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

by Moore, Lucy

  In the same month, the Société des Républicaines-Révolutionnaires moved their meeting-place from the Jacobin Club to the former Church of Saint-Eustache, beside the central marketplace of Les Halles. This physical move reflected their ideological move away from the Montagnards and a personal veneration of Robespierre towards the anarchic philosophy of the enragés, who were pressing for stricter control of prices and trade and ever more direct democracy.

  The enragés were led by a militant curé named Jacques Roux, ‘the red priest of the bon sans-culotte Jesus Christ’. Roux was a sectional representative to the Commune for one of the poorest, most marginal and most desperate areas of Paris. He had accompanied Louis XVI to the scaffold and encouraged the laundresses to riot and pillage in February. In late June he issued an enragé manifesto calling for another September massacre, directed this time against hoarders and speculators, and demanding that the government force shopkeepers to trade without making any profit themselves.

  At about the same time, the laundresses seized a boatload of soap on the Seine and distributed it amongst themselves, protesting again about high prices. The laundresses and market women were not enragées, although they shared many of the same concerns. They formed a distinct group separate from and increasingly hostile to the républicaines-révolutionnaires, who had further antagonized them by moving their headquarters to Saint-Eustache. These women were poissardes, the wives and daughters of sans-culottes, and by 1793, with their daily lives as hard as ever, they were beginning to question what the revolution had achieved. During the riots in February a drunkard among them was heard to say that in the old days there had been only one king; now there were thirty or forty.

  Some républicaines-révolutionnaires were from less deprived backgrounds than the market women, but they were politically more extreme. For them, as for the enragés, the revolution would not be over until true equality had been established. As Théophile Leclerc, one of the enragé leaders, wrote in August, ‘A state is on the verge of ruin when you find extreme poverty and abundant wealth existing side by side.’ Society, he said, should take from the rich to give to the poor.

  Twenty-two-year-old Leclerc was an engineer’s son from near Montbrison. Inflamed with revolutionary ideas in 1789, when he was eighteen, he had tried to join the National Guard but was turned down because of his age and small size, joining the army instead and going to Martinique as a soldier. After a short but turbulent army career–during which, aged only twenty, he saved his companions by addressing the National Assembly on their behalf–he fought in Lyon alongside the most extreme revolutionaries. Arriving in Paris in the spring of 1793, he became a passionate disciple of Jacques Roux. The vehemence with which he attacked the Girondins in the days leading up to their fall led to his being expelled from the Jacobin Club.

  The week after Marat’s funeral, Leclerc began publishing L’Ami du Peuple par Leclerc, taking the name as homage to the patrie’s new martyr and attempting to step into Marat’s shoes. Leclerc’s causes were radical, protosocialist: he petitioned for utilitarian, egalitarian schools, arguing that every child should have the same education; he preached that true justice could only be exercised by the people; he claimed that ‘food supplies belong to everyone’ and proposed that the state buy food directly from the producers and distribute it evenly to all.

  Leclerc moved into the rooms of Rose Lacombe, who was seven years his senior. His youthful radicalism energized the Société des Républicaines-Révolutionnaires. He and the other enragés were unique among revolutionary groups in that they valued women contributing to political life. ‘Victory is assured when women join with the sans-culottes,’ wrote Roux that August. Another enragé, Jean Varlet, who wore a badge proclaiming himself an ‘apostle of liberty’, told the Convention earlier in 1793 that he wished the Jacobins’ apathy would ‘be replaced by the energy of the women of 5 and 6 October [1789]’.

  ‘It is your special duty to warn of [hoarders and aristocrats], Republican Revolutionary Women, generous women truly above all praise for the courage and energy you have developed; your sex, gifted with a much greater sensibility than ours, will feel more vividly the misfortunes of our country,’ wrote Théophile Leclerc in his newspaper on 4 August. ‘Go–by your example and your speech awaken republican energy and reanimate patriotism in lukewarm hearts! Yours is the task of ringing the tocsin of liberty! Time is short, the peril extreme! You have deserved first place, fly, glory awaits you!’

