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

by Moore, Lucy

  The mahogany and ormolu bed was raised as if on an altar, with large gilded bronze swans at either end. It was draped in muslin edged with gold lace and canopied with gold damask. The mirror at its head was framed in violet damask; on the ceiling violet gryphons clutched gold garlands. Like Thérésia, Juliette was rumoured to have posed for the statue in her bedroom, but, typically, hers represented Silence. On one occasion she retired to bed during a party, while her room was still full of people. With her ‘beautiful white shoulders expos’d perfectly uncover’d to view’, wrote the shocked Lady Bessborough, visiting Paris at the time, Juliette was ‘completely undress’d and in bed. The room was full of men.’

  Her adjoining dressing-room was tented in eau-de-nil silk and had a recessed red leather sofa which turned into a bath. A day-bed standing in the dressing-room was very similar to the one on which Juliette was painted by Jacques-Louis David in 1800. Juliette had commissioned the painting, but she disliked it; perhaps she did not like to think of herself, as David’s biographer Anita Brookner describes the image, as a child-bride, ‘bewildered by her isolation’ in an austere room tense with sexual fear and inhibition. David portrayed a barefoot Juliette reclining seductively, but turned away from the viewer, her gaze opaque; he encapsulated the uneasy balance she maintained between passivity and provocation. She asked him to change it but he refused, telling her how hard he was finding it to do her justice. He kept the unfinished canvas in his studio. François Gérard’s 1805 portrait was more to Juliette’s taste, showing her rosy-cheeked and limpid-eyed, demure but approachable.

  Juliette also frequented the subscription balls that continued to inflame Paris. In 1797, 644 public balls were held there. At the Jardins de Bagatelle in the Bois de Boulogne, hundreds of coloured lamps, suspended from trees and bushes, turned the gardens ‘into a palace of rubies, emeralds, topazes and diamonds’. Tivoli, with its gilded and mirrored ballrooms and its landscaped gardens, was a ‘perpetual circle of pleasures’, wrote Henry Fox, staying in Paris in 1802. Entrance was three francs for a man and one for his female companion. Tivoli’s gardens were illuminated apparently ‘by the hands of fairies’; music played; fireworks exploded overhead; exotic fruit, ices of every colour, cake, lemonade and liqueurs were served.

  Fox noticed ‘dangerously fascinating’ female figures gliding about. Women dressed as nymphs, oriental princesses or savages waltzed wildly with morose, expressionless men. Costumes were still daringly transgressive: there were men who came dressed as women, and women as men. Most ladies at ‘these enchanting places’ resembled goddesses in their Athenian robes, crowned with flowers, but many other styles were also popular. Egyptomania hit Paris, courtesy of Napoléon’s expedition; the Turkish ambassador’s arrival there in 1797 stimulated a craze for all things oriental, such as the turbans favoured by Germaine; Joséphine’s admiration for the arts of the medieval period inspired le style troubadour.

  At Frascati, another of these houses and gardens open to the public, Fox saw Juliette Récamier ‘surrounded and almost overpowered by a multitude of persons admiring her’. Her mere presence drove people to distraction: one admirer was seen ‘kissing and chewing the train of her dress like a lunatic’. Amongst her papers held by the Bibliothéque Nationale in Paris numerous poems written to her by anguished worshippers survive, comparing her to spring breezes or informing her that butterflies follow in her footsteps. ‘Chère Juliette, je vous aime,’ reads one scrap.

  The old crowd still gathered in Barras’s apartments in the Luxembourg in the spring of 1799, but the mood outside was changing. In one room, people pressed round to watch Thérésia and Barras, their friendship unchanged by her established relationship with the banker Gabriel Ouvrard, playing cards with huge piles of gold in front of them. In another, Germaine–recently arrived from Switzerland–was praising Juliette Récamier to an enraptured Lucien Bonaparte. ‘If one is happy to be Mme Tallien,’ she was saying, ‘I believe that one would be even more so to be the friend of Mme Récamier.’

  Germaine and Benjamin had returned to Paris in April as, abroad, the French army began to suffer serious reverses against the British, newly rejoined by the Austrians and Russians. The Directory was now derided by all as a failure; political apathy and contempt for the government reigned supreme. Talleyrand later wrote that ‘the Directory fell by the fault of its own members’; but in fact it was more that the leaders of the Directory, having built their administration upon the ruins of revolutionary idealism while denying their own complicity in the excesses that idealism had brought about, could never command the respect of the French people. Even its own leaders had never believed in its authority.

