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

by Moore, Lucy

  Théroigne’s democratic idealism, despite her disillusion with individuals, was undimmed, encouraged by her reading of Plato and Seneca whose words she copied eagerly down into her notebook. She taught the village children revolutionary songs, gave stockings and skirts to the poor and quarrelled with the priest over his tithe and with the miller over his prices. Her beliefs were noted by those who lived in the area, and she began to dream again of helping to create a better society.

  She made friends with the young wife of the local baron, who shared her progressive opinions. After Théroigne’s visits to Mme de Sélys, though, her conservative husband would write to comte Maillebois, the French émigré agent responsible for the region (part of Austria at the time), informing him of Théroigne’s activities; the local priest with whom she had clashed over tithes joined Sélys in denouncing her. The Austrian government, hearing of her presence in Liège and fearful of revolutionary ideas flooding across the French border and sweeping away their regime too, began to observe Théroigne more closely.

  Confounded and alarmed by events in France, the Austrians became convinced that Théroigne was a Jacobin agent, sent to the area with vast sums of money to buy the loyalty of the Liégoises. The former Austrian ambassador to France, who had heard of Théroigne’s alleged activities at Versailles in October 1789 and believed she had been at the centre of a plot to assassinate Marie-Antoinette, confirmed their suspicions to the Austrian emperor, Leopold II, Marie-Antoinette’s brother. Théroigne, who through the autumn had been writing back to Paris in an effort to get her name cleared of the rumours still circulating about her activities during the October days, was once again the object of suspicion; this time it would be harder for her to escape.

  Austrian troops entered Liége in January 1791 and Théroigne was arrested in the middle of the night of the 15th. She was asleep at an inn in a small village, surrounded by her books and papers, when three mercenaries burst into her room, saying that they were patriots who had come to rescue her from counterrevolutionaries. She was suspicious at first, but eventually agreed to go with them. The hired carriage, its curtains drawn, drove off into the night.

  Over the next ten days, as the berline jolted and swayed across the Low Countries towards the Austrian Tyrol, Théroigne was questioned again and again by the three men – all ardent royalists and émigrés, two of them former officers in the French army – about her revolutionary activities. She was ‘provoked and irritated by them in a thousand different ways, each of them more degrading and shocking than the last’. They subjected her to the sexual harassment she had come to regard as normal, speaking to her ‘ineffectually of love’ and telling her she would fetch them a better price on the street. One of the men, the Chevalier Maynard de la Valette – using the macho alias M. Legros – tried to rape her, but she successfully fought him off. On another occasion the men stopped their carriage to beat up a coachman, and when they climbed back inside they jeered at her, ‘So much for your Rights of Man.’ La Valette bragged of his desire to flog the entire ‘left side of the National Assembly, and M. the abbé Sieyés at their head’.

  When she realized her captors had deceived her about being patriots, Théroigne began exaggerating her role in the revolution, feeding them with lies just to see whether they were fools enough to believe her. They noted down her words as evidence to be used against her, building up a portrait of her exulting in bloodshed, longing for the deaths of the royal family, plotting the October days, speaking in front of the Jacobins and forming her own women’s club – the latter two accusations, however untrue, considered as shocking as the first three.

  The Parisian newspapers and satirical sheets were not slow to pick up on ‘the famous Théroigne’s’ arrest. ‘We have been assured that the Jacobin Club is going to threaten the emperor [Leopold] with an army of 500,000 National Guards if he refuses to hand over this heroine,’ reported the Journal général, tongue in cheek, ‘because its chief members are anxious lest she betray their secrets.’

  Théroigne was taken to the immense, menacing medieval castle of Kufstein in the Austrian Alps, an impregnable fortress topped with squat towers and set on the crest of a forbiddingly steep hill. She was imprisoned under the name of Mme de Théobald: the Austrians considered her far too treacherous an agent provocateur to confine her using her real name. Count Metternich-Winneburg, Austrian minister plenipotentiary to the Low Countries, told the imperial chancellor Anton von Kaunitz that she was ‘particularly dangerous for public order’. From Kufstein, Théroigne wrote to one of her brothers, begging him to come to Vienna to plead her case before the emperor. She was under no illusion about the gravity of her situation. Although her captors had not yet accused her of anything, they were ‘making every effort,’ she said, ‘to prove that I was in part responsible for the events of the French revolution’. But her brother, whose allowance she still paid, remained in Paris, merely writing to her banker about his despair at having lost his protectrice before asking for more money.

