Liberty: The Lives and Times of Six Women in Revolutionary France (2 page)

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.

A
DAM DE
C
USTINE

E
VERY
T
UESDAY 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 tickets, 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.

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’.