by Moore, Lucy
Prison also allowed her to luxuriate in her love for Buzot. As she wrote to him from Sainte-Pélagie on 3 July on receiving another letter from him, ‘can I complain of my misfortune, when such delights are reserved for me?’ Dignified in any situation, she would have been ‘proud of being persecuted in a time when character and probity are proscribed’, but the freedom to love Buzot without hiding her feelings from Roland–whom she referred to as ‘le pauvre’–made her treasure her ‘sweet’ imprisonment. ‘I find it delightful to unite the means of being useful to him in a manner that allows me to be more yours,’ Manon wrote, looking forward to the moment when sacrificing her life for Roland would earn her the right ‘to give you alone my last sigh’. Her love letters–indeed, all her writing–became a substitute for physical experience, enabling her, as Outram writes, to ‘overcome the contradiction between the unchastity of her desires and the self-portrait she cherished as chaste wife’, all the while preserving for herself the dramatic heroine’s role.
‘How I cherish the bars where I am free to love you without feeling torn and to occupy myself with you without ceasing!’ she wrote to Buzot. This new pleasure was so intense that she rejected the idea of escape: returning to freedom would mean exchanging ‘chains that honour…for others that no-one can see’. Still she could not help herself hoping, as it became clear over the summer of 1793 that resistance to the Committee of Public Safety was doomed, that Buzot would flee France for the United States and that one day she would be able to join him there.
Out of superstition, Manon told Buzot, she had not wanted to bring his miniature into prison with her, but she could not bring herself to leave it behind. She wore it tucked into her bodice, hidden beside her heart where she could feel it at every moment, ‘this sweet image, weak and precious consolation for the presence of the subject’, and took it out to kiss it and weep over it. Her words recall the scene in La Nouvelle Héloïse when Saint-Preux unwraps Julie’s portrait with trembling hands. ‘How immediate, how powerful is the magic effect of these cherished features,’ he tells her. ‘Wherever you may be, whatever you may be doing at the moment when your portrait is receiving all the homage your idolatrous lover addresses to your person, do you not feel your charming face bathed with tears of love and sadness? Do you not feel your eyes, your cheeks, your bosom caressed, pressed, overwhelmed by my ardent kisses?’
Manon slipped a tiny piece of paper into the back of the locket, describing Buzot as ‘a loving soul, a proud spirit and an elevated nature…[who] cherished peace, private virtues and the pleasures of an obscure life’. Thrown into politics by circumstance, he had conducted himself ‘with the ardour of hot-headed courage and the inflexibility of austere integrity’, only to be declared traitor to the country to which he had sacrificed himself. One day, she predicted, posterity would honour him, and his portrait would be placed among ‘those of the generous friends of liberty who believed in virtue, and dared to preach it as the sole basis for a republic, and who had the strength to practise it’.
Manon’s stay in the ‘pleasant little room’ beneath Mme Bouchard’s was cut short in early August when a prison administrator saw someone entering her room and asked to see inside it. The keeper’s wife was making life too comfortable for Manon, he complained. ‘She can do without it [the pianoforte],’ he told Mme Bouchard. ‘Send her back to the corridor at once. You must maintain equality.’
Mme Bouchard could not argue. Although she allowed her back to the room near hers during the day and permitted her to leave her books and papers there, Manon had to return to her damp cell, the fetid air of the dark corridor and the screeching of the great iron bolts in their sockets as her door was unlocked every morning and locked again each night. But a month away had brought unexpected new prisoners, reflecting political changes outside the prison walls. Manon’s neighbours were no longer whores and murderesses, but other Girondin women: the wives of a Justice of the Peace denounced for ‘unpatriotic talk’ and of a president of the Revolutionary Tribunal.
An old friend, Mme Pétion, had even arrived–one of the few Girondin wives Manon had had time for. Pétion had eluded his guards in Paris and fled to Normandy with Buzot. ‘I would hardly have believed when I was sharing your worries at the Hôtel de Ville last August 10, that we would be celebrating the anniversary together in Sainte-Pélagie,’ Manon said to her when they met, ‘and that the monarchy’s fall would lead to our undoing.’
