Liberty: The Lives and Times of Six Women in Revolutionary France (31 page)
Read Liberty: The Lives and Times of Six Women in Revolutionary France Online
Authors: Lucy Moore
Manon was thus caught between her commitment to virtue, which required her political passivity, and her desire to contribute to the creation of a new France. In her memoirs, as if to exonerate herself, she emphasized again and again her love of domestic life and her devotion to her husband and his interests. The fact that she often described this devotion in terms of martyrdom is just one indication that it was a struggle for her, although the idea of self-sacrifice was a peculiarly potent one for revolutionaries of her stamp; Robespierre was also in thrall to it. It may have been that stressing how hard she found
it to be virtuous, as Rousseau did in the
Confessions
, the model for Manon’s memoirs, made her count her success all the greater.
As the memoirs make clear, Manon would never have moved into the public sphere but for the extraordinary circumstances of her life. Her intellectual principles–that devotion to Rousseauian virtue–would have triumphed over the emotional needs she had confessed to Roland during their courtship: her love of drama, her desire to play the principal role in any situation, her yearning for circumstances that would force her on to centre stage. But when her chance came, it was as if she had been waiting for it. ‘This seemed my moment,’ she wrote of the May day she had rushed to the Convention on Roland’s behalf, and pleaded so eloquently with Vergniaud to get her access to the rostrum.
Had it not been for the revolution, Manon might also have failed to fulfil her potential as a writer. Her passionate interest in the events of the day initially persuaded her to write, albeit anonymously, for friends like Champagneux’s and Brissot’s journals. More importantly, as Dorinda Outram points out, being in prison gave Manon a Woolfian ‘room of her own’: no longer a dutiful daughter, wife or mother, she had, for the first time, the space and opportunity to become a writer. A lifetime of repressed individualism and sensuality found its release in gaol in torrents of words.
In the first month of her imprisonment Manon had written enough of her ‘Historical Notes’ to fill a volume. Knowing that she was writing for posterity, and considering her work ‘my moral and political testament’, she smuggled her notebooks out of prison with various friends including Bosc d’Antic and Champagneux, the future editor of her memoirs. When, on the August night that she was arrested, Helen Williams destroyed the papers she had sneaked out of Manon’s cell, terrified that possession of them would further incriminate her, Manon was devastated: ‘I must admit that I would rather have been thrown on the fire myself.’ Bravely, she started all over again.
Writing–justifying herself–was her consolation, the focus of her constrained energies. After the ferment and intensity of the past two years, being in prison suddenly gave her time to think. ‘Here, behind bars and bolted doors, I enjoy the freedom of my thoughts, I summon objects that are dear to me, and I am at greater peace with my conscience than my oppressors are with their power.’ She was poignantly aware of the irony of physical imprisonment granting her a new sense of imaginative and emotional liberty.
Prison also allowed her to luxuriate in her love for Buzot. As she wrote to him from Sainte-Pélagie on 3 July on receiving another letter from him, ‘can I complain of my misfortune, when such delights are reserved for me?’ Dignified in any situation, she would have been ‘proud of being persecuted in a time when character and probity are proscribed’, but the freedom to love Buzot without hiding her feelings from Roland–whom she referred to as ‘
le pauvre
’–made her treasure her ‘sweet’ imprisonment. ‘I find it delightful to unite the means of being useful to him in a manner that allows me to be more yours,’ Manon wrote, looking forward to the moment when sacrificing her life for Roland would earn her the right ‘to give you alone my last sigh’. Her love letters–indeed, all her writing–became a substitute for physical experience, enabling her, as Outram writes, to ‘overcome the contradiction between the unchastity of her desires and the self-portrait she cherished as chaste wife’, all the while preserving for herself the dramatic heroine’s role.
‘How I cherish the bars where I am free to love you without feeling torn and to occupy myself with you without ceasing!’ she wrote to Buzot. This new pleasure was so intense that she rejected the idea of escape: returning to freedom would mean exchanging ‘chains that honour…for others that no-one can see’. Still she could not help herself hoping, as it became clear over the summer of 1793 that resistance to the Committee of Public Safety was doomed, that Buzot would flee France for the United States and that one day she would be able to join him there.
