Liberty: The Lives and Times of Six Women in Revolutionary France (32 page)

Across the country in Lyon, the once prosperous hometown of the young bride Juliette Récamier, another civil war was raging. Here, too, counterrevolutionary women were proud to contribute to the cause in which they so ardently believed. ‘A single heart beat in every breast, a unique sentiment inspired the men and the women: to resist tyranny,’ wrote Alexandrine des Écherolles, the teenaged daughter of a retired
army officer, in her diary. In May the people of the town had stormed the
mairie
, seizing Joseph Chalier, the despised agent of the revolutionary government, whom they executed on the same day the counterrevolutionary heroine Charlotte Corday was guillotined in Paris.

Expecting repercussions, the men and women of Lyon began to prepare for attack. ‘The most delicate women participated in armed exercises, the testing of cannons,’ recorded Alexandrine. ‘Nothing seemed to frighten or surprise them.’ The new Republic’s forces reached Lyon in August and trained their guns on the city walls. Alexandrine joined other women in helping to put out fires caused by the bombardment, and assisted the local priest in collecting donations to feed the hungry and homeless and the children orphaned by the conflict. ‘I joyfully saw myself called to play an active role in our history, which gave me a great importance in my own eyes,’ she wrote. Despite the determined lightness of her tone, her words make clear that like so many other women during this period, in the midst of disaster and destruction Alexandrine was discovering a new sense of self and a new pride in her sex.

The foreign war effort had also seen, in 1793, a series of catastrophic surrenders and defeats for the revolutionary regime. Austrian and Prussian armies had advanced deep into French territory, heading for Paris, and at the end of August the British–who had declared war on France after Louis XVI’s execution–took the port of Toulon. Ironically, the war–which the Jacobins had opposed, and so effectively used to destroy the Girondins–had become a means by which the Committee of Public Safety was able to consolidate its grip on power. ‘Who dares to speak of peace?’ demanded Bertrand Barére, answering his own question. ‘The aristocrats, the moderates, the rich, the conspirators, the pretended patriots.’

War made brutal centralization and repression necessary in the name of the public interest, and provided the government with excuses for mass conscription (decreed in August), requisitioning, plunder and murder. In September Robespierre could look out of the windows of the Tuileries, where the Committee of Public Safety met, and see the new workshops erected in the palace’s gardens. All the workmen of Paris had been ordered to manufacture muskets and cannon out of
metal melted down from church bells, altars and objects confiscated from houses abandoned by émigrés; nuns’ habits were made into bandages. The detritus of the old regime would provide the new with the instruments of its triumph.

In Paris, the disputes over the cockade were worsening, stimulated by what was, to the revolutionary government, a terrifying impulse: the desire of common women to participate in public life. Even at the time, it was obvious that ‘
la guerre des cocardes
’ (as the historian Alfred Soboul called it) was about far more than bunches of ribbon.

The Committee of Public Safety was trying to marginalize the républicaines-révolutionnaires’ radical allies the
enragés
by appropriating their ideas where they could, undermining the sectional societies that were the source of their influence and attacking their leaders. One of the most serious complaints against them was that they ‘flattered the women’s pride, seeking to persuade them they should have the rights of men, citing examples through history in science and government, saying that affairs would be better conducted by
bonnes républicaines
’.

Throughout the summer, Pauline Lèon and Rose Lacombe and their followers in the Sociètè des Rèpublicaines-Rèvolutionnaires became progressively more outspoken in their opposition to the Jacobins in general and to Robespierre in particular. Proud of the role they had played in expelling the Girondins in June and emboldened by the faith the
enragès
placed in them, they began to speak scornfully of the ‘coward’ Robespierre, calling him ‘Monsieur’–rather than the patriotic, republican ‘Citoyen’–and wondering aloud how he dared treat them as counterrevolutionaries. Other members of the Society, still passionate Robespierrists, were angry at their attacks; divisions crystallized.

