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

by Moore, Lucy

  La Chaumiére was at the heart of this corruption. It became known as a salon in which business was done. ‘What do they do at Mme Tallien’s?’ asked the journal Le Thé. ‘They negotiate.’ For Thérésia, used since her spell in Bordeaux to asking and granting favours, it was a small step to the lobbying culture endemic to these post-Thermidor times. She ‘enjoyed the only role fitting to her sex,’ remembered Antoine Thibaudeau. ‘She took over the department of favours.’ Nothing was too much trouble: ‘the beautiful Mme Tallien always loved to please her friends’.

  Thérésia dispensed kisses to Jacobins who promised they would convert, and to journalists like Lacretelle who wrote flattering things about her. People sought protectors for new business ideas and help in recovering confiscated fortunes or obtaining official pardons for émigré friends and relatives. ‘Contracts might be for anything, from oats to cavalry sabres, and as likely as not carried off by a woman wearing flesh-coloured tights and diamonds on her bare toes.’ Paul Barras said that Thérésia did happily accept money for favours, but it was ‘not the main object…[rather] the means of obtaining the pleasures she was fond of which she procured for others’.

  Perhaps because he felt emasculated by his rich wife, Tallien increasingly became known for his avarice. Although he saved nothing, his enemies claimed that he made fortunes several times over through stock-jobbing, speculating and trafficking in black-market necessities like candles and soap. Journalists (he had reopened his newspaper, L’Ami des Citoyens) and deputies to the Convention earned very modest wages; Tallien may have felt obliged to resort to these schemes just to keep up with Thérésia and her profligate friends.

  Voices of opposition to the new regime and to those who were seen to be profiting from it had been heard towards the end of 1794, and by early the next year the complaints were growing louder. The ostentatious wealth of the new rich only served to highlight the destitution of the rest of society. Tallien’s willingness to surrender to the luxuries bought by his wife’s wealth was seen as moral weakness; his devotion to a woman who embodied such unrepublican virtues as opulence and sexual liberation undermined his political reputation. ‘It is impossible, no matter how much strength of character one has, not to be influenced by the society one frequents,’ wrote one former Jacobin, Antoine Thibaudeau, commenting on how easily members of the Convention were seduced, mocked and used in the new salons of Thermidorian Paris.

  The similarity between La Chaumiére and Marie-Antoinette’s toy farm at Versailles was not lost on Tallien’s opponents. As early as January 1795, newspapers that obsessed over Thérésia’s every appearance were calling her ‘une nouvelle Antoinette’ as often as they described her as a goddess. Boudoir politics was thought to have returned, and Thérésia, who exemplified this new corruption, was condemned. ‘The airs of a courtesan suffice to make her a sensation,’ commented one journalist sniffily in January 1795.

  That same January women waiting in bread lines were saying that the counterrevolution was not far away and that the market women who had started the revolution would bring it to an end. The contrast between rich and poor, between the sated and the starving, had become too great to bear. By March the women were protesting on the streets and calling for a king who would give them bread; others were heard to say that at least under Robespierre their bellies had been full. Bread was limited to four ounces per person per day and the price of a loaf was soaring. An insurrectionary poster was pasted on to the city walls, calling for the wives of sans-culottes to occupy the tribunes of the Convention to prevent the counterrevolution taking place.

  In early April hungry, angry men and women surged into the Convention hall and scuffled with guards and muscadins, calling for bread. When calm was restored, the Thermidorians used the disturbance to expel the remaining Jacobins from their number. The most prominent of them, Barère, Collot d’Herbois and Billaud-Varenne, who had been arrested the previous month, were deported to Guiana. Marat, patron saint of the Jacobins, had been officially de-Pantheonized two months earlier.

  Counterrevolutionary reaction, known as the White Terror, was spreading across France. Jacobin prisoners were massacred and ‘aristocrats’ released from gaol. National conscription meant that deserters from the army were officially viewed as traitors, but in many conservative areas of the country they were welcomed home. Royalists–constitutional monarchists rather than agitators for a return to the ancien régime–gathered beneath their banners a whole variety of followers with new grievances and resentments. In Amiens they cried, ‘Du pain et un roi!’