12
RÉVOLUTIONNAIRE
Pauline Léon
AUGUST–NOVEMBER 1793
Since when is it permitted to give up one’s sex? Since when is it decent to see women abandoning the pious cares of their households, the cribs of their children, to come to public places, to harangue in the galleries, at the bar of the senate?
PIERRE-GASPARD CHAUMETTE
OUTSIDE ON THE STREETS, in September 1793, a police spy reported to the Committee of Public Safety that ‘une petite crise à l’occasion des cocardes’–a little trouble over cockades–had broken out in Pauline Léon’s neighbourhood, the faubourg Saint-Germain.
Since July the previous year, all men had been required by law to wear a tricolour cockade as a symbol of their devotion to the Republic. Although women’s fashions also reflected the fervid patriotism of the era, women, as passive citizens, had no such public obligation. But throughout the hot, delirious summer of 1793, the Société des Républicaines-Révolutionnaires, led by Léon and Lacombe, had taken to roaming through the capital and accosting women who were not wearing tricolour rosettes–women who, they claimed, were implicitly counterrevolutionary because they did not sport their politics on their shoulders. During the Society’s meeting observed by Pierre-Joseph-Alexis Roussel and Lord Bedford, the only decision the républicaines-révolutionnaires actually made was to send a petition to the Convention requesting that a law be passed forcing all women to wear them.
Their aggressive tactics simply scared most women–bands of ferocious women dressed as sans-culottes were just another reason to stay off the streets in 1793–but the républicaines-révolutionnaires’ antagonists, the poissardes of Les Halles, were enraged by their bullying as well as by the fact that by transferring their headquarters to Saint-Eustache they had moved on to their territory. According to the police report, the républicaines-révolutionnaires were stopping female passers-by, demanding to see their cockades and threatening them with a whipping–like the one they had administered to Théroigne de Méricourt four months earlier–if they were not wearing one. The market women retorted that they would slaughter the républicaines-révolutionnaires if they continued to accost them, and accused the women who wore the cockade of being putains, or sluts. They had no money to spend on such things, they said, when bread was so dear. Screamed insults were exchanged and blows were not always avoided; one woman in Les Halles was stabbed for venturing out unadorned.
A police observer was confused and suspicious about the way that on one day, in one area of the city, women would be beaten for wearing a cockade, while another day, in another place, they would be beaten for not wearing one. ‘The cockade is the veil behind which evil-doers hide their perfidious plans,’ he reported. ‘One cannot spy on their [the women’s] movements too much.’ As ever, the fear of conspiracy hung heavy in the air.
Paris had always been an alert, inquisitive, observant city. People watched each other, as Richard Cobb comments, not necessarily–or not always–out of malice, but often simply out of curiosity. ‘Two citizens cannot whisper without a third craning his neck to hear what the conference is about!’ wrote Louis-Sébastian Mercier in 1781. The revolutionary government knew exactly how they had come to power–with a speech at the Palais Royal and the women of Les Halles demanding bread–and they were determined to monitor what the people on the streets were saying and thinking. Spies whose remit was to report back to the Committee of Public Safety haunted the city’s alleys and arcades, stood in the long lines for bread, eavesdropped on poissardes and prostitutes, fol
lowed the prices of sugar and soap and noticed which plays sold out.
In mid-1793, the tension on the streets, as reported by the observateurs, was aggravated by another severe bread shortage. Long queues formed overnight outside bakers’ shops. In Bordeaux, Lucy de la Tour du Pin remembered that the terror of daily life was so great that people were afraid to exchange a word on the street, ‘and the queue represented, as it were, a lawful assembly where the timid could talk to their neighbours or learn the latest news without exposing themselves to the imprudence of asking a question’. But the mood could turn in a moment from friendly neighbourhood chatter to menace or fury, and some women preferred to wait in men’s clothes to avoid being hassled.