  Inspired by Leclerc, Rose Lacombe, Pauline Léon and the Society rose to the challenge. Throughout August, as the anniversary of the storming of the Tuileries drew closer and bread queues grew longer, the républicaines-révolutionnaires joined the enragés in ever more persistent demands for influence–or further insurrection.

  The writer Pierre-Joseph-Alexis Roussel took Lord Bedford, a visiting Englishman, to witness one of their meetings in the crypt of the former Church of Saint-Eustache. They counted sixty-seven women sitting on two rows of benches on either side of the room, with the president and officers of the Society, in their red caps, opposite the entrance. Visitors watched from the rear of the room, separated from the members by a chest-high bar. Roussel and Bedford did not share the enragés’ views on political women. They described the meeting as a ridiculous, grotesque spectacle–they could hardly stop themselves from laughing as they watched the proceedings, they commented.

  Rose Lacombe was in the president’s chair. She read the minutes and correspondence and invited one Femme Monic to give her address on the utility of women in government. According to Roussel’s note, Monic kept a small haberdashery shop and was ‘director of the knitters [tricoteuses] at the Jacobins’ as well as an informer for the Committee of Public Safety. Roussel added that the radical deputy Claude Basire had told him that he wrote Monic’s speech for her.

  To ringing applause, Monic listed the great female heroines and warriors of history, from Judith to Joan of Arc, from the Amazons to the matrons of Sparta. But she had no need to search the ‘dust of history’ for inspirationally heroic women, she said, ‘since we have them in our revolution and right before our eyes’. She gave the examples of ‘Reine’ Audu leading the king back to Paris in October 1789 and their own president, Rose Lacombe, who had led a corps of fédérés into the Tuileries the previous August and still bore the scars she received on that day. ‘If women are suited for combat,’ continued Monic, ‘they are no less suited for government!’ Catherine the Great of Russia proved it, but ‘even when the reins of government are held by men, women alone move and direct them’. She cited Catherine de Medici and, more controversially, Mme de Pompadour and ‘the courtesan Dubarry [just guillotined], who was herself a doll, [and] made a marionette out of Louis XV. Thus one can prove that women have always directed governments. Thus one can conclude that they deserve to govern. I would almost say, better than men.’

  Roussel and Bedford found Monic’s examples risible and her confidence in her rhetorical style utterly misplaced. Other républicaines-révolutionnaires rose to their feet to suggest even more ‘ridiculous’ proposals, such as admitting women to all branches of administration and the formation of a women’s army into which prostitutes would be forced to enlist. The women finally agreed, after much debate, to send a petition to the Convention, demanding a decree that would require women, as well as men, to wear the tricolour cockade.

  Olympe de Gouges then stood up and congratulated Monic on her speech. Not only did women govern empires, she added, but ‘they are the force behind everything’. As such, women must use their power over men. ‘Isolated, man is our slave; it is only when reunited in a mass that they overwhelm us in their pride.’ She recommended that women should direct and regulate public festivals in which they would incite men to patriotism and virtue by refusing to bestow their favours on those who did not deserve them. ‘Whoever hesitates to fight the enemy will hear her voice speaking these words to him: Stay, you cowardly soul; but never count on being united with your lover; she
has sworn to reject the desires of a man who is useless to his country.’

  Roussel and his guest left the meeting with much to discuss. Bedford confessed that ‘the delirium of those women frightens me’. Roussel replied that women were ‘the most active force in society, the common centre to which all the passions of men are attracted’, and it was ‘thus a manifest contradiction not to count them for anything in our code of laws’; still, the ‘universal and consequently dangerous ascendancy’ of women over men made it impossible to allow them rights. ‘They are strong enough,’ he concluded patronizingly. ‘Let us leave them with the empire of grace and beauty.’

  One of the ways in which the Jacobins sought to counteract the influence of the républicaines-révolutionnaires during the summer of 1793 was a campaign to exalt women as mothers, and especially breast-feeders, of future republicans. Citoyennes did not need to participate in public affairs, they argued, when the role they played at home was so vitally important.

