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

by Moore, Lucy

  At about the same time, on 1 April 1792, Etta Palm d’Aelders, who had been arrested after the Champs de Mars massacre the previous July, received permission to address the National Assembly. ‘Women have shared the dangers of the revolution; why shouldn’t they participate in its advantages? Men are free at last, and women are the slaves of a thousand prejudices,’ she said. She asked the Assembly to educate girls and to grant them their majority at twenty-one, to make divorce legal, and to declare ‘that political liberty and equality of rights be common to both sexes’. Once again, d’Aelders was granted the honours of the session, but her suggestions were not implemented.

  That same spring of 1792, Théroigne persuaded Jean-Lambert Tallien, the radical actor and writer Jean-Marie Collot d’Herbois, the painter David and his frequent collaborator the playwright Marie-Joseph Chénier to head a delegation of ‘our most illustrious patriots’, requesting permission from the Paris Commune, the municipal body that governed Paris, to commemorate the soldiers of Châteauvieux at a Liberty fête. The Châteauvieux regiment had mutinied in August 1790 after their demands for back pay were refused, and their rebellion had been suppressed with savage brutality. The soldiers were seen by many as martyrs, and their rising had become a rallying-call for some who feared the revolution was being diluted by moderates. Others, like Marie-Joseph Chénier’s poet brother André, and Camille Desmoulins who called it a ‘celebration of insurrection’, saw it as a counterrevolutionary plot.

  Revolutionary festivals, as Mona Ozouf has described, ‘provide a mirror in which the revolution as a whole may be viewed’. From the joyous hopefulness of the Federation Day celebrations in July 1790 to the uncomfortable primness of the Festival of the Supreme Being four years later, they reflected the changing face of the revolution as each successive faction and regime sought an understanding of the events that had brought them to power, and tried to disseminate their interpretation of those events.

  The unifying elements of revolutionary festivals–girls in simple white dresses, fresh flowers and greenery instead of tarnished tinsel for decorations, a move away from elaborate, creaking machinery and towards didactic speeches to provide the entertainment of the day–derived from Rousseau, who loathed the artifice of ancien régime festivals and theatre. ‘Plant a stake crowned with flowers in the middle of a marketplace,’ he recommended. ‘It is in the open air, it is beneath the sky that you must assemble and give yourself up to the sweet spectacle of your happiness.’

  Théroigne’s Festival of Liberty was held on 15 April and the Jacobin deputy’s wife Rosalie Jullien enjoyed it so much that in her diary the following day she exulted, ‘I was there, I was there!’ She thought it exemplified ‘all the pomp, all the magnificent simplicity and all the profound tranquillity of a festival of the people’. Women dressed in white marched arm in arm with soldiers. The streets were full of people dancing and the strains of the ‘Ç a Ira’ floated out of every window. Because of the protests made against her in Saint-Antoine two days earlier, Théroigne made no public appearance as the celebration she had initiated came to life.

  At the beginning of June another fête, this one called the Festival of the Law, was held in honour of the mayor of Étampes who had been killed trying to maintain order during a food riot. The Révolutions de Paris criticized the women who participated in the celebrations, led by Olympe de Gouges who, the writer commented condescendingly, resembled nothing so much as a drum major in charge of unruly troops. A band of mothers in white, crowned with oak leaves, symbolically received the book of laws from the Constituent Assembly, but the theatricality of the performance grated with the Révolutions’ contributor, who saw it as overly feminizing the masculine majesty of the Law. ‘Whatever one may say,’ he concluded, ‘women seemed out of place on that great day.’

  Given the prominence of Théroigne’s activities after her return from Austria, it was only a matter of time before she would once again be the object of journalistic venom. In March, the Journal général announced the sale of patriotic playing-cards, in which Théroigne was the dame de piques (queen of spades)–a pun on her well known desire, as an amazone, to carry a pike (pique) herself. The pike was an emblem of independence, equality and surveillance, according to a February 1792 piece in the Révolutions de Paris. ‘The pikes of the people are the columns of French liberty,’ it proclaimed. But ‘let pikes be prohibited for women; dressed in white and girded with the national sash, let them content themselves with being spectators’.

