Liberty: The Lives and Times of Six Women in Revolutionary France (35 page)

She asked Sophie whose death had had the strongest impact on her. Sophie replied, Charlotte Corday’s. Manon managed to choke down some food, and asked if Sophie would stand witness to her final moments. Her hands shaking, Sophie answered that she would. ‘It’s awful, my request horrifies me,’ cried Manon. Then, more calmly: ‘Promise me only that you will see me pass.’ Knowing Sophie would be there, she said, would assuage her terror during her dreadful journey to the Place de la Révolution; one person at least would ensure that she was not abandoned alone to her ordeal, would render her homage at the moment of her death.

On 8 November, Manon was called before the Revolutionary Tribunal to hear her sentence. She dressed carefully, in a white muslin dress with a black velvet sash and a simple hat resting on her loose chestnut hair. Beugnot noticed that her expression, though still calm, was more animated than usual as she prepared to mount the stairs to the vaulted medieval hall, above the Conciergerie’s cells, in which the court met.

When Manon rose to begin her own carefully prepared defence, she opened by pleading the Girondin cause. The judge immediately interrupted: the accused, he said, could not abuse her right to defend herself by glorifying condemned traitors. Manon turned to the onlookers to witness this injustice, but her appeal was met with cries of ‘Long live the Republic! Down with traitors!’

Manon Roland was convicted of being an accomplice, if not an author, of a conspiracy against the Republic, and sentenced to death that same day. It was less than four months before her fortieth birthday. ‘You find me worthy to share the fate of the great men whom you have
assassinated,’ she said. ‘I will do my best to mount the scaffold with the same courage they have shown.’

Descending on to the level of the cells, Manon gave the prisoners waiting to learn her fate a rueful thumbs down signal. Honoré-Jean Riouffe thought he detected ‘a certain joyfulness in her swift steps’, perhaps because she believed that in death she would finally be united with Buzot. She ate her last meal with Lamarche, a forger with whom she was to go to the scaffold, and tried to make him smile. Afterwards a guard cut their hair in readiness for the guillotine’s blade. ‘It suits you admirably,’ she told Lamarche. ‘You have the head of an ancient Roman.’

She was surprised when her hands were tied behind her back before she was helped into the tumbrel; she was not used to it, she said. Lamarche climbed into the cart ahead of her, not thinking to allow her to go first. ‘
Tu n’es pas galant
,’ scolded Manon, gently. ‘You’re not a gentleman.’

It was a cold, grey afternoon. Manon had asked Sophie Grandchamp to stand at the Pont-Neuf, where the red-painted tumbrel, drawn by two horses and accompanied by five or six gendarmes, would cross the Seine on to the right bank. The spot she had chosen was less than a hundred yards from the house on the quai de l’Horloge in which she had grown up. As they reached the bridge, Sophie could see Manon scanning the crowd for her face. ‘She was fresh, calm, smiling,’ wrote Sophie; the pleasure that her presence gave Manon was evident on her friend’s face. As she watched, the cart turned off the bridge and trundled at walking pace over the cobbles towards the Place de la Révolution. The journey could take as long as two agonizing hours, through jeering or impassive crowds.

At the scaffold, Manon insisted that Lamarche go before her. To wait and watch your companions die was seen as more difficult to bear and women were usually accorded precedence. Perhaps Manon felt that she could stand the wait better than the frightened Lamarche; perhaps she just wanted to feel the breath in her chest and the air on her skin a few moments longer.

An immense statue of Liberty stood on a plinth in the Place de la Révolution where Louis XV had once reigned in bronze majesty. She wore the
bonnet rouge
–unlike the républicaines-révolutionnaires, her
intentions were not suspect–and leaned on a pike. On mounting the scaffold, before placing her neck calmly on the block, Manon looked up at her and said, ‘Oh, Liberty, what crimes they commit in your name!’ In her friend Helen Williams’s eyes, she had triumphantly achieved her hopes of dying nobly, proving that feminine sensibility could be as heroic as masculine stoicism: ‘What more than Roman fortitude dignified the last moments of Mme Roland?’

As Manon had predicted, when Roland heard about her death he left his hiding-place in Rouen and, somewhere on the Paris road–ensuring his body would be found–leaned forcefully forward on to his swordstick. He left two notes. One said that ‘he had died as he had lived, in honesty and virtue’. The other said he was committing suicide ‘not out of fear but out of indignation. I left my refuge as soon as I learned that they had murdered my wife. I no longer wish to live in a world so covered with crimes.’

