Children of the Revolution

by Robert Gildea

  Henriette Renan, four years her senior, was also confronted by difficulties arising from her father’s death and competition from the Church. Her father, a Breton sea-captain of Tréguier, was drowned when she was seventeen, leaving substantial debts, and her mother’s grocery was not enough to keep the family. Essentially self-taught, she was unable to make a living as a primary school teacher in Brittany where the nuns enjoyed a virtual monopoly, so in 1835 she went to Paris to teach in a private girls’ boarding school, where she was worked sixteen hours a day, then became governess to an aristocratic Polish family living in Warsaw and Vienna. She declined an offer of marriage and dedicated what she earned to furthering the career of her brother Ernest, twelve years younger than she, whom she brought to Paris to be educated at the seminary of Saint-Nicolas-du-Chardonnet. Fiercely sceptical herself, she persuaded Ernest not to become ordained, and set him up with an annual allowance in 1845 so that he could study independently to become an academic, a sum that he called ‘the corner-stone of my life’.23 From 1850 she lived with him in Paris, was hugely grieved when he married, but followed him on his expedition to Syria in 1860–61, where she copied out and commented on his drafts of the Life of Jesus. She died there of malaria in 1861, a woman who in another age would have been an academic herself but whose final accolade was Renan’s dedication of the Life of Jesus ‘to the pure soul of my sister Henriette’.24

  Women’s careers were frustrated by a combination of interlocking factors: the absence of state education provision leading to the baccalauréat, the effective closure of the professions, the Church’s virtual monopoly of women’s education, and a social prejudice that the education of women was to be geared not to any career but to their calling as wives and mothers. Julie Daubié, the first woman to pass the baccalauréat, in 1861, under the pseudonym of C. de Sault, followed her success with a treatise on The Poor Woman in the Nineteenth Century in 1866, arguing that women who wanted to teach outside the Church were condemned to private boarding schools, a third of which were lay establishments in 1864, but were paid a mere 200–400 francs a year, or to private tuition, paid as little as 25 centimes an hour as piano teachers. The only solution, she said, was state secondary education for girls and ultimately the opening of the Académie Française to women: the award of the Prix Montoyon to women for a work ‘most useful for morality’ was not enough.25 When education minister Victor Duruy attempted a compromise measure in 1867, the opening of ‘secondary courses’ taught by secondary school masters to girls attending private boarding or convent schools, a broadside was opened up by the Catholic Church which saw this as an attack on its monopoly and a mistaken attempt to train femmes savantes. ‘What I want’, wrote Mgr Dupanloup, bishop of Orléans, who led the attack, ‘is not femmes savantes but what is necessary for their husbands, children and homes – intelligent, judicious, attentive women instructed in that which they need to know as mothers, housewives and society ladies’.26 Whole areas of the country controlled by the Church boycotted the courses, which were attended by only a couple of thousand girls, often daughters of teachers or civil servants, usually chaperoned by their mothers. Access to higher education was even more controversial. When a young widowed mother, Madeleine Brès, obtained permission from the Empress Eugénie in 1866 to enrol in the Paris Medical Faculty, a public debate broke out about whether women doctors would be able to amputate limbs, dissect corpses or examine male genitals. Not least perhaps to skirt round this criticism, Mme Brès wrote a doctoral thesis on breastfeeding and devoted herself to the care of mothers and children.27 Thus, even when they penetrated the professions, women were pushed into spheres where they could put to special use their qualities as wives and mothers.

  The logic of the bourgeois marriage as the path of least resistance becomes clear. The opportunities for women here should not be ignored: for some, marriage, work and wealth were attainable together. Pauline Motte-Brédart was both mother and manager of the family cotton factory at Roubaix, the French Manchester, because her husband was not interested in the business. When her second son Louis Motte-Bossut built a famous ‘giant mill’ in 1843 she was able to nip through the hedge and help him with the accounts, but while her eldest daughter Adèle Danzin-Motte inherited her head for business, her younger daughter Pauline Delfosse-Motte and three daughters-in-law opted out of business matters or were excluded from them by their husbands. Instead, the second generation of mill-owners’ wives based themselves on the home, running the household, organizing dinner parties, sending the children to Catholic schools, building the family alliances that underpinned the business empire, and developing charities to control and civilize the working classes, such as acting as dames patronesses for salles d’asile to look after the children of women working in the mills or setting up workshops for young working women who risked falling into prostitution.28