Bread riots–at their most dramatic, like the women’s march on Versailles in the autumn of 1789–were traditionally dominated by women. The fact that the demonstrators’ actions stemmed from frustration at not being able to feed their families made them somehow palatable to the men in power: protest caused by maternal love was seen as natural, even commendable, however inconvenient it might be. But the bread disturbances of the second half of 1793, from the revolutionary government’s point of view, had troubling political undertones. Hungry, angry women in the faubourg Saint-Antoine were crying, ‘Our husbands made the revolution; if necessary, we will make the counterrevolution.’ Spies thought the name of the king–since Louis XVI’s execution, his young son, still imprisoned–was, if not yet on people’s lips, already in their hearts.
Although some women remained passionate supporters of the revolution, by 1793 others had begun to turn back to their traditional ways of thinking, frustrated by the new regime’s inability to serve their needs any better than the king had. In the provinces peasant women showed their discontent by harbouring seditious local priests and pointedly keeping religious holidays and dressing up in their best clothes on Sundays.
Opponents to the revolutionary regime had been in open and brutal revolt in the Vendée region since the spring of 1793. Here, as in Paris, the mood of desperation inspired several women to step out of the domestic arena and on to the battlefield. The peasant Renée Bordereau, who fought in the royalist army disguised as a man, would become known as the Joan of Arc of the Vendée. The revolutionary army had massacred forty-two members of her family including her father, who was killed before her eyes. Filled with ‘rage and despair’, she ‘resolved to sacrifice my body to the King, to offer my soul to God, and I swore to fight until death or victory’.
Across the country in Lyon, the once prosperous hometown of the young bride Juliette Récamier, another civil war was raging. Here, too, counterrevolutionary women were proud to contribute to the cause in which they so ardently believed. ‘A single heart beat in every breast, a unique sentiment inspired the men and the women: to resist tyranny,’ wrote Alexandrine des Écherolles, the teenaged daughter of a retired army officer, in her diary. In May the people of the town had stormed the mairie, seizing Joseph Chalier, the despised agent of the revolutionary government, whom they executed on the same day the counterrevolutionary heroine Charlotte Corday was guillotined in Paris.
Expecting repercussions, the men and women of Lyon began to prepare for attack. ‘The most delicate women participated in armed exercises, the testing of cannons,’ recorded Alexandrine. ‘Nothing seemed to frighten or surprise them.’ The new Republic’s forces reached Lyon in August and trained their guns on the city walls. Alexandrine joined other women in helping to put out fires caused by the bombardment, and assisted the local priest in collecting donations to feed the hungry and homeless and the children orphaned by the conflict. ‘I joyfully saw myself called to play an active role in our history, which gave me a great importance in my own eyes,’ she wrote. Despite the determined lightness of her tone, her words make clear that like so many other women during this period, in the midst of disaster and destruction Alexandrine was discovering a new sense of self and a new pride in her sex.
The foreign war effort had also seen, in 1793, a series of catastrophic surrenders and defeats for the revolutionary regime. Austrian and Prussian armies had advanced deep into French territory, heading for Paris, and at the end of August the British–who had declared war on France after Louis XVI’s execution–took the port of Toulon. Ironically, the war–which the Jacobins had opposed, and so effectively used to destroy the Girondins–had become a means by which the Committee of Public Safety was able to consolidate its grip on power. ‘Who dares to speak of peace?’ demanded Bertrand Barére, answering his own question. ‘The aristocrats, the moderates, the rich, the conspirators, the pretended patriots.’
War made brutal centralization and repression necessary in the name of the public interest, and provided the government with excuses for mass conscription (decreed in August), requisitioning, plunder and murder. In September Robespierre could look out of the windows of the Tuileries, where the Committee of Public Safety met, and see the new workshops erected in the palace’s gardens. All the workmen of Paris had been ordered to manufacture muskets and cannon out of metal melted down from church bells, altars and objects confiscated from houses abandoned by émigrés; nuns’ habits were made into bandages. The detritus of the old regime would provide the new with the instruments of its triumph.
