Liberty: The Lives and Times of Six Women in Revolutionary France (10 page)

Several ironies were concealed behind the cult of naturalism. In the first place, it was often as artfully contrived as any ancien régime salonnière’s conversation: the great revolutionary orator Hérault de Séchelles had lessons in declamation from the actress Mlle Clairon, Germaine de Staël’s elocution teacher; later Napoléon would be tutored by Talma. Secondly, when republicanism became stylish – Théroigne’s
amazones
soon adorned many society figures – its original intention of being outside fashion was defeated.

The unhappiest side-effect of this craze for simplicity was the destruction of the stay-making, embroidery and silk-making industries, which put thousands of workers, principally women, out of work. Starchers and laundresses saw less business when plain muslin cravats replaced stiffened lace jabots; coiffeurs became redundant when smart ladies no longer wanted model ships to float in their headdresses. Lace-makers rioted in Normandy and Velay in 1793; Lyon, centre of the textile industry, was defiantly anti-revolutionary. After the revolution, the duc d’Orléans’s mistress Félicité de Genlis recounted a conversation she overheard between an old stay-maker and an old hoop-maker bemoaning the new fashions. ‘As soon as they began to introduce bodices, instead of whalebone stays,’ concluded the stay-maker darkly, ‘I immediately prophesied the revolution.’

Théroigne’s riding-habit had not been intended as a fashion statement, but it soon became one. When she arrived at the newly formed Cordeliers’ Club in February 1790, the sight of her crimson
amazone
and her sword provoked a flattering reaction. Camille Desmoulins greeted her: ‘It is the Queen of Sheba, come to see the Solomon of the
sections
[the Paris wards].’ Théroigne delivered her speech in her soft Walloon accent, proposing that a temple dedicated to Liberty, a home for the National Assembly and an altar to the fatherland be built on the ruins of the Bastille. It prompted wild applause.

Although a committee was set up to consider her suggestion, the conclusion to Desmoulins’s article on her appearance at the Cordeliers’ demonstrated her fellow-patriots’ true attitude to women involving themselves in politics. With her Society of the Friends of the Law dissolving, Théroigne had requested membership of the Cordeliers’ Club, which would allow her a consultative vote in the Assembly. While she was granted the honours of the session for her address, Desmoulins evaded her demand for an official political voice as a member of the Cordeliers’:

Mlle Théroigne and those of her sex will always be at liberty to propose whatever they believe to be advantageous to the fatherland, but as regards the question of state, as to whether Mlle Théroigne should be admitted to the district with a consultative vote only, the assembly is not competent to take sides on this question, and this is not the place to settle it.

Other clubs were more receptive to women members; indeed, ‘women were the soul of the societies and of the democratic movement’, according to the historian Alphonse Aulard. The first Fraternal Society of Patriots of Both Sexes was formed in February 1790 with the intention of ‘reading and interpreting the decrees of the National Assembly’, and welcomed women from the start. Its female members would include Théroigne, Pauline Léon, Manon Roland and Thérésia de Fontenay; Germaine de Staël did not join, but many of her friends did. Olympe de Gouges was another member, as was Louise Robert, a writer married to a lawyer (from Liège, like Théroigne) and deputy to the Convention. François and Louise Robert were ardent republicans
and active members of the Fraternal Society; Louise Robert believed that it and associations like it would bring about the final destruction of despotism. In late 1790 the Roberts founded the
Mercure National
, one of the hundreds of new journals that appeared between 1789 and 1792, for which their friend Manon Roland would write.

One of the most eloquent of the Fraternal Society’s women members was the Dutch baroness Etta Palm d’Aelders. In December 1790 she addressed the Social Circle, another club which welcomed male and female members and met weekly in the Palais Royal. She urged the government to extend full citizenship to women.

Six months earlier Condorcet had written on the same topic:

He who votes against the rights of another, whatever that person’s religion, colour or sex may be, has by the same token forsworn his own. Why should creatures subject to pregnancies and to passing indispositions not be able to exercise their rights [a common argument against women participating in public life], when no one has ever contemplated depriving people who have an attack of gout every winter, or who readily catch a cold?