Buzot heard the news of Manon’s execution in Bordeaux, where he was living in a cellar belonging to a wigmaker of Saint-Èmilion with Barbaroux and Pètion. ‘
She
is no more,
she
is no more,’ he wrote to a friend in Èvreux. ‘The scoundrels have murdered her. Consider if there is anything left for me to regret on earth!’ The following June their hiding-place was discovered and the fugitives decided to commit suicide. In her last letter to Buzot, Manon had urged him, if he was in danger of being apprehended, to ‘die a free man as you have lived’. Barbaroux’s shot misfired and he was captured and guillotined; Buzot’s and Pètion’s corpses, half-eaten by wolves, were found in a wheatfield a week later.

Women tended to form the majority of the spectators in the Place de la Révolution. The infamous
tricoteuses
, or Furies of the guillotine, knitted stockings for their husbands and sons away fighting the nation’s external enemies while they monitored the elimination of the nation’s internal enemies on the scaffold.

Officially, the guillotine was known as ‘the sword of liberty’. To
the ruling Jacobins it represented impartial justice, as merciless and incorruptible as they themselves hoped to be. Something of a cult of the guillotine developed during the Terror. Hymns were composed to ‘Sainte Guillotine,’ addressing the ‘admirable machine’ and ‘proud device’; a play called
La guillotine d’amour
was playing at the Théâtre du Lycée in 1793. As the historian Andrea Stuart comments, the guillotine was ‘familiarized, domesticated and commodified: miniature guillotines were made into paperweights, children’s toys and even hair ornaments and earrings’.

The main reason for watching the enemies of the state go to their deaths was not support for the new regime, but a macabre fascination with the ultimate exercise of power. ‘It was not the love of the republic that each day drew so many to the place de la Révolution,’ wrote Camille Desmoulins, ‘but curiosity, and the new play that could have but a single performance.’ Although the crowds lining the streets to watch the tumbrels go by were often boisterous, the onlookers in the Place de la Révolution were more usually apathetic and bemused than bloodthirsty. The scaffold was raised and surrounded by policemen or soldiers, usually on horseback, so from ground level it was hard to get a clear view, even when Sanson held up a victim’s head. The quick competence with which the executioner worked made the spectacle more like watching a professional butcher than a theatre of propaganda.

Most victims made an effort to be dignified, and many royalists uttered a last defiant cry of ‘
Vive le roi!
’, but there were a few notable exceptions. Some victims composed songs that would raise their spirits on the
trajet
, the long route to the Place de la Révolution, which were known as
chansons de guillotine
. Many became well-known hymns, like ‘Mourir pour la patrie’, first sung by a Girondin newspaper editor on his way to the scaffold. ‘
C’est le sort le plus beau, le plus digne d’envie
,’ went the chorus: it is the most desirable, the finest fate. Others laughed and danced in the tumbrels, or poked fun at the onlookers.

When Louis XV’s former mistress, the ageing courtesan Jeanne du Barry, was killed in the spring of 1793, ‘she showed very little courage on the scaffold,’ wrote Grace Dalrymple Elliott, who had been held alongside her in Sainte-Pélagie. Elliott thought that if everyone protested like Barry, ‘Robespierre would not have dared to put as many to
death as he did, for Mme du Barry’s screams, they told me, frightened and alarmed the mob’.

Manon Roland was one of several prominent women, including Marie-Antoinette and Olympe de Gouges, who were executed in the autumn of 1793 at the same time as the Jacobins crushed the Société des Républicaines-Révolutionnaires. The Jacobin regime may not have been prepared to admit that women were capable of exercising the same political rights as men, but they saw no contradiction in imprisoning and executing them for political crimes–for many, like the wives of émigrés, simply crimes of association.

Olympe de Gouges had been arrested nearly two months after Manon, on 20 July. At first she tried to avoid the guillotine by pretending she was pregnant, but since she was forty-five her claims were greeted with derisive scorn. During her trial, which took place on the second day of Manon’s hearing, 2 November, she boldly outlined her federalist ideas, criticized Marat and described Robespierre as ‘ambitious, without genius or soul…ready to sacrifice a whole nation to become dictator’. She was killed two days later. Different versions of her last words survive. One has her shouting, ‘Children of the Fatherland, you will avenge my death!’ to which the onlookers responded, ‘
Vive le République!
’. The other, more poetic account sees her lamenting her destiny with improbable perspective: ‘Oh fatal aspiration to fame! I wanted to be a somebody!’

