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

by Moore, Lucy

  From the Assembly’s earliest debates, the issue of ‘active’ and ‘passive’ citizenship had been a provocative one. Active citizens had the right to vote for representative assemblies and to sit in them themselves; they had the freedom to make moral choices and to act independently. Passive citizens had to allow other people to think, speak and act for them. In order to sit in the National Assembly, a man had to pay annual taxes of a silver mark, or fifty days’ wages for an unskilled worker; those who paid ten days’ wages’ worth of taxes qualified to sit in local government; those who paid three days’ wages in tax were eligible to vote. It was not just the poor who were counted as passive citizens: even if they paid taxes, women, blacks, non-Catholics, domestic servants and actors were all forbidden the vote and considered incapable of participating in public life.

  Robespierre was one of the earliest champions of universal male suffrage, arguing against the Abbé Sieyès’s contention that property should define civil status. When the question of Jewish citizenship was raised in December 1789, Robespierre spoke out against persecution. ‘We should bear in mind that it can never be politic,’ he said, ‘to condemn to humiliation and oppression a multitude of men who live in our midst.’ In January 1790, after this debate, the Society of the Friends of the Law denounced discrimination against Jews. They called the law of the silver mark unjust and expressed the hope that an alternative way of distinguishing between citizens be found. They backed the complete freedom of the press, also being debated in the Assembly at the time.

  At the last session of the month, in a discussion on natural rights, one member of the Society asserted that a man’s rights over his wife and children ‘are those of a protector over his protégés’. Despite Romme’s progressive views on women’s rights, Théroigne was the only member of the group to voice her objections to this statement; like Robespierre, most revolutionaries were too busy defending men’s rights to concern themselves with women’s. Although she never drafted her views on the matter, as she had intended, she put down in her notebook her thoughts on ‘the liberty of women, who have the same natural rights as men, so that, as a consequence, it is supremely unjust that we have not the same rights in society’. The prejudice and discrimination she had encountered in her own life made her desire for freedom and equality all the more poignant.

  One member of the Society of the Friends of the Law was Augustin Bosc d’Antic, a mineralogist and botanist. He had seen Théroigne in the galleries of the National Assembly in Versailles and written to a friend about a beautiful, patriotic stranger who had captured his imagination. A few months later, he joined the Society and may have confessed his feelings to her. If so, the former courtesan Théroigne, who in her new incarnation rejected any amorous advances ‘with Spartan pride’, did not respond.

  Because of her regular attendance at the National Assembly, and because of her remarkable appearance which had so fascinated Bosc d’Antic – Théroigne’s slight figure and delicate, gentle face contrasted unintentionally picturesquely with the strict cut of her signature amazone and plumed hat – she became a celebrity. The people and the deputies respected her, she said proudly, ‘because of my patriotism and my personal conduct’. By the end of 1789, she was popularly known as ‘la belle Liégoise’.

  The royalist press had different words for her: trollop, nymph, second-rate courtesan, débauchée, whore. The name Théroigne de Méricourt (which she never acknowledged) was first used in a November 1789 article in the royalist paper the Apostles: ‘One might call her the muse of democracy, or else think of her as Venus giving lessons in public right. Her company is itself a college; her principles are those of the Porch. She would adopt those of the Arcades [the prostitutes’ haunt in the Palais Royal], if the need arose.’

  Théroigne was also the heroine of a satirical play entitled Théroigne et Populus, ou le triomphe de la démocratie, in which she was linked to a deputy to the National Assembly whose name, Populus, made him a cypher for the average Frenchman. Although the pair did not know one another, their names were often joined by journalists implying that Théroigne sold her favours to the entire French nation. Another royalist newspaper described her in lurid detail giving birth to the ‘National embryo’, with labour brought on by her excitement at Robespierre’s eloquence, and suggested Talleyrand, Mirabeau or the young orator Antoine Barnave might be the imaginary infant’s father.

