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

by Moore, Lucy

  In their eyes, one of these enemies of the revolution was the unlucky Théroigne de Méricourt. A group of républicaines-révolutionnaires was patrolling the Tuileries gardens and the corridors of the Convention on 15 May, as the struggle between the Montagnards and the Girdondins was nearing its climax, when they encountered her on the Feuillants Terrace. They were checking that visitors to the Convention had entry cards, making sure passers-by were wearing the revolutionary cockade (not yet required by law) and stopping anyone whose politics they suspected; they seem not to have known or cared that their vigilance might be an ‘arbitrary act’ from which others might need protecting.

  Very little survives of Théroigne’s activities in the early months of 1793 except for an undated broadsheet she published at about this time which was posted around Paris on thick, blue-grey paper. It warned Parisians of the dangers facing them and the traps which had been so artfully deployed to waylay them. In stark contrast to the républicaines-révolutionnaires’ robustly hands-on approach to the crisis, she pleaded for a calm, reasoned response: ‘Fellow citizens, let us stop and think, or else we are lost.’ Conspirers against democracy were inciting anarchy and civil war in order to demonstrate that the people were incapable of governing themselves, she said; both the rebels and France’s invaders seemed more ‘determined to defend despotism and religious prejudices than we are to defend liberty’.

  But, concluded Théroigne, ‘danger will unify us yet again, and we will show you what men who wish for liberty, and who are working for the cause of humankind, are capable of’. She proposed that six women be chosen from each ward every six months, ‘the most virtuous and the most serious for their age’, whose job would be to reconcile and unite the men of their area by reminding them of the dangers threatening liberty and the fatherland. These women would wear long scarves bearing the words ‘Amitié et Fraternité’, and they would supervise patriotic girls’ schools and take part in national festivals. Nothing could have been further from the tomboyish swagger of the républicaines-révolutionnaires.

  On sighting Théroigne, whose political sympathies were well known, they shouted ‘Brissotine!’ and accused her of distributing Girondin propaganda. They had been hoping to run into her for weeks; now they turned on her with ‘incredible fury’ and gave her ‘le fouet’–a whipping. It was only when Jean-Paul Marat appeared, an unlikely hero, and shielded her under his arm that they let her go. Despite his fierce reputation, Marat seems to have disliked watching individuals suffer. Paul Barras recorded seeing him rescue a beleaguered aristocrat from a mob by giving him a kick; as with their encounter with Olympe de Gouges, the mob’s anger turned to laughter and they lost interest. After this humiliating attack on Théroigne, a commemorative plate appeared for sale depicting her bare buttocks.

  Four days later, a deputation from the Société des Républicaines-Révolutionnaires accompanied an enragé delegation of the Cordeliers to the Jacobin Club to demand the foundation of revolutionary courts all over France and the arrest of anyone suspected of being a counterrevolutionary. The Girondin deputies, who had hitherto been more sympathetic than the Montagnards to the idea of women having political rights, were horrified at the women’s attacks on them. On 20 May, Manon Roland’s lover François Buzot denounced what he called the impudent women from these ‘depraved societies’, calling them ‘avid for death and blood’. They were, he said, ‘monstrous women who have all the cruelty of weakness and all the vices of their sex’.

  Another Girondin deputy, the journalist Antoine-Joseph Gorsas, described the women of the Society as Furies, ‘intoxicated Bacchanalians’, crazed by the revolution. ‘What do they want?’ he asked. ‘What do they demand? They want to “put an end to it”; they want to purge the Convention, to make heads roll, and to get themselves drunk with blood.’

  As the atmosphere of crisis intensified, the républicaines-révolutionnaires filled the streets shouting, ‘Vive la Montagne! À la guillotine les brissotins! Vive Marat! Vive le Père Duchesne!’ They occupied the area around the Convention, checking people’s permits and tickets, and when challenged replied, ‘Equality? If we are all equal, I have as much right to enter as someone with a card.’ One Citoyenne Lecointre addressed the Jacobins in the name of the Society on 27 May, saying that she and her companions were not ‘domestic animals’ and promising they would form a phalanx to annihilate all aristocrats.

