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

by Moore, Lucy

  Although Pétion was briefly suspended from office and letters of support for Louis flooded into the Assembly, after 20 June the political momentum rested entirely with the people of Paris. They could smell the march of their own power. Lafayette made his final attempt to dominate events, returning to Paris to demand controls on the press and the closure of the popular societies, but when he was challenged in the Assembly about having left his troops without permission he was forced to back down and return to his command in Alsace. Marie-Antoinette, who hated Lafayette, had informed Pétion of his plans to rally his Guardsmen to support a coup d’état.

  The atmosphere in Paris became steadily more disorderly throughout July 1792 as fears of invasion escalated, thousands of ardently revolutionary fédérés converged on the city, and the divided leaders of the weak National Assembly made and broke alliances with one another. On the 11th an emergency government was declared, requiring every council, ward and department to sit in permanent session, and the Assembly assumed the executive role, effectively removing from Louis the vestiges of his official duties as monarch.

  Private life was changing too. From 5 July, every citoyen was required to wear a tricolour cockade as a demonstration of his devotion to the patrie. Five days earlier Catherine Grand, the future Mme Talleyrand, had ordered forty-six yards of tricolour ribbon. Gradually the wards and departments began formally to adopt a more egalitarian style of address, reflecting the common revolutionary usage between strangers of the unceremonious second-person-singular tu instead of the more polite second-person-plural vous.

  Louis made what would be his last public appearance before his death on 14 July, the third anniversary of the Bastille’s fall. Cheers of ‘Vive Pétion!’ drowned out the few feeble shouts of ‘Vive le roi!’, which sounded to Germaine de Staël ‘like a last cry, like a last prayer’. She watched the king’s old-fashioned embroidered court coat and his white head–conspicuously alone in a sea of plain black coats and patriotically unpowdered hair–as he mounted the steps of the altar with his touchingly shambling gait, to renew his oath to the constitution. ‘He seemed,’ she wrote, ‘a sacred victim offering himself as a voluntary sacrifice.’ The queen’s eyes were red from crying.

  A week later, the émigrés gathered in Mainz for the coronation of the new emperor of Austria, Francis II. Their hopes for victory were quixotically high. The politician Lord Granville Leveson Gower described the scene to his mother, and reflected that ‘the pleasure of seeing these great people’ was enhanced by the thought ‘that they are preparing to crush the Democrats and to bring back the people of France to their senses. The French here speak as confidently of living at Paris next year as if they were in actual possession.’

  As Paris spiralled out of control and the power of the popular wards swelled, Manon Roland and her friends debated how to preserve the revolution and protect liberty if the Austrians did reach Paris. They were willing to try to harness popular energy to their cause, uniting the radical sans-culottes on the street with the patriotic soldiers newly arrived in the capital from the provinces. If they could not defeat the king’s supporters, as a last resort the Brissotins were prepared to move the revolutionary government away from Paris.

  A battalion of five hundred soldiers from Marseille marched into Paris at the end of July singing the stirringly patriotic ‘War Song for the Army of the Rhine’, which would become known as the ‘Marseillaise’. Scuffles between rival groups of soldiers, sans-culottes and ‘aristocrats’ began to break out on the streets. The city’s radical wards–in which any man, regardless of his wealth or property, was allowed a voice and a vote–were in constant session. Almost unanimously, they called for the establishment of a republic: ‘Let us strike this colossus of despotism…let us all unite to declare the fall of this cruel king, let us say with one accord, Louis XVI is no longer king of the French.’ One ward declared that if the Assembly did not accept their petition and declare Louis dethroned, they would sound the tocsin from nine until midnight. Even Robespierre, who hoped to see Louis removed from power by a legitimately elected Assembly rather than by a popular uprising, declared in the Jacobin Club on 29 July that the king had been overthrown.