In 1904, Olympe de Gouges’s ‘case’ was analysed by a Dr Guillois as an instance of revolutionary hysteria. Her symptoms were ‘abnormal sexuality’, or having fallen into prostitution, which he speculated was caused by hormonal irregularity; ‘narcissism’, shown by her whore’s habit of bathing daily; and a defective moral sense, as demonstrated by her refusal to remarry. Even at the start of the twentieth century, women who claimed equal rights were seen not as campaigners for justice, but as sexually depraved madwomen.

The revolutionary press delighted in making connections between Gouges, Marie-Antoinette, Charlotte Corday and Manon Roland. Their shared fate was a warning to other women who dared hope to have an independent voice. ‘Marie-Antoinette was a bad mother, a debauched wife, and she died under the curses of those she wished to
destroy,’ declared the
Moniteur Universel
on 19 November. ‘Olympe de Gouges, born with an exalted imagination, took her delirium for an inspiration of nature’, while ‘the Roland woman, a fine mind for great plans, a philosopher on notepaper, the queen of a moment’ was worst of all: ‘a monster however you look at her…Even though she was a mother, she sacrificed nature by trying to raise herself above it; the desire to be learned led her to forget the virtues of her sex.’

Fabricating an ‘unnatural’ sexuality–painting Corday as a tortured virgin, Marie-Antoinette and Manon as depraved adulteresses swapping sexual favours for influence, and belittling Gouges for believing that in her forties she was still attractive enough to have lovers–which they could then attack was the means by which the Jacobin regime sought to prevent other women from following their example. If women who spoke out lost their reputations and society’s respect, then very few others would be willing to speak out.

Spurious reports about Manon’s life and last moments leaked out in the years following her death. It was said that on her last night in prison she had played on the harpsichord ‘in
so strange
,
so shocking
, and
so frightful
a manner that the sounds will never escape her [a fellow-prisoner’s] memory’.
The Female Revolutionary
, published pseudonymously by ‘Plutarch’ in England in 1806, contained an entirely false description of Manon, ‘the faithless subject, and the malignant conspirator’. ‘She evinced an early inclination for literature and gallantry,’ it began, as if unsure which crime were graver. ‘Before she was fifteen she had lovers, and before she was sixteen she was an author.’ But her memoirs and letters have confounded her enemies and guaranteed her immortality. In the spring of 1795 Manon’s friends Bosc d’Antic and Luc Antoine de Champagneux published her memoirs under the title
Appel à l’impartiale postérité
.

Mary Wollstonecraft’s biographer Claire Tomalin suspects Wollstonecraft may have edited the first English edition of Roland’s memoirs while she was in Scandinavia in 1794. Certainly the two women had moved in overlapping circles during the 1790s, sharing friends in London and Paris, most notably Helen Williams, one of those to whom Manon had entrusted her precious notebooks from prison. Williams had burned hers when she was arrested in August
1793, but it is quite possible Wollstonecraft received the remainder from another source.

Over the next decades, influenced by her writing, a new generation of romantic historians like Michelet and Lamartine held Manon up as their revolutionary muse–the embodiment of the passion, faith and purity of true republicanism.

Only one mystery remained. Manon’s veiled references to a lover in her memoirs had piqued the curiosity of readers since the publication of her
Appel
, but the deaths of some and the loyalty of others who knew the secret ensured that Buzot’s identity remained hidden for seventy years after her death. It was not until 1863, when a package of manuscripts taken to a Paris bookseller on the banks of the Seine was found to contain the five letters written by Manon to Buzot from prison, that his name and their hopeless passion were finally revealed.

On 10 November–the day that a broken-hearted Roland committed suicide on an empty provincial road–the first Festival of Reason was held in Paris. This was the high point of revolutionary dechristianization. The Republic’s secular calendar had been introduced the previous month, with its months and holidays renamed using nature and agriculture as inspiration. According to the new system the festival was held on 20 Brumaire Year II: the second
décadi
, or twentieth day, of the month of mists, in the second year of the Republic. The day itself was called Herse, or ‘harrow’, after the farm implement used to till the fields at that time of year.