  Jacques-Louis David used four turning-points of the revolution as the explicitly Jacobin framework for the celebrations of the anniversary of 10 August. At the first stage, the site of the Bastille became the triumph of Nature; at the third, Liberty was enthroned at the Place de la Révolution, where Louis XVI had been guillotined; at the fourth, a gigantic Hercules represented the French people crushing federalism–a feat not yet accomplished.

  The second station was a triumphal arch erected on the boulevard des Italiens to honour the heroines of October 1789. Although laurel-wreathed actresses sitting on cannons represented the market women, David’s script for the pageant was not in keeping with the originals’ militant spirit. ‘O Women! Liberty attacked by the tyrants has need of heroes to defend it. It is for you to breed them,’ they were pointedly reminded–the implication being that they were to be mothers to heroes, not heroines themselves. ‘Let all the martial and the generous virtues flow together in your maternal milk and in the heart of the nursing women of France.’

  This was a double-pronged attempt to identify the Republic with a nurturing mother and to restrict women to the domestic sphere by glorifying their activities there. It was not a new concept. In Rousseau’s Émile, Sophie’s fecundity and willingness to breast-feed her baby were proof of her modest virtue–in contrast to the unwomanly, barren, pleasure-seeking bodies of aristocratic women like Marie-Antoinette, who were typically portrayed as flat-chested. ‘In making yourselves more motherly, you make all hearts more human,’ wrote Mme Le Rebours in her 1775 Advice to Mothers Who Wish to Nurse Their Infants.

  Despite their best intentions, not all mothers had such positive experiences of nursing their children. Manon Roland, devoted disciple of Rousseau, was disappointed to find that even though she had breast-fed Eudora, her daughter was ‘cold and indolent’, adding, ‘her dulness and lack of spirit will never give me the joy for which I had hoped’. Germaine de Staël did not even bother to try to breast-feed her children; she always had more important affairs to attend to.

  From ‘the nectar of the age of reason’–natural and wholesome–breast-milk became the food of future republican heroes. Nursing one’s own children, instead of handing them over to wet-nurses, was hailed as a patriotic duty. When the aristocratic Lucy de la Tour du Pin was in disguise in Bordeaux in 1793 and a group of uncouth red-bonneted clerks saw her breast-feeding her baby, she was called a ‘charmante nourrice’ and given a loaf of white bread, an unheard-of luxury at the time.

  ‘We are all your children,’ were the words inscribed on contemporary statues of Liberty. One 1793 etching showed her bare-breasted, with a masonic level hung round her neck on a ribbon indicating that all Frenchmen had equal access to her nourishing milk. The female bosom became, instead of an erotic area, one of virtue and patriotism. A pamphlet described how the ‘nipple does not flow freely until it feels the lips of a baby in need; in just the same way, those who are the guardians of the nation can give nothing without the kiss of the people; the incorruptible milk of the revolution then gives the people life’.

  At a time when the debate over who controlled food sources and distribution was raging and long lines of disgruntled people waited daily outside bakeries for their quota of bread, identifying the Republic as a mother feeding her children/citizens was an astute move, emphasizing how dependent–rather than demanding–the Committee of Public Safety wanted the French people to be. But Pauline Léon and the members of the Société des Républicaines-Révolutionnaires had no intention of resigning themselves to domesticity when the principles of liberty and equality were under fire.

  11

  PRISONNIÈRE

  Manon Roland

  JUNE–AUGUST 1793

  I have never enjoyed greater calm than in this strange situation.

  MANON ROLAND

  AS SOON AS he heard the news of his wife’s arrest, Jean-Marie Roland fled Paris. Wits quipped that although the body of Roland might have left the capital he had left his soul behind him.

  When Manon arrived at the Abbaye prison near the Place Saint-Germain on the morning of 1 June, she was taken beneath the stone gates and through a dark waiting-room where the guards slept on camp beds; as she entered, ‘men stood up in a flurry of agitation’. At the top of a filthy staircase was ‘quite a clean little room’, where she was offered breakfast and allowed to sit down while instructions were given for her care. Later, Manon learned that these orders had been brutally severe but the prison keeper, an honest, diligent man, was able to avoid following them to the letter because they had not been written down. The keeper’s plump wife took her to her room, and said how sorry she always was to see women arrive at the prison, adding kindly, “‘for they are not all serene and calm like Madame”’, wrote Manon. ‘I smiled and thanked her and she locked me in.’

