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

by Moore, Lucy

  The National Guard he commanded was made up of the members of various volunteer militias, especially former members of the garde française, gathered together as a regular force and charged with defending the decrees of the new National Assembly on the one hand and protecting the people from revolution’s excesses on the other. They had to pay for their own muskets and red, white and blue uniforms, so most were relatively prosperous. Progressive patriotism was their unifying sentiment. Germaine de Staël’s army officer lover, Louis de Narbonne, would become commander of a regiment of the National Guard in Besançon the following summer.

  The effects of recent failed harvests, droughts and bitter winters had accumulated and despite an adequate harvest in 1789 a flour shortage became cruelly evident on the streets of Paris as September wore on. In the public mind, the subsistence crisis was intimately connected to the political crisis. The despised representatives of the Crown were held responsible for the people’s hunger; it was thought that bread was being withheld from them in order to crush their spirit of revolt. Lafayette, who was responsible for ensuring that supplies reached the Parisian markets, was a particular focus for their resentment.

  Women began stopping carts of grain and dragging them to the Hôtel de Ville for distribution. On 17 September, after another morning when riflemen had been stationed at the bakers’ to prevent rioting when the bread was handed out, they requested an audience with the mayor, saying ‘men didn’t understand anything about the matter [the lack of grain] and they wanted to play a role in affairs’.

  The issue of the veto (what Germaine de Staël had described as ‘her’ veto–Louis was delaying his assent to his new constitutional role, approved by the National Assembly on 10 September) exacerbated popular discontent and suspicion of the king and queen, who were scathingly known as Monsieur and Madame Veto. In revolutionary newspapers, firebrand journalists like Jean-Paul Marat urged their readers to ‘sweep away the corrupt, the royal pensioners and the devious aristocrats, intriguers and false patriots. You have nothing to expect from them except servitude, poverty and desolation.’

  Given the atmosphere of starvation and destitution, an extravagant dinner held at Versailles on 1 October by the royal bodyguard was ill conceived. An additional regiment from Flanders had been summoned to Versailles as a precautionary measure, and the royal forces extended to them their traditional welcome of a banquet. Unusually, the king and queen made an appearance, bringing the gold-ringleted dauphin with them; toast after toast was drunk, royalist songs were increasingly blurrily sung, and court ladies handed out cockades in white and black, respectively – the Bourbon (for Louis) and Hapsburg (for Marie-Antoinette) colours.

  The next day, the liberal press denounced this royalist ‘orgy’, repeating the words of one officer who had said, ‘Down with the cockade of colours [the tricolour]; may everyone take the black, that’s the fine one.’ It was said the guards had stamped underfoot the tricolour cockade, since the fall of the Bastille in July the potent emblem of a new, reformed France. Marie-Antoinette later expressed her ‘enchantment’ with the guards’ banquet, and this was taken to mean that she was enchanted by the insult offered to France. Black and white cockades seen on the streets of Paris began provoking fistfights; the people grew still hungrier.

  At dawn on the morning of 5 October, a young market woman began beating a drum in the street in central Paris. By seven o’clock, perhaps two thousand women had gathered in front of the Hôtel de Ville, calling out for bread and for the punishment of the royal bodyguard. They broke into the building, threatening to burn all the council’s papers, combing it for weapons, blockading the doors – refusing to let any men inside on the grounds that the city council was made up of aristocrats–and denouncing the mayor Jean-Sylvain Bailly, and Lafayette, who they said deserved to be strung up from streetlights for not ensuring that Paris had bread. They declared that ‘men were not strong enough to be revenged on their enemies and that they [the women] would do better’.

  This violent appropriation of previously proscribed places ‘was the first delight of the revolution’: ‘the beating down of gates, the crossing of castle moats, walking at ease in places where one was once forbidden to enter’. For ordinary women, restricted by their gender as well as by their status, these new liberties were all the more potent. What is evident in the accounts of these October days is that the women revelled in their own boldness and determination. They were driven to act by desperation, but they seem to have surprised even themselves, and they were proud of what they did.