In Paris, the disputes over the cockade were worsening, stimulated by what was, to the revolutionary government, a terrifying impulse: the desire of common women to participate in public life. Even at the time, it was obvious that ‘la guerre des cocardes’ (as the historian Alfred Soboul called it) was about far more than bunches of ribbon.
The Committee of Public Safety was trying to marginalize the républicaines-révolutionnaires’ radical allies the enragés by appropriating their ideas where they could, undermining the sectional societies that were the source of their influence and attacking their leaders. One of the most serious complaints against them was that they ‘flattered the women’s pride, seeking to persuade them they should have the rights of men, citing examples through history in science and government, saying that affairs would be better conducted by bonnes républicaines’.
Throughout the summer, Pauline Lèon and Rose Lacombe and their followers in the Sociètè des Rèpublicaines-Rèvolutionnaires became progressively more outspoken in their opposition to the Jacobins in general and to Robespierre in particular. Proud of the role they had played in expelling the Girondins in June and emboldened by the faith the enragès placed in them, they began to speak scornfully of the ‘coward’ Robespierre, calling him ‘Monsieur’–rather than the patriotic, republican ‘Citoyen’–and wondering aloud how he dared treat them as counterrevolutionaries. Other members of the Society, still passionate Robespierrists, were angry at their attacks; divisions crystallized.
As autumn began, a group of mutineer républicaines-révolutionnaires confronted Léon and Lacombe about their outspokenness. Lacombe, they said, belittled Robespierre, telling them, ‘You are infatuated with and enthusiastic about Robespierre, whom I regard only as an ordinary citizen.’ She publicly criticized his measures, denouncing the bloody harshness of the government’s efforts to crush the counterrevolution in Lyon and, in October, calling the Convention’s decree declaring the Republic revolutionary until peace had been achieved a measure that would only to drive the people to incessant revolt and further carnage. In stirring Rousseauesque language, Pauline Léon was calling for the dissolution and re-election of the Convention, on the grounds that its members had been lagging in their seats long enough. ‘The prolongation of power,’ she declared, ‘was often the tomb of liberty.’
When the Committee of Public Safety questioned Rose Lacombe about how many citoyennes belonged to her Society, she replied three or four thousand. One of the newer républicaines-révolutionnaires–who said she was the hundred and seventieth member of the Society–asked her why she had lied so barefacedly. ‘We must make those white beaks grow pale and tremble,’ answered Lacombe defiantly.
The républicaines-révolutionnaires also conf
ronted Lacombe about her relationship with Théophile Leclerc. It was alleged that the ‘immoral’ Leclerc had shared Lacombe’s lodgings for some months. This charge reveals a personal rupture between Lacombe and Pauline Léon, simmering away beneath their intimate political alliance, and perhaps explains why Léon, previously so conspicuous on the stage of Parisian radical politics, had allowed herself to fade into the background beside her swaggering, exhibitionist friend.
In November 1793–three months after Lacombe and Leclerc’s liaison was scrutinized first by the républicaines-révolutionnaires and then by the Jacobins–Théophile Leclerc married not Rose Lacombe, his established mistress, but her associate Pauline Léon, a woman thirteen years older than him. Their unexpected union followed an angry scene in front of the society, in which Léon accused Lacombe of sleeping with Leclerc. Although Lacombe had previously denied living with Leclerc, face to face with Léon, she had no choice but to admit it.
Leclerc’s mentor Jacques Roux, the red priest, had been arrested for the first time in August, released and then arrested again on 5 September, the day Terror was declared the order of the day. Bertrand Barére had denounced enragés he described as counterrevolutionaries stirring up the women of the streets. Roux was sent to prison not by order of the government, but by the ‘unanimous judgement’ of the Jacobin Club. Among his confiscated papers was a letter praising militant women who had ‘the doubly advantageous attribute of conquering through charm and through fearlessness’, and declaring that the moment when the enragé ‘mass of republicans’ would be ready ‘to crush tyranny’ was approaching.