Liberty: The Lives and Times of Six Women in Revolutionary France (27 page)

Her speech to the Assembly in July 1792 reveals a little about her motivation and philosophy. As an unemployed actress, Lacombe said she regretted being unable to donate money to the fatherland, but she was still able to ‘pay it homage with my person. Born with the courage of a Roman and with the hatred of tyrants, I would consider myself fortunate to contribute to their destruction.’ As a single woman she declared that she was in a position to play an active role in ‘combating the enemies of the Fatherland’, but would condemn mothers for abandoning their children to follow her example. They ought to do their
duty by staying at home and instilling in their children ‘a love of liberty and a horror of despots’. With their usual backhanded gallantry, the deputies congratulated one ‘made more for softening tyrants than for struggle against them’ for her patriotism, and awarded her the honours of the session.

By the time they registered their society, Lacombe, Léon and their associates were already familiar figures in the visitors’ galleries of the Commune, the Jacobin Club and the National Convention. Léon later said that she spoke before huge crowds at the ward assemblies and in popular societies during this period: there, she ‘manifested my love for the Fatherland, propagated the principles of a sweet equality, and supported the unity and indivisibility of the Republic’. The scholar Dominique Godineau estimates that in 1793 Paris there were only a few hard-core
militantes
, many with links to one another. They included Léon and her mother; their neighbour Constance Évrard; Jean-Paul Marat’s publisher Anne Colombe; and a woman known in police reports as
la Mère Duchesne
, one Femme Dubouy, an ardent Robespierrist who was famous for shouting and making crude gestures in the tribunes of the Commune, the Jacobins and the Convention.

Common men active in Parisian political life were more numerous than women, but still formed only a modest proportion of the population. From August 1792, each of the city’s forty-eight wards had an elected assembly which in turn elected the powerful municipal government, the Commune. (Pétion had become mayor of Paris with only 14,137 votes in a city of 550,000.) But on average only a tenth of the eligible voters turned out.

Paris’s radicalization was thus engineered by a small percentage of committed activists, generally men with a little education–clerks, tradesmen or shopkeepers rather than true sans-culottes, who struggled to survive hand to mouth and lacked the time to devote to organized political protest. The activists packed sectional assemblies, persistently petitioned the Convention, intimidated voters at elections and took to the streets bearing arms when they saw trouble ahead. During the spring of 1793, the leaders of these militants–known as
enragés
–developed a radical programme of reform which the Société des Républicaines-Révolutionnaires supported wholeheartedly.

The républicaines-révolutionnaires met in the library of the Jacobin Club rather than the main chamber, which had been deemed off limits for women’s meetings when the laundresses tried to use it in February. Their official regulations–one of the few extant documents concerning their activities–stated that the group’s aim was ‘to instruct themselves, to learn well the Constitution and laws of the Republic, to attend to public affairs, to succour suffering humanity, and to defend all human beings who become victims of any arbitrary acts whatever’; its purpose was ‘to be armed to rush to the defence of the Fatherland’.

Each month, a new president, vice-president and four secretaries, whose responsibilities included taking minutes and dealing with club communications, were elected. An archivist, a treasurer and their respective assistants were chosen every three months. Three committees were formed: Administration, Relief and Correspondence. New members had to be introduced by an existing member and seconded by two others; their names were then inscribed on the register and they were given a membership card. All had to swear an oath on joining the Society: ‘I swear to live for the Republic or die for it; I promise to be faithful to the Rule of the Society as long as it exists.’

During their sessions, the president was distinguished from the rest of the républicaines-révolutionnaires by her red Phrygian cap. This was a potent appropriation of masculine attire. Since the previous year, sans-culottes men had been wearing these
bonnets rouges
as demonstrations of their symbolic emancipation from the servitude of the ancien régime. Until this point, women had seldom worn them: the figure of Liberty on the Republic’s seal had hers draped over the point of her pike, more as decoration than as a declaration of citizenship.