  In Paris the people’s demands for bread had not been satisfied, and in early May women were observed taunting and provoking their men ‘to rebellion and to pillage’, calling them cowards and haranguing them for allowing their families to starve. By then a baguette from the baker’s cost 16 livres; they had been 8 or 9 sous in 1789. Women were goading their husbands–in the words of a police spy, ‘firing them up with their seditious propositions and stimulating the most violent excitement’, communicating all their rage to them. ‘If you go to present a petition about it [the lack of affordable bread] to the National Convention, you are arrested,’ one woman was heard to say to a friend on 18 April. ‘The popular societies have been closed. That was in order to plunge us back into slavery. We are all suckers.’

  On 1 Prairial (20 May) women occupied the tribunes of the Convention while their husbands and sons outside armed themselves with pikes and cannon. The crowd cried, ‘Bread or death!’ and ‘Du pain et la constitution de 1793!’, storming the hall in defiance of the guards, who tried to herd the women out of the galleries with whips and the butt ends of their bayonets. When the deputy who had been charged with provisioning Paris confronted the mob he was shot and his head stuck on to a pike. The protesters forced the Convention to pass a series of Jacobin measures that would have bolstered the dwindling power of the wards, and of the revolutionary committees, before being expelled from the hall by the National Guard late that night; the measures taken were repealed then and there.

  The Convention responded to the violence–of the same kind that two or three years earlier had been coordinated and manipulated by men like Danton, Hébert and Tallien himself–by disarming the faubourgs. The women of faubourg Saint-Antoine at first resisted handing over their cannon, but without success. From this point onwards, it would no longer be possible for the people of the streets to generate political change through protest and uprising.

  Common women, described as bloodthirsty Furies, were seen as instigators of this violence. One hundred and forty-eight were arrested for inciting the revolt. Most had previous records as militants; most were wage-earners whose brothers, husbands or sons were fighting in the republican army; none were young mothers. Pauline Léon, so recently released from prison, was not among them.

  Women were barred from attending the Convention without a male companion, and from participating in political meetings. Gathering in public in groups of five or more was forbidden. The Société Fraternelle des Deux Sexes was denounced as a ‘hotbed of insurrection’ but its female members resisted attempts to close it down.

  Even the national spinning workshops set up in 1790 were dismantled; women were officially encouraged to work at home. In this way, said the official report to the Convention, the unfortunate classes would avoid long and miserable journeys to work, thus saving time they could devote to their families. The manufacturers’ expenses would be lessened and quality improved. Working at home would also prevent ‘inconveniences that might result–for morals or for public tranquillity–from numerous gatherings of simple people who are credulous and easily led astray by perfidious suggestions of malevolence and seduction’.

  For these women of the Parisian streets, whom the revolution in all its incarnations had failed to provide with food for their children, the response to the riots of Prairial was one betrayal too many. How else could the working woman ‘assess the revolution except by examining her wrecked household’, asks
the historian Olwen Hufton, ‘by reference to her children aborted or born dead, by her own sterility, by the disappearance of her few sticks of furniture, by the crumbling of years of effort to hold the frail family economy together, and what could her conclusion be except that the price paid for putative liberty had been far too high?’

  From 1795 many returned to the old ways, once again finding the support and succour they needed in the Church. The Thermidorians had re-established religious tolerance, and on 11 Prairial the Convention was persuaded to authorize worship in former churches. A few days later mass was celebrated in fifteen churches in Paris for the first time in three years.

  In late June, encouraged by the change in the political atmosphere since the events of Thermidor, royalist forces landed at Quiberon in Brittany. By July Rose de Beauharnais’s ex-lover, General Hoche, had defeated them and taken nine thousand men prisoner. As émigrés returning to France in arms, they were all automatically subject to the death penalty. Hoche and Tallien, there as a répresentant, hesitated to carry out the sentences, and told the prisoners they would sue for acquittal. Tallien returned to Paris to present their case to the Convention.

