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

by Moore, Lucy

  Outside the Convention hall, half of Paris was going hungry. The prices of meat and vegetables were at record highs. ‘The grocers continue to give the citizens garbage,’ reported a police spy. ‘Their brandy is abominable, the vinegar is as worthless as the oil; the best of it is not fit to be eaten on salad.’ Women on the streets were not only taking their own children with them to beg, but kidnapping other people’s so as to incite greater generosity from passers-by.

  ‘Do you believe that if this committee restrained their audacity, there would be so many unjust imprisonments?’ an old man asked a government agent. ‘No–you would see 3000 or 4000 or 5000 fathers returned to their children; for I do not let the small number given in the newspapers fool me; and the republic which seems to be covered with mourning cloth would become the haven of happiness.’

  Popular discontent only strengthened the resolve of the Committee of Public Safety. ‘Some wish to moderate the revolutionary movement,’ said Collot d’Herbois, one of the most bloodthirsty of the Committee members, at the Jacobin Club. ‘What! Can a tempest be steered?’ Later, before the Convention, he declared that indulgence was a ‘dangerous weakness’: ‘we are hardened against the tears of repentance’. His colleague Saint-Just agreed. ‘A revolution like ours is not a trial, but a thunderbolt called down on the wicked.’

  In the face of sentiments like these, Helen Williams was right in saying that Terror required ‘the most daring courage to be humane’. Tallien, his revolutionary ardour softened by love, would need courage to defend his humanity against his critics. Although the reception he received at the Committee’s meeting-room in the Tuileries was icy, his first address to the Convention was as successful as he could have hoped. After outlining his and Ysabeau’s successes in Bordeaux, he made an appeal for accusations to cease and for trust and respect to be restored among France’s rulers. Echoing Camille Desmoulins’s new journal, the Vieux Cordelier, he called for the true patriots–those who had been present at the first days of the revolution, ‘who were not hiding in their caves while we were at the Bastille’–to steer its course faithfully.

  ‘We will go home later to our gabled cottages, and there we will savour the pleasure of having fulfilled our noble responsibilities, of having responded to the needs of the nation, of having justified the trust placed in us,’ he concluded, appealing to his listeners’ pastoral fantasies. ‘There we will enjoy in peace the happiness of having brought the people happiness: it is a boon that we prefer to all the treasures on earth.’ Although Tallien was elected president of the Convention (they rotated every fifteen days), Robespierre was unmoved by his arguments. ‘I cannot look at that Tallien without shivering,’ he said.

  Robespierre’s fear of his political rivals was not restricted to Tallien. Anyone who did not accept his vision for France was viewed as a traitor; personal loyalty never clouded his resolve. Having eliminated the radical hébertistes (the supporters of the journalist Jacques Hébert, publisher of Père Duchesne, including Antoine Momoro and Pierre-Gaspard Chaumette) who dominated the Commune of Paris, at the end of March he turned his attentions to Georges Danton and his followers, who drew their strength from the Convention. By this stage, the dantonistes were ‘indulgents’, moderates, who were calling for Terror to be contained, for patriotism to be brought back into line with humanity.

  The dantonistes went to their deaths with dignity and remorse for the excesses to which they had been witness. In prison, Helen Williams reported Danton as saying that he had instituted the Revolutionary Tribunal ‘not to become the scourge of humanity’ but ‘to prevent the renewal of the massacres of September [1792]’. ‘In revolutions the power always remains in the hands of villains,’ he said. ‘It is better to be a poor fisherman than to govern men. Those fools! They will cry “Long live the Republic!” on seeing me pass to the scaffold.’ Robespierre had offered him the chance to betray his friends in return for his life, but he had refused it.

  Even Camille Desmoulins’s childhood closeness to Robespierre could not protect him. He went to the scaffold alongside Danton, just as the two men had gone together to the Tuileries on the night of 9 August 1792. His wife had come each day with their baby to gaze up at his window, much like the little boy described by Helen Williams who came every day to the Luxembourg and asked the guard, with his hat in his hands, ‘Citoyen, vous me permettrez de saluer mon papa?’–‘Citizen, will you allow me to wave to my father?’–and stood beneath the prison walls, blowing kisses up to his father’s window while his father inside wept.