  Just before the end of May a police spy reported nervously that ‘evil influences, under the mark of patriotism, have excited these revolutionary heroines to riot and to take up arms so as to dissolve the Convention and cause rivers of blood to flow in Paris’. Although Robespierre and the Montagnards were willing to harness the Société des Républicaines-Révolutionnaires’ energy to the cause of ridding them of their political opponents, not everyone was convinced it would be easy to rein in the ‘Maenads’ afterwards. Between 31 May and 2 June, when the Parisian radicals pressed the National Convention to expel the Girondins, the républicaines-révolutionnaires played a critical role. ‘Who rang the tocsin?’ asked a desperate Girondin deputy. ‘We did!’ cried the women in the tribunes. A ‘troupe de furies, avide de carnage’ prevented Girondin deputies from fleeing the Convention. Helen Williams described Robespierre’s female army standing ‘in the passages of the Convention armed with poniards’.

  Afterwards the Montagnards praised the républicaines-révolutionnaires for their contribution to the coup. ‘Their zeal is indefatigable, their vigilance penetrates plots, their actions thwart them, their audacity exposes intrigues, their boldness prevents dangers, their courage surmounts them,’ said Louis-Pierre Dufourny, a prominent Jacobin and Cordelier, at the end of June. ‘Finally they are republicans and revolutionaries.’ Buzot, fleeing to Caen to make a stand against the Jacobins, confirmed the role the ‘hideous coquines of Paris’ had played in the Girondins’ fall.

  Other women were inspired by the républicaines-révolutionnaires’ example. A group of citoyennes from one of the Paris wards presented the Society with a martial standard, praising them for the ‘firmness and intrepidity’ of their actions on 31 May and 2 June and congratulating them on having broken ‘that prejudice…which made passive and isolated beings out of half the population by relegating women to the confined sphere of their households…Why should women, gifted with the faculty of feeling and explaining their thoughts, see themselves excluded from public affairs?’ A woman’s first duty was still to her home, they said, but ‘after they have attended to their indispensable occupations, there are still some moments of leisure, and les femmes citoyennes in the fraternal societies who consecrate them to surveillance and to instruction have the sweet satisfaction of seeing themselves doubly useful’.

  On 24 June 1793 a new constitution was adopted by the Convention containing innovations such as the right to work and the right to resist one’s own government if it became oppressive. Although the principal authors of the constitution (including Gilbert Romme, Bertrand Barère, Tom Paine and Condorcet) had included a carefully worked-out system of checks and balances, this had been largely disregarded by the Montagnards in their desire to make political concessions to the sans-culottes. Condorcet dared to protest; a warrant was issued for his arrest and, like the other Girondins, he went into hiding.

  The constitution’s authors had considered the issue of women’s rights. Originally Condorcet had been the strongest advocate for enfranchising women, although, perhaps shocked by the radical new involvement of women in public life in the spring of 1793, latterly he had not pursued this objective with any vigour. The constitution denied women political rights for the time being. ‘The vices of our education still oblige us to perpetuate this exclusion, at any rate for several years to come.’ A woman from Beaurepaire complained to the Convention in July that ‘women are far from being equal; they do not count in the political system. We demand from you primary assemblies, and, as the Constitution rests on the rights of man, we demand it all today.’

  Women
may not have been included in the liberties of the new constitution, but they were determined to participate in celebrating it. In Paris and across France they gathered alongside the men to send messages of support to the Convention, often participating in mock elections as demonstrations of their approval–acting out a privilege they had not been granted. They promised to marry only true patriots and to raise their children in the principles of liberty and equality. A police spy said of the women celebrating, ‘It would seem that, born slaves of men, they have a greater interest in its [liberty’s] prevailing.’ As Dominique Godineau comments, the roles women played in these celebrations were ‘ornamental’–as they were at all revolutionary festivals–but they reveal the potent ambiguity of women’s importance to the revolution. Although they were excluded from the body politic, they were still determined to comment on and participate in public affairs, and their presence at and approval of significant events had become an essential part of revolutionary life.