  Despite her cell’s dirty walls, the double bars on the windows and the pallet-bed ‘without curtains’ upon which she was expected to sleep, Manon was resolved to meet her trials with the fortitude of her antique heroes. She reflected that at least the room was relatively large and she had been given a pillow and a coverlet. Her situation was a crisis she felt herself magnificently prepared to meet: ‘although, listening to my innermost soul, I may have detected some excessive emotionalism, I found nothing there to make me ashamed, nothing which did not justify my courage or which I did not feel capable of mastering’.

  Her first visitor was one Citoyen Grandpré, a man Roland himself, as Minister of the Interior, had appointed prison inspector. During the September massacres the previous year, Grandpré had informed Danton of the atrocities being committed and been dismissed with an oath. He was horrified to see Manon behind bars, and advised her to write a letter to the National Convention, which he would deliver. Although he urged her to soften her accusatory tone of outraged innocence, the letter still went unread: Manon did not know it then, but the Convention was otherwise occupied, expelling the Girondins from their number.

  On the evening of 3 June, a haggard, unkempt Bertrand Barére–a Montagnard who sat on the newly formed Committee of Public Safety, but who almost exclusively among the Robespierrist Jacobins had retained his personal independence and remained on good terms with his Girondin friends–arrived at Manon’s friend Helen Williams’s house with tears in his eyes. Over and over again he said that ‘since the national representation was violated, liberty was lost; [he deplored] the fate of the Gironde [Barére came from the south-west], above all of Vergniaud, and execrat[ed] the Jacobins, and the Commune of Paris’. Soon after this visit he stopped coming to see Williams: political expediency had triumphed over goodwill. Later on that summer Williams was arrested and imprisoned. Despite her sincere and publicly avowed republicanism, with France at war with England, as an Englishwoman she was considered an enemy of the state.

  Other visitors to the Abbaye came and went as Manon settled into her captivity, still without being formally questioned or charged. More prisoners arrived daily, and in order to avoid sharing she was moved into a smaller
cell overlooking the gaol entrance. All night long, through the bars of her tiny window, she could hear the shouting and jostling of the sentries and new prisoners arriving. By the summer of 1793 almost three hundred people were held in the Abbaye alone.

  Manon kept the damp room immaculate, eating her simple meals from the corner of the chimneypiece so that she did not disturb her makeshift desk, which she covered with a white cloth. She asked her maid to bring her books, including Plutarch’s Lives, which she had not read since she used to take it to church instead of a prayer book as a child, and David Hume’s History of Great Britain, to improve her English.

  A few days after her arrival she was allowed a newspaper, and read of the warrants issued for the arrest of the twenty-two Girondin deputies. This news–which she would have known meant the almost certain deaths of Roland, many of their friends and, worst of all, of Buzot–made Manon despair for the first time. ‘Folly and crime have triumphed,’ she wrote. ‘All that was notable for probity, force of character and talent is now proscribed…Farewell, our sublime illusions, our generous sacrifices, our hopes, our happiness. Farewell, beloved country.’ And farewell Buzot, she must have been thinking: farewell love, before she had truly tasted it.

  The scurrilous Pére Duchesne, ever hostile to the Rolands, pictured Manon in the Abbaye bemoaning her fate. ‘The evil sans-culottes of Paris have messed up all my plans,’ it imagined her saying. ‘What will become of me if my dear Buzot, if my friend Gorsas, if my little Louvet, if the favourite of my heart, the divine Barbaroux, will not incite civil war in the provinces?’ Buzot and a group of fugitive Girondins actually were trying to muster support, in Normandy, and Manon was indeed fervently hoping to hear news of a regional uprising. Brissot was one of several who refused to allow the Jacobins to make him into a criminal by going into hiding. He was arrested soon after Manon. ‘My conscience,’ he wrote, ‘spoke to me with a louder voice than all these terrors from without.’