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

  The storming of the Bastille was by no means the first act of the revolution. Since 1787, extraordinary developments had been witnessed in government. France was a nation trembling on the brink of change. Its causes were many and varied: ideological, fiscal, constitutional, personal, economic, historical, social, cultural. ‘The Revolution must be attributed to every thing, and to nothing,’ wrote Germaine. ‘Every year of the century led toward it by every path.’ In the summer of 1789 the fateful mechanism that would exchange absolute for representative government (and back again) was already in motion. Nor was Necker’s dismissal the sole cause of the Bastille’s fall. But Germaine de Staël can be forgiven for thinking that her adored father–and through him, she herself–was at the heart of events.

  It was no accident that green, the colour Camille Desmoulins chose as the emblem of hope in the Palais Royal, was the colour of Necker’s livery–and typical of the confusion inherent in the revolution itself that it should be replaced soon after with the tricolour because it was also the livery colour of the king’s unpopular brother, the comte d’Artois. The tricolour contained within it a multitude of references: red and blue for Paris, combined with white for the Bourbon dynasty; red and blue were also the colours of the popular duc d’Orléans. Like everything during this period, these colours were laden with symbolism: white for the revolutionaries’ purity, blue for the heavenly ideals they were pursuing, red for the blood which was already seen as the necessary price of France’s liberation. The tricolour was immediately invested with an almost mystical aura. It became a sacrosanct emblem of the new France that the revolution was creating, materially revered in bits of ribbon representing the fatherland.

  Germaine had been dining with her parents in Versailles when Necker received Louis’s notice on 11 July. Saying nothing, but squeezing his daughter’s hand beneath the table, Necker got into his carriage with his wife as if for their regular evening drive; instead of idling round the park in Versailles, they headed straight for the border with the Low Countries. Germaine returned to Paris that night (fourteen kilometres, a carriage journey of about two hours) and found there a letter from her father informing her of his departure and advising her to go to his country house at Saint-Ouen. Ignoring, despite herself, the crowds already gathered in the rue du Bac to hear news of Necker, she rushed to Saint-Ouen with her husband, only to find there another letter summoning them to Brussels, where they arrived on the 13th. There she found her parents, still wearing the same clothes in which they had sat down to dinner two days earlier.

  After a week Necker received a courier from the king recalling him to Versailles. He deliberated for three days and then began the journey back to Paris with his wife, daughter and son-in-law. Fifteen years later, Germaine remembered how intoxicated she was by the accolades showered on her father, the bliss of basking in his popularity. Women working in the fields fell to their knees as the Neckers’ coach passed by; as they entered each town, their carriage was unhitched from the horses and drawn through the streets by the inhabitants. When they reached the Hôtel de Ville in Paris, where a massive crowd was waiting to greet the man on whom their hopes for reform and prosperity rested, Germaine fainted, feeling she had ‘touched the extreme limits of happiness’.

  The excitement even made her write affectionately to her husband, uncharacteristically sending him in a note, soon after they returned to Paris, ‘mille et mille tendresses’. The same letter concluded, more characteristically, with a message for her father: ‘Tell my father that all of France does not love or admire him as much as I do today.’

  It was in this heady atmosphere that Germaine de Staël’s salon became the most important in Paris. The tradition of the salon, in which an intelligent woman (never her husband) held regular ‘evenings’ for a circle of friends and acquaintances, was a long-established one in France and had ordained Woman, according to the Goncourt brothers a century later, as ‘the governing principle, the directing reason and the commanding voice’ of eighteenth-century high society. The salon may have brought women extraordinary behind-the-scenes influence; but this influence came at a price.

