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

by Moore, Lucy

  Over the next few years, Juliette’s life consisted of close friends and visits to Germaine at Coppet. Other regulars there included Constant, Mathieu and Adrien de Montmorency, Prosper de Barante, the German scholar August Wilhelm von Schlegel, the Swiss writer Charles-Victor de Bonstetten, Chateaubriand and various German princes. Most fell in love with Juliette and were gently guided towards devoted friendship. Only Chateaubriand succeeded in breaking down her defences and their love would endure till their deaths, his in 1848 and hers, from cholera, the following year.

  In 1811, after the publication of Germaine’s On Germany, Napoléon took advantage of one of Juliette’s many absences to forbid her returning to Paris. The innocent Juliette’s intimacy with Germaine, her independence of mind, had finally become a political issue.

  19

  FEMMES

  Resist, keep resisting, and find the centre of your support in yourself.

  GERMAINE DE STAËL

  UNDER NAPOLÉON’S RULE women were granted fewer rights than before the revolution and their voices were relentlessly suppressed. All the passion and optimism of the women of the early revolutionary period, exemplified by Germaine de Staël, by Manon Roland, Pauline Léon and Théroigne de Méricourt, and all the influence enjoyed during the Directory by Germaine, Thérésia Tallien and Juliette Récamier, had apparently come to nothing.

  Manon Roland’s bones lay in a common grave beside hundreds of others guillotined under Robespierre. Pauline Léon, released from prison after Robespierre’s fall, does not reappear in the official records. After her turbulent years of political activism, she seems to have decided that a quiet life was worth more than the rights for which she had once fought. She was not alone. After the riots of Prairial in the spring of 1795 common women no longer involved themselves with political protest. It would take the upheavals of 1848 to bring them back on to the streets–with the Société des Républicaines-Révolutionnaires as their inspiration.

  Thérésia Cabarrus, formerly marquise de Fontenay and Mme Tallien, died as princesse de Chimay in 1835, having spent the last years of her life in seclusion at her husband’s estates doting on her many children and grandchildren and indulging her love for music and painting. The fact that despite her respectable third marriage she was never welcomed back into European high society (although her husband and children were) was a continual source of regret. ‘If I should deign to defend myself, I should say to you,’ she wrote to a friend in 1826, with her extraordinary ability to view the facts of her life as she wished them to be, ‘is it my fault if M. de Fontenay betrayed and abandoned me, if M. Tallien left for Egypt when his responsibilities required him in Paris?’ In fact much of the blame for her exclusion from the world she had once almost reigned over can be attributed to Napoléon’s inability to forget a slight or forgive a rejection–especially if it came from a woman.

  When the unreliable memoirs of a revolutionary government agent called Sénart, which were overwhelmingly hostile to Tallien, were published in 1824 (four years after Tallien’s lonely death) Thérésia declared herself heartbroken–especially on behalf of their daughter. Rose-Thermidor Tallien, called Joséphine during her childhood (Joséphine continued to pay for her god-daughter’s education even after her break from Thérésia), took the name of Laure after her marriage to Félix de Narbonne-Pelet as a final rejection of the controversial circumstances of her birth which had so coloured the lives of her parents.

  Although Napoléon had been able to ensure that Thérésia lost her best friend and was ostracized from her husband’s world, he could not control his children. Thérésia’s son by Chimay, Joseph, married one of Napoléon’s illegitimate daughters; their four children could claim both Napoléon and Thérésia as their grandparents.

  Juliette Récamier, who better conformed to the new ideal of a virtuous, modest woman, became one of the great literary muses of the nineteenth century through her long-standing friendships with Benjamin Constant, Pierre-Simon Ballanche, François-René de Chateaubriand–her only real love–and Germaine de Staël. She returned to Paris in 1814 after Napoléon’s fall. In the 1830s, when she was in her fifties, she was described as still possessing an irresistible ‘velvetiness’ of manner.

