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

by Moore, Lucy

  In the republican Year III (September 1794–September 1795), mortality rates in Paris reached a record high for the second year running. But in 1794–5 the culprit was dearth, famine and freezing temperatures, rather than Madame Guillotine. Suicide rates soared, especially among young, poor, single women.

  One household seemed oblivious to these hardships that winter. On 26 December Jean-Lambert Tallien finally married Thérésia Cabarrus-Fontenay, who was four months pregnant. Their principal witness was Stanislas Fréron; Rose de Beauharnais attended Thérésia.

  Almost as soon as their relationship had begun, Thérésia had expressed doubts about her feelings for Tallien and in several cases been openly disloyal to him. To some, she declared that she loved him, but it seems more likely that she saw their destinies as intertwined and irrevocable–an alliance of mutual dependency from which she neither could nor should extricate herself. ‘When one comes through a storm, one cannot always choose one’s lifeline,’ she wrote to a friend, years later. In Bordeaux she had said that she could not leave Tallien because she was responsible for his political difficulties; in Paris, perhaps, she felt she could not leave him because she was responsible for his success. Then, too, she longed to play a great part on the world’s stage. Tallien, the hero of the hour, looked as if he had a brilliant career ahead of him. In late 1794, even despite the first rumbles of criticism, there were few more promising men to whom to be attached. Her pregnancy was the deciding factor. As contemptuous as Thérésia was of convention, she did not want to have a baby out of wedlock.

  Tallien had no such scruples about their union. When soon after his wedding a deputy at the Convention asked him to define his relationship to the fabulously rich Cabarrus woman, he responded with pride. He had never wanted to bring her into the public eye, he began, but he could remain silent no longer; the calumnies heaped upon her forced him to speak. ‘We speak of Cabarrus’s daughter,’ he said. ‘I have known her for a long time; I saved her life in Bordeaux; her unhappiness and her virtues inspired me with affection and respect.’ In La Force, pressed by Robespierre’s men to betray him, she had responded with indignation. ‘This, citizens, this is the woman who is my wife.’ This semi-official announcement of their marriage only made his enemies despise him more.

  Thérésia’s reservations about marrying Tallien were made clear by the prenuptial agreement they drew up. Wary after her experiences with Fontenay, she was leaving nothing to chance. The contract specified that their goods were to be owned separately and that Thérésia was to remain in control of her own money. Any children were to be brought up by their parents each according to their respective fortunes.

  After the civil ceremony, statuesque and glowing, Thérésia defied the icy temperatures outside to welcome the guests to her wedding feast wearing a short white muslin tunic, draped like a Greek statue’s and caught up at the shoulders with antique cameos. Her finely modelled arms and hands were exposed and on her bare feet she wore thin cothurni, or sandals strapped around her ankles. The party was held at La Chaumiére, the thatched cottage that had formed part of Thérésia’s dowry when she married Fontenay. It was set in what were then the outskirts of Paris, near the modern avenue Montaigne. The area was rural in feel, populated by cowherds, milkmaids, laundresses, and gardeners attending their lettuce beds and vineyards. La Chaumiére itself was theatrically rustic, a rose-covered, weather-stained brick cottage with a mossy thatched roof, set in a secluded grove of poplars, fruit trees and lilacs.

  People coming out of prison, their eyes accustomed to the darkness of crowded, damp cells, found solace in the light and greenery of rural idylls like La Chaumiére. Harking back to the fashion for the pastoral which had marked the early revolution–and of which Thérésia had been an enthusiastic proponent, with her fête champêtre at Fontenay-aux-Roses in 1789–this desire for nature was both escapist and therapeutic. ‘I would like so much to live in the woods and the forests,’ wrote one disenchanted political wife in 1793, echoing Manon Roland’s longing for her serene way of life at the Rolands’ farm near Lyon. When the artist Jacques-Louis David was in prison in 1794 (guilty of supporting Robespierre), he painted a lyrically restorative landscape of the Luxembourg gardens from his cell window. La Chaumiére served this purpose for Thérésia; it was the ideal ‘gabled cottage’ Tallien had rhapsodized about before the Convention in the spring of 1794.