  On the surface, salons might seem nothing more than parties attended by bored, frivolous socialites whose daily lives were governed by their toilettes–aristocratic women changed their clothes several times a day, often while receiving favoured visitors–but the details of these lives in fact reveal the social developments of the times. In an age of rigorous formality, for example, in which behaviour itself seemed bound up in whalebone stays, the ritual of the toilette provided a release, allowing people to see each other in relaxed circumstances. In an age that had almost institutionalized extramarital affairs, it also gave women the chance to display themselves to current or potential lovers beyond the citadel of their petticoats, hoops and corsets: in 1790 it was fashionable to receive friends from the luxury of one’s milk-bath.

  Although she was famously badly dressed, Germaine never lost the ancien régime custom of receiving visitors during her toilette, all through her life carrying on metaphysical conversations with a horde of people while one maid dressed her hair and another did her nails. Her doctor in England in 1792 was surprised to be greeted by Germaine in her bedroom wearing ‘a short petticoat and a thin shirt’, and astonished by her energy. She talked and wrote all day long, he reported, her green leather portable writing-desk permanently open on her knees, whether she was in bed or at dinner. Even when she gave birth there were fifteen people in her bedroom and within three days she was talking as much as ever.

  Before the revolution, every different outfit served a different purpose, and each one minutely indicated the wearer’s status. Wearing unsuitable clothes was an implicit rejection of the hierarchy that controlled society. Inelegant Germaine, who always showed too much flesh–even her travelling dresses had plunging necklines–was by these criteria deeply suspect. Riding-habits were worn to ride or drive in the Bois de Boulogne or go out hunting with the court; day dresses were worn to receive guests at home, to go shopping in the Palais Royal or to attend lectures in the thrilling new sciences of electricity and botany; in the evening, to attend the theatre or a court ball, three-inch heels, heavy makeup and elaborate, pomaded headdresses, snowy-white with powder and sprinkled with jewels, flowers and feathers were de rigueur. Their hair arrangements were often so tall that women had to travel crouching on the floor of their carriages.

  Fluttering a fan in a certain way or placing a patch near the eye as opposed to on the cheek revealed a person’s character without them having to speak. The sociologist Richard Sennett observes of this period that it is hard to imagine how people so governed by ‘impersonal and abstract convention [can] be so spontaneous, so free to express themselves…their spontaneity rebukes the notion that you must lay yourself bare in order to be expressive’. Contemporaries were fully aware of this dichotomy between word and action. ‘A man who placed his hand on the arm of a chair occupied by a lady would have been considered extremely rude,’ wrote the comtesse de Boigne, looking back on the pre-revolutionary period of her youth, and yet language ‘was free to the point of licentiousness’.

  But by the mid-1780s contemporary medical and philosophical views were transforming women’s fashions and habits. In 1772 one doctor described corsets as barbarous, impeding women’s breathing and deforming their chests, and especially dangerous during pregnancy; he was also concerned about the moral effects they produced by displaying the bosom so prominently. His advice was echoed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, prophet of naturalness and sensibility in Émile and La Nouvelle Héloïse, who recommended that children wear loose clothes that would not constrict their growing bodies.

  For the first time, women’s clothes allowed them to breathe and eat freely: the new fashions quite literally liberated their bodies from an armour of stays, panniers and hoops at the same time as the ideological implications of the change in fashion began to liberate their behaviour. In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman written in 179
2 Mary Wollstonecraft declared that stiff, uncomfortable clothes, like the ‘fiction’ of beauty itself, were a means by which society kept women submissive and dependent. Shedding these restrictions would empower them. By this definition Germaine, who rose above her plainness (Gouverneur Morris thought she looked like a chambermaid) and paid scant attention to her dress, was already halfway to emancipation.