  As recognition of the part they had played in ousting the Girondins, the Société des Républicaines-Révolutionnaires was allowed to march in the Convention’s official procession marking the adoption of the constitution. Pauline Léon expressed to the Convention the ‘joy and satisfaction’ of the citoyennes of her ward ‘over the completion of the Constitution’.

  In the midst of these celebrations, a twenty-five-year-old woman named Charlotte Corday left her home in the Norman town of Caen, where François Buzot and other Girondins were preparing for their final struggle against Robespierre and the Commune. A fervent supporter of the Girondins, she saw the coup of 2 June as a degradation of the revolution’s purity. One of the anti-Jacobin tracts circulating in Caen in the spring of 1793 read, ‘Let Marat’s head fall and the Republic is saved!…Marat sees the Public Safety only in a river of blood; well then his own must flow, for his head must fall to save two hundred thousand others.’ Mlle Corday saw Marat as perverting France, and became convinced that if he were removed, the revolution would be saved. Before setting out for Paris, she left her Bible lying open to the story of Judith, and wrote to her father apologizing for leaving home without his permission.

  When Charlotte Corday arrived in Paris on 11 July she was disappointed to find that Marat’s persistent arthritic psoriasis had confined him to his apartment near the Cordeliers’ Club on the left bank: she had hoped to kill him in public, at the Convention. Two days later, in the already blazing sunshine of a summer morning, she got up early and walked the short distance from her rented room to the Palais Royal. She made several purchases: a newspaper reporting the recent demand in the Convention that the death sentence be pronounced on the expelled Girondins; a tall black hat with black tassels and a green cockade to replace her provincial white bonnet; and a kitchen knife with a wooden handle and a five-inch blade.

  A hackney coach dropped Corday off outside Marat and Simone Évrard’s apartment in the rue des Cordeliers just before eleven thirty. Simone’s sister told her that Marat was too ill to see anyone. Charlotte left him a letter saying that she had important information about the Girondins hiding in Caen, but forgot to leave her address. She returned to her lodgings. That afternoon, Corday summoned a hairdresser to her room and changed into a spotted muslin dress with a pink fichu; she tucked the knife, her birth certificate and a letter to the French people into her bodice. She put on her new black hat with its jaunty green rosette.

  At seven in the evening, Charlotte took another cab to Marat’s rooms. This time she was luckier: she arrived at the same time as a bread delivery, so she made it up the stairs before she was challenged by Simone. Marat heard her telling Simone about the escaped Girondins, and shouted out from the tiled bathroom next door that she should come in. In the summer heat, one of the only ways Marat could ease the itching, scaly sores on his body was to soak in cool kaolin baths. He kept an upturned wooden box beside his tin bath which he used as a desk; on one wall hung a map of France, on another a pair of crossed pistols beneath which was scrawled the word ‘Death’.

  Simone, still suspicious, showed the young woman in. Charlotte told Marat about the situation in Caen, and listed the names of the Girondin plotters there. ‘Good,’ he replied, ‘in a few days I will have them all guillotined.’

  When Simone left the room, Charlotte, who was sitting on a chair next to the bath, stood up and pulled the knife out of her bodice. She stabbed Marat once, at the top right of his chest, beneath his collarbone, and pierced an artery. Her blow was fatal; as she later said, it was just luck. Marat shrieked, ‘À moi, ma chère amie!’ and sank back into the rapidly staining water.

  As Simone, one of Marat’s newspaper distributors and various neighbours rushed into the room to try to save his life, Charlotte Corday sat quietly awaiting her fate. The news spread rapidly, and furious crowds soon thronged the street outside Marat’s home, baying for the murderess’s blood–one woman said she would like to cut her into pieces and eat her. But the officials called to the scene persuaded the mob that killing Corday would mean they would never discover what had really happened.