  Men, who had failed in their duties as administrators and providers, were deliberately barred from the Hôtel de Ville. The only man the women allowed in was a National Guardsman called Stanislas Maillard. At first, because of his black coat (members of the Third Estate wore plain black coats), they thought he was a councillor; but then they recognized him as a vainqueur, one who had participated in the sacking of the Bastille, and opened the doors to him.

  Despite Maillard’s initial efforts to dissuade them, the women insisted they were going to Versailles to present their demands to the king and the National Assembly. Maillard decided to go with them, explaining to a colleague that in this way warning could be sent ahead of the crowd of angry women and control maintained over them. He was also sympathetic to their cause, as were many National Guardsmen who were husbands or sons of those protesting. Lafayette, knowing this, tried to keep the National Guard under his command from joining up with the marchers for as long as possible, fearing violence.

  Another Guardsman, known as Fournier ‘l’Américain’, who defied ‘the sycophant Lafayette’ to assemble troops to follow the women to Versailles, believed, like the women, that royalists were plotting to starve the nation into submission. Writing during the Reign of Terror, he remembered rallying straggling women in Paris with the words, ‘Your children are dying of hunger; if your husbands are perverted and cowardly enough not to want to go look for bread for them, then the only thing left for you to do is to slit their throats.’

  Maillard began beating a drum to call the women to order, but the area in front of the Hôtel de Ville was too small to hold them all and they moved their assembly point first to the Place Louis XV at the end of the Tuileries gardens and then spilled over into the open Place d’Armes on the Champs Élysées. Children blowing bugles and ringing bells went round the market area of Les Halles to assemble the throng. Women converged on the site carrying makeshift weapons like pitchforks and broomsticks as well as pikes, swords and muskets. ‘The town is in alarm,’ reported Gouverneur Morris. ‘All carriages were stopped’, and any passing woman was swept along by the crowd and ‘obliged to join the female mob’. Later, respectable bourgeois women would testify that they had been forced to join the crowd; onlookers were surprised to catch sight of pale-complexioned women in fine clothes alongside the rough market women.

  Numbering by this stage about six thousand, the women set off for Versailles, fourteen kilometres distant, through driving rain. Maillard and six drummers headed the procession alongside two cannon, ridden by women. The cannon were taken for effect; they had no powder, but all the same Maillard persuaded the women to place them at the back of the cavalcade when they reached Versailles so as not to intimidate the townspeople. The marchers wore tricolour cockades and carried leafy branches, just as Camille Desmoulins’s mob had three months earlier when they stormed the Bastille. They sang poissard songs such as the ‘Motion of the Market Women of La Halle’, which just tipped the balance between coarsely amusing and threatening:

  If the High-ups still make trouble

  Then the Devil confound them,

  And since they love gold so much

  May it melt in their traps –

  That’s the sincere wish

  Of the Women Who Sell Fish.

  With cries of ‘Vive le roi!’ the women reached Versailles at about five in the afternoon, just as dusk was beginning to fall, marching down the broad allée that leads straight up
to the palace. Germaine de Staël, who had driven to Versailles by the back roads as soon as she heard news of the march, had already arrived, but a reluctant Lafayette, at the head of the seditious National Guard, was some hours behind her. The great gates had been drawn across the palace entrance for the first time in its history. ‘Every eye was turned towards the road that fronts the windows of the palace of Versailles,’ recalled Germaine. ‘We thought that the cannon might first be pointed against us, which occasioned us much alarm; yet not one woman thought of withdrawing in this great emergency.’ Both inside and outside the palace women were preparing themselves to participate in history.

  After much discussion, fifteen were chosen to appear with Maillard before the National Assembly. Maillard spoke for them, raising rumours of grain hoarding, which the women believed was an aristocratic plot. Deputy Robespierre, immaculate as usual, rose to his feet to confirm the rumours of hoarding. Maillard took the floor again, this time asking that the royal bodyguard be requested to adopt the tricolour cockade to make amends for the insult they were said to have made to it.