  ‘Pauvre Louis XVI,’ wrote Rosalie Jullien, sympathetic to his plight despite her strident republicanism. Her husband had chastised her a few days earlier for writing to him (he was away from Paris) of nothing but politics. ‘So you don’t want me to talk politics to you?’ she asked. ‘In truth that is a great contradiction, because I think of nothing else, and public affairs become so personal that one can’t stop oneself taking them to heart as that is what controls our fortune and our life.’ A few weeks later, she wrote, ‘the affairs of state are my love affairs; I do not think, or dream, or feel but of them’.

  Prussia had allied itself with Austria by declaring war on France in early July. As their troops marched towards the French border, their commander, the Duke of Brunswick, issued a manifesto unwittingly demonstrating Louis’s treasonous collusion with France’s foreign enemies. Brunswick urged the French to rise up against the revolutionaries who controlled their nation and threatened to raze Paris to the ground and torture anyone who resisted his reimposition of the monarchy. Patriotic Parisians were drunk on a toxic combination of cheap wine, fear and defiance.

  On 6 August, the travel writer and francophile Dr John Moore landed in Calais. As he and his party travelled from the coast to Paris, wherever they stopped they encountered more carriages full of people fleeing the capital, each giving alarming accounts of the mood there and urging Moore and his companions to turn back. ‘They all seemed to be impressed with the notion that an important event is about to happen.’ But when Moore’s group got to Paris, they were surprised to find the general public there apparently unconcerned by the prospect of invasion or by the impending elections. An uninformed visitor, wrote Moore, would have imagined ‘from the frisky behaviour and cheerful faces’ of the people he met on the streets that this was a holiday ‘appointed for dissipation, mirth and enjoyment’–not the day before one of the defining moments of the revolution.

  On the night of 9 August, delegates from the forty-eight Paris wards overthrew the moderate municipal government and formed an ‘Insurrectionary Commune’ (replacing Paris’s usual governing body), which immediately gave orders to march on the Tuileries palace the following day. Robespierre would sit on its new governing committee; Antoine Santerre was put in charge of the National Guard.

  Before midnight, the alarm bells in the wards began to sound out their ‘monotonous, mournful and rapid’ toll. Carrying a musket, the journalist Camille Desmoulins set out for the Hôtel de Ville beside his bear-like friend Georges Danton, an important figure in Parisian city politics who had been instrumental in organizing the anti-monarchist demonstration that provoked the massacre of the Champs de Mars the previous summer.

  The tocsin rang throughout the night, and soon after dawn, while Louis reviewed his remaining loyal troops in the courtyard of the Tuileries, the first blasts of cannonfire were heard in the faubourgs. As the people of Paris massed outside the palace, the king and his family were ushered to safety behind the bars of the National Assembly’s cell-like press gallery. The Assembly, submitting to the demands of the pike-bearing sans-culottes, formally suspended the monarchy and instituted a provisional Executive Council which would rule until a National Convention could be elected by universal male suffrage. Equality had finally prevailed over liberty; but while all men possessed civil rights from this date, women were still ‘citoyennes without citizenhood’.

  Outside in the August sunshine, bands of sans-culottes and soldiers invaded the Tuileries and began murdering the Swiss guards still stationed in the palace. The fighting was frenzied, fierce and bloody. In the mêlée, any man in a red coat–the uniform of the Swiss guards–was a target; even the ultra-patriotic fédérés from Brest, who wore the same colour, were mistaken for them and blindly killed. People were ‘stabbed, sabred, stoned and clubbed’ to
death, their bodies stripped and crudely mutilated, and then thrown on to either bonfires at the Tuileries or carts that took them to limed burial pits.

  Some women fought alongside the men. Pauline Léon, who spent the night of 9 August at her local ward on the left bank while the decision was made to seize power, marched with her neighbours towards the Tuileries ‘to fight the tyrant and his satellites’ the next morning. Once there, she was persuaded to hand her pike over to a sans-culotte–but ‘only after I admonished him to make good use of it in my place’. She might have been among the women in the courtyard seen stripping corpses of their clothes and rifling their pockets. Reine Audu, heroine of the October days, and Claire Lacombe, an actress recently arrived in Paris, were more successful than Léon: both were granted civic crowns for their bravery in the battle by the new National Convention when it convened in September.

