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

  Liberty

  The Lives and Times of Six Women in Revolutionary France

  Lucy Moore

  for Justin

  From my earliest days I had a feeling

  that adventures lay in store for me.

  Lucy de la Tour du Pin

  Contents

  Epigraph

  Introduction: Citoyennes

  1 Salonnière: Germaine de Staël, May–October 1789

  2 Fille Sans-Culotte: Pauline Léon, January 1789–March 1791

  3 Clubiste: Théroigne de Méricourt, July 1789–August 1790

  4 Mondaine: Thérésia de Fontenay, May 1789–April 1791

  5 Républicaine: Manon Roland, February 1791–March 1792

  6 Amazone: Théroigne de Méricourt, August 1790–August 1792

  7 Émigrée: Germaine de Staël, August–September 1792

  8 Femme Politique: Manon Roland, August 1792–May 1793

  9 Mariée: Juliette Récamier, February–April 1793

  10 Activiste: Pauline Léon, May–August 1793

  11 Prisonnière: Manon Roland, June–August 1793

  12 Révolutionnaire: Pauline Léon, August–November 1793

  13 Victime: Manon Roland, August–November 1793

  14 Maîtresse: Thérésia Cabarrus Fontenay, April 1793–April 1794

  15 Libératrice: Thérésia Cabarrus Fontenay, May–July 1794

  16 Épouse: Thérésia Tallien, August 1794–October 1795

  17 Retournée: Germaine de Staël, May 1795–January 1798

  18 Icône: Juliette Récamier, April 1797–April 1811

  19 Femmes

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Words and Phrases

  Acknowledgments

  Searchable Terms

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  INTRODUCTION

  CITOYENNES

  The women have certainly had a considerable share in the French revolution: for, whatever the imperious lords of the creation may fancy, the most important events which take place in this world depend a little on our influence; and we often act in human affairs like those secret springs in mechanism, by which, though invisible, great movements are regulated.

  HELEN MARIA WILLIAMS

  THE NATIONAL ASSEMBLY–France’s first constitutional government–met between October 1789 and September 1792 in the covered riding-school of the Tuileries palace in Paris. The long, narrow manège [see ‘Words and Phrases’] had been remodelled to accommodate the deputies with a classical austerity intended to correspond to the gravity of their new political responsibilities.

  Although women did not possess the rights either of voting or of holding office, they were permitted into the hall’s galleries to observe and marvel at the workings of the administration and the debates on France’s future. On any given day in the spring of 1791, four women might have been sitting among the onlookers gathered to watch the Assembly’s proceedings.

  The first was a dark-haired, red-faced woman of twenty-five, looking perennially dishevelled despite her expensive, extravagantly dé-colleté dress. As she watched the men below her debate, it was clear that several of them were her friends and that she was well acquainted with every argument they put forth. She leaned eagerly forward to catch every word, fiddling distractedly with a twisted scrap of paper that showed off her fine hands.

  This was Germaine de Staël, one of the richest women in Europe, daughter of Louis XVI’s former Finance Minister Jacques Necker [see ‘Secondary Figures’], whose dazzling intelligence never quite consoled her for not being beautiful. She was at the heart of a group of progressive aristocrats she believed would shape a new, reformed France ruled by a constitutional monarchy; her centrist coterie included the hero of the American War of Independence, the marquis de Lafayette, toeing an uneasy line between his liberal principles and his loyalty to the king.

  Her critics found her over-bearing and even her friends called her self-centred, but such was the power of Germaine’s intellect and conversation that within half an hour of meeting her most people, despite themselves, were utterly captivated. ‘I know of no woman, nor indeed any man, more convinced of his or her own personal superiority over every other person,’ wrote one of her lovers, Benjamin Constant, ‘or who allows this conviction to weigh less heavily on others.’