  But in Paris Tallien had been accused of corresponding with royalists, and, desperate to prove himself a true republican, he argued instead that rigour rather than clemency be shown to the rebels. About 750 men were executed. Thérésia was devastated by the deaths. Weeping, she told Charles de Lacretelle afterwards that if she had been there, she believed she could have prevented the killings. On a political level, Tallien had endeared himself neither to the increasingly powerful constitutional monarchist faction nor to the remaining radicals.

  Quiberon, said Thérésia, gave people an excuse to tear down the hero of Thermidor, although in truth that process of re-evaluation had already begun. Tallien’s political enemies had remembered his role during the September massacres as secretary to the Commune, and accused him of colluding in the atrocities committed then. Later that autumn Antoine Thibaudeau publicly reminded Tallien that he had defended the bloody events of September 1792. The windows of La Chaumière were smashed. ‘But for me, I could not abandon my duties,’ Thérésia lamented. ‘I could not accuse him who had brought such glory to my name; I would have had to bid farewell to that glory which so intoxicated me.’

  Tallien failed to plead for the Quiberon prisoners on the anniversary of 9 Thermidor. Thérésia remembered giving a dinner that night at which she raised a toast: ‘To forget mistakes, to forgive injuries, to the reconciliation of all the French.’ Her guests then raised their glasses, in return, to ‘Notre Dame de Thermidor’. But although she was still adored by Parisian society, the backlash had begun. Her enemies had started calling Thérésia ‘Notre Dame de Septembre’.

  Even a great love would have trembled beneath the pressures imposed on Thérésia and Tallien’s marriage, and theirs was an alliance born of desire, fear and ambition. Tallien had betrayed his revolutionary principles for Thérésia and she had abandoned her caste for him. In Paris, the common ground they had shared in Bordeaux had slipped away from beneath their feet. ‘Tallien’s company repels me, but I cannot pull myself away from it,’ she said to a friend. ‘It is the only way of satisfying my thirst for celebrity.’

  Tallien resented the adulation still showered upon his wife; Thérésia could not learn to respect her husband. Watching them together, said one observer, was like seeing ‘a lion sharing a cell with a pet dog’. Tallien was a man ‘with nothing in the way of merit’, said one of his fellow-deputies. Even Thermidor, wrote his accomplice on that day Paul Barras, showed ‘Tallien incapable of rising above the common-place’. His eloquence was contrived, his conversation laborious, his manner vulgar. Barras nicknamed him Robinet d’Eau–‘water tap’–because of the relentless stream of his insipid monologues.

  ‘Too much blood [stained] the hands of that man,’ Thérésia told a friend later. ‘I was always repelled by him.’ But she never reproached herself for her association with Tallien, considering herself not an accomplice to his crimes, but rather the only thing that had restrained him.

  Sensing that he had lost her love, Tallien responded with rage, violence and jealousy. By late 1795 the husband of the most desired woman in Paris was said to be boasting of his encounters with prostitutes. And as Tallien’s marriage turned sour his political career waned; his personal and public fortunes were inextricably linked.

  On 22 August, the Convention approved a new constitution which returned control of France to men of property–a return, as some had it, to the state of affairs in 1789. It was, as Furet writes, ‘another attempt to realise the eighteenth-century ideal of enlightened bourgeois liberalism’: happiness was seen as an end to be pursued, not a right to be seized; equality meant equality of opportunity, not equality of rank or wealth. Avoiding tyranny and promoting stability were its twin aims. Former radicals accepted this retreat from their ideals because the Terror’s excesses had been so appalling.

  A French citizen was defined at this time as a male taxpayer, born and resident in France and over twenty-one years of age; he had the right to vote for ‘electors’, men of twenty-five and over who possessed disposable incomes equivalent to two hundred days’ ordinary labour. These perhaps three hundred thousand electors chose the governing houses, made up of the Council of Five Hundred and the Council of the Elders. The Elders would select five Directors (who formed the government’s executive branch) from a list of ten names nominated by the Council of Five Hundred. Tallien was elected to this Council, but given no more prominent role in the new government.