Pauline Léon–along with the rest of the members–‘vowed to execrate the scoundrels Roland and Brissot and the whole gang of federalists and…undertook the defence of all persecuted patriots such as Robespierre [and] Marat’. Part of what the républicaines-révolutionnaires called attending to public affairs involved stalking the streets of Paris in search of counterrevolutionaries, conspicuous in their
bonnets rouges
and the red and white striped trousers of the sans-culottes, with pistols or daggers tucked into their belts. Their tricolour cockades were always prominently displayed. They were the new bullies
of the streets, replacing the
poissardes
as the city’s most aggressive activists and ‘exclusively’ occupying the tribunes of the Convention and the political clubs. As Pauline Léon had hoped, they saw themselves as agents of liberty, hunting down the nation’s internal enemies.

In their eyes, one of these enemies of the revolution was the unlucky Théroigne de Méricourt. A group of républicaines-révolutionnaires was patrolling the Tuileries gardens and the corridors of the Convention on 15 May, as the struggle between the Montagnards and the Girdondins was nearing its climax, when they encountered her on the Feuillants Terrace. They were checking that visitors to the Convention had entry cards, making sure passers-by were wearing the revolutionary cockade (not yet required by law) and stopping anyone whose politics they suspected; they seem not to have known or cared that their vigilance might be an ‘arbitrary act’ from which others might need protecting.

Very little survives of Théroigne’s activities in the early months of 1793 except for an undated broadsheet she published at about this time which was posted around Paris on thick, blue-grey paper. It warned Parisians of the dangers facing them and the traps which had been so artfully deployed to waylay them. In stark contrast to the républicaines-révolutionnaires’ robustly hands-on approach to the crisis, she pleaded for a calm, reasoned response: ‘Fellow citizens, let us stop and think, or else we are lost.’ Conspirers against democracy were inciting anarchy and civil war in order to demonstrate that the people were incapable of governing themselves, she said; both the rebels and France’s invaders seemed more ‘determined to defend despotism and religious prejudices than we are to defend liberty’.

But, concluded Théroigne, ‘danger will unify us yet again, and we will show you what men who wish for liberty, and who are working for the cause of humankind, are capable of’. She proposed that six women be chosen from each ward every six months, ‘the most virtuous and the most serious for their age’, whose job would be to reconcile and unite the men of their area by reminding them of the dangers threatening liberty and the fatherland. These women would wear long scarves bearing the words ‘
Amitié et Fraternité
’, and they would supervise patriotic girls’ schools and take part in national festivals.
Nothing could have been further from the tomboyish swagger of the républicaines-révolutionnaires.

On sighting Théroigne, whose political sympathies were well known, they shouted ‘Brissotine!’ and accused her of distributing Girondin propaganda. They had been hoping to run into her for weeks; now they turned on her with ‘incredible fury’ and gave her ‘
le fouet
’–a whipping. It was only when Jean-Paul Marat appeared, an unlikely hero, and shielded her under his arm that they let her go. Despite his fierce reputation, Marat seems to have disliked watching individuals suffer. Paul Barras recorded seeing him rescue a beleaguered aristocrat from a mob by giving him a kick; as with their encounter with Olympe de Gouges, the mob’s anger turned to laughter and they lost interest. After this humiliating attack on Théroigne, a commemorative plate appeared for sale depicting her bare buttocks.

Four days later, a deputation from the Société des Républicaines-Révolutionnaires accompanied an
enragé
delegation of the Cordeliers to the Jacobin Club to demand the foundation of revolutionary courts all over France and the arrest of anyone suspected of being a counterrevolutionary. The Girondin deputies, who had hitherto been more sympathetic than the Montagnards to the idea of women having political rights, were horrified at the women’s attacks on them. On 20 May, Manon Roland’s lover François Buzot denounced what he called the impudent women from these ‘depraved societies’, calling them ‘avid for death and blood’. They were, he said, ‘monstrous women who have all the cruelty of weakness and all the vices of their sex’.

Another Girondin deputy, the journalist Antoine-Joseph Gorsas, described the women of the Society as Furies, ‘intoxicated Bacchanalians’, crazed by the revolution. ‘What do they want?’ he asked. ‘What do they demand? They want to “put an end to it”; they want to purge the Convention, to make heads roll, and to get themselves drunk with blood.’

As the atmosphere of crisis intensified, the républicaines-révolutionnaires filled the streets shouting, ‘
Vive la Montagne! À la guillotine les brissotins! Vive Marat! Vive le Père Duchesne
!’ They occupied the area around the Convention, checking people’s permits and tickets, and when challenged replied, ‘Equality? If we are all equal, I
have as much right to enter as someone with a card.’ One Citoyenne Lecointre addressed the Jacobins in the name of the Society on 27 May, saying that she and her companions were not ‘domestic animals’ and promising they would form a phalanx to annihilate all aristocrats.