  Staël, as a novelist, social commentator and literary theorist, left behind a wealth of source material that, unusually, spans the entire period before, during and after the revolution. She is not only the best and most consistently documented of this book’s six women, in terms of her own letters and of being mentioned in other people’s correspondence and memoirs, but also the one who wrote the most eloquently about the revolution itself.

  Germaine had little time for other women, but one acquaintance who might have been sitting nearby was the delectable Thérésia de Fontenay. Just eighteen years old, already married for four years and the mother of a little boy, tender-hearted Thérésia was the toast of Parisian society; the only thing she enjoyed more than pleasure was attention. She would have been wearing fashionably simple, patriotic clothes–a white muslin dress with a tricolour sash fastened with a brooch made out of one of the shards of the fallen Bastille. At her side was her radical lover whose brother, a former marquis, was closely allied to the most extreme-left deputies including Maximilien Robespierre.

  Manon Roland, the thirty-seven-year-old wife of a provincial civil servant, sat in another part of the gallery, well away from the world of high society. Demurely dressed, eyes downcast, her virtuous exterior concealed an ardent, rebellious heart. Drawn to Paris in 1791 by the events taking place there, she and her husband became central members of a group of middle-class republican lawyers and journalists who included Robespierre and the progressive journalist Jacques-Pierre Brissot. Unlike Thérésia de Fontenay, Manon had chafed at the old order of things. When the revolution came it was the fulfilment of all her dreams.

  Manon watched the debates as keenly as Germaine, knowing the deputies speaking, and their arguments, because many of them met regularly in her drawing-room. But while Germaine would have given her guests champagne; Manon proudly served sugar-water. With her love of order, she deplored the chaos of the Assembly’s sessions: the uncontrollable deputies shouted over one another to make their voices heard, preventing the business of the day from being accomplished.

  Pauline Léon had no such scruples. She heckled from the galleries, shouting down moderates like Lafayette and cheering her hero Robespierre. No portrait of her survives – if one was ever made – but as a thirty-three-year-old single woman of the streets, who helped her widowed mother run the family chocolate-making business and look after her five younger brothers and sisters, it is likely that she was well made and strongly built. A fresh white handkerchief covered her hair, pinned up with a tricolour rosette, and she was wearing a blue woollen waistcoat over a white chemise, the sleeves pulled up to expose her tanned forearms; a red and white striped skirt with an apron; and wooden clogs.

  Sixty-five per cent of French women of the late eighteenth century could not write their names; the illiterate would have been slightly fewer in Paris. Pauline Léon could read and write – she had been educated by her father – but she was a woman of the people and, as with most of them, it is harder to build up a rounded picture of her life because the sources concerning her are so scarce. No onlookers described her behaviour as a child; she left no diaries or letters. In a rare document produced while she was in prison in 1794, Lé
on testified to roaming Paris from 1789 onwards, frequenting political assemblies, demonstrating on the streets as well as ‘manifesting my love for the fatherland’. She was less forthcoming about harassing and beating up passers-by for not being good ‘patriots’–a synonym for devotion to the revolution.

  A notable absence from the galleries on this imaginary afternoon was the former courtesan Théroigne de Méricourt, who before leaving Paris in the late summer of 1790 had been such a regular observer of the Assembly’s sessions that she had her own seat reserved for her. She was known for always wearing a riding-habit of an austerely masculine cut, either in red, black or white. Although she had intended her trademark costume to compel men to treat her as an equal rather than as a woman, by wearing it she became one of the feminine icons of the revolution.

  Abandoned by a faithless lover and reviled for having lost her reputation, Théroigne was very much alone in the world. She had suffered more at the hands of men than any of the other women here, and she was the most passionate and lonely campaigner for the liberties which the revolution seemed to promise women but ultimately failed to deliver. For nineteenth-century historians the image of pretty Théroigne in her red riding-habit, her bloody sword held aloft, represented all the savage excesses of the popular revolution; but this portrait of her bore very little relation to the earnest young woman whose early hopes were so disappointed by that revolution.