  To be a bourgeois woman increasingly meant not working outside the home, but further down the social scale working women were fully part of the family enterprise. A baker, for example, not only required his wife to run the shop and cultivate the clientele while he (by night) baked the bread, but relied on marriage to supply the capital to buy the business in the first place. Jean-François Baulme, for example, was an employee in a baker’s shop in Lyon until in 1835, aged twenty-eight, he more or less simultaneously married and bought a shop of his own. He stumped up 1,800 francs himself (of which 1,000 francs came from his father, a peasant farmer in the Ain), while his wife advanced 3,000 francs (including a 1,500-franc inheritance from her mother). Bakers could not do without wives – who were more often of more urban origin, adept at managing social relations – to front the business, and generally remarried quickly if they lost them. In an exception to the Civil Code’s restrictions on married women’s control of property, article 220 permitted a married woman in trade to keep and run the business in her name in the event of the husband’s death, which explains the frequency of ‘veuve’ in the names of businesses. That said, widowed boulangères tended to remarry within a couple of years in mid-nineteenth-century Lyon, if they wished to continue the business, because they could not do without the baker in his fournil.29 In the countryside, the need to maintain the family farm intact meant that, as in the upper classes, romantic love had to take second place to family considerations. Marriages were often arranged by a go-between, and a good marriage involved pooling property or the promise of inheritance, and a robust relationship between a healthy, hard-working couple. Courtship might take the form of squeezing hands until the knuckles nearly broke, in order to test the strength of the intended, and beauty was actually seen as a negative quality. ‘A girl tall and beautiful is like half of the devil’ ran one Breton saying; ‘A woman without an apron is anybody’s’ ran another. The married couple observed a strictly gendered division of labour. The man’s tasks included cutting wood, ploughing and planting the soil, scything the grain, tending the vines, looking after the horses and oxen used in production, and extracting manure from the stables. The woman’s jobs included fetching the water used for cooking, washing and cleaning, feeding both humans and animals, milking the cows, looking after the farmyard and kitchen garden, knitting, sewing and weaving if it were for the family’s own needs, and bringing up the children. There was never any question of farmers’ wives contesting these age-old conventions.30

  Rural society was hierarchical, and day-labourers without the expectation of land could not expect to marry. Girls without the expectation of a dowry might go to the city to work as domestic servants, hoping to accumulate enough for a trousseau in order to return to the village and make a decent marriage. Often they came from poorer regions of the country such as Brittany, Auvergne or the Morvan. Having domestic servants was another sign of a bourgeois family, and the number of domestic servants increased during the century to a high point of 1,156,000 in 1881, some 70 per cent of them women. ‘Domestique’ covered a range of conditions from milkmaids at the bottom to ladies’ companions and governesses in
rich families at the top, and in between shop assistants, barmaids and the cleaning staff of colleges, convents, hospitals and asylums, as well as cooks, chambermaids and valets in private homes.31 Cleaning in a hospital was often the first job after arriving from the country, paid about 12 francs a month in the 1840s because the main perk was accommodation; the next stage would be service in a private household, paid at 35 or 40 francs a month.32 Saving for a dowry was not easy in these circumstances, and in addition the work was insecure. Servants were seen as easy prey by employers and their sons and becoming pregnant led immediately to dismissal. Single mothers were totally rejected by society and little stood in the way of the descent into prostitution. Up to a half of prostitutes in Paris had started work as domestic servants.

  Industrial work for women offered scarcely more money or more security. The right bank of Paris was the centre of luxury trade, where women made so-called articles de Paris – costume jewellery, perfumes, fans, gloves, umbrellas, artificial flowers and feathers – or were employed as milliners, dressmakers or embroiderers, for 2 or 3 francs a day. Suzanne Voilquin (née Monnier) was the daughter of a hatter from Nîmes who had moved to Paris during the Revolution but whose business failed. As a girl she went to work with her sister in an embroidery shop in the rue Saint-Martin, starting work at 7 a.m. and regularly being accosted after work by men who saw them as no better than prostitutes. After her mother died and her father left Paris she became the girlfriend of a medical student who promised to marry her but never did.33 As such she was typical of the grisettes. These young workers in the luxury trade might become the girlfriends of middle-class students, who helped them to pay the rent but soon abandoned them when it was time to settle down. In fact working-class girls rarely married at all. Marriage was about the acquisition and inheritance of property, and they had none. It required the written permission of parents, which was difficult to obtain when the girl had migrated from one part of France to another, and documents drawn up at great expense by a notary. Living in ‘concubinage’ as it was called also had advantages: if the relationship broke up the woman, not the man, acquired control of the children and another relationship could not be deemed adulterous.34

  Industrial work was highly gendered, and patterns of female labour differed sharply between textile towns and those where mining and metallurgy predominated. Working-class families observed a traditional division of labour. In the cotton town of Roubaix (Nord), textiles provided plenty of employment for women. Nearly 55 per cent of female workers were in textiles in 1872, as against 15 per cent in commerce and dressmaking, and 15 per cent in domestic service. Eighty-one per cent of women worked if they were unmarried, although only 17 per cent of married women did so. In the south of the same department, in the mining town of Anzin, underground miners were all men, though some girls were employed to sort the coal and carry baskets. Of those women who did work, 15 per cent ran bars and cafés and 34 per cent were seamstresses, but most tended the garden and raised animals like a farmer’s wife, since the miner’s wage was good enough to keep the family.35

