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

by Moore, Lucy

  Moore saw only one woman enter the Jacobins’ main hall and take her seat among the members. Although he did not name her, it is clear from his description that this was Théroigne de Méricourt: she was wearing a blue jacket modelled on the National Guard uniform, and Moore reported that she was known to have ‘distinguished herself in the action of the tenth, by rallying those who had fled, and attacking a second time at the head of the Marseillois [the Marseille contingent]’.

  The guillotine, which had been in sporadic use in front of the Hôtel de Ville since April 1792, mostly for forgers, was moved to the Place du Carrousel outside the Tuileries. Its first victims were scapegoats for the bloodshed at the Tuileries: royalists accused of instigating the violence on 10 August, convicted, significantly, in front of a newly created Communal Committee of Surveillance rather than by due process of law. Under the auspices of this radical revolutionary committee over a thousand people deemed unsympathetic to the new regime–from the dauphin’s devoted governess to royalist journalists to refractory priests to admirers of Lafayette (dismissed from his post at this time, he crossed enemy lines and spent the rest of the revolution in an Austrian prison)–were imprisoned in the last weeks of August.

  The National Assembly reinstated the Brissotin ministers dismissed in June (including Roland, back at the Ministry of the Interior) in the provisional Executive Council, and added two Jacobins to their number: the mathematician Gaspard Monge and the jovial lawyer Georges Danton, who became Minister of Justice.

  Danton’s powerful voice dominates this period. He had been an adored figure in the Cordeliers’ Club from the start of the revolution, and had become a popular hero. In July 1791 at the Champs de Mars and in June, July and August of the next year, he had learned to use his influence with the people to instigate mass demonstrations. As minister, Danton authorized emergency police powers, including domiciliary visits. Heavily armed ward patrols, sometimes numbering up to ten people, were ordered to search houses–ostensibly for weapons, but also for counterrevolutionary suspects or for incriminating evidence against them.

  The Prussian army crossed the French frontier on 19 August, and laid siege to Verdun on the 30th. Danton managed to use the enemy’s approach as a spur to patriotism. ‘Citizens, no nation on earth has ever obtained liberty without a struggle,’ he declared, encouraging Parisians to meet their impending ordeal with courage and determination–even relish. ‘You have traitors in your bosom; well, without them the fight would soon have been over.’

  Newspapers and placards from the last weeks of August–many of them written by friends of Danton and Robespierre–emphasize not only the threat from external enemies, but also a more immediate threat from internal traitors. Dark rumours swirled about the ‘ravening wolves’ held in the prisons. It was said that as soon as the army left Paris to fight the Prussians, the counterrevolutionaries would escape to slaughter the wives and children the patriots had left behind. Before turning to foreign enemies, then, ‘the first battle we shall fight will be inside the walls of Paris,’ wrote Stanislas Fréron in his Orateur du peuple. On the 19th, Marat urged his readers to ‘rise and let the blood of traitors flow again. It is the only means of saving the fatherland.’ He instructed ‘good citizens to go to the Abbaye [prison], to seize priests, and especially the officers of the Swiss guards and their accomplices and run a sword through them’.

  A placard written by the poet and playwright Fabre d’Églantine echoed Fréron and Marat:

  Once more, citizens, to arms! May all France bristle with pikes, bayonets, cannon and daggers; so that everyone shall be a soldier; let us clear the ranks of these vile slaves of tyranny. In the towns let the blood of traitors be the first holocaust to Liberty, so that in advancing to meet the common enemy, we leave nothing behind to disquiet us.

  Given the incendiary atmosphere, it was hardly surprising that when news reached Paris of Verdun’s fall to the Prussians, the capital should ignite once again into violence. It was said that the Prussian army would be at the city’s gates in three days. Black flags of distress were hung on the churches, and the tocsin rang out across the rooftops. The Paris wards began demanding ‘the death of conspirators before the departure of citizens’. The streets were full of people every night.