  The Duke of Wellington, who met Juliette in Paris in 1815 after the final defeat of Napoléon at Waterloo, was another of her admirers. ‘I own, madame, that I do not greatly regret that urgent business will prevent me from calling on you this afternoon, since each time after seeing you I quit your person more than ever penetrated by your attractions, and less disposed to give my attention to politics,’ he wrote. ‘I will, however, wait upon you tomorrow…if you should be at home, notwithstanding the effect which these dangerous visits produce on me.’

  Théroigne de Méricourt, officially declared insane in September 1794, was transferred from one grim asylum to another over the next thirteen years. Pierre Villiers, once Robespierre’s secretary, visited her in 1797. He described her as a ‘revolutionary Fury’ still obsessed with the ideas of equality and liberty–as if those deluded hopes were proof of her madness. It is more than likely that Théroigne was treated during this period by Philippe Pinel, an early specialist in mental disorders. He believed that revolution ‘expanded the soul’ but he also argued that it caused a greater incidence of mental disorders and insanity because it acted as a powerful emotional stimulant. Revolutions, according to his theory, drove people to such extremes of emotion that many simply went mad.

  Théroigne was finally placed in La Salpêtrière in 1807; here she would spend the last decade of her life ministered to by keepers who were little more than gaolers, clothed in filthy rags, fettered to the walls and fed like an animal through the bars of her damp, dirty, airless cell. Abandoned by her family to these inhumane conditions, the desperate Théroigne degenerated rapidly. If someone approached her she would threaten them, swear, accuse them of royalism and speak wildly of liberty and the Committee of Public Safety. Her world was still that of 1794.

  By 1810, the asylum’s records describe her as completely dislocated from reality, speaking to herself for hours on end, muttering ritualized incantations about committees, decrees, villains, liberty and the revolution, at times smiling at an imaginary audience. Often naked, even in the coldest weather, she punctuated her monologues with purifying baths of freezing water or self-abasement in muddy excrement.

  Since her death in 1817 Théroigne’s case has been seized upon by generation after generation of historians who have used her as a metaphor for the ruined idealism of the first years of the revolution. In the mid-nineteenth century Jules Michelet (basing his analysis on distorted reports of her life, since discredited) saw her as the fatal personification of revolutionary fury, savage, bloodthirsty and anarchic. In fact she seems to have been more victim than aggressor, a tragic casualty of her own exalted hopes for freedom.

  It was Michelet who first attributed to women a prominent role in the revolution. He argued that the daily deprivations suffered by ordinary women–hunger, disease, the sight of their husbands and sons going off to war–made them overcome their traditional political passivity to become bold instigators of change. ‘What is most people in the people, I mean what is most instinctive and inspired,’ he wrote, ‘is assuredly the women.’

  Later historians, like the socialist Albert Mathiez at the start of the twentieth century, looked at women more sceptically, generally viewing their counterrevolutionary activity–their calls for a return to king and Church–as their most important contribution to the history of the period. To Mathiez, such women were political and religious fanatics who undermined the achievements of true (male) revolutionaries like Robespierre. On the other hand his contemporary, Jean Jaurés, commended the role women played in bringing the king to Paris in 1789 and forcing him to sign the Declaration of the Rights of Man. It was female hands, Jaurès wrote, ‘that received for humanity its new, glorious title’.

  But humanity’s new, glorious title contained nothing within it
for women. As Olympe de Gouges had pointed out, France still needed a declaration of the rights of women. Modern feminist historians have turned their focus to this central inconsistency in revolutionary history: the fact that when women became politically active, either from behind the scenes, like Germaine de Staël and Manon Roland, or on the streets, like Pauline Léon and Théroigne de Méricourt, they were agitating for rights from which they, as women, were actively excluded. A female figure might have represented Liberty, but for real women she remained an unattainable ideal.

  Although women were silenced by the revolution, their role as republican mothers had been politicized. Remaining in the domestic sphere had become their essential contribution to the virtuous new republic. The message was that female independence, especially sexual independence, threatened the stability and security of the French nation. Thus the revolution, as Dorinda Outram suggests, ‘succeeded perfectly in carrying out its “hidden agenda” of the exclusion of women from a public role’.