  Prince Kaunitz was convinced, as Théroigne thought, that his attractive prisoner could unravel the entire revolution for him. He sent the conscientious, scrupulously impartial civil servant François de Blanc to Kufstein to interrogate her formally. Kaunitz’s extensive instructions revealed the importance he attached to her testimony and how his hopes of discovering through her the truth of events in France prevented him from assessing her real significance. He told Blanc to find out how central a role Théroigne had played in the revolution, which men had been her patrons (the implication being, lovers) and who had facilitated her rise to prominence. He wanted to know ‘how it was possible for her to wield such enormous political influence’, not dreaming that the influence she had actually wielded was negligible.

  Through Théroigne’s revelations – he suspected ‘grave political crimes’ although he was prepared for mere revolutionary propaganda – Kaunitz hoped Blanc would furnish him with detailed information ‘on the main leaders of the revolution, on their personal characters and their ideas, and, finally, on their intentions and their ultimate aims’. He was particularly interested in these unspecified leaders’ views on the royal family. Kaunitz told Blanc that Théroigne seemed ‘an exceedingly enterprising person, possessed of an ardent desire to have some influence upon the masses’. Alongside this ruling passion he detected an almost fanatical vanity. Blanc was not instructed to treat ‘the delightful person who is in our charge’ with cruelty: the intention was not to punish Théroigne but to elicit from her everything she knew.

  François de Blanc, rigorous and principled, devoted to the pursuit of truth and justice, would turn out to be Théroigne’s saviour. At their first meeting, he read out to her the parts of Kaunitz’s letter demanding a complete confession. Théroigne, who had absorbed the concept that freedom of thought and speech was a natural right and thus could not be criminal, willingly accepted this directive, believing that a man of principle would see the innocence of her words and actions. All through the month of June 1791, while the French king and queen tried and failed to reach the French border, Théroigne and Blanc laboured over her ‘confession’. While he sifted through various reports on Théroigne as well as the papers seized with her when she was arrested, she spent her days laboriously writing a detailed account of her life up until her arrest. Blanc asked her to fill in gaps and respond to certain allegations, but otherwise she wrote what she thought was important. What she left out were the shaming or painful details of her past: the extent of her career as a courtesan, the severe venereal disease she had suffered from in Genoa, and her little dead daughter.

  Blanc discovered what Théroigne did not tell him from her confiscated papers, which included a record of her political opinions and activities, her thoughts on the books she read, drafts of letters and some strange, dark, stream-of-consciousness writings. The coherence of her notes on patriotism and legislation (‘As far as politics is concerned, the important thing is not to have a good king but to have a good governm
ent’) was completely lacking from these private dream sequences. In one, she imagined building a bronze façade containing a black vault where a female figure stood, trampling tyranny underfoot. ‘This tyranny will be represented by the figure of a man. This woman will reach out her hand to me and will cry out: help me or I shall succumb. I will then take hold of a dagger from nearby and I will strike the man.’ These words were underlined in black.

  When Blanc asked her what this troubling image meant, Théroigne replied that she had heard of a vault in Rome bearing a statue of a Fury with a dagger:

  This vision came to me because, having always been offended by the tyranny which men exercise over my own sex, I wished to find an emblem for it in this picture, in which the death of this tyranny would mark the downfall of the prejudices under which we groan, and which it was my dearest wish to have been able to destroy.

  For Théroigne, the revolution’s rejection of the paternal authority of the monarchy was explicitly associated with her personal rejection of any type of masculine domination and exploitation, from which she had suffered so much.