  Another figure completes the sextet described in this book, but in the spring of 1791 Juliette Bernard, the future Madame Récamier, was still a bourgeois schoolgirl of thirteen, absorbed in studying English, Italian, dancing and the harp.

  One further feminine image appears and reappears throughout these pages: not a real woman, but a constant, ghostly presence alongside her six flesh-and-blood sisters. Throughout this period Liberty–the ideal, or hope, that inspired the revolution–was represented as a goddess and exalted, pursued, manipulated and betrayed by turns.

  The world of these six women, centred on Paris, was a small and intimate one. Less than six hundred thousand people lived in the capital in 1791 and their lives touched tangentially, crossed over without pausing and sometimes intersected. Respectable Manon Roland would never have received Théroigne de Méricourt at her salon, but one of her dearest friends fell hopelessly in love with her; Thérésia de Fontenay would not have known who Pauline Léon was, but before she met him her future husband gave a speech at a popular political club of which Léon was a member; despite the gap in their ages and backgrounds, Juliette Récamier would become one of Germaine de Staël’s most intimate friends.

  From the start, the revolution coloured every facet of their daily lives. It politicized everything, from clothing to modes of address to what was taught in schools to slang to food. Women, who had no direct influence over the political changes taking place around them, were intimately involved with these cultural changes; after all, they had read the same books and been inspired by the same ideas as their brothers. As the nineteenth-century historian Alexis de Tocqueville wrote of the period leading up to the revolution, even ‘women, amidst their petty household tasks, sometimes dreamed about the great problems of existence’. Many found that they were swept away by the exhilaration and optimism that infused French society, and became as absorbed by the revolution as their husbands and lovers.

  The six women whose experiences form the basis of this book were each transformed by their experiences during the revolution. As Simon Schama writes in his book Citizens, the revolution ‘had the deepest craving for heroes’ embodying the abstract principles they were trying to make real. It also created heroines.

  Although they came from a range of backgrounds and, like looking through different sides of a prism, each illuminates different aspects of the period – from the tomboy Pauline Léon with a brace of pistols tucked into her belt, haranguing the deputies of the National Convention, to the exquisite Juliette Récamier abandoning her inhibitions on the dance floors of the public balls during the Directory – these six women had in common courage, vitality, a youthful energy and a passion that marked the revolution as much as it marked them. Each of them, in her own way, burned to distinguish herself in the great drama unfolding in front of her.

  1

  SALONNIÈRE

  Germaine de Staël

  MAY–OCTOBER 1789

  Mme de Staël’s salon is more than a place where one meets for pleasure: it is a mirror in which we see reflected the image of the times.

  ADAM DE CUSTINE

  EVERY TUESDAY EVENING in the early years of the revolution, Germaine de Staël held a small dinner at her hôtel in the rue du Bac, on Paris’s left bank. She invited a catholic assortment of liberal, anglophile nobles, their glamorous wives and mistresses, and ambitious young men of middling rank. ‘Go hence to Mme de Staël’s,’ wrote Gouverneur Morris, the one-legged American envoy to Paris, in his apple-green journal in January 1791. ‘I meet here the world.’

  For Germaine’s guests, these evenings were a chance to discuss the latest news: books, plays, affairs and, above all, politics, the shared obsession of the day. Thomas Jefferson, a frequent visitor to the rue du Bac, called Paris in 1788 a ‘furnace of politics…men, women and children talk nothing else’. In the words of a foreign observer, the entire country felt ‘that they were on the eve of some great revolution’. For Germaine, her salons, combining her three passions – love, Paris and power – were ‘the noblest pleasure of which human nature is capable’.

  ‘We breathed more freely, there was more air in our lungs,’ she wrote of this optimistic period; ‘the limitless hope of infinite happiness had gripped the nation, as it takes hold of men in their youth, with illusion and without foresight’. If her friend the marquis de Talleyrand could say that no one who had not lived before 1789 could know the true sweetness of living, then Germaine could equally truly declare that for her, nothing could compare to the exquisite flavour of those days between 1788 and 1791 when she was in love and believed a new France was being created within the four gold-embroidered walls of her drawing-room.