  ‘Adieu Loulou, adieu my life, my soul, my divinity on earth,’ wrote Camille to his wife from prison, in a turmoil of romanticism, desperation and grief. ‘I feel the river banks of my life receding before me, I see you again Lucile, I see my arms locked about you, my tied hands embracing you, my severed head resting on you. I am going to die…’

  Lucile Desmoulins perished a week after her beloved husband. At the Luxembourg, Camille had made friends with another prisoner, Arthur Dillon–Lucy de la Tour du Pin’s father. After Camille’s death Dillon tried to smuggle a letter of sympathy and some money out to Lucile, but it was intercepted and used as evidence of a conspiracy between them. She was executed, wearing white, on the same day as Dillon. ‘Among the victims of the tyrants, the women have been particularly distinguished for their admirable firmness in death,’ wrote Helen Williams. ‘Perhaps this arose from the superior sensibility which belongs to the female mind, and which made it feel that it was less terrible to die, than to survive the objects of its tenderness.’

  ‘One can no longer go out, some said, without seeing the guillotine or those being taken to it,’ a police spy reported. ‘Our children are getting cruel and it is to be feared that pregnant women will bring forth children with marks on their necks or still as statues because of the distressing sights they are subjected to in the streets.’ Another spy heard some apprentices talking as the tumbrels rumbled past them. ‘Good Lord, when will we have had enough of shedding blood?’ said one. ‘When we’ve no longer any guilty left,’ replied another. A third said, ‘A man’s death doesn’t cost much.’ ‘If they guillotined people for thinking, how many people would have to die?’ asked a fourth, and then added, ‘Don’t let’s talk so loud…’

  Tallien survived the purge of the dantonistes; while he shared some of their views he was not close enough to their leaders to be condemned alongside them. Although a Montagnard radical, Marc-Antoine Jullien, had been dispatched to Bordeaux to continue the Committee of Public Safety’s revolutionary work there, and the investigation against Tallien and Ysabeau was ongoing, for the moment Tallien was free–waiting and planning for the day when his enemies would be vanquished and his mistress back in his arms.

  15

  LIBÉRATRICE

  Thérésia Cabarrus Fontenay

  MAY–JULY 1794

  A general deliverance, a universal resurrection.

  CHARLES DE LACRETELLE

  EVEN WITHOUT TALLIEN in Bordeaux to protect her, Thérésia continued to help all those who appealed to her tender heart. She persuaded the ‘fierce’ Ysabeau to pardon a few more souls, including the Girondin Jean-Baptiste Louvet, whose newspaper Roland had once funded, and helped set up the Hospice de Sainte-Croix for the aged indigents of Bordeaux.

  She knew she could threaten or tease Ysabeau into complying with her demands, but when nineteen-year-old Marc-Antoine Jullien (son of Rosalie Jullien), an ardent Robespierrist charged with purifying and regenerating the revolutionary regime in Bordeaux, arrived there on 10 April it was clear that her reign of mercy was over. Thérésia’s emollient beauty would not melt his glacial revolutionary virtue.

  Jullien wrote to inform Robespierre that ‘Bordeaux seems to have been until now a labyrinth of intrigues and waste. Revolutionary justice here is hungrier for money than blood. One woman has captivated the authorities of the entire town. The favourite is called Thérésia Cabarrus. It is she who forced the Committee of Surveillance to give free rein to
her corruptions,’ he wrote, his tone rising to shrill hysteria. ‘I denounce the free union between Tallien and this foreign woman. I accuse Tallien of softness and moderation.’

  Thérésia made a final attempt to demonstrate her unimpeachable republicanism four days after Jullien’s arrival, when she delivered a second sermon, this time to Bordeaux’s National Club. Her subject was women, that ‘portion of the human race which exercises such a great influence on morals’. Despite the lack of humanity Robespierre and his followers had recently shown women as varied as Marie-Antoinette, Manon Roland and the members of the Société des Républicaines-Révolutionnaires, Thérésia hoped that her eloquence would soften their hearts towards her, but she could hardly have chosen a less auspicious subject.