He advised that unmarried women and widows should be granted the vote and called for all women to use their talents to benefit the society in which they lived.

Not every member of the Fraternal Society or the Social Circle shared Condorcet’s unusually egalitarian views, but most were progressive thinkers committed to improving women’s status in society through legislation, to legalize divorce, to provide protection for battered wives, and to reform inheritance and property laws. A committee was established by Etta Palm d’Aelders’s club, the Confederation of the Friends of Truth, to distribute aid to ill and indigent women and children in Paris.

Most men tolerated their wives’ and daughters’ new-found interest in politics, but the Jacobin Club was wary of women from the start. The Fraternal Society met in 1790 in various rooms of the same former monastery as the Jacobins, and the two clubs shared some members, many of whom also had connections with Théroigne, Germaine de Staël, Thérésia de Fontenay and Manon Roland: Condorcet, Brissot,
the Lameth brothers, Mirabeau, Georges Danton and Jean-Lambert Tallien. Despite these links, however, the Jacobins displayed their reluctance to treat the Fraternal Society seriously from the start. In the autumn of 1790, they told the Society that they would only receive a deputation from them if it were composed entirely of men. The journalist Marat used the Fraternal Society to attack the Jacobins that December, snidely saluting ‘the club of women which providence seems to have placed beneath the Jacobins [the Society sometimes met in the monastery’s crypt] to repair their faults’.

It was this type of revolutionary misogyny that prompted Théroigne to leave Paris at the end of the summer of 1790. The idealism with which she had greeted the early months of the revolution had been disappointed. It was becoming clear to her that her fellow-revolutionaries were campaigning for the rights of men, not the rights of humanity; her struggle was unimportant to them. In prison in Austria the following year she said it had been her dearest wish to have been able to destroy ‘the tyranny which men exercise over my own sex’, but her efforts had been in vain.

Neither of the progressive associations she had formed had taken off as she had hoped. The Society of the Friends of the Law had disbanded in the spring of 1790. In February Théroigne had watched the deputies of the National Assembly process to Notre Dame to hear a mass celebrating their oaths of citizenship. She recognized some of them, and they asked her to join them; the honour of walking with them and of seeing such a spectacle made her say yes, but when onlookers exclaimed at there being a woman in the deputies’ midst she was forced to withdraw, even though many others marching were not deputies either. What the people had found so curious, she said, was the thought that a woman should wish to be a part of the procession.

Théroigne acknowledged that her lack of talent and experience hindered her efforts to play an active political role, but her greatest weakness in the eyes of her fellow-revolutionaries was her sex. She was hassled in the Assembly’s tribunes, mocked on the streets and lampooned in the press, but her most bitter disappointment stemmed from the men with whom she hoped to work. ‘The patriots, instead of
encouraging me and treating me justly, ridiculed me,’ she said; this was why she became disenchanted with politics, despite her devotion to the cause of reform, and left Paris ‘without too much regret’. For the moment, Théroigne’s hopes of being allowed to participate directly in France’s new government had been dashed.

4

MONDAINE

Thérésia de Fontenay

MAY 1789–APRIL 1791

We continued to dance,
as they do in camp on the eve of a battle.

A
UGUSTE
-F
RANÇOIS DE
F
RÉNILLY

I
F FOR
T
HÉROIGNE DE
M
ÉRICOURT
the revolution was a sacred event, regenerative and transformative both publicly and privately, for Thérésia, marquise de Fontenay, seventeen years old and three years married, it was just the new backdrop to her normal life. Instead of attending dull court parties in stiff tight-laced dresses, she wore frilled chemises to picnics in the woods; otherwise, eighteen months after the Bastille had fallen, not much seemed different. ‘The tranquillity of France is but little disturbed, notwithstanding the wonderful changes that have of late happened,’ Lady Sutherland, the English ambassadress, wrote home in January 1791, complaining that Paris had grown very dull.

