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

by Moore, Lucy

  In another return to ancien régime life, the first masked ball since 1793 was held at the Opéra in the same month as the Bonapartes moved into the Tuileries. Female guests wore dominoes over their gowns; the men, in evening dress, were unmasked. Juliette Récamier, ‘who was so timid without a mask, became entirely self-possessed under this disguise, and was able to converse much more freely’. When he saw Thérésia, scantily dressed as Diana in diamonds and a leopardskin, Napoléon stiffly had her informed that fancy dress was no longer in fashion.

  Rather like Germaine bemoaning the dissolution of post-revolutionary society, Napoléon had no plans to observe his new code of morality himself. Deeply distrustful of women, especially after being informed of Joséphine’s unfaithfulness, he was determined not to take an official mistress but dallied, as men of his class did, with actresses and opera singers. Only one woman, whom he had met just once, seemed worthy of him: the beautiful Juliette Récamier, so virtuous that she would not even sleep with her own husband.

  Germaine’s friendship with Juliette was one of her few consolations during her lonely period of exclusion from Parisian society; another was work. On Literature was published in April 1800. Although ostensibly not about politics, it was a passionate declaration of its author’s liberal principles. Its themes were progress and the perfectibility of mankind–in which tenet, despite her own experiences, Germaine de Staël never lost her faith. ‘It was often repeated during the Revolution in France that a certain amount of despotism was necessary to establish liberty,’ she wrote. ‘This is a contradiction in terms…Institutions based upon force may simulate everything about liberty, except its workings.’

  Napoléon tried to rise above On Literature’s popularity; another book, published soon afterwards, was harder to ignore. The satire Zoloé, possibly written by the marquis de Sade, came out in the summer of 1800. Sade, a distant cousin of Paul Barras’s, was imprisoned before the revolution for his immorality and had been released from the Bastille when it fell in 1789. The eponymous Zoloé was clearly modelled on Joséphine; other characters were unmistakably Barras, Thérésia and Napoléon himself, thinly disguised as d’Orsec–an anagram of Corse, or Corsica.

  Zoloé’s world was one of feasting, intoxication, orgies and wanton debauchery led by Joséphine and Thérésia, portrayed as Maenads frenzied by lust, fame and gold. Echoing Barras’s memoirs, Zoloé herself was described as having ‘every quality of seduction…[and] a mad desire for pleasure’ as well as ‘the greed of a moneylender’; she spent ‘with a gambler’s fervour’. Thérésia, or Laureda, was ‘all fire and love’. Her fortune allowed her to indulge her taste for depravity. ‘Enamoured of the lubricities of Ovid and the furies of Sappho, she has exhausted all the combinations of voluptuousness.’ Laureda’s only regret was having married a pompous flunkey who mistakenly congratulated himself on serving the people and whose jealousy of her was always in vain.

  Sade never admitted authorship, but Napoléon had him arrested in March the following year, ostensibly because of his novel Juliette which had been published five years earlier. He died in prison in April 1803.

  Zoloé came out while Napoléon was in the north of Italy, dramatically defeating the Austrian army at the battle of Marengo. His forces had been financed by Gabriel Ouvrard. Marengo was, as one contemporary said, ‘the baptism of the personal power of Napoléon’. From this point onwards, Bonaparte’s dominance was unquestioned.

  Germaine recognized that victory would confirm his grip on France. She was at Coppet, with the news of his campaign relayed to her by courier every hour, and she confessed later that she had hoped he would lose. Napoléon stopped in Geneva on his way back to Paris, where he met Necker for the first time. Necker pleaded his daughter’s case, and Napoléon agreed to allow her to return to Paris. But although Germaine went back to Paris and guests flooded back to her salon, she was never invited to the Tuileries. Napoléon’s dislike for her was well known. He sent his brother Joseph, who defied his wishes so as to remain friends with Germaine, to ask her what it would take to stop her criticism of his rule. He said he would be willing to return Necker’s millions and overturn the 1795 decree of exile against her.