  As he spoke, the women waiting outside flooded into the assembly hall, declaring that the bodyguards in the palace courtyard had fired on them. The mood in the hall became riotous, almost carnivalesque: the marchers levelled hostile remarks at the Bishop of Paris, threatened to murder a guard, derided the king’s failure to sign the Declaration of Rights and spread their wet clothes out to dry. One woman sat in the chair reserved for the president of the Assembly; others tried to participate in the debate and vote with the deputies. They mocked the rituals of government, shouting insults so as to disrupt proceedings, some dropping off to sleep on the deputies’ benches.

  Outside, the town of Versailles had shut down. One of Marie-Antoinette’s ladies-in-waiting tried to get back into the palace at about nine on the evening of the 5th, but a National Guard sentry from Versailles recognized her at the gates and sent her back to her lodgings. ‘You must not be seen in the street,’ he told her. ‘You have nothing to fear for your friends, but there will not be a single lifeguardsman [royal bodyguard] left tomorrow morning.’

  Meanwhile the Assembly’s president, Jean-Joseph Mounier, had taken a deputation of women to see the king himself. Much impressed by Louis’s paternal sympathy and concern (he fetched smelling-salts for a seventeen-year-old flower-girl, chosen as spokeswoman, who fainted at his feet), they returned to the assembly hall bearing a signed order for any delayed wheat to be delivered to Paris immediately. Mounier and some of the women now went back to Paris to inform the people of the king’s promises; the remainder stayed in Versailles, the lucky ones finding beds in stables and coach-houses, others huddling in the lee of buildings wrapped in their damp clothes. Many of them wept with exhaustion and confusion, saying they ‘had been forced to march and did not know why they were there’, miles from home and without shelter on a cold, damp night.

  The king then agreed without qualification to sign the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, which he had delayed doing for almost a month. He consulted his ministers about whether he should resist the hostile approaching National Guard by force, or flee, and decided to do neither. ‘Habits of formality’ stopped him escaping, then or later, according to the daughter of an aristocrat who urged flight.

  When Lafayette arrived with the factious Guard it was almost midnight. Versailles was quiet, but wide awake: the tinderbox still smouldered. Alone and unarmed, the general was permitted into the palace to see the king, and told him – after swearing to die at his feet – that if Louis would guarantee food for Paris, allow the patriotic National Guard to replace the royal bodyguard, and agree to move his family, court and government from Versailles to Paris, the National Guard would be satisfied and a clash between them and the royal bodyguard would be averted. The king said he needed to think about the last proposal. Lafayette reported back to the National Assembly, then to his soldiers and officers, and spent the next few hours trying to maintain calm before snatching a few hours’ sleep on a sofa at his grandfather’s house.

  Just before dawn, a crowd of armed men and women broke into the palace compound. Storming into the royal apartments, they called for the blood of the ‘Austrian whore’ (Marie Antoinette had been an Austrian princess before she became the French queen). Two soldiers were killed and their heads paraded around the courtyard on pikes. They chased the barefoot, frantic queen through the Hall of Mirrors to the king’s apartments, where the terrified royal family were reunited; outside, the National Guard finally turned against the mob and stemmed their advance.

  Lafayette, awoken by the mayhem, ran to the palace. At his suggestion Louis took his family on to the narrow balcony outside his grandfather’s state bedroom and, addressing the crowd, promised to entrust himself to the love of his subjects, to their cheers below. Then Lafayette persuaded Marie-Antoinette to step out in front of the crowd alone, turned to her, and kissed her hand; the volatile crowd suddenly turned royalist, and erupted with cries of ‘Long live the queen!’ as well as, brandishing loaves on pikes, ‘We have bread!’

  For the moment, the crisis had been averted.