  Blanc soon realized that her political importance and the contacts she was credited with were vastly exaggerated. He rejected the sensational ‘statements’ extracted from her by her abductors en route to Kufstein: ‘I have to point out that they [the documents] were drafted and signed by French aristocrats,’ commented Blanc, ‘that is, by people who are plainly the prisoner’s sworn enemies.’ Théroigne’s evidence about having both misled her abductors and been maligned by them was borne out by their own admissions. The responses to the enquiries that Blanc addressed to the courts in Paris showed that the evidence against her was so slim that the authorities there had not bothered to issue a summons.

  At the beginning of July, Blanc summed up his preliminary findings to Kaunitz, saying ‘the accused seems to be innocent, the accuser [La Valette] the opposite’. He recommended that Théroigne, whose health was deteriorating–she was depressed, could not sleep, coughed and spat blood and complained of terrible headaches–be released. He praised her enthusiasm for her country and ‘luminous and surprising’ intuitive understanding of events there, and compared the bullying La Valette and his henchmen to their prisoner in strikingly unfavourable terms.

  In August, Blanc and a doctor accompanied Théroigne to Vienna. Although she had not been formally cleared or released, Blanc told her she would be freed when the case was closed. By the time she left Austria the two of them had spent six months together in a situation of extraordinary intimacy and had developed an affectionate mutual respect. With her usual admiration for austere, older men–like Romme and Sieyés in Paris–Théroigne saw Blanc as a father figure. Her letters to him, mostly concerning things she needed or wanted, or asking him to visit her, were signed ‘votre toute dévouée’ and show the comfortable, rather touching trust that had grown up between the vulnerable former courtesan and the upright civil servant.

  In October, Théroigne was granted an audience with the emperor Leopold, who gave her permission to return to Liége. Money for her return journey was advanced to her and she returned to the Low Countries at the end of November. Almost immediately, the rumours started flying again: Leopold’s sister Marie-Christine, wife of the Austrian governor of the region, reported to him that Théroigne had been spotted in Brussels, boasting ‘of having seen the emperor and of having converted him to her principles’.

  By the end of January 1792, Théroigne was back in Paris. The political atmosphere was tense and divided, with royalists, Feuillants and Jacobins taking different sides over the issue of whether to declare war on Austria. The king and the court party advocated war, hoping a French defeat would allow the Austrians to re-establish the ancien régime. Among the Feuillant constitutional monarchists, Lafayette favoured war, hoping glory would advance his personal ambition, while Alexandre de Lameth thought even victory would only help the republican party. Brissot believed war would consolidate the revolution in France and spread its principles across Europe. Robespierre opposed him, arguing that victory would throw up a dictator while defeat would restore the king to his former powers; neither end, he said, would serve the revolution.

  From this point onwards, the ideological division between Brissot and Robespierre would become an unbridgeable chasm. Manon Roland, rebuffed by Robespierre, attributed his antipathy towards Brissot and his associates to envy. In fact he saw that the Brissotins would be fatally compromised by the policies they were instituting. They urged war, but opposed the governmental control necessary for victory; they made the monarchy unworkable, but hesistated to dispose of the king; they championed moderation, but moderation always fell short of the revolution’s ever-changing aims.

  Théroigne, fresh out of her Austrian prison, backed Brissot’s calls for war. Her first public appearance was in the galleries of the Jacobin Club–where both Brissotins and Jacobins still met–on 26 January. ‘I can announce to you a triumph of patriotism,’ declared the president. ‘Mlle Théroigne, celebrated for her civic devotion and by the persecutions she has submitted to, is among us in the women’s tribune.’ She was carried down on to the floor, and invited to come back to give an account of her recent experiences.