  One of the first five Directors was Paul Barras, who assumed office in October 1795. Barras, like Tallien, was a former deputy to the National Convention who had been a représentant en mission in 1793, then recalled by the Committee of Public Safety in early 1794. Like Tallien, he had been hailed as one of the architects of Robespierre’s fall. The similarities between them ended there.

  Barras was forty when he moved into his official apartments at the Luxembourg, the former palace and revolutionary prison renamed the Palais Égalité. He was an elegant, self-assured ci-devant viscount from Provence whose ancient lineage had not hampered his republican ambitions. Tall, dark, unscrupulous and inscrutable, Barras was a dissolute, dandified roué who loved pleasure as much as his mistress, Rose de Beauharnais, and Thérésia. At parties, accosted by colleagues, he would say, ‘À demain les affaires!’–‘Leave business till tomorrow!’

  At the round of balls, concerts, dinners and card parties of the hedonistic summer of 1795, Barras’s constant companion was a swarthy Corsican soldier, Napoléon Bonaparte, whose career seemed paralysed by his previous support for Robespierre. Barras and Napoléon had met at the siege of Toulon in the autumn of 1793, where Napoléon showed the first signs of the military genius that would propel him to greatness. With his stringy, unwashed hair, bony face and ill-fitting greatcoat, the young general possessed none of the looks, influence or wealth that distinguished the men of Thérésia’s circle; compliments froze in his mouth and he laughed at the wrong moments. But what Bonaparte lacked in polish he made up for in drive and self-belief.

  When Barras brought him to La Chaumière, the inexperienced young soldier was captivated by Thérésia: by her fame, her dazzling looks, her casual friendliness. Writing to his young sweetheart in Marseille, he callously described the women he was meeting in Paris in words that vividly evoked Thérésia. They were, he said, as

  beautiful as in old romances…as learned as scholars…their toilette, the arts and pleasure occupy all their time. They are philosophers, lovers, courtesans and artists. But what all these frivolous women have in common is an astonishing love of bravery and glory. Truly, they inspire the nation with the courage to conquer Europe…their work and their delight is to win brave men to their cause.

  Misinterpreting Thérésia’s open informality–when he appeared in a brand-new uniform made of rationed fabric she had requested for him she called out, ‘So,
my friend, you have your trousers!’–he dared try to make love to her, declaring his ‘unconquerable passion’. Thérésia responded with an incredulous laugh that Napole Barras had a solution to his protéon would not forget.

  Barras had a solution to his protégé’s disappointment–his own mistress, Rose de Beauharnais, of whom he had tired. Placed next to her at dinner chez Barras, the ambitious Napoléon was intoxicated by Rose’s sweetness, her graceful elegance and practised admiration. As for Thérésia, ‘roi Barras’, as he was becoming known, had plans for her too.

  17

  RETOURNÉE

  Germaine de Staël

  MAY 1795–JANUARY 1798

  The universe is in France; outside it, there is nothing.

  GERMAINE DE STAËL

  IN MAY 1795, Germaine de Staël wrote to a friend that she was ‘joyeuse, sur la route de Paris’. After nearly three years of exile, she was returning to the city she loved more than anywhere else in the world, the place that consoled her for the happiness that continued to elude her in her private life. Heavily pregnant, she had left blood-soaked Paris in September 1792, as the massacres spread across the city. She spent three months at her father’s house, Coppet, in Switzerland, waiting for her second son to be born, and five weeks later rushed to England to be with his father, her lover of four years, Louis de Narbonne.

  Narbonne had not been waiting for her. Devastated by the news of Louis XVI’s execution, he believed that he had betrayed the royalist cause by not dying at the king’s side; he had little emotional energy left to devote to the woman who had persuaded him to change his political allegiances when they fell in love. The path of their affair, conceived at the start of the revolution, had followed its course from exhilarated optimism through passion and betrayal to resigned futility.