  ‘In short,’ Napoléon said to Joseph, ‘what does she want?’ ‘My God,’ replied Germaine, when this question was put to her, ‘it is not a matter of what I want but of what I think.’

  ‘Advise her not to block my path, no matter what it is, no matter where I choose to go,’ Napoléon said to Lucien and Joseph, from his bath, as fresh instances of her defiance were relayed to him. ‘Or else, I shall break her, I shall crush her. Let her keep quiet,’ he concluded. ‘It’s the wisest course she can take.’ There was, said Germaine, when she was told of Napoléon’s words, ‘a kind of physical pleasure in resisting an iniquitous power’.

  It was during this period that they met face to face for the last time. At a reception at General Berthier’s house, Napoléon stopped in front of Germaine and inspected her ample, generously displayed bosom critically. ‘No doubt you have nursed your children yourself?’ Germaine, frozen, for once could think of no reply. ‘You see,’ Napoléon turned to Lucien triumphantly, ‘she doesn’t even want to say yes or no.’

  Germaine, who represented all the qualities Napoléon feared in women, may have been the most obvious recipient of his misogyny, but he did not reserve his venom for her alone. Literary women were a particular focus of his suspicion. ‘A woman distinguished by qualities other than those proper to her sex,’ wrote the government-controlled Gazette de France a few years later on the subject of women writers, ‘is contrary to the laws of nature.’ When he saw Condorcet’s spirited widow Sophie, an old friend of Germaine’s, at about this time, Napoléon informed her that he disliked seeing women meddling in politics. ‘You are right,’ she replied, ‘but in a country where they lose their heads, it is natural for them to desire to know the reason.’

  Some women of letters were more amenable to Napoléon’s blandishments. The novelist Félicité de Genlis, who had returned from exile after the coup of Brumaire, demonstrated the same ideological dextrousness that had marked her behaviour during the early years of the revolution. In return for spying on her friends, she received a large pension and the use of apartments and a library.

  Napoléon’s control of government was so firmly entrenched by the spring of 1802 that he was able to expel Benjamin Constant from the Tribunate, deal with rumours of a coup with surprising leniency and make a very satisfactory peace with Britain. English visitors, deprived for a decade of French art, culture and fashion, rushed across the Channel and appeared in droves in the drawing-rooms of Thérésia, Germaine and Juliette.

  That same spring Thérésia was finally divorced from Tallien. He had returned to Paris the previous year, after a brief stay in London (where the Duchess of Devonshire gave him her portrait set in diamonds) because his ship had been captured by the British fleet. Thérésia, who was about to have her second baby with Ouvrard when Tallien came back, destroyed his hopes of a reconciliation. Tallien wrote lovingly and forgivingly to her the day after their first meeting telling her that he believed the immorality with which society had charged her was more to do with the corruption of society and the world than with her heart, ‘which is and always has been good’. His own feelings for her, he said, were those of pure and unalterable affection.

  Many still braved Napoléon’s disapproval to visit Thérésia. The prevailing view of her was that despite her indiscretions–the result more of the turmoil of the times than innate sinfulness–she was a genuinely kind woman whose current treatment was unfair. ‘Few women had had it in their power to do so much good or seized so eagerly every opportunity of doing it as she had,’ Germaine’s friend General Moreau told Lady Bessborough, and ‘none almost of men and women had met with more ingratitude.’

  She was still stunning. When the painter Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun returned to Paris the previous year she saw Thérésia at the theatre in all her ‘glittering,
radiant beauty’. Henry Fox was a regular guest at her house in the rue de Babylone in 1802 and found her a fascinating, elegant and infinitely thoughtful hostess. Despite the ambivalence with which her revolutionary past was viewed, she was still using it to her advantage: one evening’s entertainment consisted of a ventriloquist imitating a revolutionary committee during the Terror.

  When on 2 August 1802 an overwhelming plebiscite voted Napoléon consul for life, Germaine’s salon became the focus of open opposition to his regime. ‘They say she talks about neither politics nor myself,’ he complained, ‘but somehow it happens that everyone comes away liking me that much less.’