  Blasé and beleaguered, the French people were ready for the man who would rescue them from the spectres of terror and anarchy. As Manon Roland had predicted from prison in 1793 (although she was thinking of Robespierre), France was ‘waiting for the first master who will come along and subdue her’. Napoléon Bonaparte, campaigning in Egypt, was determined to be that master. ‘I do not understand either the spirit or the supposed patriotism of those people [the French],’ wrote an English friend of Germaine’s visiting Paris that spring. ‘They love public affairs, rather than the public good. Love of the public good does not often lead to places, pensions, business interests; only intrigue leads to all of those.’

  That summer, Lucien Bonaparte wrote to his brother urging him to return to France, and began mustering potential allies at Juliette’s house on the outskirts of Paris. Later he would claim that he engineered the coup of Brumaire with her in mind. Joseph Fouché said Lucien was animated at this time by ‘two powerful passions’–love and ambition. Juliette’s carefully maintained neutrality makes her own involvement in the plotting unlikely, but, given her closeness to Germaine (ordered to leave France yet again in July), it is more than probable that she knew of the plans afoot to overthrow the Directory.

  By August, an uneasy alliance between Barras, Talleyrand and Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès awaited only a ‘sword’–a military leader, in the parlance of the day–to command the army in their name. News of French victories in Egypt and on the French borders was announced in Paris by thundering cannon. Napoléon abandoned his post in Cairo and left for France at the end of August, landing in Fréjus on the south coast in early October. He raced to Paris through cheering crowds, the fulfilment of his dreams becoming more possible with each mile his horses covered.

  After three weeks of plotting and double-crossing, Napoléon’s plans were set. He had an appointment with Barras at eleven o’clock on the night of 8 November. Instead of going personally, he sent his friend Louis-Antoine Bourrienne to tell Barras that he had a headache ‘but that he need not fear’. Barras listened until Bourrienne had finished his excuses, and said, ‘I see Bonaparte has tricked me. He will not come back. It is finished. And yet he owes me everything.’ He was right. Bonaparte had tricked everyone, but perhaps Barras–once his friend and patron, and himself no stranger to betrayal–most of all.

  The following morning Napoléon was appointed Commander-in-Chief of the army of the Paris region. Thérésia, heavily pregnant with her first baby by Ouvrard but as loyal to Barras as ever, came up to his Luxembourg apartments while he was in his bath. She and Ouvrard had tried to alert him to Napoléon’s machinations, but he had not listened. ‘What can be done?’ cried Barras, ‘that man (designating Bonaparte by a coarse epithet) has taken us all in.’ It was probably Joséphine’s failure to warn him of the coup (of the details of which, in fact, she seems to have been largely ignorant) that earned her such a hostile description in Barras’s memoirs.

  As he sat down to dinner that night Talleyrand and Admiral Bruix, another of Barras’s former protégés, entered the dining-room. They told Barras, falsely, that the other four Directors had resigned and that they had come to receive his resignation. Without comment, Barras signed their papers. Talleyrand, who had two million francs in his pocket with which to buy Barras’s compliance, kept the bribe himself. Afterwar
ds, ‘with charming vivacity’, Thérésia told Barras that he should look upon his removal from office as a release, not a defeat. Away from power, she said, he ‘would once more be worthy of’ himself. He left Paris immediately and was barred from returning to the capital the following year. Neither Napoléon nor Joséphine ever answered his reproachful letters.

  Early on the morning of 19 Brumaire (10 November) the Assembly of Elders and the Council of Five Hundred gathered at Saint-Cloud, just outside Paris, as instructed by Napoléon’s men. Troops encircled the tumbledown château, which had not been used since Louis XVI and his family had spent their last free summer there in 1790. Napoléon hoped that, away from their usual meeting place, the councillors and deputies would be more receptive to his demands, but his success was by no means assured: most people in the know, including Talleyrand (who was lunching nearby with Fortunée Hamelin, among others) and Sieyès, had their carriages at the ready in case they needed to flee. Bullied by a furious Napoléon, eventually marched upon by their own Guardsmen under Lucien Bonaparte’s command, at 2 a.m. a small group of reluctant deputies and Elders finally recognized the end of the Directory and swore in as provisional consuls Napoléon and the former Directors Sieyès and Roger Ducos, who had betrayed Barras to back Sieyès’s bid for power.