  Perhaps the most celebrated proponent of these progressive ideas was the queen, Marie-Antoinette, who was painted by Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun in 1783 in a simple white chemise dress tied at the waist with a satin sash. This seemingly innocent act raised eyebrows for a number of reasons. Chemises were muslin shifts, previously worn only in the intimacy of a toilette (or by prostitutes), so to eighteenth-century eyes Vigée-Lebrun had painted the queen in a shocking state of undress. Furthermore, for the queen herself to reject the formality of court custom–she was traditionally portrayed in carapace-like court dress–carried seditious undertones of disrespect to the traditions she represented. Finally, the chemise de la reine (as it came to be called) was a style anyone could afford. As Mary Robinson, the courtesan who popularized the chemise de la reine in England, commented, ‘the duchess, and her femme de chambre, are dressed exactly alike’. Dress, which had once distinguished between people, was becoming dangerously democratic.

  Manners, too, were changing. As with clothing, the fashion for informality initially came from the top down: in the artificial world of the salon, being able to give the impression of naturalness and ease had long been considered the highest of the social arts. ‘Do not people talk in society of a man being a great actor?’ asked the philosopher Denis Diderot. Just as the cut flowers in her headdress were kept fresh with tiny glass vases hidden in her hair, the salonniére achieved the sparkling effect of spontaneity in conversation through study and discipline. Every day, Mme Geoffrin, celebrated pre-revolutionary hostess to the great Enlightenment philosophers, wrote two letters (in those days an art form) to keep her brain sharp.

  Germaine de Staël’s favourite game was called the Boat, in which everyone present was asked who they would save from a sinking ship. She asked her first lover, Talleyrand, who he would rescue, her or his other mistress Adéle de Flauhaut. He replied that she was so talented she could extricate herself from any predicament; gentility would oblige him to save the resourceless Adéle. Another version of this story has Germaine and Talleyrand actually in a boat, talking about devotion and courage. To her question as to what he would do if she fell in, he reportedly replied, ‘Ah, Madame, you must be such a good swimmer.’ Word games, jokes, debates, making up poems and proverbs and amateur theatricals were salon pastimes designed to stimulate and heighten conversation, which Germaine described as an instrument the French above all other nations liked to play, producing a sublime ‘intellectual melody’. Conversation, she said, was

  a certain way in which people act upon one another, a quick give-and-take of pleasure, a way of speaking as soon as one thinks, of rejoicing in oneself in the immediate present, of being applauded without making an effort, of displaying one’s intelligence by every nuance of intonation, gesture and look–in short, the ability to produce at will a kind of electricity.

  Naturally, Germaine herself excelled at this art: ‘If I was queen,’ said a friend, ‘I should order Mme de Staël to talk to me always.’ When she spoke, constantly fiddling with a small twig or twist of paper which the unkind said was a way of drawing attention to her fine hands, her captivated listeners forgot her scruffy clothes, red face and large frame, noticing only the beautiful expression in her eyes.

  These showers of sparks, as Staël defined the words and ideas that brought a salon to life, showed the importance to French society of writers and philosophers. Salonniéres acted as confidantes, editors, muses and patrons to their talented guests, corresponding with them, intriguing to have them elected to the Academy or appointed to political office and erecting statues in their honour. Women were, according to a 1788 pamphlet entitled Advice to the Ladies, ‘the arbiters of all things…Business, honours, everything is in your hands.’ These roles set a dangerous precedent by giving women powerful identities outside marriage and motherhood.

  Another dangerous precedent set by the salons was the relatively open access to them. Women who wanted to have the best thinkers in Europe at their feet were unconcerned about their breeding, and willing to run the moral and political risks of being exposed to their exciting new philosophies. It was at Versailles and in the most exclusive salons in Paris that the ‘bourgeois’ works of Diderot, Rousseau and the artist Jean-Baptiste Greuze were celebrated.

  Contemporary opinion was divided over the wisdom of women occupying such a prominent place in society. On the whole, the philosophers who frequented salons and benefited from their hostesses’ efforts on their behalf were liberal-thinking, although many believed that trying to impose uniformity on men and women was to challenge nature’s own distinctions. To equalize men and women, wrote the novelist Restif de la Bretonne in 1776, ‘is to denature them.’ Implicit in all this was the understanding that of the two sexes, the masculine was undoubtedly the superior. Diderot held that ‘beauty, talents and wit’ would in any circumstances captivate a man, ‘but these advantages peculiar to a few women will not establish anywhere a general tyranny of the weaker sex over the robust one’.

