brother, Augustin, jumped from one of the hall’s windows, landing in front of the approaching force. Inside, the crippled Georges Couthon was lying paralysed and bloody on the staircase; he had apparently thrown himself out of his wheelchair and down the stairs, but had not died. Joseph Lebas had been more successful–he had blown his brains out–but Robespierre had only managed to shatter his jaw. He was lying in agony on a council table. ‘Do you suffer, your majesty?’ asked the sans-culotte guards sardonically when they arrived. Saint-Just alone was unscathed, standing cool and defiant as he waited to be taken.

  The next day, after a brief appearance before the Revolutionary Tribunal where they were formally identified (but not tried), Couthon, Saint-Just, Robespierre and nineteen others were bundled roughly into tumbrels and driven through the city to the Place de la Révolution. The route to the scaffold took them along the rue Saint-Honoré, past Robespierre’s lodgings, where the carts stopped. Dancing, clapping, singing, taunting crowds encircled them; strangers who the day before would not have dared look at one another in the streets kissed and embraced; oxblood was splattered on to the walls of Robespierre’s house.

  Marxist historians believe that ‘when the Thermidorians killed Robespierre, they killed the revolution’, and even today many historians end their analysis of the revolution with Robespierre’s death. A more measured view is that held by François Furet, who views 9 Thermidor as the end of the revolution because it was the ‘victory of representative over revolutionary legitimacy’, but thinks we must neither detest Robespierre nor exalt him. He was as much victim as manipulator of his times. ‘Robespierre is an immortal figure not because he reigned supreme over the revolution for a few months,’ writes Furet, ‘but because he was the mouthpiece of its purest and most tragic discourse.’

  He echoes Joseph Fouché, years after the fact, who said that although at the time he was ‘too near a spectator of events’ to appreciate them fully, he had since come to believe that seeing Robespierre as a dictator was doing him ‘too much honour; he had neither plan, nor design; far from disposing of futurity, he was drawn along, and did but obey an impulse he could neither oppose nor govern’.

  Robespierre’s contemporaries were generally less equivocal, removing from themselves any blame for their own complicity in the Terror by painting him as personally responsible for all its horrors. Very few regretted his demise, even those most closely associated with him. On 11 Thermidor, the day after Robespierre’s death, one theatre was playing La Mort de César and another L’Hypocrite en révolution. Newspaper editors informed their readers that ‘at last, France is free’; grisly prints depicting Robespierre squeezing blood from a heart into a cup from which he was about to drink went on sale in the stalls of the Palais Royal. All Paris erupted in a delirious outpouring of relief and joy. ‘To finish the revolution was an idea of all others the most soothing to the public mind,’ wrote Helen Williams.

  Louis-Sébastien Mercier, whose political sympathies were Girondin, excoriated Tallien for not taking his victory further. ‘Tallien!’ he exclaimed. ‘Thou raised thyself as a cowardly sluggard rises at length when the fire reaches the mattress of his bed.’ But many more viewed Tallien as their saviour from the stench of death and daily fear that had become their lives. Mary Wollstonecraft, in Le Havre in August, wrote that she was ‘still pleased with the dignity of his conduct’, admiring his talents, his humanity and his ‘openness of heart’.

  Tallien revelled in his triumph. In the days after 9 Thermidor he let it be known that he had acted from the purest and most impartial political motives as well as from the most ardently subjective ones. ‘I would prefer to save twenty aristocrats accidentally than to expose one patriot to unjust oppression,’ he declared before the Convention, saying that ‘Terror is the weapon of tyranny’ and arguing for liberties curtailed under the Jacobin regime such as freedom of the press and freedom of speech–even for former aristocrats–to be restored. ‘Terror is a pervasive involuntary trembling, an exterior tremor that affects the most hidden fibres, that degrades man and assimilates him to beast,’ he declared, undermining Robespierre’s concept of Terror as an instrument of social regeneration and justice. ‘It is a collapse of all physical strength, a concussion of all moral faculties; a disturbance of all ideas, an overthrow of all affections; it is a veritable disorganisation of the soul.’