  Later that morning, Lafayette escorted the royal family back to Paris through the rain at the heart of a procession of perhaps sixty thousand people flanked at either end by the National Guard. Ministers and deputies marched too, alongside flour wagons from the king’s own stores and triumphant market women arm in arm with Guardsmen whose caps they were wearing. Green branches were tied to rifle butts, the two cannon brought from the Hôtel de Ville the morning before were wreathed in laurel, and the two murdered bodyguards’ heads were carried aloft on pikes beside bloody loaves of bread. Many women lifted their skirts and flashed their bottoms as they passed, a traditional expression of female mockery and contempt. They were bringing the baker, the baker’s wife and the baker’s boy (the king, queen and dauphin) to Paris, sang the mob.

  The harlequin makeup of the crowd during those October days excited much comment at the time. The eight-year-old daughter of a courtier remembered the streets of Versailles flooded with ‘horrible-looking people, uttering wild cries’. Edmund Burke, from the safety of England, denounced the ‘horrid yells, and shrilling screams, and frantic dances, and infamous contumelies, and all the unutterable abominations of the furies of hell, in the abused shape of the vilest of women’. ‘Probably,’ responded Mary Wollstonecraft icily, ‘you mean women who gained a livelihood by selling vegetables or fish, who never had any advantages of education.’

  Some of the October women undoubtedly were violent, bloodthirsty and deliberately intimidating. On the way to Versailles, a few shouted that they were going to the palace ‘to bring back the queen’s head’. When the palace was stormed, some were heard calling for the queen’s liver to be fricasséed. On the whole, though, it was not until the National Guard arrived late on the night of the 5th that the mood turned bloody.

  Mme de Tourzel, governess to the royal children, thought that many of the ‘women’ who entered the palace early on the morning of the 6th were men in female clothing. It was not unusual for eighteenth-century Frenchmen to adopt women’s clothes and women’s names, such as Mère Folle, when demonstrating for political or economic purposes; peasants had dressed as women and blacked their faces to attack surveyors during a land dispute in the Beaujolais in the 1770s. Like poissard humour, like the joy taken in entering forbidden places and challenging long-established authorities, this grim fancy dress was another element of black carnival, the combination of festivity and menace that characterized the popular revolution.

  Most of the marchers were proud of their participation, and saw the precedent set by women seizing the political initiative as a positive one. The following month, a woman writer in Les Étrennes Nationales des Dames hailed the Parisiennes for proving that they were at least as courageous and enterprising as the men. ‘We suffer more than men who with their declarations of rights leave us in the state of inferiority and, let’s be t
ruthful, of slavery in which they’ve kept us so long,’ she continued. ‘If there are husbands aristocratic enough in their households to oppose the sharing of patriotic honours, we’ll use the arms we’ve just employed with such success against them.’

  The poissardes, for their part, had a new song:

  To Versailles, like braggarts,

  We dragged our cannon.

  Although we were only women,

  We wanted to show a courage beyond reproach.

  We made men of spirit see that just like them, we weren’t afraid;

  Guns and musketoons across our shoulders…

  Pauline Léon did not say whether she had been in Versailles on 5 and 6 October, but she did say that Lafayette’s behaviour on those days, the evident conflict between his political principles and his loyalty to the king, and his efforts to bring about a compromise between the royalists and the populists, had confirmed her mistrust of him. She saw him as a traitor, and her words echo Fournier l’Américain’s portrait of a wretched, perfidious general stalling for time to save his king at the cost of his countrymen: ‘Since that time [the women’s march] I have sworn eternal hatred of him, and I have used all possible means to unmask him.’

  The march on Versailles gave the women of Paris like Pauline Léon a new political self-confidence. The guts and initiative they had shown gave credence to their demands. Ceaselessly they urged the continuance of the work of the revolution. Eighteen months later a group from Saint-Germain, mostly widows and single women, addressed the Cordeliers’ Club, a popular revolutionary assembly which had met, since April 1790, on the rue des Cordeliers. Léon may have been among them: she lived in Saint-Germain and regularly attended the club, which met at the bottom of her street.

  ‘Watch with more exactitude and severity than ever over the governing of the state,’ they exhorted the Cordeliers. If Frenchmen failed in their duty, if they trusted perfidious tyrants – like Lafayette – who hoped to return the French people to slavery, the women swore that they themselves would defy established social roles to fight in defence of liberty.