  It was at this time, too, that the rumours of Théroigne as a bloodthirsty warrior who had stormed the Bastille in July, then Versailles in October, became current. She was depicted in an engraving wearing, inevitably, the amazone in which, sword aloft and pistols smoking, she supposedly ‘bested a brigade of bodyguards [at Versailles]…She was ever to be found where the unrest was greatest.’ While the attacks against Théroigne in the press demonstrate the prominence she had attained – in a 1791 etching she represented French women alongside a generic cleric, nobleman and peasant as witnesses to the birth of France’s new constitution – they are also evidence of how threatening emancipated women were to the majority of Frenchmen, from members of the political elite to the man in the street.

  Women who were outsiders and did not have reputations to protect were practically the only ones who dared speak out against the social injustices women faced, and to which they were especially vulnerable – fallen women like Théroigne or Mary Wollstonecraft, living in Paris in the early 1790s with an American merchant to whom she was not married and with whom she had a child; actresses, who were viewed as little more than prostitutes; and foreigners.

  It was no accident that Théroigne, although she counted among her male acquaintances friends of both the liberal aristocrat Germaine de Staël and the republican bourgeoise Manon Roland, never met either woman. She would not have been welcome in their worlds. The aristocratic adulteresses Germaine de Staël and Thérésia de Fontenay were, arguably, greater sinners than the newly virtuous Théroigne, who had rejected her degrading past; but while they were embraced by society, she was despised by it.

  Their already ambiguous moral roles freed female outsiders to express discontent with the status quo. This was partly because they had less to lose – no families to disown them, no legitimate children to disgrace, no respectability to sacrifice in the name of idealism – and partly because any woman who did have a voice in eighteenth-century France, from the queen down, was denounced for immorality.

  Marie-Antoinette had been married at fourteen to the future Louis XVI, who had a medical condition that made sex almost impossible; their union was unconsummated for seven years. Despite living in a society which considered love affairs completely normal, she might in twenty years of marriage have taken a single lover (Axel von Fersen). Her actual sins were thus completely incommensurate with those of which she was accused by the revolutionary scandal-sheets: of sleeping with her brother-in-law and various ministers, not to mention fleets of footmen, and of lesbian orgies with her ladies-in-waiting during which she committed incest with her prepubescent son. These egregious crimes were salaciously reported alongside her real political ‘crimes’ – her influence over the king and her fear of the changes taking place in her world. The association between politics and pornography, which were sold alongside each other in the stalls lining the Seine and the shops of the Palais Royal, was a long-standing one; in 1748 Diderot had attacked Louis XV through the lubricious tale of a king who owned a magic ring that made women’s vaginas speak.

  Attacking the ancien régime meant, in one sense, attacking the power women were thought to wield from behind the scenes. Politically involved women, who were seen as preventing politics from being disinterested by promoting their favourites, were believed to contaminate both society and the state. For most revolutionaries, cleansing France of corruption could only be accomplished by preventing women from playing any kind of public role. Influenced by Rousseau, they believed that a society dominated by women was fundamentally tainted. In the ideal republic, according to their ‘natural’ roles, m
en would lead and women would serve. ‘The reign of courtesans brought on the ruin of the nation; the power of queens consummated it,’ wrote the journalist Prudhomme in 1791. Women, who ‘are born for perpetual dependence and are gifted only with private virtues’, should not be allowed to enter into public life.

  By this thinking, any politicized woman, regardless of her private behaviour, was depraved and unnatural, and inventing lurid stories about her was a legitimate way of undermining her reputation and public influence. Although Théroigne was a revolutionary, and at this stage women’s rights of citizenship were still on the constitutional table, her conduct was every bit as suspect as Marie-Antoinette’s because they were both women. Théroigne became such a prominent figure because the idea of a former courtesan becoming a revolutionary campaigner was almost inconceivable at the time – and offered her opponents such irresistable ammunition with which to attack her.