  On the day after Robespierre’s fall news of their salvation began filtering through the gaol walls to the prisoners inside, still awaiting their deaths. One man’s wife had permission to write just ‘Je me porte bien’–‘I am well’–on the packet of clean laundry she brought him each day. On the day Robespierre went to the guillotine, she wrote, ‘Ah, que je me porte bien!’–‘Oh, how well I am!’

  At Les Carmes, where Rose de Beauharnais was held, a woman stopped on the streets outside and began gesticulating up at the barred windows. She shook out her dress, and then picked up a stone, and repeated these actions again and again. Finally the prisoners grasped what she was doing–miming ‘Robe’ and ‘pierre’–dress and stone–and shouted his name down to her. The woman nodded and drew her finger across her throat, and then began dancing and applauding.

  Prisoners–including Rose de Beauharnais and Pauline Léon, but not Théroigne de Méricourt, who would shortly be placed in an asylum–were swarming out of Paris’s gaols throughout August. The mad elation they felt at their release was tempered in almost every case by grief for those they had lost.

  Thérésia rejoiced when she heard the news of Robespierre’s death, years afterwards calling 9 Thermidor ‘the most beautiful day of my life, since it was in part by my little hand that the guillotine was overturned’. She was released from La Force three days after Tallien had stood up in the Convention, waving the dagger she had given him, and called for Robespierre’s arrest. Tallien later declared that the warrant for her execution was found among Robespierre’s papers; for the second time, he had saved her life.

  16

  ÉPOUSE

  Thérésia Tallien

  AUGUST 1794–OCTOBER 1795

  Beautiful women are everywhere in Paris…Here alone of all places on earth they deserve to hold the reins of government; men make fools of themselves over them, think only of them, and live only for them. A woman need come to Paris for just six months to discover what is her due and what is her empire.

  NAPOLÉON BONAPARTE

  THÉRÉSIA EMERGED from La Force to find herself a celebrity, hailed as ‘Notre Dame de Thermidor’ by an adoring public. ‘No-one was unaware of the part I had played on 9 Thermidor,’ she told one of her children, many years later. ‘The letter which had provoked and accelerated that day was on everybody’s lips, known by heart to everyone.’ ‘She seemed to us at that time humanity incarnate in the most ravishing of forms,’ wrote Charles de Lacretelle, a Thermidorian journalist who believed Thérésia had had more influence for good than he and all his peers combined. Newspapers described her every movement in hungry, rapturous prose. Wherever she went she was followed by grateful crowds and guarded by a band of devoted muscadins, dandies, who had seized control of the streets from the sans-culottes.

  The muscadins, or jeunesse dorée, were a group of idle young men with anti-revolutionary sentiments, a mixture of liberated prisoners, deserters from the revolutionary army, clerks and actors. With the tacit support of the new regime, they patrolled the streets, intimidating and insulting people they suspected of Jacobinism. Their ringleader was Stanisl
as Fréron, an ally of Tallien’s during Thermidor, who had been his friend since the early days of the revolution. Both were Parisian, both had been journalists before entering the Convention in September 1792 and both had been représentants accused by Robespierre of corruption. René Levasseur, a defiant Jacobin, called Fréron an ‘evil genius’.

  Just as the sans-culottes had been immediately recognizable by their red caps, striped trousers and wooden clogs, so too did the scented muscadins wear what amounted to a uniform. Theirs, however, instead of being deliberately populist was exaggeratedly mannered. They favoured oversized grey or brown coats, high, stiff cravats, very tight breeches and long white stockings wrinkling around the ankles. It was an imaginary version of the clothes English country gentlemen were thought to wear, and a mockery of the republican plainness of dress that had dominated the first years of the revolution. Monocles were fashionable accessories, as were leaded canes or knotty wooden cudgels with which they harassed passers-by. Their pomaded, powdered hairstyles were extraordinarily elaborate: cut à la victime, very short at the back, and either falling over the eyes at the front or in oreilles de chien–‘dogs’ ears’–long, ear-covering ringlets. Muscadins also spoke with a distinctive drawl, dropping their r’s. ‘C’est ho’ible,’ they would lisp.