Out of superstition, Manon told Buzot, she had not wanted to bring his miniature into prison with her, but she could not bring herself to leave it behind. She wore it tucked into her bodice, hidden beside
her heart where she could feel it at every moment, ‘this sweet image, weak and precious consolation for the presence of the subject’, and took it out to kiss it and weep over it. Her words recall the scene in
La Nouvelle Héloïse
when Saint-Preux unwraps Julie’s portrait with trembling hands. ‘How immediate, how powerful is the magic effect of these cherished features,’ he tells her. ‘Wherever you may be, whatever you may be doing at the moment when your portrait is receiving all the homage your idolatrous lover addresses to your person, do you not feel your charming face bathed with tears of love and sadness? Do you not feel your eyes, your cheeks, your bosom caressed, pressed, overwhelmed by my ardent kisses?’
Manon slipped a tiny piece of paper into the back of the locket, describing Buzot as ‘a loving soul, a proud spirit and an elevated nature…[who] cherished peace, private virtues and the pleasures of an obscure life’. Thrown into politics by circumstance, he had conducted himself ‘with the ardour of hot-headed courage and the inflexibility of austere integrity’, only to be declared traitor to the country to which he had sacrificed himself. One day, she predicted, posterity would honour him, and his portrait would be placed among ‘those of the generous friends of liberty who believed in virtue, and dared to preach it as the sole basis for a republic, and who had the strength to practise it’.
Manon’s stay in the ‘pleasant little room’ beneath Mme Bouchard’s was cut short in early August when a prison administrator saw someone entering her room and asked to see inside it. The keeper’s wife was making life too comfortable for Manon, he complained. ‘She can do without it [the pianoforte],’ he told Mme Bouchard. ‘Send her back to the corridor at once. You must maintain equality.’
Mme Bouchard could not argue. Although she allowed her back to the room near hers during the day and permitted her to leave her books and papers there, Manon had to return to her damp cell, the fetid air of the dark corridor and the screeching of the great iron bolts in their sockets as her door was unlocked every morning and locked again each night. But a month away had brought unexpected new prisoners, reflecting political changes outside the prison walls. Manon’s neighbours were no longer whores and murderesses, but other Girondin
women: the wives of a Justice of the Peace denounced for ‘unpatriotic talk’ and of a president of the Revolutionary Tribunal.
An old friend, Mme Pétion, had even arrived–one of the few Girondin wives Manon had had time for. Pétion had eluded his guards in Paris and fled to Normandy with Buzot. ‘I would hardly have believed when I was sharing your worries at the Hôtel de Ville last August 10, that we would be celebrating the anniversary together in Sainte-Pélagie,’ Manon said to her when they met, ‘and that the monarchy’s fall would lead to our undoing.’
Since when is it permitted to give up one’s sex? Since when is it decent to see women abandoning the pious cares of their households, the cribs of their children, to come to public places, to harangue in the galleries, at the bar of the senate?
P
IERRE
-G
ASPARD
C
HAUMETTE
O
UTSIDE ON THE STREETS
, in September 1793, a police spy reported to the Committee of Public Safety that ‘
une petite crise à l’occasion des cocardes
’–a little trouble over cockades–had broken out in Pauline Léon’s neighbourhood, the faubourg Saint-Germain.
Since July the previous year, all men had been required by law to wear a tricolour cockade as a symbol of their devotion to the Republic. Although women’s fashions also reflected the fervid patriotism of the era, women, as passive citizens, had no such public obligation. But throughout the hot, delirious summer of 1793, the Société des Républicaines-Révolutionnaires, led by Léon and Lacombe, had taken to roaming through the capital and accosting women who were not wearing tricolour rosettes–women who, they claimed, were implicitly counterrevolutionary because they did not sport their politics on their shoulders. During the Society’s meeting observed by Pierre-Joseph-Alexis Roussel and Lord Bedford, the only decision the républicaines-révolutionnaires actually made was to send a petition to the Convention requesting that a law be passed forcing all women to wear them.