  The king in Théroigne’s suit was the duc d’Orléans, who was said to have paid her to rabble-rouse at Versailles in October 1789, and her knave was Antoine Santerre, the rich brewer who would shortly chastise her for trying to drum up support for her female regiment in the faubourg Saint-Antoine; both were well known womanizers and therefore, in the eyes of her political adversaries, apt partners for a former courtesan like Théroigne. The other queens in the pack were Thérésia de Fontenay’s friend Dondon de Lameth, Sophie de Condorcet and Germaine de Staël.

  Satirical attacks rained down on Théroigne: the ‘Jacobins’ strumpet’ was depicted in the Journal général drilling a regiment of Les Halles market women wearing false moustaches; the Chronique du manége called her ‘a manhunter, mad for men’; an etching showed her in her amazone leading an army of women including Mmes de Staël, Condorcet and Genlis against the Austrian troops, vanquishing them by showing them her ‘république’.

  A miscellaneous and often sensationalist selection of revolutionary writings published in England in 1806 includes a speech Théroigne was said to have made at the Palais Royal in June 1792 extolling free love and calling for marriage to be banned. Its tone is so salacious that it must have been written by a royalist journalist–for whom Théroigne represented the most terrifying incarnation of womankind–seeking to associate political liberty with the worst excesses of immorality. The putative Théroigne asked if ‘our shameful institutions, imposed by rogues and submitted to by fools’, were not less natural than the unrestrained freedoms and equality enjoyed by lovers and seducers. ‘Yes, I, Théroigne de Méricourt, rejoice in being among those called harlots by aristocrats; I rejoice in prostituting myself to everybody, without belonging to anybody,’ she is said to have said. ‘I am as free as the birds that wing the air, or the animals that range the forests.’

  The most vicious misogynist amongst the royalist hacks was François Suleau, who in the most demeaning and revolting terms, described in April 1792 ‘the women who have harnessed themselves to the chariot (or, more exactly, to the dung-cart) of the revolution’. The young women–he did not specify Théroigne here, though she was the frequent butt of one of the newspapers he wrote for, the Acts of the Apostles–who ‘have hurled themselves into the [frying pan] of the rights of man’ were, according to Suleau, despite their ‘pretty little faces’, their ‘frisky appearance and their air of being a proper little madam’, covered with the marks of promiscuity and madness: ‘itch, scabs, ringworm, fleurs à la Pompadour, scurf, yaws, blisters on the nape of the neck, suckers on the breast, ulcers on the thigh, and plasters on all their scars’. Théroigne, always so conscious of humiliating insults directed at her sex, would remember Suleau’s name.

  The dissension between Robespierre and Brissot over war with Austria was becoming increasingly overt, and even Théroigne’s name was drawn into it as the political lines were drawn. In the days immediately following the declaration of war on 20 April 1792, Robespierre and his friends attacked Brissot and his political allies. Robespierre attacked Lafayette at the Jacobin Club while Jean-Lambert Tallien, becoming more and more prominent politically, denounced Condorcet, who was accused at the same time of being dominated by his spirited young wife.

  During one of these debates, someone said as an aside that he had heard Théroigne, at a café near the manége, angrily withdrawing her support from Robespierre because of his opposition to the war. The deputies burst out laughing at the thought that a woman’s backing could count for a
nything in a debate of such gravity. Théroigne, embarrassed and furious, tried to insist on speaking, but her move towards the tribune caused such an uproar that the session had to be suspended. ‘Since we cannot find men capable of being ministers, why don’t we call on women, such as Mme Condorcet and Mlle Théroigne de Méricourt?’ asked the right-wing Petit Gautier the next day. ‘They have the vocation, the talent to be femmes publiques [literally, public women or prostitutes].’