  Determinedly frivolous, vain and affected, they prided themselves on their amorous adventures–which was perhaps part of the reason they worshipped Thérésia. Their fingers were heavy with rings, each apparently the souvenir of an affaire du coeur. Both men and women, released from the fear of death, now abandoned themselves to a post-apocalyptic pursuit of physical gratification as a way of reminding themselves that they were alive. People’s affections, as Helen Williams put it, ‘burst forth with uncontrollable energy’. Everyone understood the need to test boundaries, to escape limitations, to feel free.

  ‘Life began again,’ wrote Lacretelle of this heady period, describing strangers embracing on the streets and at the theatres, astonished to find themselves survivors. ‘Men’s hearts and minds, which had a brief while since been so hideously transformed, seemed now to have grown more exalted, to have been purged of all their dross…Faults were forgotten, generosity was the order of the day…All were bent on pleasure.’ Williams agreed: ‘The theatres, the public walks, the streets, resounded with the songs of rejoicing; the people indulged themselves in all the frolic and gaiety which belongs to their character; and all the world knows that joy is nowhere so joyous as at Paris.’ But the inverse of this wild jubilation was a listless sense of cynicism and ennui. People who had lived through the Terror had looked into the depths of hell; nothing could restore their lost innocence.

  One of Thérésia’s first free acts, at Tallien’s request, was to visit the children of his friend Rose de Beauharnais and reassure them that their mother would shortly be released. Sweet-natured, pleasure-loving Rose, ten years Thérésia’s senior, was universally adored. When the two women met soon afterwards, they instantly became inseparable friends, united by their desire to drown out their memories of prison and deprivation with a surfeit of hedonism and luxury.

  In mid-August Thérésia wrote to a friend in Bordeaux with whom she had entrusted her things asking her to sell her guitars, her mahogany paper-holder, her orange trees, a walnut casket, her horse and her open carriage. She regretted that she was not there to sell some of her dresses, as her time in prison had been so expensive and Fontenay had diminished her fortune by selling houses and land that were not his to dispose of. With the money made, she asked for wine, sugar, coffee, tea, candles and soap to be bought and sent to her, along with some bottles of oil. These were ‘absolutely indispensable’, she said. Paris lacked all basic necessities. Guests invited to dinner parties at this time committed ‘an unheard-of impoliteness’ if they did not bring with them their own bread and candles.

  ‘Tallien loves you and embraces you with all his heart,’ Thérésia concluded; although they were not living together, their affair continued. ‘Happiness is on every face. Long live the Republic for ever! As one of their victims, I say perish the factions, the intriguers. My writing is messy, but I am moving house and very busy.’

  Despite supplying the list of instructions to her friend in Bordeaux, Thérésia returned briefly the following month to collect Théodore and close her affairs there.

  Back in Paris, she took a house in the rue Saint-Georges, in the up-and-coming quartier of Chaussée d’Antin on the right bank, a quiet, exclusive area. ‘The greatest of all miracles,’ wrote Mercier, ‘is that this superb city still exists.’ Thérésia and Fréron had the words ‘L’Égalitie, la Fraternité, la République ou la Mort’ erased from the walls near her new house.

  On 3 September, the ongoing relationship between Thérésia and Tallien excited comment at the Jacobin Club, still open despite the triumph of its political opponents. ‘We demand from Tallien an exact account of his liaisons,’ said Réné Levasseur, a Jacobin deputy, ‘that he tell us where he stands with an émigré’s wife, who turns out to be the daughter of [one of] the king of Spain’s bankers.’ Less than a week later, an attempt was made to assassinate Tallien as he returned to his mother’s home in the rue de la Perle one night. ‘Villain, I have been waiting for you for a long time!’ shouted his assailant, shooting him in the left shoulder and then running away. The injury was a serious one which went septic; a newspaper reported that ‘one of the purest and most intrepid defenders of the people’ had had to be bled three times.