  On 1 February, Théroigne duly returned to address the Jacobins, urging war and declaring that the Low Countries were full of patriots waiting to be freed from Austrian rule. She also recommended the formation of regiments of female soldiers–not a home guard of women to defend the patrie against internal enemies of the revolution, like that for which Pauline Léon petitioned, but actual fighters, amazones, in the field of battle. She was granted, as ‘president of her sex, seated today alongside our president’, the honours of the session. Male-dominated society had once questioned whether women had souls, but this was just an effort ‘to curse women in order to seem not to love them’, said Louis-Pierre Manuel, who paid homage to the Amazon of Liberty. ‘If our forefathers had so dim a view of women, it was because they were not free; for liberty would have taught them, just as it has taught us, that it is as easy for nature to create Porcias as Scaevolas.’*

  Almost two months later, on 25 March, Théroigne addressed the Fraternal Society of the Minimes–the branch of the Fraternal Society founded by Alexandre de Lameth’s handsome young secretary Jean-Lambert Tallien, who had perhaps already tucked Thérésia de Fontenay’s fallen rose into the breast-pocket of his National Guardsman’s jacket.

  Théroigne called once again for women to show men that they were inferior to them neither in courage nor in virtue. ‘Let us raise ourselves to the height of our destinies; let us break our chains,’ she cried. ‘At last the time is ripe for women to emerge from their shameful nullity, where the ignorance, pride and injustice of men had [sic] kept them enslaved for so long a time.’ She recalled how the women of the ancient Gauls and Germans had debated in public assemblies and fought beside their men, and asked if men alone had the right to glory. Women too, who cherished liberty all the more because despotism weighed even more heavily on them than on men, had the right to earn laurels in defence of the patrie.

  Her audience must have been receptive, not least because another member of the Minimes branch of the Fraternal Society was the radical Pauline Léon. Only a few weeks before, the Society had re-addressed Léon’s 1791 petition requesting for women the right to defend themselves, this time to the Legislative rather than the Constituent Assembly, and with Léon’s signature among the names rather than at the head of them.

  On the same evening that she addressed the Minimes, Théroigne attended a dinner given in the working-class faubourg Saint-Antoine for the market porters. Also at the party were revolutionary royalty: ‘Queen’ Audu, heroine of the women’s march to Versailles, and Théroigne’s friend Jérôme Pétion, mayor of Paris and nicknamed King Pétion. Two weeks after the dinner, the city of Paris gave commemorative swords to Audu and Théroigne. Pétion praised Audu, who had been imprisoned after the October 1789 protest, for her patriotic conduct dur
ing the demonstration and ‘for having escaped the slavery of your sex’s education’. When the patrie was in danger, he said, women ‘do not feel any the less that they are citoyennes’. Someone in the crowd protested at such honours being granted to Théroigne, but he was told to shut up: ‘she will serve her country better than you’.

  Théroigne began trying to muster recruits in the faubourg Saint-Antoine, urging women to arm themselves and join her battalion of amazones. Her activities brought her name to the attention of the Jacobins again, but this time in a less favourable light. On 13 April a delegation to the Club accused Théroigne of stirring up trouble in the neighbourhood, of arranging thrice-weekly political meetings for local women and promising them a civic banquet at which Robespierre–whom she had never met–and other prominent Jacobins would be present. A Jacobin friend, Antoine Santerre, whose wife’s signature Théroigne was accused of forging on a list of supporters for her proposed banquet, defended her cautiously, but suggested that the men of the faubourg preferred ‘to find their household in good order rather than to await the return of their women from meetings [which]…rarely inculcate a spirit of docility in them’. For this reason, said Santerre, he had asked Théroigne to stop her meetings in Saint-Antoine.

  Santerre’s wary response to Théroigne’s efforts to bring women into public life, especially when contrasted with Pétion’s enthusiasm for female patriots, demonstrates reformers’ wildly varying views on the issue of political women. Both men were considered progressive ideologically, and both were popular idols, but Santerre, following Rousseau, believed women could best support the patrie by creating a home for their husbands and children, while Pétion, closer to Condorcet ideologically, praised women who had risen above such limitations. As women, fired with enthusiasm for the revolution, moved into the public sphere, their actions were regarded with increasing mistrust by many male observers, however radical their views on other issues. The misogynist Robespierre, whose concern for universal suffrage was limited strictly to men, demonstrated his antipathy to women interfering in politics by refusing to dignify with a comment Théroigne’s misappropriation of his name for her own uses.