  Germaine de Staël, undaunted by the mood of impending tragedy, set out for the Hôtel de Ville on 28 August to plead for the lives of her friends Trophime-Gérard de Lally-Tollendal and François de Jaucourt, who were being held in the Abbaye prison in Saint-Germain. She had selected the literature-loving Paris procurator Louis-Pierre Manuel, who had proposed the honours of the session to Théroigne de Méricourt at the Jacobins earlier that year, as the most likely of the Commune’s officials to be susceptible to her fame.

  As instructed, she swept into his office at 7 a.m., notwithstanding that it was ‘une heure un peu démocratique’. Manuel was late, and as she waited, Germaine was pleased to observe a self-portrait on his desk. ‘This made me hope, at least, that he might be vulnerable if he was attacked in his vanity.’ She was right. The procurator told her that it would be difficult to be more compromised than she was, but he was still delighted to help the celebrated Mme de Staël; and Germaine’s friends were released forthwith.

  They got out just in time. The massacres began at the Abbaye three days after her meeting with Manuel, and spread quickly to the city’s dozens of other prisons. A crowd outside the Abbaye demanded that a party of priests arriving under guard be put through a mob ‘trial’. They were perfunctorily interrogated and then pushed into the prison’s garden, where an armed rabble awaited them. Within an hour and a half nineteen of them were hacked to death by perhaps fifteen men.

  For five days this pattern was repeated across Paris, the crowds watching the murders and National Guardsmen standing impotently by. The lucky ones were shot; most of the victims were stabbed through with pikes, beheaded by sabres or bludgeoned to death. ‘All Paris saw it and all Paris let it go on,’ raged Manon Roland later, having heard the shameful details from the surviving prisoners when she arrived at the Abbaye herself. ‘It is impossible to imagine Liberty finding a home amongst cowards who condone every outrage and coolly stand by watching crimes which fifty armed men with any gumption could easily have prevented.’

  Perhaps 70 per cent of the Abbaye’s prisoners were killed over the subsequent days, their murderers returning day after day to complete the job, for which they had evidently been paid, though no one knew by whom. One survivor remembered how the horror was intensified by the ‘profound and sombre silence’ in which they worked.

  Women were a particular focus of the killings because, like priests, aristocrats and speculators, they were seen as inherently counterrevolutionary and suspected of involvement in the most sinister conspiracies. Prostitutes, whose very existence undermined ideas of republican virtue, were especially despised. When the mob reached La Salpêtrière on 4 September, which doubled as a prison for prostitutes and a women’s asylum, thirty-five women were killed and a further group, numbering anywhere between fifty and two hundred, were raped and released. There were predictably few witnesses to these atrocities, but Manon Roland heard ‘the terrible details’: ‘women brutally violated before being torn to pieces’.

  Marie-Antoinette’s devoted friend, the princesse de Lamballe, had been placed in La Force prison earlier in August when the royal family were incarcerated in the Temple. In 1791, she had returned from exile to serve the queen in her hour of need. Their friendship, naturally, was transformed by the salacious revolutionary press into a lesbian affair; they were said to have encouraged the little dauphin to join in their orgies.

  When the mob reached La Force on 3 September, the princess was summoned into a makeshift court in the records office and asked to swear an oath of loyalty to Liberty and Equality, and another of hatred to the royal family and the monarchy. She made the first oath but, refusing the second, she was hustled through an open door where men waited with pikes and axes. She was killed a
nd stripped. Her naked body was dragged through the streets and her head was cut off and paraded through the Marais to the Temple, where the mob demanded that Marie-Antoinette look out of the window to see her friend’s bloodied blonde curls. It was said, too, that her body was grotesquely mutilated, her guts worn as a belt and her genitals cut off and exhibited as a macabre trophy.

  Mme de Lamballe and the whores of La Salpêtrière were the first female victims of the revolution. Although they had not been permitted to share the same civic rights and freedoms as men, from September 1792 women would be held accountable for their perceived crimes. It was equality of the the most unjust nature.

  Sentences were meted out unevenly. The duchesse de Tourzel, the dauphin’s governess imprisoned with the royal family in the days immediately following 10 August, who had sat beside Mme de Lamballe during her interrogation at La Force, was saved by a man previously unknown to her who had freed her daughter a few days earlier. As she left the prison at the end of the day, Mme de Tourzel was greeted by several sans-culottes who only a few hours before had been preparing to kill her. In one of the astonishing turnarounds so common during the revolution, they embraced the duchesse and congratulated her on her freedom. They insisted on accompanying her to her hiding-place, giving the coachman directions so as to spare her seeing the worst of the carnage on the streets.