  When Tallien had recovered from his bullet wound, he and Thérésia went to see a play at the Odéon, arriving in her distinctive oxblood coloured carriage. Having made their entrance through a crush of fans, they walked into the theatre itself to find ‘the entire audience was standing on chairs and benches, where the ovation was prolonged into more applause and cries of love’. For the moment, each shared in the other’s triumph; it was a parity that would not last for long.

  People worked hard to forget the horrors of the Terror, but as the ramifications of Robespierre’s fall filtered down through the political classes, Tallien became an object of hatred among displaced Jacobins and disappointed sans-culottes. Many suspected his political integrity, along with that of his fellow-Thermidorians Fréron, Barras and Fouché. Levasseur said that when he heard that Robespierre had been defeated his first emotion was joy, but on finding out who had risen in his place he feared for France. ‘The men who had taken control were, for the most part, men without principles, ambitious mercenaries.’

  Even those favourably inclined towards Tallien and his friends, like Germaine de Staël (who had been escorted out of Paris by Tallien in September 1792), questioned their intentions. ‘The new revolution which has just occurred has put the villains-for-the-love-of-profit in place of the villains-for-the-love-of-crime,’ she wrote. In just a few months, the tenor and direction of the revolution had been transformed. Individualism was no longer viewed as a crime against the state; rigid, austere virtue was no longer its governing sentiment.

  In their efforts to allow some kind of normality to reimpose itself on society, the Thermidorians relaxed the Jacobins’ stringent economic controls and limited the executive arm of the government. Freedom of religion was reinstated and price maximums lifted, but political clubs lost the rights of affiliation, correspondence with each other and petitioning. The result of these confused policies was political compromise, dramatic inflation, corruption and lawlessness. The upheaval was rendered less dangerous than two years earlier because the threat of invasion had diminished–the republican armies, winning victory after victory on the French frontiers, were becoming a formidably victorious force. Nonetheless, it threw a dislocated and traumatized populus into near-anarchy. Visitors arriving in Paris, where the once mighty Commune had been dismantled and the wards’ powers limited, commented on the city’s ‘strange character of uncertainty, of displacement. Nothing seemed to be in its place.’

  Throughout the autumn the debate over what should happen to
the Jacobin Club raged on the streets of the capital. In November Thérésia, accompanied by Stanislas Fréron and a band of muscadins, ceremoniously locked its doors, shutting the Club down for good, and presented the keys to the National Convention. ‘That woman is capable of closing the gates of hell,’ commented the British prime minister, William Pitt.

  Despite the new sense of political freedom on the streets, daily life after Thermidor was as hard as ever. The harvest in 1794 was one of the worst recorded in Western Europe. Even in August people had been complaining that they could only buy rough black bread; by December of the coldest winter since 1709, they were starving. It was not unusual to see households keeping a thin goat for its milk, or fattening a family of rabbits. Queues for the coarse, expensive bread might last all day. The government printed more paper money, but merchants refused to sell their goods for debased currency.

  ‘Subsistence is always the subject of conversations,’ reported a police spy. The Seine froze over, and barges carrying firewood could not get through. People began foraging for fuel in the Bois de Boulogne and the Bois de Vincennes, decimating the ancient forests there. Exquisite panelling, furniture and picture-frames from abandoned hôtels were torn apart and thrown on fires. Hungry wolves prowled the city boundaries. On the streets, desperate for money, people were selling whatever they could lay their hands on: beds, marble statues, books, paintings, used clothes, china. The whole city looked like an enormous junk shop, its streets jostling with gangs of muscadins and a ‘universal brocantage [buying and selling]’. Most essential items were available only on the black market. ‘Nothing was either bought or sold except in secret,’ remembered Frénilly. ‘Every purchase was a conspiracy.’