  Théroigne de Méricourt also received a civic crown. At last her chance had come to prove that women were as brave and as worthy of glory as men. Wearing a black plumed hat and a blue amazone, with a pair of pistols tucked into her belt, she was seen standing on a stone holding her sabre aloft, addressing the people:

  Citizens, the National Assembly has declared that the fatherland is in danger, that it was unable to save it, and that its safety depends on your arms, your courage and your patriotism; take up arms, then, and run to the château des Tuileries, for your enemies’ leaders are there. Exterminate this race of vipers, which for three years has done nothing else but conspire against you. If you are not victorious today, in a week’s time you will be exterminated. Choose between life and death, between liberty and slavery. Show due respect for the National Assembly and for property, justice is in your hands.

  Théroigne fought beside the Marseille regiment, and was at the head of a gang which confronted the royalist journalist François Suleau and eight others who had been arrested outside the Tuileries earlier that morning and then seized by the mob. She recognized Suleau, or at least recognized his name, and leapt at his throat. He fought back, and was about to run her through with a sword he had grabbed out of someone’s hand when the crowd surged and brought him down. All nine royalists were killed and decapitated, and their heads paraded around on pikes.

  Despite the brutality of the day, patriots and republicans counted it as a triumph, a second revolution. Dr Moore, who had arrived in Paris just in time to witness the events of 10 August, saw a weary National Guardsman return home to his shop that evening to be greeted by his wife and children. He went through the door ‘carrying one of his children in each of his arms; his daughter following with his grenadier’s cap in her hand, and his two little boys carrying his musket’. Moore depicts not a murderer, but a dutiful family man, defending his country and his children’s future. ‘Day of blood, day of carnage, and yet day of victory,’ wrote Rosalie Jullien, ‘which was watered by our tears.’

  7

  ÉMIGRÉE

  Germaine de Staël

  AUGUST–SEPTEMBER 1792

  In twenty-four hours the aspect of Paris was changed…

  Nobody dared to show himself to be rich, or to be superior to anyone else.

  AUGUSTE-FRANÇOIS DE FRÉNILLY

  DURING THE RISING outside the Tuileries on 10 August Germaine de Staël–who was six months pregnant with their second child–heard that her lover Louis de Narbonne, as a member of the palace’s exterior guard, had been slaughtered. She immediately got into her coach, and tried to cross the river to the palace to seek news of him. But she was held up for two hours because the streets were so full of raging fédérés and sans-culotte men and women. Some men signified to her green-liveried coachman with a silent, expressive gesture that anyone who did pass, especially in such a grand carriage, would probably have their throat cut. Finally Germaine heard that Narbonne was alive–he had rushed to fight at the king’s side but the courtiers had not allowed him into the palace–and turned her horses homeward.

  That night, this time on foot, stepping over drunken, half-sleeping men in doorways raising their heads only to utter curses, Germaine went out into the streets and found Narbonne and Mathieu de Montmorency in their hiding places, and brought them back to the embassy where she put them in the remotest room of the house. Warrants were out for their arrest; other friends had already been imprisoned, and one of the most brilliant of their number, Stanislas de Clermont-Tonnerre–the man Germaine had once called ‘mon orateur’ and who had tried, in the early days of their affair, to woo her away from Narbonne and earned such a loving rejection–had been thrown out of a window at the Tuileries and trampled to death.

  Although Dr Moore thought Narbonne ‘as much distinguished by his talents as by his birth…[and] a warm friend to freedom’, the prejudice against his and his friends’ noble origins was too strong for them to remain any longer in Paris. Brissot might have been able to believe ‘that men were born equal; and that there was no birth either illustrious or obscure’; but the man on the street, who sensed his power growing through the late summer of 1792, wanted to punish aristocrats simply for existing. Nor did Narbonne want to stay. After Louis had been bullied and humiliated that June, he wrote to a friend in England that it was ‘no longer possible for a man of honour to stay [in France], if the whole of France neither refutes nor avenges this act. As for me, I cannot hold on any longer.’ Like many aristocratic liberals, Narbonne had favoured a constitutional monarchy, but he could not bear to see his king dishonoured and removed from the throne.