  She opened conventionally, insisting that she did not want women to develop ‘the absurd ambition of appropriating men’s rights, and thus lose the virtues of their own sex’. But, she continued, in a republic, ‘everything must be republican’: everyone must serve their country. How could women instil modesty and morality into their children, if they were not first taught them? How could they acquire the character, sentiment and goodwill necessary to be wives and mothers if they were not educated and respected? In particular, Thérésia requested for women a role as nurses of the unfortunate, the sick and the dying, for which their quality of compassion especially fitted them. Compassion–which she had shown so fearlessly in Bordeaux–she described as ‘the germ inherent in all virtues…not a sterile, fleeting emotion but a profound and bravely active sentiment’. She urged her listeners to allow women to take the name of citoyenne, ‘the veritable title of their public-spiritedness’, not as an empty description but with pride and faith, and concluded by expressing her own hope of being ‘one of the first to carry out these sweet, these delightful duties’.

  Thérésia’s discourse was published and distributed, as her last one had been, and delivered to the National Convention. On 24 April it was read out in front of the deputies there, who applauded it and gave it an honourable mention in their minutes. But Robespierre, who had lost his own mother’s love (he was orphaned as a child) and was incapable of forming an intimate, adult relationship with a woman, was hardly likely to be moved by her appeal. Impulsive, spoiled, untroubled by conventional morality, easily swayed by her emotions, Thérésia represented all that Robespierre despised politically and distrusted personally–a warm-hearted, flesh-and-blood symbol (to a man who was wary of the flesh above all else) of all he hoped to eradicate from France. If, as Thérésia said, they had met in the early years of the revolution, the motives behind his almost obsessive interest in destroying her become even clearer.

  On 4 May, in Bordeaux, Thérésia received a passport permitting her to travel to Orléans (in these times passports were necessary for domestic as well as international travel) where she said she planned to live in retirement. ‘Signalement: taille cinq pieds 2 pouces, visage blanc et joli, cheveux noirs, front bien fait, sourcils clairs, yeux bruns, nez bien fait, bouche petite, menton rond’–‘Description: height five feet 2 inches, face pale and pretty, hair black, forehead well made, light eyebrows, brown eyes, nose well made, small mouth, round chin.’ Leaving Théodore behind with an uncle and the faithful Joseph, she set out for Paris via Orléans. Along the way, her carriage made a stop near Blois where she met another young fugitive, Joseph de Camaran, comte de Chimay. Her distress and her beauty would stay in his mind.

  Just after her arrival in the capital, on 20 May, Robespierre personally signed the warrant for Thérésia’s arrest, his tiny writing isolated at the bottom of the page. Also in his hand was the order that when she was arrested, she was to be held in solitary confinement and forbidden any privileges, like exercise, that might allow her to communicate with anyone. His interest was unusual: in the month of Prairial, Robespierre wrote only fourteen of the 608 documents issued by the Committee of Public Safety for which an author can be ascertained, and his cramped signature on their decrees was equally rare. ‘All the papers relating to the Cabarrus woman must be gathered together,’ he wrote, assigning two men to her case. ‘Never did Robespierre pursue a victim more remorselessly,’ remembered one of his associates.

  Since Tallien was under investigation, the lovers did not dare to meet openly, although one spy reported seeing them dining together in a restaurant in the Palais Royal. Like so many at this time, Thérésia could not risk spending too many nights in one place, moving between the houses of friends willing to take the risk of harbouring her.

  Paris in the spring of 1794 was a city of ‘silent streets and barricaded doors’. ‘Everyone seemed to slip through the shadows’; people wore their hats drawn down over their faces and dared give no sign of recognizing one another on the streets. ‘Women did not go out at all, men rarely,’ remembered the marquis de Frénilly. ‘The whole of people’s lives was centred in their homes where they spoke little, in a low voice, and with the doors securely closed.’ Servants were encouraged to inform on their masters, children to inform on their teachers; no one could be trusted.