Their aggressive tactics simply scared most women–bands of ferocious women dressed as sans-culottes were just another reason to stay off the streets in 1793–but the républicaines-révolutionnaires’ antagonists, the
poissardes
of Les Halles, were enraged by their bullying as well as by the fact that by transferring their headquarters to Saint-Eustache they had moved on to their territory. According to the police report, the républicaines-révolutionnaires were stopping female passers-by, demanding to see their cockades and threatening them with a whipping–like the one they had administered to Théroigne de Méricourt four months earlier–if they were not wearing one. The market women
retorted that they would slaughter the républicaines-révolutionnaires if they continued to accost them, and accused the women who wore the cockade of being
putains
, or sluts. They had no money to spend on such things, they said, when bread was so dear. Screamed insults were exchanged and blows were not always avoided; one woman in Les Halles was stabbed for venturing out unadorned.
A police observer was confused and suspicious about the way that on one day, in one area of the city, women would be beaten for wearing a cockade, while another day, in another place, they would be beaten for not wearing one. ‘The cockade is the veil behind which evil-doers hide their perfidious plans,’ he reported. ‘One cannot spy on their [the women’s] movements too much.’ As ever, the fear of conspiracy hung heavy in the air.
Paris had always been an alert, inquisitive, observant city. People watched each other, as Richard Cobb comments, not necessarily–or not always–out of malice, but often simply out of curiosity. ‘Two citizens cannot whisper without a third craning his neck to hear what the conference is about!’ wrote Louis-Sébastian Mercier in 1781. The revolutionary government knew exactly how they had come to power–with a speech at the Palais Royal and the women of Les Halles demanding bread–and they were determined to monitor what the people on the streets were saying and thinking. Spies whose remit was to report back to the Committee of Public Safety haunted the city’s alleys and arcades, stood in the long lines for bread, eavesdropped on
poissardes
and prostitutes, followed the prices of sugar and soap and noticed which plays sold out.
In mid-1793, the tension on the streets, as reported by the
observateurs
, was aggravated by another severe bread shortage. Long queues formed overnight outside bakers’ shops. In Bordeaux, Lucy de la Tour du Pin remembered that the terror of daily life was so great that people were afraid to exchange a word on the street, ‘and the queue represented, as it were, a lawful assembly where the timid could talk to their neighbours or learn the latest news without exposing themselves to the imprudence of asking a question’. But the mood could turn in a moment from friendly neighbourhood chatter to menace or fury, and some women preferred to wait in men’s clothes to avoid being hassled.
Bread riots–at their most dramatic, like the women’s march on Versailles in the autumn of 1789–were traditionally dominated by women. The fact that the demonstrators’ actions stemmed from frustration at not being able to feed their families made them somehow palatable to the men in power: protest caused by maternal love was seen as natural, even commendable, however inconvenient it might be. But the bread disturbances of the second half of 1793, from the revolutionary government’s point of view, had troubling political undertones. Hungry, angry women in the faubourg Saint-Antoine were crying, ‘Our husbands made the revolution; if necessary, we will make the counter-revolution.’ Spies thought the name of the king–since Louis XVI’s execution, his young son, still imprisoned–was, if not yet on people’s lips, already in their hearts.
Although some women remained passionate supporters of the revolution, by 1793 others had begun to turn back to their traditional ways of thinking, frustrated by the new regime’s inability to serve their needs any better than the king had. In the provinces peasant women showed their discontent by harbouring seditious local priests and pointedly keeping religious holidays and dressing up in their best clothes on Sundays.
Opponents to the revolutionary regime had been in open and brutal revolt in the Vendée region since the spring of 1793. Here, as in Paris, the mood of desperation inspired several women to step out of the domestic arena and on to the battlefield. The peasant Renée Bordereau, who fought in the royalist army disguised as a man, would become known as the Joan of Arc of the Vendée. The revolutionary army had massacred forty-two members of her family including her father, who was killed before her eyes. Filled with ‘rage and despair’, she ‘resolved to sacrifice my body to the King, to offer my soul to God, and I swore to fight until death or victory’.