  Corday was taken to the Abbaye prison (she was kept in the cell occupied by Manon Roland the month before) and the investigation into her crime began. People found it hard to believe that a woman had so premeditatedly killed Marat–his own brother and sister refused to accept it, holding that he had been ‘assassinated by a scoundrel wearing women’s clothes’–and that she had acted alone. Corday was fully aware of how much the fact of her femaleness changed the significance of her crime, writing, ‘No one is satisfied to have a mere woman without consequence to offer to the spirit of that great man.’

  Charlotte Corday was guillotined on 17 July. She went to her death remorseless and composed. ‘Her beautiful face was so calm that one would have said she was a statue,’ wrote one onlooker. ‘Behind her, young girls held each other’s hands as they danced. For eight days I was in love with Charlotte Corday.’ The Girondin Pierre Vergniaud, in hiding, said of her, ‘She has killed us, but she has taught us how to die.’

  Threatened by her femininity, the Jacobins did all they could to besmirch Corday’s myth. Four days after her death, a vilely misogynistic notice about her was posted throughout Paris. This woman being called pretty was not pretty at all, it thundered.

  She was a virago, chubby rather than fresh, slovenly, as female philosophers and sharp thinkers almost always are. Moreover, this remark would be pointless were it not generally true that any pretty woman who enjoys being pretty clings to life and fears death…Her head was stuffed with all sorts of books; she declared, or rather she confessed with an affectation bordering on the ridiculous, that she had read everything from Tacitus to the Portier des Chartreux [a book of pornography very popular in the eighteenth century]…All these things mean that this woman has hurled herself completely outside of her sex.

  The discovery, at her autopsy, of the unmarried Corday’s virginity added further fuel to Jacobin flames: her chastity was used–just as proof of sexual activity would have been used–to confirm their theories that she was an unnatural, unfeminine woman.

  Marat became a revolutionary martyr. David’s portraits of him and of Michel Lepeletier, murdered in January 1792, flanked the president’s chair in the hall of the National Convention; his bones were interred in the Panthéon.

  The Société des Républicaines-Révolutionnaires carried Marat’s boot-shaped tin bath in his funeral procession on 16 July, and afterwards continued to parade it and his bloodstained shirt through the streets like relics or fetishes. On the following day, the day of Corday’s death, they swore before the Convention ‘that they will people the land of liberty with as many Marats as children borne by the Revolutionary Republican Women, that they will raise these children in the cult of Marat, and swear to put in their hands no gospel other than Marat’s works, with verses in his memory, and curse the infernal fury brought forth by the race of Caen’.

  Ten days after Corday was killed, with the enemy again at France�
�s frontiers and half the country in open revolt against the revolutionary regime in Paris, Maximilien Robespierre took his place for the first time on the Committee of Public Safety, recently created by the National Convention as a means of centralizing and strengthening executive power. Twelve men sat on the Committee, which met around a large green-paper-covered table in the gilded Pavillon de Flora at the top of the queen’s staircase in the Tuileries–the room which had once been Louis XVI’s private office.

  The consolidation of authority in the hands of the Committee of Public Safety ushered in a new revolutionary era. Having scrambled to power on the backs of the Parisian militants of the Commune, the Montagnards now turned sharply around to kick their makeshift ladder away. The path of the revolution had changed: from the summer of 1793 it was about not reform, but Terror. In the words of Antoine Saint-Just, one of the Committee’s chief propagandists,

  There is no prosperity to be hoped for so long as the last enemy of liberty shall breathe. You have to punish not only the traitors, but even those who are indifferent; you have to punish whoever is passive within the Republic and does nothing for her; for, from the time that the people manifested its will, everything that is opposed to it is outside sovereignty; everything that is outside sovereignty is enemy.