  Napoléon used the pretext of Germaine’s novel Delphine, based on her affair with Narbonne and set in the early years of the revolution, to let it be known that Paris was no longer open to her. She was in Geneva in December 1802 when Delphine was published, to enormous critical and popular acclaim. When it came out all Paris was closeted away reading it and delightedly working out who was who. Although professedly apolitical, Germaine’s powerful attack on the hypocrisy of society, ‘the tyranny of public opinion’ as Constant put it, and her arguments for the rights of women could only enrage Napoléon, whose every concept of passive womanhood it challenged. ‘Women,’ as one character put it, are ‘the victims of all social institutions.’

  ‘He fears me. Therein lies my joy and my pride; therein my terror,’ Germaine told François-René de Chateaubriand, preparing herself again for the ordeal of exile. ‘I must admit to you that I am bound to be proscribed and I am ill prepared to bear the boredom of a long exile; my courage fails but not my will.’

  A year later, her will had failed her too. In the autumn of 1803, ‘like an Irishman who kept coming back until he was thrown out of a fourth-floor window’, as she put it, Germaine tried to re-enter Paris but was formally exiled and escorted from France. Friends tried to intervene on her behalf, but Napoléon would have none of it. ‘No, no, there is no truce nor peace possible between us; she asked for it, let her suffer the consequences.’ Juliette declared that the man who could banish such a woman ‘could never appear to me except as a despot’.

  Germaine was never reconciled to exile. ‘Anyone born on the blessed soil of France cannot bear life elsewhere,’ she wrote. When, some years later, her seventeen-year-old son Auguste (Narbonne’s son) went to plead her case before the emperor, he was not unkind but unflinching. ‘What I want is submission,’ he told Auguste. ‘Tell your mother my mind is made up. She will never set foot in Paris again, as long as I live. Besides,’ he added, ‘you can make politics by talking literature, morality, art, anything in the world. Women should stick to knitting.’

  Napoléon’s Civil Code became law in March 1804, two months before he was declared emperor. Unsurprisingly, the laws concerning women were designed to restrict their independence. Women were viewed as legal minors all their lives, passing from the custody of their fathers into that of their husbands. Submission and fidelity were the essence of their marriage vows. ‘We need the notion of obedience, in Paris especially,’ said Napoléon, ‘where women think they have the right to do as they like.’ Adulterous women (not their equally married lovers) were culpable in the eyes of the law; children’s custody favoured the father. Illegitimate children, who had been recognized by the constitution of 1793, were no longer recognized. Secondary state education was to be provided only for boys. ‘Public education is not suitable for them [girls], because they are never called upon to act in public.’ Divorce was severely restricted but not forbidden–which was just as well, since five years later Napoléon’s desire for an heir would bring him and Joséphine to the divorce courts.

  After his divorce, it had taken Tallien over a year to find a job, even having petitioned Bonaparte. Proudly, he had refused Ouvrard’s offer of La Chaumière and a generous annual allowance. In November 1804 he was sent to Alicante as consul. Ouvrard also went to Spain early the following year, cementing the end of his six-year relationship with Thérésia. At thirty-one, twice divorced and the mother of six children by three men, Thérésia was on her own for the first time in over ten years, but she would not be single for long.

  She married for the third time in August 1805. Her husband–who had fallen in love with her at first sight when he caught a glimpse of her rushing back to Paris from Bordeaux in the bloody spring of 1794–was the young comte de Camaran, son of a lady-in-waiting to Marie-Antoinette. Thérésia had sought the blessing of the Pope when he came to Paris the previous December to crown Napoléon emperor; she made a point of stating her desire to regain the reputation she would not have lost, she said, ‘had not her first husband been a fool and her second a rogue’. When in 1806 Camaran’s father died and he and Thérésia became the prince and princesse de Chimay, Tallien said, ‘It is all very well for her to call herself the Princesse de Chimères [a pun on Chimay, chimère meaning wild dream or illusion], but she will be Mme Tallien to the end.’