  Germaine de Staël was twenty-three in July 1789, the month that her father Jacques Necker, on-and-off Finance Minister to Louis XVI, was sacked by the king. Louis’s powers permitted him to appoint, dismiss and banish ministers at will, so there was nothing unusual in this; what was unusual this time was the response it provoked.

  Necker had made himself unpopular at court by advising the king to make wide-ranging changes to his archaic administration, urging modernization (particularly of the system of taxation, which weighed most heavily on the poor) and greater accountability to the French people. He had encouraged the king to summon the Estates-General, France’s only national representative assembly, for the first time since 1614 and, partly at his daughter’s urging, argued that the three estates (clergy, nobles and commons, known respectively as the First, Second and Third Estates) should vote individually - thus preventing the nobles and clergy from grouping together to block the Third Estate’s demands.

  Hard-line royalists, who feared the changes sweeping France, were convinced Necker would betray the king to his people, and welcomed his downfall. In the royal council, two days before Necker was dismissed, the king’s brother, the comte d’Artois, told the minister to his face that he ought to be hanged; on the same day, in Paris, a well dressed woman was publicly spanked for spitting on his portrait.

  Necker’s defiant attitude towards the king had prompted his discharge and cemented his status as a popular hero; his reputation for financial acumen was matched only by his reputation for probity. Reformers who idolized him saw his expulsion as a manifestation of outmoded arbitrary power and an unwelcome confirmation of the king’s distaste for reform. They rallied to the cause of their champion.

  News of Necker’s dutifully silent departure from Versailles reached Paris on Sunday, 12 July. A large crowd had gathered in the Palais Royal, as it did every Sunday, to eat ices, buy caricatures, ribbons or lottery tick
ets, ogle scantily dressed femmes publiques and magic lantern shows, and listen to orators declaiming against the government. The Palais Royal, owned by the king’s cousin the duc d’Orléans, was a vast, newly built piazza surrounded by colonnaded shops, theatres and cafés. By the mid-1780s, protected from police regulation by its royal owner and encouraged by that owner’s well known antipathy to the court party at Versailles, it had become a city within a city, a place where anything could be seen, said or procured, and the centre of popular opposition to royal abuses.

  On that July afternoon the crowd gathered around a passionate young journalist, Camille Desmoulins, who stood on a table urging his fellow-citizens to rise up against the king’s ‘treachery’ in sacking Necker. ‘To arms, to arms,’ he cried; ‘and,’ seizing a leafy branch from one of the chestnut trees that edged the Palais Royal, ‘let us all take a green cockade, the colour of hope.’ With Desmoulins carried triumphantly aloft, the shouting, clamouring, bell-ringing mob surged on to the streets to search Paris for the weapons that would transform them into an army.

  The king was not unprepared for this type of rising; indeed, one of the underlying causes for the popular uproar that greeted Necker’s dismissal was distrust of the troops–about a third of whom were Swiss or German soldiers rather than French–with which Louis had been quietly surrounding Paris during late June and early July as preparation for a show of force that would silence his critics for good. But the democratic germs of patriotism and reform that had infected the French people had penetrated as far as the lower ranks of the army, for so long a bastion of aristocratic privilege and tradition, and their leaders’ response to the crisis was hesitant. The Palais Royal mob, by evening numbering perhaps six thousand, met a cavalry unit of the Royal-Allemands at the Place Vendôme and the Place Louis XV (later, Place de la Révolution, and still later Place de la Concorde) just to the north-west of the Tuileries palace, and, reinforced by the popular Paris-based gardes françaises, forced the German and Swiss soldiers, in the early hours of 13 July, to retreat from the city centre. After a day of chaos and plunder, on the 14th the people’s army reached the Bastille, and the revolution received its baptism in blood.