  Her timing unerring, Germaine de Staël had returned to Paris the previous day. Waiting to find out whether she should prepare to leave again, she received messengers from Saint-Cloud every hour. On hearing the news of Napoléon’s success, her father wrote to congratulate her ‘on the happiness you find in his glory’. In his letters he would continue to refer to Germaine’s admiration for Napoléon but, as her biographer points out, these comments may have been inserted for the benefit of Napoléon’s spies who were certainly reading Germaine’s correspondence. For the moment, she considered Napoléon’s rise the least bad of the options available to France.

  Napoléon and Joséphine moved into the Luxembourg the day after the coup, and Napoléon spent the following weeks fine-tuning his seizure of power. The new constitution, in the words of one historian, was ‘drafted by Sieyès and emasculated by Bonaparte’, who removed the system of balances devised by Sieyès to prevent tyranny. There were to be four assemblies, but no elections. Napoléon proposed that one of the consuls–himself, unsurprisingly–should be named First Consul, with full executive powers, the term to be renewed after ten years. The other two consuls would have solely consultative roles; Napoléon nominated the republican-leaning Régis de Cambacérès and the moderate royalist Charles Lebrun. Sieyès, who had been taking riding lessons to prepare himself for life as a leader, was compensated for his many disappointments with grants of land which, as Germaine observed, finally compromised the former priest who had survived every stage of the revolution. Even before work on the new constitution was complete, Napoléon issued a public proclamation announcing that the revolution was over at last.

  On 1 January 1800 the Tribunate, which debated laws before sending them to the legislature, met for the first time. Having assured Napoléon that he would be ‘positive’, Benjamin Constant had been appointed a tribune. Germaine gave a dinner the night before his maiden speech, which he had written with her and which was a bold defence of liberty and liberalism and an attack on the new regime. ‘Tonight, your drawing room is filled with people whom you like,’ Benjamin said to her. ‘If I make my speech, it will be deserted tomorrow.’ ‘One must follow one’s convictions,’ Germaine replied.

  The next day ten of her guests–including Talleyrand–wrote to say that they could not come to dinner that night. Talleyrand, who called treason ‘merely a question of dates’, had decided that his alliance with Napoléon meant more to him than his friendship with Germaine. His loss was a bitter blow–one she would expiate in her portrayal of him as the cynical, seductive Madame de Vernon in Delphine–and it would be followed by another. Having repudiated Germaine, several years later Louis de Narbonne gained access to Napoléon’s circle of intimates and became one of his most valued diplomats.

  As her romance with Constant faded, Germaine was left, at thirty-four, to ponder the elusiveness of love. ‘I live with a wound in my heart as others live with a physical ailment. Do you think that after these experiences a new beginning is possible?’ she asked the philosopher Joseph-Marie de Gérando.

  The three men I have loved most since I was nineteen or twenty are Narbonne, Talleyrand, and Mathieu [de Montmorency; probably only platonically]. The first is only a graceful husk, the second has not even salvaged the husk, and the third has lost his grace, although he has retained his adorable qualities. New friends have become dear to me, but it is the past which stirs my soul and imagination.

  Benjamin, ‘tired of being swept away in her whirlwind’, was making vain attempts to leave Germaine (including marrying someone else) but they were too closely bound together intellectually and temperamentally to stay apart for long.

  His speech at the Tribunate prompted a flurry of hateful articles directed more personally at Germaine than at Benjamin. ‘It is not your fault that you are ugly, but it is your fault that you are an intriguer,’ said one newspaper, urging her to return to Switzerland, taking Constant with her. ‘She writes on metaphysics, which she does not understand; on morality, which she does not practise; on the virtues of her sex, which she lacks,’ wrote another, imagining her saying, ‘Benjamin will be consul; I’ll give the Treasury to Papa; my uncle will be Minister of Justice; and my husband will be given a distant embassy. As for me, I shall have the supervision of everything.’ After a tense interview with Joseph Fouché, the new Minister of Police, Germaine retired, for tactical reasons, to Saint-Ouen for a few weeks. When she returned to Paris she found herself ostracized by society.