  The actress and writer Olympe de Gouges was another woman held in contempt by the press at the start of the revolution. Like Théroigne, she came from a humble background and had washed up as a kept woman in 1780s Paris – just as Lamartine had said of Théroigne, ‘as the whirlwind attracts things of no weight’. Like Théroigne, she saw the revolution as an opportunity to jettison her unhappy past, reinventing herself as a prolific and enthusiastic political pamphlet-writer. As an animal-lover and a believer in reincarnation, her campaigns were occasionally eccentric but always benevolent. Gouges advocated the abolition of slavery, rights for illegitimate children (a cause close to her heart – she claimed to be the bastard daughter of a marquis) and cleaner streets, and proposed setting up maternity hospitals, a national theatre for women and public workshops for the unemployed. But both the republican and the royalist papers reviled her.

  Actors and actresses like Olympe de Gouges, inhabiting the same demi-monde as Théroigne in her incarnation as Mlle Campinado, were until 1789 not only automatically excluded from political life but excommunicated from the Church. Because of this treatment, many were immediately sympathetic to the revolutionary cause. The theatre’s new star, François-Joseph Talma, used his traditional end-of-season speech in the spring of 1789 to speak out against prejudice and servitude and express the hope that the Estates-General (soon to be the National Assembly) would rid France of the last vestiges of feudalism. Marie-Joseph Chénier, an habitué of Germaine de Staël’s salon and a new friend of Théroigne’s, wrote Talma’s footlights speech as well as the hit play of 1789, Charles IX, in which Talma played the murderous, manipulative, imbecile monarch. Although the play was suppressed after only thirty-three performances, patriotic audiences continued to clamour for the crucial scene in which the king acknowledged his betrayal of his country and his honour.

  Talma’s politicization was tacit as well as outspoken, evident as much in the way he interpreted roles, the way he moved and dressed, as in the words he spoke. Ancien régime theatre and festivals were seen as tawdry and elitist; revolutionaries, again taking their cue from Rousseau, idealized naturalism, innocence and purity. In popular celebrations, this meant replacing artificial tableaux with pastoral fêtes modelled on village life: country dancing, fresh, simple food, branches of greenery and bunches of flowers instead of tinsel. In the theatre, it meant Talma.

  He was the first actor to play his roles in authentic costumes rather than the tights and doublets of traditional theatre-wear. His friend the painter Jacques-Louis David, who often collaborated with Talma in set-design, congratulated him for making his Charles IX look like a Fouquet painting; when Talma played Rousseau’s ghost to celebrate the fall of the Bastille, he wore the same clothes in which Rousseau was pictured in his memorial portraits; as Proculus in Voltaire’s Brutus, in November 1790, David designed him a short toga modelled on antique statues, with bare legs, sandalled feet and cropped hair.

  This desire to be genuine and uncontrived was revolutionary in itself. The liberal press contrasted Talma’s Roman haircut with the powdered ringlets of the court party. Brissot’s publication the Patriote Français declared it the only suitable republican hairstyle, praising its economy of money (hair-powder, made of flour, was unpatriotically wasteful) and time (elaborate aristocratic hair-dos took hours to perfect). ‘It is carefree and so assures the independence of a person,’ the paper continued, ‘it bears witness to a mind given to reflection, courageous enough to defy fashion.’ Even liberal society women stopped powdering their hair, letting it fall on to their shoulders in loose curls. Théroigne’s iconic riding-habits were demonstrations of this same impulse towards free-thinking, simplicity and classlessness in appearance, with an added frisson of transgression – the idea of a woman in a man’s clothes. By wearing such a deliberately masculine outfit, Théroigne imagined that she would be better respected by men: seen as a public woman, not a femme publique. She hoped looking less feminine would compel people to respond not to her appearance but to her words and conduct.

  Under the ancien régime, people had been identified by their dress; in the new France, people were still defined by what they wore. Even though the ceremonial costumes of the three governing estates were abolished in October 1789, republican men continued to take pride in the unadorned black coats, breeches and shoes they had been required to wear as members of the Third Estate, in contrast to the glowing colours, velvet and lace of the other two estates. Théroigne urged her fellow-women to give up their luxuries, which were ‘incompatible with liberty’.