Just before the end of May a police spy reported nervously that ‘evil influences, under the mark of patriotism, have excited these revolutionary heroines to riot and to take up arms so as to dissolve the Convention and cause rivers of blood to flow in Paris’. Although Robespierre and the Montagnards were willing to harness the Société des Républicaines-Révolutionnaires’ energy to the cause of ridding them of their political opponents, not everyone was convinced it would be easy to rein in the ‘Maenads’ afterwards. Between 31 May and 2 June, when the Parisian radicals pressed the National Convention to expel the Girondins, the républicaines-révolutionnaires played a critical role. ‘Who rang the tocsin?’ asked a desperate Girondin deputy. ‘We did!’ cried the women in the tribunes. A ‘
troupe de furies, avide de carnage
’ prevented Girondin deputies from fleeing the Convention. Helen Williams described Robespierre’s female army standing ‘in the passages of the Convention armed with poniards’.

Afterwards the Montagnards praised the républicaines-révolutionnaires for their contribution to the coup. ‘Their zeal is indefatigable, their vigilance penetrates plots, their actions thwart them, their audacity exposes intrigues, their boldness prevents dangers, their courage surmounts them,’ said Louis-Pierre Dufourny, a prominent Jacobin and Cordelier, at the end of June. ‘Finally they are republicans and revolutionaries.’ Buzot, fleeing to Caen to make a stand against the Jacobins, confirmed the role the ‘hideous
coquines
of Paris’ had played in the Girondins’ fall.

Other women were inspired by the républicaines-révolutionnaires’ example. A group of
citoyennes
from one of the Paris wards presented the Society with a martial standard, praising them for the ‘firmness and intrepidity’ of their actions on 31 May and 2 June and congratulating them on having broken ‘that prejudice…which made passive and isolated beings out of half the population by relegating women to the confined sphere of their households…Why should women, gifted with the faculty of feeling and explaining their thoughts, see themselves
excluded from public affairs?’ A woman’s first duty was still to her home, they said, but ‘after they have attended to their indispensable occupations, there are still some moments of leisure, and
les femmes citoyennes
in the fraternal societies who consecrate them to surveillance and to instruction have the sweet satisfaction of seeing themselves doubly useful’.

On 24 June 1793 a new constitution was adopted by the Convention containing innovations such as the right to work and the right to resist one’s own government if it became oppressive. Although the principal authors of the constitution (including Gilbert Romme, Bertrand Barère, Tom Paine and Condorcet) had included a carefully worked-out system of checks and balances, this had been largely disregarded by the Montagnards in their desire to make political concessions to the sans-culottes. Condorcet dared to protest; a warrant was issued for his arrest and, like the other Girondins, he went into hiding.

The constitution’s authors had considered the issue of women’s rights. Originally Condorcet had been the strongest advocate for enfranchising women, although, perhaps shocked by the radical new involvement of women in public life in the spring of 1793, latterly he had not pursued this objective with any vigour. The constitution denied women political rights for the time being. ‘The vices of our education still oblige us to perpetuate this exclusion, at any rate for several years to come.’ A woman from Beaurepaire complained to the Convention in July that ‘women are far from being equal; they do not count in the political system. We demand from you primary assemblies, and, as the Constitution rests on the rights of man, we demand it all today.’

Women may not have been included in the liberties of the new constitution, but they were determined to participate in celebrating it. In Paris and across France they gathered alongside the men to send messages of support to the Convention, often participating in mock elections as demonstrations of their approval–acting out a privilege they had not been granted. They promised to marry only true patriots and to raise their children in the principles of liberty and equality. A police spy said of the women celebrating, ‘It would seem that, born slaves of men, they have a greater interest in its [liberty’s] prevailing.’ As Dominique Godineau comments, the roles women played in these
celebrations were ‘ornamental’–as they were at all revolutionary festivals–but they reveal the potent ambiguity of women’s importance to the revolution. Although they were excluded from the body politic, they were still determined to comment on and participate in public affairs, and their presence at and approval of significant events had become an essential part of revolutionary life.