As autumn began, a group of mutineer républicaines-révolutionnaires confronted Léon and Lacombe about their outspokenness. Lacombe, they said, belittled Robespierre, telling them, ‘You are
infatuated with and enthusiastic about Robespierre, whom I regard only as an ordinary citizen.’ She publicly criticized his measures, denouncing the bloody harshness of the government’s efforts to crush the counterrevolution in Lyon and, in October, calling the Convention’s decree declaring the Republic revolutionary until peace had been achieved a measure that would only to drive the people to incessant revolt and further carnage. In stirring Rousseauesque language, Pauline Léon was calling for the dissolution and re-election of the Convention, on the grounds that its members had been lagging in their seats long enough. ‘The prolongation of power,’ she declared, ‘was often the tomb of liberty.’

When the Committee of Public Safety questioned Rose Lacombe about how many
citoyennes
belonged to her Society, she replied three or four thousand. One of the newer républicaines-révolutionnaires–who said she was the hundred and seventieth member of the Society–asked her why she had lied so barefacedly. ‘We must make those white beaks grow pale and tremble,’ answered Lacombe defiantly.

The républicaines-révolutionnaires also confronted Lacombe about her relationship with Théophile Leclerc. It was alleged that the ‘immoral’ Leclerc had shared Lacombe’s lodgings for some months. This charge reveals a personal rupture between Lacombe and Pauline Léon, simmering away beneath their intimate political alliance, and perhaps explains why Léon, previously so conspicuous on the stage of Parisian radical politics, had allowed herself to fade into the background beside her swaggering, exhibitionist friend.

In November 1793–three months after Lacombe and Leclerc’s liaison was scrutinized first by the républicaines-révolutionnaires and then by the Jacobins–Théophile Leclerc married not Rose Lacombe, his established mistress, but her associate Pauline Léon, a woman thirteen years older than him. Their unexpected union followed an angry scene in front of the society, in which Léon accused Lacombe of sleeping with Leclerc. Although Lacombe had previously denied living with Leclerc, face to face with Léon, she had no choice but to admit it.

Leclerc’s mentor Jacques Roux, the red priest, had been arrested for the first time in August, released and then arrested again on 5 September, the day Terror was declared the order of the day. Bertrand
Barére had denounced
enragés
he described as counterrevolutionaries stirring up the women of the streets. Roux was sent to prison not by order of the government, but by the ‘unanimous judgement’ of the Jacobin Club. Among his confiscated papers was a letter praising militant women who had ‘the doubly advantageous attribute of conquering through charm and through fearlessness’, and declaring that the moment when the
enragé
‘mass of republicans’ would be ready ‘to crush tyranny’ was approaching.

In early September Leclerc was denounced as a counterrevolutionary by one of the rebel républicaines-révolutionnaires, Citoyenne Govin (the testimony of only one person being enough by this time to secure a warrant). Rose Lacombe sprang to Leclerc’s defence. She demanded an explanation from Govin and ordered her expulsion from the Society if she could not prove her allegations; she accused the Committee of Public Safety of arresting all the best patriots.

Lacombe was present in her usual place in the tribunes of the Jacobin Club on 16 September when they debated the issue of Govin’s denunciation of Leclerc and her subsequent removal from the Society. A Citoyen Chabot took the floor to describe how Lacombe had become a counterrevolutionary menace, demanding the release of political prisoners being held without trial and threatening him with the wrath of her army of women.

A few days earlier, Lacombe had gone to Chabot’s house to argue the case of the former mayor of Toulouse, held for some months without charge because he was rich, popular, of noble blood–and had offended Chabot’s vanity when the latter was commissioner to his region. ‘She claimed that one didn’t keep men in prison like that; that Revolution or no Revolution, they had to be questioned within twenty-four hours, released if they were innocent, and sent to the guillotine at once if they were guilty–in short, all the remarks that you hear aristocrats mouthing all the time when we arrest one of their friends,’ Chabot said. His views on guilt were very much in line with his leaders’: the day after this speech, the Law of Suspects was passed, ordering the arrest of all those who by their own or their associates’ words or behaviour showed themselves to be ‘advocates of tyranny or federalism and enemies of liberty’.

Lacombe’s brave defence of a victim of injustice was enough to incriminate her in Chabot’s ‘cockroach eyes’ (as she described them). ‘I told him that we didn’t get rid of the tyrant [Louis XVI] in order to replace him with others,’ Lacombe reported. She accused Chabot himself of being an enemy of the revolution and insisted that she had not insulted Robespierre, but merely tried to warn him against his evil associates.