  Germaine was not the only woman to fall into disfavour at the start of the new regime. Joséphine was banned from seeing Thérésia, her best friend and most intimate companion for the past five years. Napoléon was determined to eradicate any hint of scandal from his wife’s past in particular and from his rule in general. Thérésia, with her four children by three fathers–and whose humiliating rejection Napoléon had not forgotten–was considered a bad influence: Napoléon insisted that her dangerous friendship with his wife come to an end. His spies kept close watch over her. As once under Robespierre, all of Thérésia’s correspondence was scrutinized by the police.

  Thérésia was devastated at Joséphine’s betrayal. In October she took the opportunity of having been asked for an introduction to Joséphine to write to the woman who ‘was once my friend’ on behalf of a man who had lost everything as a result of the revolution. She no longer indulged herself with the illusion of their friendship, she wrote; ‘time, events and your own heart have undeceived me.’ However, she could not resist reminding Joséphine ‘that my friendship for you is proof against everything, and that it will end only with my life’. Her words would have hurt the First Consul’s wife, who six years later was still begging him to allow her to see her old friend. Napoléon was obdurate about the woman he said was branded ‘with horror and infamy’. ‘If you value my esteem and wish to please me, never transgress this injunction,’ he told her in 1806. ‘If she tries to gain access to you, if she comes to you under the cover of night, tell your porters to keep her out.’

  At first, Joséphine hoped that if Thérésia would sever her connection with Gabriel Ouvrard, the father of her baby daughter Clémence, Napoléon would relent. But despite Joséphine’s pleas, Thérésia refused to leave him. Napoléon may have despised Ouvrard for winning the woman who had once turned him down, but he was happy to do business with him. His regime was funded with millions borrowed–and frequently left unpaid–from Ouvrard.

  Aimée de Coigny and Fortunée Hamelin were also unwelcome at Napoléon’s court. Fortunée, an admirer of Napoléon’s, remained loyal despite his treatment of her, but Aimée de Coigny was a confirmed liberal who was outraged by his authoritarianism and prudery. Napoléon saw her at a party in about 1
802. ‘Do you still like men as much as ever?’ he asked spitefully. ‘Yes, Sire,’ she replied. ‘When they are polite.’

  The merveilleuses’ exclusion from consular society was part of a broader change, instituted from the top down, in France’s moral climate. Napoléon wanted clothes to be less revealing and manners more decorous. Arms and bosoms were covered up; starch and stiff silks returned to fashion. His motivation was partly political–because France was at war with Britain, he forbad Joséphine from wearing her trademark diaphanous muslin, which was imported from India via London–but principally moral. Gradually the ease and informality of Directory society vanished, to be replaced with what Germaine described as an ‘oriental etiquette’. Knee-breeches, which had not been worn since 1792, soon became required court wear once again.

  Even Talleyrand, notoriously unprincipled, was persuaded to marry his mistress, Catherine Grand, a former courtesan. When she was presented at the Tuileries, Napoléon said to her, ‘I hope that the good conduct of the Citoyenne Talleyrand will soon cause the indiscretions of Madame Grand to be forgotten.’ She replied innocently, ‘In that respect, I cannot do better than follow the example of Citoyenne Bonaparte.’

  Despite the wit of this response, Talleyrand’s wife was popularly considered a little stupid. Germaine declared that she could not understand why he had married such a silly woman. ‘To have once loved Mme de Staël is all that is needed to understand the satisfaction of loving an idiot,’ Talleyrand responded gallantly.

  Bloodstains in the corridors of the Tuileries dating back to the day the former royal palace was stormed in August 1792 and faded red bonnets and revolutionary slogans painted on to its façade had to be erased before Napoléon and Joséphine moved into their new consular apartments there in February. On the day of their ceremonial arrival, Napoléon wore a gold-laced red coat and his carriage was drawn by six magnificent horses. He had come a long way from the sober, modest general rapturously greeted at the Luxembourg three years earlier. Joséphine hated their new home. She had been given Marie-Antoinette’s former apartments and could not rid herself of the thought that they were haunted.