  Women thus became victims in September 1792, but they were also perpetrators: if not actual murderers, then supporters, hecklers, bearers of pikes on which heads were mounted, draggers of corpses through streets. The women of the faubourgs and marketplaces spoke the same shockingly savage tongue as their husbands and sons, what Louis-Sébastien Mercier later called the idiome jacobin of blood and carnage, vociferously announcing their desire to eat the ‘naked, quivering bodies of their victims’, or telling their children of ‘nothing but cutting or tailoring heads and shedding ever more blood’. The fact that some women succumbed to the savage mob mentality allowed some men to make women in general into revolutionary Furies, feasting on flesh and drunk on blood. One observer said that in every crisis of the revolution, women invented and executed atrocities, inciting men ‘to commit new tortures and bloody deeds’; this, he said, disgraced all womankind. ‘The myth of the Maenads was not gratuitous,’ writes Madelyn Gutwirth. ‘It allowed men to emerge virtually unscathed in their own eyes in the wake of the massacre.’

  Having seen Lally-Tollendal and Jaucourt safe, Germaine de Staël had finally made up her mind to abandon Paris; she hoped to meet Narbonne in London or tempt him to join her in Switzerland. On the morning of 2 September she ordered six horses harnessed to her big yellow travelling-coach, and set out for the city gates accompanied by her liveried postillions and servants. Later, she recognized that such magnificence was ill-judged; at the time, she thought her boldness would serve as a double bluff, disguising her true intentions. One historian has speculated that she was deliberately courting drama: ‘asking for it’, by daring to go out so brazenly, seeing how far she could rely on her wits to get her out of trouble.

  The horses had not taken four steps before ‘a swarm of old ladies, emerging from hell, threw themselves on my horses, and cried that I should be arrested, that I was taking the nation’s gold with me, that I was going to join the enemies’. Their shouts attracted a crowd, and ‘common people with savage faces’ insisted that Germaine be taken to the ward office of the faubourg Saint-Germain.

  The ward officials found her papers in disorder: one servant was missing. When she realized that her journey had been interrupted Germaine had sent a groom to inform a fugitive friend whom she was planning to pick up on her way out of Paris that she could not keep their appointment. She was dispatched to the Hôtel de Ville under police escort.

  Moving slowly through the crowded streets, the caravan took three hours to reach the Hôtel de Ville, a distance that should have taken about half an hour to walk. The people on foot, seeing her fine clothes and equipage, screamed insults at her. Germaine’s very obvious pregnancy only made matters worse. She appealed to the gendarmes accompanying her for help but they responded with ‘the most scornful and menacing gestures’; only the policeman sitting beside her in the coach was sympathetic, promising to protect her with his life.

  The Place de Grève, in front of the town hall, was packed. Germaine was taken ‘under a vault of lances’ to the Hôtel, then mounted the staircase which ‘bristled with spears’. One man pointed his pike at her, but her faithful gendarme drew his sword and she passed safely. She was told to wait. Soon afterwards, Louis-Pierre Manuel, whom she had visited three days earlier in the same building, happened to pass by. Understanding the danger she was in, he locked Germaine and her maid into his own office. He did not dare try to take her home in daylight. Despite his position, there was nothing he could do to halt the murders they both knew were taking place throughout the city. ‘An abyss was opened behind the steps of every man who had acquired any authority,’ wrote Germaine, ‘and if he receded he could not fail to sink into it.’

  The two women waited there for six hours, ‘dying of hunger, of thirst, of fear’, looking out over the throngs in the Place de Grève where the abandoned coach-and-six stood bizarrely untouched, protected from looters by a lone National Guardsman. This was the brewer Antoine Santerre, friend of Théroigne de Méricourt, who had led the men of the faubourg Saint-Antoine when they attacked the Tuileries in August. Although Germaine did not recognize him–she could not imagine why he was bothering with her carriage on such a day, she commented–Santerre knew exactly who she was. He came in later with Manuel to tell her that he had guarded her coach as a way of demonstrating his gratitude to her father, whose efforts to procure wheat for the people in times of scarcity he remembered. Germaine was unimpressed; her coach, she thought, had given him a useful excuse for avoiding the gaols.