  Helen Williams, the British writer living in Paris throughout this period, observed in 1801 that women only enjoyed the benefits of the new regime second-hand. The real question, she said, was not ‘whether they [women] have gained by the revolution, but whether they have gained as much as they ought’. Her answer was an unequivocal no. Despite revolutionary champions of female rights like the marquis de Condorcet and Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès, she wrote, women were still woefully ill-educated and lacked basic political and civil rights:

  When Republican lawgivers shall have established public institutions where woman may receive the blessings of a liberal education, when they shall have allotted for her whose mind is enlightened by study, and refined by nature, some dignified employments, which, if she is destitute of fortune, may shield her from the cruel alternative of penury…or of uniting herself to a man whom her heart despises or rejects, then will she kneel, with that glowing enthusiasm, that instinctive impulse of admiration for what is great and generous which the female heart wants no lesson to feel, and bless the tutelary sway of the Republic!

  With Napoléon’s ascent to power, despotism, as so many observed, had merely changed hands. Women who had scrambled to unofficial positions of influence during the chaos after Robespierre’s fall were systematically excluded from social life–especially those who had personally rejected Napoléon, like Thérésia, dared to disagree with him, like Germaine, or both, like Juliette.

  But even Napoléon could not ensure that their voices were silenced completely. In the short term his political objectives may have been achieved by their removal from the public stage, but in the long term it would ensure that he would be remembered for injustice and tyranny.

  Her ten years of exile only gave Germaine de Staël more reason to develop her ideas on the urgent necessity for liberty–especially for women. She declared that a society’s treatment of its female citizens was the measure of its civilization. The old regime may have ridiculed feminine emotions but it had granted women influence, she argued, while the new order despised, belittled and excluded them. It was a measure of how much attitudes had changed since 1789 that she and others were no longer prepared to accept this state of affairs. Although the revolution had been more concerned with the rights of men than with the rights of humanity, it had shown women that their opinions were important and their contribution to society vital.

  Germaine spent the early 1810s writing and travelling in continental Europe, Russia, Sweden and England, retreating as Napoléon’s empire expanded towards her. Perhaps her greatest work, On Germany, was suppressed by Napoléon in 1810 but published in London three years later. In 1811, in secret, she married a dashing but not very intellectual army officer twenty-one years her junior; with him she finally achieved the personal contentment she had sought for so long. Their son, born when Germaine was forty-six, would marry Louis de Narbonne’s granddaughter.

  Napoléon was defeated by an alliance of British, Russian, Austrian and Prussian troops in 1814 and Germaine returned to Paris in triumph after a decade-long exile. Once again, her salon was the most important in Paris; once again, the circle she dominated drew up France’s constitution, this time restoring Louis XVIII, Louis XVI’s brother, the former comte de Provence, to the French throne. Although she fled when Napoléon escaped from Elba the following year, she need not have bothered. To regain power in France Napoléon needed a constitution–and the endorsement of Madame de Staël, the ‘empress of thought’. His brother Joseph was sent to persuade her to return to support his new liberal rule, promising the return of Necker’s money (still unpaid), a peerage for her son-in-law and the establishment of the liberal principles of government for which she had fought and suffered so long.

  But while Germaine feared for France’s independence if Napoléon’s final bid for power failed, she could not conceive of supporting the man she saw as the enemy of liberty. ‘The Emperor has done without a constitution and without me for twelve years,’ she said to her cousin. ‘He does not love one any more than the other.’ She returned to Paris in the autumn of 1816, when Louis XVIII was restored to the throne for a second time. Her influence and advice were eagerly sought by France’s new ruling caste. Some of these, like the Duke of Wellington, were new friends; many others, like Lafayette and Mathieu de Montmorency, had been close to her since those heady, idealistic days of their youth in the rue du Bac.

  Germaine de Staël died in Paris on 14 July 1817–twenty-eight years to the day after the Bastille had fallen and the revolution she had so longed for had begun.