  Overnight Paris was transformed. ‘Not a carriage was to be seen…The city gates were closed. At night the red-capped members of the sections made domiciliary visits.’ The word ‘royal’ was erased from shops, hotels and street names. Public statues, regardless of their historical or artistic value, were to be destroyed and replaced with monuments to liberty. Property belonging to émigrés was to be sold off. ‘Liberté Fraternité, Égalité ou Mort’ was scrawled on the walls.

  When the local patrol arrived at the Swedish embassy late one August night, saying that they had heard Monsieur de Narbonne was hiding there, Germaine, ‘with death in my heart’, forced herself to greet them with her usual brio. She was alone: her husband had been recalled to Sweden by Gustavus for consorting with revolutionaries–his wife’s friends. Narbonne crouched beneath the altar of the embassy’s chapel while Mme l’Ambassadrice, pregnant with his child, lectured the sans-culottes in the hall on the inviolability of embassies, the sanctity of international law and the warlike vigour and might of Sweden–which, she said, was an easily roused nation just across the Rhine. The guards were confused, but when Germaine managed to joke with them about ‘the injustice of their suspicions’ they allowed themselves to be led to the door without searching the house. ‘Nothing pleases men of this class better than jokes,’ Germaine observed, with the very condescension for which the aristocracy were loathed, ‘for in their boundless hatred of the nobles they enjoy being treated by them on an equal footing.’

  This scare prompted Germaine to arrange Narbonne’s escape as quickly as she could. She found a young German willing to provide him with one of his friend’s passports and so, disguised as a German traveller, Narbonne reached England on 20 August. When she heard the news of his arrival five days later, Germaine laid aside the opium she had carried with her for the past four months, ready to kill herself if the worst should have befallen her lover. ‘At last I can hope that I do not need it, that your baby will be born and that as long as I live I will hold in my arms his adored father, the object of such tender and passionate idolatry,’ she wrote to him. To the young man who had escorted Narbonne to England she wrote simply, ‘You have saved my life and more than my life.’

  Germaine had also hoped to help the king and queen escape, having sent a message to them in July with her plan of buying a small estate at Dieppe, going there twice with servants resembling the royal family, and then one day going with the royal family themselves, disguised as her servants. Narbonne would drive the coach;
Lafayette had promised to send support. But Marie-Antoinette refused to accept the help of Germaine, Lafayette and the constitutionalists; she sent a frosty message back saying that there was no very pressing reason for the royal family to leave Paris. Three weeks later, having narrowly escaped death, she and her family were moved from the ransacked Tuileries into imprisonment in the Temple, a former monastery on lands once owned by the Knights Templar, now transformed into the royal prison.

  On the night of 11 August, Robespierre was elected to the Paris Commune as representative for the Place Vendôme ward in which stood the rooms he rented on the rue Saint-Honoré, a short walk from the Jacobin Club. He led the Commune in the last few weeks of August as they incarcerated the king and his family and defended their localized seizure of power against the outmanoeuvred Brissotins in the National Assembly, defying the national government to establish their own revolutionary regime.

  When Dr Moore visited the Jacobin Club on the 17th, he found Robespierre’s partisans there so vocal in support of their hero that whenever someone dared oppose Robespierre’s views he was drowned out entirely and had to step down from the tribune. ‘A little English phlegm would be of use in their councils,’ observed Moore drily.

  Women were very much in evidence in the galleries of the Jacobin Club. ‘Applauders and murmurers are to be had at all prices,’ Moore’s companion told him, ‘and as females are more noisy, and to be had cheaper than males, you will observe there are generally more women than men in the tribunals [sic].’ Ironically, most of the women were there because they revered the grave, priestly Robespierre, whose antipathy to their taking part in public life was unshakeable. Rosalie Jullien described him at this time as ‘a man devoted to public affairs, with the generosity of the greatest men of antiquity’.