  Jean-Marie Roland, as Minister of the Interior, was at the heart of the Brissotin administration that had declared war on Austria. At this stage Roland hoped the king accepted that his interests would be best protected by their government, and he and his associates, believing in Louis’s sincerity, were trying to work with him. But the temporary alliance between court and Brissotin parties was based on mutual mistrust. For his part, Louis welcomed war, numbly hoping he would be restored to his former powers in the aftermath of a French defeat, while Marie-Antoinette was doing her best to provide the Austrians with treacherous information about the French army. As Manon Roland said, Louis ‘constantly undermined the arrangements which he was professing to support’. Pére Duchesne put it more succinctly, calling the king ‘Louis le Faux’.

  Germaine de Staël’s view of the Brissotin ministry was that they were talented but inexperienced unknowns who ‘aimed at a republic and succeeded only in overturning the monarchy’. She saw them as principled, but made hypocritical by their desire for power–‘some of them offered to support royalty, if all the places in the ministry were given to their friends’–and it did not occur to her that her own efforts to advance her friends might be interpreted in a similar light. Principles do not preclude ambition, and the Brissotins, like Germaine herself, would have countered that their principles were the best for France and that they were the only people capable of realizing them.

  As the wife of a minister, Manon Roland found herself in the spring of 1792 ‘at the centre of affairs’. In her memoirs she attempted to emphasize her continued distance from public life, insisting that she did not join in political talk or distribute political favours, but her use of the pronoun ‘we’ when she described the events of Roland’s ministry belied her efforts to demonstrate her non-involvement. Roland confided everything in her; and Manon, claiming that their methods, spirit and principles were as one, acted less as her husband’s secretary than as his muse and inspiration. She guarded personal access to him from her little office, where friends and petitioners used her to sound out ideas or pass messages on to Roland. Manon wrote later that she found ‘it hard to describe my agitation at that time. I was passionate for the revolution…I burned with zeal for my country. Public affairs had become a torment to me, a moral fever which left me no rest.’

  Manon had backed war from the start–like Brissot she believed that it would cement the revolution and bring about the king’s final demise–but she was anxious about the rift between Robespierre, whom she respected, and her friends. She knew that the resolution she desired could only come about through unity. As his political relations with Brissot and Roland were breaking down towards the end of March that year, Manon wrote to Robespierre, asking him to visit her and assuring him of her unalterable admiration for him. ‘I hope only to be able to make some contribution to the common weal with the help of enlightened, devoted and wise patriots. You are for me at the head of this class.’

  She wrote again a month later, five days after the declaration of war, repeating her request that he come to see her because she believed him ‘an ardent lover of liberty, entirely devoted to the public good’, and assuring him that she had nothing to do with ‘those whom you regard as your mortal enemies’. Her appeals came to nothing. Robespierre was not interested in dealing with a woman–if anything, Manon’s interference would only have confirmed his dislike of Roland, Brissot and their friends–and he already recognized that he must take command of his political destiny.

  The early stages of the war did not go well. At the beginning of May, the Assembly was in constant emergency session as unhappy news kept rolling in from the front. Fears of invasion were intense. Arms were distributed among the Parisian sections (wards) so that sans-culotte patriots could defend themselves. On 29 May the king agreed that his personal bodyguard, a privilege granted to him as a safeguard of his constitutional role, be disbanded, amid worries that it would rise to join an invading Austrian force.

  Louis agreed to relinquish his bodyguard because his attention was focused elsewhere; he was determined not to allow two other proposals through the National Assembly. He used his hard-won veto once to reject a decree that would force into exile refractory priests, and a second time to prevent an armed camp of twenty thousand provincial soldiers, or fédérés, being established just outside Paris. Manon Roland was enraged by his presumption: the king’s behaviour ‘proved his lack of good faith’ and she was determined that her husband, as the minister concerned, should resign in a blaze of publicity. A quiet withdrawal would not be enough–Roland ‘must make his gesture openly and vigorously, so as to enlighten public opinion about the evils which had led to it and turn his resignation to good account for the Republic’.