  Several ironies were concealed behind the cult of naturalism. In the first place, it was often as artfully contrived as any ancien régime salonnière’s conversation: the great revolutionary orator Hérault de Séchelles had lessons in declamation from the actress Mlle Clairon, Germaine de Staël’s elocution teacher; later Napoléon would be tutored by Talma. Secondly, when republicanism became stylish – Théroigne’s amazones soon adorned many society figures – its original intention of being outside fashion was defeated.

  The unhappiest side-effect of this craze for simplicity was the destruction of the stay-making, embroidery and silk-making industries, which put thousands of workers, principally women, out of work. Starchers and laundresses saw less business when plain muslin cravats replaced stiffened lace jabots; coiffeurs became redundant when smart ladies no longer wanted model ships to float in their headdresses. Lace-makers rioted in Normandy and Velay in 1793; Lyon, centre of the textile industry, was defiantly anti-revolutionary. After the revolution, the duc d’Orléans’s mistress Félicité de Genlis recounted a conversation she overheard between an old stay-maker and an old hoop-maker bemoaning the new fashions. ‘As soon as they began to introduce bodices, instead of whalebone stays,’ concluded the stay-maker darkly, ‘I immediately prophesied the revolution.’

  Théroigne’s riding-habit had not been intended as a fashion statement, but it soon became one. When she arrived at the newly formed Cordeliers’ Club in February 1790, the sight of her crimson amazone and her sword provoked a flattering reaction. Camille Desmoulins greeted her: ‘It is the Queen of Sheba, come to see the Solomon of the sections [the Paris wards].’ Théroigne delivered her speech in her soft Walloon accent, proposing that a temple dedicated to Liberty, a home for the National Assembly and an altar to the fatherland be built on the ruins of the Bastille. It prompted wild applause.

  Although a committee was set up to consider her suggestion, the conclusion to Desmoulins’s article on her appearance at the Cordeliers’ demonstrated her fellow-patriots’ true attitude to women involving themselves in politics. With her Society of the Friends of the Law dissolving, Théroigne had requested membership of the Cordeliers’ Club, which would allow her a consultative vote in the Assembly. While she was granted the honours of the session for her address, Desmoulins evaded her demand for an official political voice as a member of the Cordeliers’:

  Mlle Théroigne and those of her sex will always be at liberty to propose whatever they believe to be advantageous to the fatherland, but as regards the question of state,
as to whether Mlle Théroigne should be admitted to the district with a consultative vote only, the assembly is not competent to take sides on this question, and this is not the place to settle it.

  Other clubs were more receptive to women members; indeed, ‘women were the soul of the societies and of the democratic movement’, according to the historian Alphonse Aulard. The first Fraternal Society of Patriots of Both Sexes was formed in February 1790 with the intention of ‘reading and interpreting the decrees of the National Assembly’, and welcomed women from the start. Its female members would include Théroigne, Pauline Léon, Manon Roland and Thérésia de Fontenay; Germaine de Staël did not join, but many of her friends did. Olympe de Gouges was another member, as was Louise Robert, a writer married to a lawyer (from Liège, like Théroigne) and deputy to the Convention. François and Louise Robert were ardent republicans and active members of the Fraternal Society; Louise Robert believed that it and associations like it would bring about the final destruction of despotism. In late 1790 the Roberts founded the Mercure National, one of the hundreds of new journals that appeared between 1789 and 1792, for which their friend Manon Roland would write.

  One of the most eloquent of the Fraternal Society’s women members was the Dutch baroness Etta Palm d’Aelders. In December 1790 she addressed the Social Circle, another club which welcomed male and female members and met weekly in the Palais Royal. She urged the government to extend full citizenship to women.

  Six months earlier Condorcet had written on the same topic:

  He who votes against the rights of another, whatever that person’s religion, colour or sex may be, has by the same token forsworn his own. Why should creatures subject to pregnancies and to passing indispositions not be able to exercise their rights [a common argument against women participating in public life], when no one has ever contemplated depriving people who have an attack of gout every winter, or who readily catch a cold?