  The cottage’s deliberately humble exterior gave no indication of the opulence of its neoclassical interiors. Etruscan vases stood in the Pompeian-style hall. A large fountain, dominated by a statue of Neptune holding a trident,* formed the centrepiece of the main salon. In an age of scarcity, the rooms were extravagantly heated and lit; hot-house jonquils, hyacinths and heliotropes scented the air; rich dishes like lobster Thermidor were served up by Thérésia’s chefs. Upstairs her huge bed, draped in yellow, was set into a mirrored alcove, with gilded bronze cupids guarding each corner. Standing nearby was a nude statue of the goddess Diana, bearing an unmistakable resemblance to Thérésia herself.

  Although the newlyweds remained in the rue Saint-Georges until the winter of 1795 (and it remained Tallien’s official address on the Convention’s registry until 1796), from this period La Chaumiére became the focal point of Thermidorian social life. Thérésia’s charm and beauty, Tallien’s political position and their joint fame attracted the most glittering characters of the new society, all meeting on equal ground. Republican manners were still the fashion. Lapdogs–Thérésia’s little Minerve ate out of a gold bowl studded with emeralds–were trained to bark at the word ‘aristocrat’, and the title citoyen sufficed for everybody. But the new mores were tempered by the old-fashioned etiquette of the returning exiles, and to have been in prison during the Terror was ‘a necessary introduction to good society’. Gradually vous replaced tu in polite conversation; tricolour cockades, though still theoretically obligatory, were less and less prominently displayed.

  In this oddly meritocratic atmosphere, energy and money replaced birth and breeding or revolutionary fervour as the sole currencies of social status. Thérésia’s guests were mostly young, ambitious, charismatic and full of passion. Their experiences over the past few years had taught them that they could rely only upon themselves, and they were determined to suck all they could from life. ‘People speak of patriotism and liberty,’ wrote a German visitor to Paris at this time, ‘but it is power and riches that they want; it is glory and vanity that intoxicate them.’

  One found at La Chaumiére in 1795 deputies to the Convention of all political stripes, including Théroigne de Méricourt’s hero Emmanuel Joseph Sieyés, the Girondin journalist whom Thérésia had saved in Bordeaux, Jean-Baptiste Louvet, and Tallien’s friends Paul Barras and Stanislas Fréron; foreign grandees, like the US envoy James Munroe; the playwright Marie-Joseph Chénier, responsible alongside David for most of the revolutionary fêtes, the actor Talma and his actress wife Julie; contractors, speculators and profiteers, including Jacques-Rose Récamier and the dashing young Gabriel Ouvrard, for whom the phrase nouveau riche was invented; and soldiers like Lazare Hoche, who had been the lover of Rose de Beauharnais while they were both held in the Luxembourg and whom she still adored.

  Their lust for excitement and experience was mirrored in the exotically beautiful women who surrounded them. Aimée de Coigny–whom Gouverneur Morris had ogled in 1789–was a returned émigrée who had been imprisoned in Paris during the Great Terror. The poet André Chénier, Marie-Joseph’s brother, had known Aimée in Saint-Lazare prison and immortalized her as La Jeune Captive, describing her ‘enchanting face, her figure like a Venus’. Citoyenne de Coigny’s husband’s mistress was Fortunée Hamelin, a Creole heiress so dark-skinned people doubted the ‘purity’ of her blood. She doused herself in attar of roses and was renowned for her kindness, her sparkling wit and the uninhibited lasciviousness of her dancing.

  Rose de Beauharnais, another languid Creole, was Thérésia’s closest, most constant companion. When Tallien and T
hérésia’s daughter was born in May (conceived on her release in August 1794), Rose was asked to be her godmother and the little girl was given the names Thermidor-Rose-Thérésia. The two women were partners in crime, co-conspirators, far more than Thérésia and her new husband ever were. Rose wrote to Thérésia in the spring of 1795 about a ball they were to attend together, asking her to wear ‘that peach-blossom dress you are so fond of’ and a red handkerchief on her head with three kiss-curls on each side of her face. Rose planned to wear the same thing, she wrote, and she predicted the effect of their paired beauty would be ‘wondrous’, driving the other female guests to despair.