  On 11 June, Roland had delivered to the king a letter of resignation written entirely by his wife and in the most searing of tones. She castigated Louis for his policies and attitude to the revolution, and forcibly reminded him of his duties to France and of the risks of civil war. The revolution ‘will be accomplished and cemented at the cost of bloodshed unless wisdom forestalls evils which it is still possible to avoid,’ she warned. ‘I know that the austere language of truth is rarely welcomed near the throne but I also know that it is because it is so rarely heard that revolutions become necessary.’

  Two days later, without acknowledging the letter, the king dismissed Roland and the rest of the Brissotin ministers. Manon urged Roland to send a copy to the National Assembly so that the reasons for his leaving office–and the fact that it was a resignation rather than a dismissal–were made clear. The Assembly ordered the letter printed and sent out to all the regional departments of France. Manon’s words were greeted with admiration by Roland’s supporters. Condorcet praised it in the highest terms, saying Roland spoke ‘the most pure language of probity, patriotism and reason’. Rosalie Jullien thought the letter immortalized him, and would win him the admiration and respect of the entire country.

  Her experience of Roland’s opponents and colleagues during the few days leading up to this crisis reduced still further Manon’s already low opinion of most of the men involved in affairs of state. ‘I would never have thought, if I had not seen it with my own eyes, that good judgement and firmness of character were such rare commodities and that so few men are fit to govern,’ she remembered. Asking for those qualities to be combined with honesty was ‘like asking for the moon’. What struck her most about the people Roland worked with was their ‘universal mediocrity’. This realization gave her a new confidence in her own opinions and abilities. ‘Really! I am not surprised that I was much sought after. They could see that I was worth something.’

  After the king’s dismissal of his ministers, a huge demonstration took place on 20 June in front of the royal palace of the Tuileries where the National Assembly met. With the Brissotin Pétion in the mairie, or mayor’s office, there was little chance of official opposition to the protest. Popular leaders and activists–including the sans-culotte butcher Louis Legendre; Fournier l’Américain, one of the seditious National Guardsmen who had followed the women who marched on Versailles in October 1789; Théroigne’s friend Santerre; Théroigne herself; and Pauline Léon–had spent several days mobilizing artisan and working-class Paris wards such as the faubourg Saint-Antoine to come out on the 20th to plant a ‘liberty tree’ in the Tuileries grounds.

  The people gathered at the palace and asked permission to present their petition to the National Assembly, which, given the king’s recent dismissal of the Brissotins, was sympathetic to their demand
s. Carrying pikes and wearing red caps–the Phrygian cap worn by freed Roman slaves, symbol of liberty–they planted a poplar in the Capuchins’ garden; as Bertrand Barére said in front of the Assembly, ‘the tree of liberty grows only when watered by the blood of tyrants’. They waited for a response to their request, according to Rosalie Jullien, who was sitting in the Assembly tribunes, ‘in the most profound silence’. Finally they were admitted to the manége, singing the ‘Ça Ira’. ‘Never has the Assembly been so brilliant and so majestic,’ recorded Rosalie. ‘What a beautiful day! What a triumph!’

  Afterwards, as the huge crowd swelled around the manége, the Tuileries gardens and up to the palace railings, the gates burst open and a multitude swarmed into the undefended palace and came face to face with the king, attended by only a few unarmed guards and courtiers. Some were said to have waved in his face a calf’s heart, stuck on a pike, intended to represent ‘the heart of an aristocrat’; others yelled insults at him. The butcher Louis Legendre, at the head of the mob, is said to have said to King Louis, ‘Monsieur, you must hear us; you are a villain. You have always deceived us; you deceive us still. Your measure is full. The people are tired of this play-acting.’

  The king, backed into an alcoved window, responded with dignity and composure. He was given a red cap which he put on, then toasted the Parisians and the French people, but he refused to declare that he would relinquish his right to the veto or that he would reinstate the Brissotin ministers. Marie-Antoinette was subjected to abuse, but kept out of sight: Rosalie Jullien, scathingly republican, reported that ‘la femme du roi [not la reine] was away in the morning, I don’t know where’. Finally at six that evening, Pétion appeared: he had just been informed of what was going on, he told Louis. He managed to disperse the exultant crowd and the exhausted king was reunited with his terrified wife and children.