  As evening drew in, they saw the assassins making their way home from the emptied prisons, ‘with their arms bare and bloody and uttering horrible cries’. When night fell Manuel returned and drove Germaine and her maid home in her own carriage, along unlit streets through which gangs of men carrying torches roamed. He promised her that the following day he would send someone to her with a new passport.

  The man Manuel sent to Germaine on the morning of 3 September was Jean-Lambert Tallien. He had been working for Manuel since February 1792. In August he became secretary to the Commune and was elected to it as a ward representative. He also sat on its new Committee of Surveillance, alongside the journalist Marat. When he arrived at the rue du Bac, he found wanted men in Germaine’s rooms. She begged him not to give them away; Tallien gave his promise, and kept it. He took her to the city gates. For once, Germaine was silent. ‘We parted without being able to tell each other what was on our minds.’ The words, she said, were frozen on their lips. Leaving Tallien at the city’s boundary, her carriage rolled away towards Switzerland and safety.

  In the first five days of September 1792, 1,368 people including forty-three children were killed–about half of all the prisoners in Paris. Although no one person or group seems to have masterminded the massacres, it is clear both that most members of the Commune knew that they would happen–there was a rush in the last days of August to free or imprison certain individuals–and that, once begun, they could do nothing more than wait for them to end. Some militants, like Fournier l’Américain, personally saw to it that certain killings took place; many others were content to use the chaos to settle old scores.

  ‘Is it possible that this is the accomplishment of a plan concerted two or three weeks ago?’ wondered Dr Moore on the night of 2 September.

  That those arbitrary arrests were ordered with this view; that false rumours and treasons and intended insurrections and massacres were spread to exasperate the people; and that, taking advantage of the rumours of bad news from the frontiers, orders have been issued for firing the cannon and sounding the tocsin, to increase the alarm, and terrify the public into acquiescence; while a band of ch
osen ruffians were hired to massacre those whom hatred, revenge or fear had destined to destruction, but whom law and justice could not destroy? It is now past twelve at midnight, and the bloody work still goes on! Almighty God!

  By the next day Moore was hearing rumours–rife on the streets of Paris since before the massacres began–that the Duke of Brunswick, commanding the Prussian and Austrian troops, was in league with certain unnamed traitors ‘long concealed under the mask of patriotism’ who were about to open the gaol gates, arm the prisoners and set them free to plunder, rape and murder all patriots. Robespierre himself accused Brissot of having been bought by Brunswick. Although Brissot’s name was cleared, the taint of treachery was less easy to erase.

  Moore saw Parisians not exulting in the bloodshed, but rather ‘lamenting their fate’. The people he observed were terrified above all by the stories of conspirators and the sight of bands of assassins moving from prison to prison, their alarm heightened by the sound of the cannon and the tocsin and by fears of invasion. By 6 September the ardent Robespierrist Rosalie Jullien–who four days earlier had written of the people avenging ‘three years of cowardly treasons’–was of the opinion that, ‘inconceivable as it may seem’, Paris had thrown a veil over the recent scenes of carnage and was preparing to meet the impending invasion. The streets were full of people marching to the noise of the drum and crying ‘Vive la nation!’ ‘We have the air not of a threatened people, or an embattled people; but of a great family which is in jubilation,’ she wrote. ‘If you have another idea of the capital, you do not know the French.’

  Despite Mme Jullien’s composure, during the first two weeks of September a wave of violence spread across France. On the 18th, a report from Neuville-aux-Bois, in the Loiret, was sent to Paris. ‘Anarchy is rampant; there is no more authority,’ it began. ‘There is a state of frenzy that we can hardly describe to you. All we hear is threats to kill, break down houses and ransack them…Finally all these people are saying that they want no more administration, no more courts, that the law is in their hands and that they will enforce it.’