  Thérésia, ‘l’idole du jour’, revelled in her role as uncrowned queen of Thermidorian society and ordainer of its fashions. Her daring costumes were worlds apart from the modest styles of previous years, mocking expressions of disdain for the bourgeois morality so earnestly preached by Robespierre and which suddenly seemed so outdated. Profligacy and cynicism as well as wantonness were the hallmarks of the new era, extreme reactions to the deprivation and loss of hope engendered during the dark years of the Terror. ‘Never had fashion exercised an empire more extravagant and more fickle,’ wrote Alexis de Tocqueville. ‘A strange thing, despair had made all the frivolity of the old mores reappear. Only frivolity had taken on new characteristics: it had become bizarre, chaotic, and so to speak, revolutionary; like serious things, pleasure had lost its rules and boundaries.’

  Just as the early revolutionaries had been inspired by the philosophies and personalities of Greece and Rome, Thérésia was inspired by their aesthetics, modelling her outfits on the sparse costumes worn by antique statues, many of which, to Mercier’s disapproval, were on public display in the gardens of Paris. She appeared in the finest unstarched Indian muslin dresses caught up under the bosom and trimmed with lace–styles called by dressmakers robes à la Vestale or à la Minerve–which left her magnificent arms and legs bare. People whispered that she dipped them in scented oil or misted them with water so that they would cling even more closely to her body. Underwear might be a tunic or body-stocking of flesh-coloured silk, or nothing at all. Thérésia was fond of enumerating the drawbacks of corsets, ‘adding that it was not when a woman was dressed that it mattered so much whether she was beautiful’. It was joked that the sans-chemises had replaced the sans-culottes.

  The merveilleuses, as Thérésia and her friends were known, even dared to appear in public bare-breasted, perhaps subconsciously modelling themselves on the bare-breasted figures of Liberty that had dominated the iconography of the early years of the revolution. Thérésia was painted by Jean-Baptiste Isabey wearing a blond wig and with one breast exposed; Fortunée Hamelin appeared at the theatre with her breasts covered only by a riviére of diamonds, and was said, for a bet, to have walked the length of the Champs Élysées in her languorous Creole gait, with her breasts bare. On another occasion, Thérésia bet a guest at one of her parties that her entire outfit, including sandals and bracelets (she favoured gold armlets in the shape of serpents with engraved emerald heads), did not weigh more than two six-franc coins; to prove it, in front of everyone, she stripped and placed her clothes on a scale, winning the wager.

  Women’s bodies, which before the revolution had been unrecognizable beneath their carapaces of whalebone and horsehair, then during the revolution had been either unnoticeable in drab, shapeless dresses or disguised as men’s in amazones or striped trousers, were suddenly very prominent. Through their daring, fantastical experiments with fashion, the merveilleuses renegotiated women’s cultural visibility, making themselves at once defiantly feminine and unignorable. Thérésia, with her fancy-dress classicism, was at the forefront of this social movement. She went to the Opéra in the guise of Diana, wearing a leopardskin draped over one shoulder and carrying a jewelled quiver.

  Although hairstyles seemed simple they required lengthy sessions with Messieurs Bertrand or Hippolyte, the celebrity coiffeurs of the day. Thérésia usually wore her dark hair cut short but she also owned fifty wigs, said to be made from the hair of guillotine victims, in a rainbow of colours including red, blue and violet. She popularized the cropped blonde wig à la Titus which, in November 1794, had become so fashionable that a newspaper expressed the vain wish that ladies would return to their natural hair colour.

  Hats were of vital importance: huge velvet jockey caps, oriental turbans, plumed bandeaux and simple straw bonnets raced in and out of fashion. Their flimsy dresses had no pockets, so women started carrying tiny morocco leather handbags, known as ridicules or réticules. An admirer was always on hand to carry anything bigger than a handkerchief or a pot of rouge, a merveilleuse essential. Every woman of fashion prided herself on wearing her Indian cashmere shawl in a distinctive way. Thérésia draped her wraps ‘with inimitable grace and infinite coquetry’. On their feet the merveilleuses wore light silk slippers or sandals tied with tassels or jewelled straps around the ankle.

  Thérésia loved jewellery, wearing diamond toe rings and anklets to hide–or perhaps to draw attention to–the scars on her feet and legs from the rat bites she had received in prison. Hoops of diamonds set in gold around her thighs glittered through her muslin dresses. ‘One could not be more richly undressed,’ commented Talleyrand.