  Blood literally flowed in the drains, and the city stank like a charnel-house. Dogs drank from the thick red pools beneath the scaffold in the Place de la Révolution, while alongside it hordes of listless prostitutes of all ages and both sexes grimly solicited custom. The executioners complained that they had to replace their clothes all the time because they were so stained and sodden with blood. One of the only concessions made by the Commune to the palpable fears of Parisians was to maintain the street lights at night.

  Even–or perhaps especially–the deputies of the Convention were loath to walk the streets unprotected. Many carried pistols or swordsticks, or paid guards to accompany them. Tallien had a Spanish dagger that Thérésia had given him. One night in June, according to one of the spies directly accountable to Robespierre, he walked home from the Jacobins with a man with a ‘heavy stick’. The spy, Guérin, complained that the street in which Tallien lived–the rue de la Perle in the Marais–was so straight and short that it was hard to keep watch on him; there was nowhere for an observer to conceal himself.

  Robespierre too needed bodyguards. The president of the Committee of Public Safety, Marc Guillaume Vadier, posted his own spy, one Paul Auguste Taschereau-Fargues, to watch over Robespierre; but Taschereau double-crossed him, spying on Vadier for Robespierre instead. Their world was claustrophobically intimate, overstretched loyalties criss-crossing in a complex web of treachery and allegiance, given then withdrawn: Taschereau was also a friend of Tallien’s, and through him Thérésia’s, advising them about how she could avoid arrest.

  Three days after Robespierre signed Thérésia’s arrest warrant, a nineteen-year-old girl called Cécile Renault went to his lodgings in the rue Saint Honoré. When she was told that he was not at home, and asked what her business was, she replied that she had just come ‘to see what sort of a thing was a tyrant’. Although she was only carrying two unconvincing-looking knives, she was accused of attempting to murder Robespierre. When questioned by the Committee of Public Safety, she said that she deserved to die–not because she had wanted to kill Robespierre but because of her anti-republican sentiments. Renault and her entire family–except for two brothers fighting at the front, whom they could not be bothered to wait to recall–were guillotined.

  Robespierre’s response to this assassination attempt, if such it was, and another two days earlier on his colleague Collot d’Herbois, was to introduce the laws of 22 Prairial (10 June) which were designed to expedite revolutionary justice. Henceforth people could be arrested simply for ‘impairing the purity of the revolutionary government’–a crime of which Thérésia was certainly guilty. When suspects were tried, no proof was needed to convict them and they were not allowed either a defence counsel or to call witnesses. ‘Arbitrary power against which the revolution ought to have been directed,’ as Germaine de Staël observed, ‘had acquired a new strength from the revolution itself.’

  Towards the end of M
ay, Thérésia and Tallien were reunited at her ex-husband’s country house, Fontenay-aux-Roses, near Versailles. Robespierre’s spies reported that Tallien had spent several nights at the house of the Cabarrus-Fontenay woman, former noble, whom they had thought was in Paris. The net was closing in on her.

  Thérésia was arrested in a Versailles hotel on the night of 30 May and taken straight to a revolutionary committee in the capital where she was interrogated. Helen Williams, arrested with her sister the previous summer, described the committee rooms and their antechambers at night as ‘crowded with commissaries and soldiers, some sleeping, some writing, and others amusing themselves with pleasantries of a revolutionary nature, to which we listened trembling’. Pikes and guns were leant casually against the walls, tobacco smoke filled the air and the red-capped guards were usually drunk. As Richard Cobb writes, inebriation was ‘an important component in a certain type of revolutionary excitability’. Wine stains smear the minute books of popular societies and gaolers’ records.

  By 1794 Paris had about fifty makeshift prisons, but they were so full that it took some time to persuade one to admit Thérésia. She and her escort spent a day and most of a night driving around Paris looking for a gaol with space for her, passing the bloody guillotine in the Place de la Révolution several times, to the delight of her guards. Finally the women’s side of La Force, originally a debtors’ prison, in the Marais, agreed to take her.