  Many reformers saw the influence women wielded as evidence of the corruption of the ancien régime. Boudoir politics, as it was called, when women manipulated their family, friends and, still worse, their lovers, to gain personal influence in the political world from which they were theoretically excluded, was held up before the revolution as one of the chief problems with the French system. Thomas Jefferson told Washington in 1788 that women’s solicitations ‘bid defiance to [natural] laws and regulation’ and had reduced France to a ‘desperate state’. The fact that women could play a role in politics at all was, for reformers of all stripes, one of the essential justifications for change.

  ‘The influence of women, the ascendant of good company, gilded salons, appeared very terrible to those who were not admitted themselves,’ conceded Germaine de Staël. While she acknowledged that ancien régime women ‘were involved in everything’ on behalf of their husbands, brothers and sons, she maintained they had no effect on ‘enlightened and natural intelligence’ like that her father possessed; in this as in everything, she believed herself an exception.

  The prevailing view, propounded by the great naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, was that women, inherently more gentle and loving than men, played a valuable social role by moderating masculine energies. Germaine agreed, arguing that French women were accustomed to take the lead in conversation in their homes, which elevated and softened discussions on public affairs. This more temperate view did allow that wives and mothers were essential elements of a civilized society, and some radical thinkers went so far as to suggest that if women were educated they would make their husbands happier and their sons more successful. Mankind would enter into ‘all its vigour, all its splendour’, wrote Philibert Riballier in 1779, if women could be made ‘strong, robust, courageous, educated and even learned’.

  Riballier’s ‘even learned’ is crucial, because it reveals, even in works that were outwardly sympathetic to women, a belittling tone beneath the praise. The duchesse d’Abrantes commented that before the revolution women seemed to be esteemed but in fact had only the appearance of influence. In 1785 Mme de Coicy said that although France was called ‘the paradise of women’ its female subjects were ‘unworthily scorned and mistreated’, despite their superiority to all other European women. The privileged few who became powerful, like Mme de Pompadour, Louis XV’s mistress, generally acquired that power at the cost of their reputations.

  Although strong women had been tolerated and even appreciated through French history, there was an equally potent strain of misogyny to which Germaine de Staël, as gauche as she was eloquent, frequently fell victi
m. In her writings, throughout her life, she railed against the double standards that permitted women to be judged by different standards than men. Women, as she put it in her novel Corinne, were fettered by a thousand bonds from which men were free. Every man of her acquaintance might, as she did, take lovers, neglect his spouse, write books or involve himself in politics; they were not criticized for doing those things at all, but for doing them well or badly, while she would always be castigated for her looks or her private life. In On Literature she wrote feelingly of the ‘injustice of men towards distinguished women’, their inability to forgive ‘genuine superiority in a woman of the most perfect integrity’. The knowledge that she was as intelligent as any man of her generation but could never truly have a public life tortured her, and only at her salon was she consoled.

  But Germaine was extraordinary, and her contemporaries did recognize it. ‘The feelings to which she gives rise are different from those that any woman can inspire,’ observed one, unwittingly providing a list of the feminine qualities her age considered ideal. ‘Such words as sweetness, gracefulness, modesty, desire to please, deportment, manners, cannot be used when speaking of her; but one is carried away, subjugated by the force of her genius…Wherever she goes, most people are changed into spectators.’

  Her friends (and enemies) were united in praise of her ability to talk, but also of her skill in drawing out whomever she was talking to. One left Germaine ‘in admiration’, spellbound by her knowledge and persuasiveness, but also ‘entirely pleased with oneself’. She could be overpowering, egotistical and embarrassingly unselfconscious, and she preferred ‘to dazzle rather than to please’, but she was good-natured and generous to those she loved.