  NOTES

  ABBREVIATIONS

  BHÈSRF

  Bulletin d’Histoire Économique et Sociale de la Révolution Française

  CG

  Germaine de Staël, Correspondance générale

  HMW 1790

  Helen Maria Williams, Letters Written in France…to a Friend in England

  HMW 1794

  ——, Letters from France

  HMW 1796

  ——, Letters Containing a Sketch of the Politics of France

  HMW 1801

  ——, Sketches of the State of Manners and Opinions in the French Republic

  WRP

  Applewhite et al., Women in Revolutionary Paris

  For full information on the publications cited in the Notes, see the Bibliography.

  INTRODUCTION

  I know of no woman: Herriot I, 33

  manifesting my love for: Document reproduced in full in WRP 158

  women, amidst their petty household: Tocqueville 31

  had the deepest craving for: Schama 545

  Chapter 1 · SALONNIÈRE

  Go hence to Mme de Staël’s: Morris II, 102

  furnace of politics…some great revolution: The next quotations, Adams 266, 265

  the noblest pleasure…and without foresight: The next quotations, Staël Considèrations I, 386, 378–9 [French version, 1818]

  To arms, to arms: Schama 382

  The Revolution must be attributed: Staël Considerations I, 89 [English version, 1818]

  touched the extreme limits: Herold 86

  mille et mille…I do today: Staël CG I, 315, 21 July 1789

  the governing principle, the directing: Goncourt 243

  the social developments of the times…: For modern discussions of salons and their importance, see Gutwirth, The Twilight of the Goddesses, and Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in…the French Revolution

  a short petticoat: Herold 124

  impersonal and abstract convention: Sennett Flesh and Stone 73

  A man who placed his: Boigne 32

  the duchess, and her femme: Byrne 207

  Do not people talk in: Sennett Flesh and Stone 110

  Ah, Madame, you must be: Gronow 50; Ducrest I, 151, the other woman referred to was not Talleyrand’s current mistress but his future wife, Catherine Grand.

  intellectual melody: Staël Corinne 26

  a certain way in which: Herold 71

  If I was queen: Ga
y III, 23, quoting Mme Tessé

  the arbiters of all things: Tocqueville 403

  is to denature…the robust one: The next quotations, Gutwirth 138, 117

  bid defiance to laws: Adams 234

  The influence of women: Staël Considerations II, 148

  were involved in…and natural intelligence: Melzer and Rabine 125

  all its vigour: Gutwirth 86

  the paradise of…scorned and mistreated: Melzer and Rabine 200

  injustice of men…most perfect integrity: The next quotations, from ‘On Literature’ in Berger 186, 184

  The feelings to…changed into spectators: Herold 104

  in admiration…pleased with oneself: Boigne 189

  to dazzle rather than to: Ducrest I, 85

  of all the men I: Bruce 19

  If it had depended: Faderman 101

  the most courtly refinement: Burney 235

  the inexhaustible treasures of grace: Herriot I, 76, quoting Sainte-Beuve

  He is a…let alone gunpowder: Staël Lettres à Narbonne 48

  stop your famous…be your fault: The next quotations, Staël CG I, 403, 256, both undated

  her intellectual endowments…more obviously undesigning: Burney 236

  the friend of Mme de Staël: Morris, I, 144

  le comte Louis…changed his destiny: Staël CG I, 355, to Stanislas de Clermont-Tonnerre

  of no duty…the strongest side: Morris I, 144

  the great business…of all that: The next quotations, Rousseau La Nouvelle Héloïse 90, 61

  maternal love became as much: Berry 404

  There are no…seeking among men: Landes 72, and Gutwirth 126; both quoting Rousseau’s Letter to M. d’Alembert on Spectacle

  A taller stature, a stronger: Rousseau La Nouvelle Héloïse 108

  Rousseau has endeavoured…over their happiness: Staël Letters on…Rousseau 15

  always been half in love: Wollstonecraft 263