Thérésia de Fontenay moved in the same worldly circles as Lady Sutherland and Germaine de Staël. Her father François Cabarrus was a successful Basque banker at the Spanish court, who in 1782 had founded the state bank, the Banco San Carlos. Thérésia had been brought up in rural Spain before joining her mother in Paris and attending, as girls of her class did, an exclusive Parisian convent. When she was fourteen she was married to twenty-six-year-old Jean-Jacques Devin de Fontenay who came from a family of recently ennobled merchants. Like Germaine Necker’s marriage to Éric Magnus de Staël, Mlle Cabarrus’s match with Fontenay was arranged – a union of new money with, in this case, new aristocracy. Thérésia’s dowry included a substantial chunk of Parisian real estate, but the young couple lived in the Fontenay
hôtel
on the Île Saint-Louis.

Thérésia was married for the first time, according to her daughter long afterwards, ‘
sans joie comme sans chagrin
’. ‘Her good and tender soul’ would have grown attached to her husband’s, lamented Mme
du Narbonne-Pelet, but for his ‘revolting behaviour, inconstancy and profound immorality’. Her parents, ambitious but inexperienced in Parisian ways, and according to Thérésia’s later descriptions of her childhood, neglectful, seem to have found Fontenay’s personal unsuitability for marriage less important than his title. He was a gambler and a roué, utterly debauched, who kept a mistress and travelled with a guidebook containing details ‘of all the
filles de joie
to be found on the road’. Thérésia, still a child, was ‘prostituted’ to an infamous rake.

This, of course, was the way of the pre-revolutionary
haut monde
; all that was unusual was the degree of Fontenay’s dissipation, and the fact that his mistress was a lowly shop-girl rather than an actress or a friend’s wife. The same society that reviled the lonely, idealistic Théroigne de Méricourt as a prostitute sold the young Thérésia de Fontenay into an unhappy marriage and expected her to console herself with lovers.

In
Letters to Jean-Jacques Rousseau
, written two years after her own marriage, Germaine de Staël lamented the hypocrisy that brought up young girls in the closest seclusion only to marry them off to men who had no intention of forming an emotional attachment to them, thrusting them unprepared into a world where everything they had been taught to value was denigrated. ‘Even the men, with their bizarre principles, wait until a woman is married before they speak to her of love,’ she observed. ‘At that point, everything changes: people no longer seek to exalt their minds with romantic notions but to soil their hearts with cold jests on everything they have been taught to respect.’ Custom only legitimized these practices. ‘What social disaster for a husband to consider himself invited to a house simply because his wife was invited!’ remembered Lucy de la Tour du Pin of the habits of her pre-revolutionary life. Corruption had become natural. ‘Virtue in men and good conduct in women became the object of ridicule and were considered provincial.’

Many husbands encouraged their brides to take lovers, aware that if their wives were busy elsewhere their own activities would escape attention. Accomplished libertines were masters of amorality. ‘There is nothing in love but the flesh,’ held the naturalist Buffon, and Rousseau’s
Confessions
substantiate the ancien régime’s institutionalized cynicism.
His independent, older mistress, Mme de Warens, was taught by her first lover that the moral importance of marital fidelity lay only in its effect on public opinion. According to this argument, ‘adultery in itself was nothing, and was only called into existence by scandal…every woman who appeared virtuous by that mere fact became so’.

Perhaps because her husband was so unlovable, Thérésia made little effort even to appear virtuous. Although she produced a son, Théodore, in May 1789, she was more interested in social than domestic life and quickly became part of the louche, liberal circuit of Germaine de Staël and her friends. By the summer of 1790, in an aptly revolutionary analogy, Thérésia was said to have ‘dethroned’ the ‘delicious’ blonde Nathalie de Noailles as the most beautiful woman in Paris.

Thérésia’s dark loveliness and foreign riches made her a celebrity. Raven-haired, with flashing eyes, she was much in the mould of Germaine de Staël, ‘but extremely
en beau
’. Mme de la Tour du Pin compared her to the goddess Diana – though no doubt in her aspect as huntress rather than virgin – enthusing that ‘no more beautiful creature had ever come from the hands of the Creator’. Thérésia’s statuesque looks were enhanced by ‘matchless grace’, ‘radiant femininity’ and a peculiarly charming voice ‘of caressing magic’, husky, melodious and slightly accented.