Chabot’s distrust of Lacombe in particular was aggravated by a more general misogyny. ‘It’s because I like women that I don’t want them to be forming a body apart and calumniating even virtue,’ he protested to the Jacobins. He had taunted Lacombe by insisting he could never refuse anything to a woman; she retorted that she pitied her ‘country because the counterrevolutionaries also had women, and it wouldn’t be difficult for them to obtain pardons by sending [their] women to him’.

‘It is these counter-revolutionary sluts who cause all the riotous outbreaks, above all over bread,’ stormed Chabot. ‘They made a revolution over coffee and sugar, and they will make others if we do not watch out.’ Others confirmed that Lacombe meddled everywhere and encouraged her followers to speak scornfully about ‘Monsieur Robespierre’. Her liaison with Leclerc was raised, of note as much because of Leclerc’s supposedly aristocratic background as for any depravity implicit in their living together: ‘Citoyenne Lacombe, or Madame Lacombe, who likes nobles so much, is sheltering a noble in her house.’

Just as the Club turned its attention to the case of Leclerc–who had declared in his newspaper that ‘if they wanted to arrest him, he would stab both the person who issued the arrest warrant and the person who executed it’–Lacombe stood up and demanded the chance to speak. Cries of ‘
À bas la nouvelle Corday!
’ greeted her request; the women in the galleries nearby hissed, ‘Intriguer!’ and ‘Get out, miserable woman, or we will tear you to pieces!’ Lacombe stood her ground, loudly protesting that she would speak or perish. ‘The first one of you who dares to come forward, I am going to show you what a free woman can do!’

‘The tumult and disorder became so great that the president donned his hat [to call for order],’ recorded the minute-taker. ‘It was only at the end of a considerable period that calm returned.’ The president
pointed out to Lacombe that causing turmoil in a group of people trying calmly to debate a point concerning the interests of the people was counterrevolutionary in and of itself.

At the Jacobins’ orders, Lacombe was prevented from speaking in her own defence and seized by guards, who took her to the Tuileries to be questioned by the Committee of Public Safety. After two hours waiting in the Committee’s antechamber, one of her guards took pity on her and escorted her back to her lodgings near the Palais Royal. When they got there they found the
commissaires
of the local sectional committee had placed seals on all her belongings and on the doors, so she could not enter. As it was late at night and the streets were dangerous, her kindly guard offered her a bed for the night. Just then appeared two members of the Société des Républicaines-Révolutionnaires, who had ventured out into the dark streets to find word of Lacombe, and took her home with them. Meanwhile the Jacobins had voted to order the Society to expel her and to recommend that all female agitators be arrested as counterrevolutionaries.

The following day, at Lacombe’s request, the
commissaires
returned to inspect her papers. ‘We found nothing suspect,’ they reported. ‘On the contrary, we found nothing but correspondence of fraternal societies, which breathes the purest patriotism, and different personal letters where the public good and patriotism were beautifully expressed.’ The seals were lifted and, for the moment, Rose Lacombe was safe.

Soon afterwards a furious, defiant Lacombe gave the Société des Républicaines-Révolutionnaires her own account of the Jacobins’ session and her argument with Chabot. ‘All the ills that are befalling Paris are attributed to us,’ she lamented, decrying ‘these monsters, who are strong only when they oppress the weak’.

One of the most important elements of the threat that Lacombe posed to the Jacobin elite was her eloquence. They accused her of using ‘hypocritical and Feuillant [by extension, aristocratic] language’ and seeking to undermine the constitution. For her part, Lacombe understood that controlling the language of the revolution was the essence of the Jacobins’ political mastery. A large part of her rage at their treatment of her stemmed from frustration at the way they distorted the meanings of potent words and twisted the charges of
their accusers back at them. ‘Be careful, Robespierre,’ she had warned on 16 September. ‘I noticed that those accused of having lied believe they can side-step the denunciation by accusing those who denounce them of having spoken ill of you.’

Within days the undaunted Lacombe was petitioning the Convention once more, this time demanding the arrest of the wives of émigrés and urging the rehabilitation of prostitutes. As an actress–actresses were viewed by most people as little more than whores–Lacombe empathized with the plight of prostitutes. She saw them as victims rather than criminals and recommended that they be given honest employment and state housing, and made to listen to patriotic lectures intended to save them from the error of their ways.