  Even though they no longer bore their owners’ coats of arms on the doors, in post-Thermidor Paris carriages, like jewels, were rare marks of wealth and status, expensive, aspirational objects of desire. A German visitor reported that Parisians were obsessed with carriages of all types: curricles, phaetons, wiskis, diligences, gigs, buggies, berlines, rattle-traps, chariots, dormeuses, demi-fortunes. One courtesan at this time had rose diamonds set into her horses’ harnesses; Paul Barras’s harness was silver. Thérésia’s dark-red cabriolet was instantly recognizable on the streets of Paris after Thermidor, because so few people could afford such vehicles.

  Permissiveness in fashion was reflected in familiar, licentious manners. People spoke freely, slangily, with abandon. Ladies used words that ten years earlier would have caused duels if they had been uttered in their presence. Old-fashioned scruples had disappeared: men appeared in drawing-rooms in their boots; they did not scruple to compliment women to their faces (something that was seen before the revolution as an insult to their modesty); friends addressed one another by their first names. Women sat on sofas with their legs tucked up under them, displaying their feet and ankles, and went out in public unaccompanied.

  Good health had become fashionable. Fresh air was all the rage. A cult of the physical, derived from the ancients, inspired men and women to take vigorous exercise, walking, riding and swimming. Chariot races were held in the Champs de Mars. For women, though, the appearance of delicate health was still considered attractive; powder was a valuable tool in producing this effect.

  Released from their corsets, ladies ceased to swoon and ate and drank in public for the first time, despite the consternation this caused in some masculine hearts. ‘The beloved is always pictured to the fancy like some airy spirit,’ wrote a German visiting Paris in 1795, ‘and it really grieves one to see her eat with a great appetite.’ Restaurants serving luxuries unaffordable to nine-tenths of the population opened up all over Paris, run by formerly private chefs made redundant by the revolution.

  Another German visitor was shocked to see pregnant women out in public. These ‘fecund belles’ had lost all their delicacy and reserve, he said, and he attributed it not to an innate desire to begin again after the devastation of the Terror, nor to the new fashions for unrestrictive clothing which revealed swelling bellies, but to loose women indulging in light liaisons. He might have been thinking of Thérésia.

  The showplace for the merveilleuses’ insouciant beauty was the immensely popular public balls which began during the freezing winter of 1794–5; it was to one of these that Rose and Thérésia planned to wear their matching outfits. Anyone who could pay could buy a ticket for these frenzied events, when men and women forgot their troubles, sing
ing wildly as they danced, ‘intoxicated by the speed and the voluptuous music’, while outside on the frosty streets emaciated children were begging for bread.

  ‘Despairing of escape from their hardships,’ wrote Alexis de Tocqueville, Parisians ‘tried not to think of them.’ Dancing was not just the pursuit of pleasure but a way to escape, almost to protest against grief. The poor had their own riotous dances, held on both Sundays and décadis (after Thermidor they kept both of these days as holidays) in smoky cellars dimly lit by cheap tallow candles or earthen oil-lamps, where they drank rough brandy and danced jigs in their wooden clogs to the tune of a single fiddle. Other balls were held in the ruins of empty hotels and churches, in cemeteries, in the yards of former prisons and on the very boulevards themselves.

  The most notorious of these ticketed parties was the bal des victimes, held on the first floor of the Hôtel Richelieu, to which only those who had lost a near relative during the Terror were invited. The room was draped in black: black ribbons tied on to the musicians’ violins, black hangings on the walls, black crêpe on the chandeliers. Dancers of both sexes had their hair cut short at the back, à la victime; women wore thin shifts like the ones in which their mothers and sisters had gone to the scaffold, and narrow red ribbons around their necks, as if to show where the guillotine’s blade had missed. They greeted each other with sharp, awkward nods in imitation of the motion made by severed heads as they dropped into the basket below.

  These extraordinary, macabre balls were for the survivors one way of making sense of the devastating events through which they had lived, of coming to terms with their shared trauma. In the words of the historian Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, they were a form of ‘collective cultural mourning’. But they were seen by disapproving contemporaries as evidence of a worrying moral decline. The insolent extravagance, the cynicism and lack of conscience or inhibition in their quest for pleasure that marked Thérésia and her set were seen either as an insult to the memories of those who had died during the Terror or as the destruction of the revolution’s legacy.