  Juliette Récamier was idolized by consular society but gradually, under Germaine’s provocative influence, she came to view Napoléon as a tyrant. In the spring of 1802, after an abortive plan by the generals Moreau and Bernadotte to unseat him, Juliette made a hastily arranged visit to England. Some said that she was advised to leave because of her public friendship with the plot’s leaders; others that her departure was on account of the unwelcome admiration the First Consul had developed for her.

  London worshipped Juliette as ardently as did Paris. She became friends with Georgiana Duchess of Devonshire and Lady Bess Foster, and flirted with the Prince of Wales. On the first Sunday in May, her visit to Kensington Gardens with the Duke of Hamilton and the Duchess of Somerset was recorded in the newspapers. Juliette looked like a goddess in a hat draped with a white veil that swept the ground, a fashion that had not been seen before in London; in the rush to try and touch her, she was almost stifled by the crowd.

  Back in Paris, prints and engravings bearing her image multiplied on the stalls at the Palais Royal. A German friend described Juliette, on seeing a caricature of herself on a stand, asking the seller if it was a picture of a lady of ill-fame. ‘Nay, God forbid,’ he replied. ‘It is a lady of the most spotless reputation.’ He then praised her so highly–not realizing who she was–that she was consoled ‘for the bitterness of the libel she held in her hand’.

  Two years later, Napoléon, an admirer of Juliette since his brother’s infatuation with her, began a pursuit in earnest. He sent Fouché to her country house at Clichy to present his suit. Fouché told Juliette how highly the emperor thought of her, and said that if she were to apply for a position at Joséphine’s court he knew her request would be granted. She immediately declined the offer, arguing that her shyness, her love of independence and the simplicity of her tastes made her unfit for such a position; furthermore, her responsibilities towards her husband would preclude serving at court. Her real reason was Napoléon’s treatment of Germaine. Fouché smiled–one can imagine how wolfishly–and said how useful she might be at court in arguing on behalf of the poor and oppressed, adding that a woman as noble and charming as she might exert a powerful influence over the emperor. ‘He has not yet met a woman worthy of him,’ he added significantly, ‘and no one knows what the love of Napoleon might be, if he attached himself to a pure person.’

  Soon afterwards, Napoléon’s sister Caroline Murat invited Juliette to visit her. She spent the morning with Caroline, already a friend, and her husband, who tried to convince her to accept a position as Caroline’s lady-in-waiting. A role in her establishment would protect Juliette from the empress’s jealousy, they said, and would allow Caroline always to have Juliette near her.

  As Juliette left, Caroline recalled her friend’s admiration for Talma, and offered her her box at the Théâtre Français. This box happened to be opposite Napoléon’s own, and both times Juliette used it she found him seated across from her, his opera-glass trained not on the stage but on her. Her surrender began to be spoken of as a cert
ainty, though Juliette had avoided responding to Fouché’s offer.

  Finally Fouché visited her again, this time offering her the position of lady-in-waiting in Napoléon’s own name. ‘You can no longer refuse,’ he said. But, knowing her husband supported her decision, refuse she did, incurring (as Thérésia Tallien had done) Napoléon’s lasting rancour. On hearing, soon afterwards, that three of his ministers had met at her house Napoléon irritably enquired when his council had last convened there. He declared that any foreigner who frequented the Récamiers’ house would be considered his personal enemy. Metternich, then secretary at the Austrian embassy, was obliged to visit Juliette in secret to avoid the notice of Napoléon’s spies.

  In late 1805 Jacques Récamier went catastrophically bankrupt. When Napoléon was asked to authorize the Bank of France to bail him out (Récamier, along with Gabriel Ouvrard, had been one of the few bankers upon whom Napoléon relied) he refused with the words, ‘I am not (Récamier’s lover, and I do not come to the aid of merchants who maintain a house that costs 600,000 francs a year.’

  Juliette met her husband’s reversal of fortune with serene dignity and courage. Knowledge of her good works, hitherto accomplished in secret, began to leak out; the society beauty was revealed as an angel. Out of respect for her, and partly out of contempt for Napoléon, whose treatment of Récamier had been broadcast around Paris, Parisian society made a point of calling at the house in the rue du Mont Blanc (already on the market) to express their sympathy.