  Textiles and the clothing industry relied on female labour, and conditions were generally harsh. In Lyon girls were recruited from the age of eleven or twelve from peasant or artisan families all over the south-east of France to work twelve hours a day in the silk mills, virtual industrial convents under the eye of nuns, housed in dormitories from which they were rarely allowed home, and paid 15 centimes an hour (1.8 francs a day). Nearly 2,000 of these oval-ists as they were called went on strike in Lyon in June 1869 in pursuit of a ten-hour day paid at 2 francs. The employers refused to meet them so they petitioned the prefect, alluding to the fact that they had to supplement their wages by recourse to prostitution. They joined the International Association of Workers, which applauded their strike at its Basle congress in September 1869, though it was already over. Under the settlement the working day was reduced to ten hours but the rate remained the same, 15 centimes an hour, with overtime paid at 30 centimes.36

  In this context prostitution was often resorted to out of a simple need to make ends meet. Alongside the regulated prostitution of maisons de tolérance or of girls working independently was clandestine or irregular prostitution practised outside the official system. The clearance of traditional haunts of the trade such as the Île de la Cité by Baron Haussmann brought about a shift from maisons de tolérance to the clandestine trade of girls living in the suburbs or who descended each night to do business on the boulevards. A survey of 1878–87 in Paris showed that clandestine prostitutes, much as registered ones, were recruited from dressmakers and other workshop employees, shop assistants, barmaids or domestic servants. Most telling was the fact that 29 per cent were orphaned of both parents, 34 per cent had lost their father and 19 per cent their mother. They did not have the support of a family either to launch them or on which they could fall back in hard times.37 Of course there was a hierarchy among prostitutes, as there was in any trade, and those who acquired some protection generally did better. At the top were the courtesans, re-created as cultivated ladies and able to choose their lovers, who contributed lavishly to their upkeep. Marie-Anne Detourbey, for example, born near Reims in 1837, lost her carpenter father and became a bottle-washer in a champagne house. Moving to Paris to be initiated into la vie galante she was cultivated by Alexandre Dumas fils. She asked him to find her a teacher in order to penetrate society and her tutor was none other than Sainte-Beuve, who called her the ‘madonna of the violets’. She was launched as an actress at the Théâtre de la Porte Saint-Martin, but was not a success, and eventually became the mistress of Prince Jérôme-Napoléon, cousin of the emperor. In 1870 she acquired a fortune and a title from the Comte de Loynes, who subsequently disappeared to England, leaving her as the Comtesse de Loynes to preside over her own salon, and in turn to launch the literary career of her lover Jules Lemaître.38 Few prostitutes, however, ever reached this degree of fame and fortune.

  WOMEN AND POLITICS

  The French Revolution saw a brief flurry of feminist activity. Olympe de Gouges, the daughter of a butcher from Montauban who came to Paris as a playwright, published a Declaration of the Rights of Women in 1791, in which she argued that since women had the right to mount the scaffold they should have the right to contribute to public debate. A Society of Revolutionary Republican Women was set up in 1793 by chocolate-maker Pauline Léon and actress Claire Lacombe, to press for radical measures against counter revolutionaries and hoarders. Unfortunately the involvement of women in politics during the Ancien Régime had been discredited by the influence of the mistresses of Louis XV and of Louis XVI’s Austrian wife Marie-Antoinette. The French Republic was constructed as a republic of brothers who alone were citizens and subscribed to the male virtues of dedication to the public good, whereas the role of women was to ensure order in the home. In the autumn of 1793 the Society of Revolutionary Republican Women was closed down and both Marie-Antoinette and Olympe de Gouges were guillotined.39

  If women achieved political influence it was generally behind the scenes, promoting the careers of men, as the hostesses of salons which often had a political as well as a literary function, and as writers, though usually under assumed names. Germaine de Staël was thrown into her role as a salon hostess by the illness of her mother when her father, Jacques Necker, was a minister in 1788–90, his brief dismissal on 11 July 1789 provoking the storming of the Bastille. She exerted influence behind the scenes to establish her lover Narbonne as minister of war in 1791 and Talleyrand as foreign minister in 1797, and to further the political career of Benjamin Constant. In 1800 she published a study of Literature and its Relations with Social Institutions. Before the Revolution, she argued, women who wrote had to fear appearing ridiculous, now they simply provoked hatred for drawing attention to themselves; genius and renown were for men only. Although the influence of women might ‘calm men’s furious passions’, she wrote, ‘since the Revolution men have thought it politically and morally useful to re
duce women to the most absurd mediocrity. They have no more occasion to develop their reason, but morals, for all that, have not improved.’40 The book was not well received in the current climate. Sylvain Maréchal, who had taken part in a republican conspiracy in 1796, published a pamphlet in 1801 entitled Bill to Prohibit Teaching Women to Read. He argued that ‘reading leads to adultery’ as well as to women wanting to write and participate in politics. ‘A woman poet is a little moral and literary monstrosity,’ he wrote, ‘a woman ruler is a political monstrosity.’41 The advent of Bonaparte was even more tragic for Germaine de Staël. He hated her novels, which placed independent-minded women centre-stage, and saw her salon stoking liberal opposition to his regime. In 1803 he banned her from Paris and she spent most of the next decade either on her father’s Coppet estate near Lake Geneva or wandering from one European country to another.