Read Liberty: The Lives and Times of Six Women in Revolutionary France Online
Authors: Lucy Moore
Liberty: The Lives and Times of Six Women in Revolutionary France (5 page)
According to the historian Madelyn Gutwirth, Condorcet was so concerned to avoid the ‘posture of bogus rococo gallantry’ that marked so much eighteenth-century writing about women that he lamented his lack of it. ‘Sighing philosophically, he observes that in robbing women of their myth by speaking of their “rights rather than their reign”, he may fail to earn their approval, for he saw all about him the stampede among women to Rousseauist views’, which granted them dominion over men’s hearts but no political rights.
Although the constitution of the newly formed United States had not granted rights to women, its democratic example was an inspiration to Condorcet. ‘Men whom the reading of philosophic books had secretly disposed to love liberty were filled with passion [during the War of Independence],’ he wrote in a eulogy to Benjamin Franklin. ‘They seized with joy this occasion to publicly confess sentiments that prudence had obliged them to maintain in silence.’
England provided Germaine’s circle with another social and political model; collectively, they were known as ‘Anglomaniacs’. Helen Maria Williams described the French in 1789 and 1790 as ‘mad about the English’. So-called English pastimes of racing and betting preoccupied the upper classes’ leisure time; young aristocrats affected English accents and a deliberate awkwardness of manner, because the English were famously clumsy. ‘Everything had to be copied from our neighbours, from the Constitution to horses and carriages,’ wrote Lucy de la Tour du Pin, whose Irish blood and fair English looks made her a sensation at court.
In the first half of the eighteenth century, the political philosopher Montesquieu had applauded Britain’s well balanced, representative government. English customs were seen as an ideal combination ‘of privilege and liberty, elegance and easy informality, tradition and reform’, and English men and women were praised by French visitors for their cleanliness, motivation and industry. Germaine thought England had ‘attained the perfection of the social order’, with its division of power between Crown, aristocracy and people. But even to speak of the English constitution at court ‘seemed as criminal as if one had suggested dethroning the king’.
Away from court, beneath the Gobelin tapestries on the walls of the dining-room in the rue du Bac, there were no such restrictions on speech or thought. In her favourite stance with her back to the fireplace, Mme de Staël, ‘young, brilliant [and] thoughtless’, would captivate her own coterie of dazzled youths by proclaiming ‘in strokes of fire the ideas they thought they held’.
On 5 May 1789, from a palace window, an ecstatic Germaine watched the deputies of the Estates-General process into their opening session at Versailles. They had last gathered together 175 years earlier. Among the deputies Germaine’s rejected suitor, Stanislas de Clermont-Tonnerre, represented the royalist centre right; her friend Lafayette was a moderate constitutional monarchist; the three Lameth brothers and Mathieu de Montmorency, all of whom had fought beside Lafayette in America, were slightly more liberal; on the extreme left were the lawyers Maximilien Robespierre, François Buzot and Jérôme Pétion.
Perhaps the most celebrated deputy in 1789 was Honoré-Gabriel de Mirabeau, the debauched Provençal count who represented his region in the Third Estate, the commoners, instead of sitting with the peers. The inspiring beauty of his oratory was almost enhanced by its contrast with his physical brutishness and coarse, pock-marked face. Germaine despised him: he was her father’s rival for the hearts of the people. Blinded by his weaknesses – egotism and immorality – she could not see the political talents he possessed in abundance. Necker dismissed Mirabeau as ‘a demagogue by calculation and an aristocrat by disposition’.
On the streets of Versailles, crowds ‘drunk with hope and joy’, according to another observer, lined the route to wish the Estates-General well, but Mme de Montmorin, the wife of a royal minister standing beside Germaine, was pessimistic. ‘You are wrong to rejoice,’ she said to Germaine. ‘This will be the source of great misfortune to France and to us.’ She was right, as far as she and her family were concerned: she would die on the scaffold beside one of her sons; another
son drowned himself; her husband and one daughter died in prison and another daughter died before she was thirty.
Maximilien Robespierre was invited to Necker’s Versailles residence later that summer. Deputies to the National Assembly
*
were much in demand in the grand salons of Paris and Versailles. ‘His features were ignoble, his skin pale, his veins of a greenish colour,’ Germaine recalled. ‘He supported the most absurd propositions with a coolness that had the air of conviction.’ From the start, Robespierre saw himself as France’s saviour. ‘
La patrie est en danger
,’ he had written in April 1789. ‘Let us fly to its aid.’ A provincial lawyer from a modest but comfortable background (at the start of the revolution he signed his name using the aristocratic ‘de’), he became a regular speaker at the National Assembly and was already attracting attention for his lofty democratic principles, arguing in favour of freedom of the press and insisting suffrage should be granted to all men, including servants and the poor; he did not mention votes for women.
Alongside Germaine’s friends Lafayette and the Lameth brothers, Robespierre was a prominent member of a club formed at Versailles in the summer of 1789 by a group of progressive deputies with the purpose of debating issues before they came before the National Assembly. The Society of the Friends of the Constitution would become known as the Jacobin Club because, when the Assembly moved to Paris that October, they hired the hall of a Dominican (
Jacobin
, in French slang) monastery on the rue Saint-Honoré, almost opposite the
manége
where the Assembly met.
As her opinions of Robespierre and Mirabeau demonstrate, Germaine’s view of politics was intensely personal, coloured by her first-hand observation of people and her sense of being at the centre of events. She called Clermont-Tonnerre ‘my speaker’, meaning speaker on her behalf in the Assembly, and in September 1789 she scribbled an urgent note to Monsieur de Staël in Versailles to find out whether or
not ‘my bill on the veto’ (whether or not the king should have a veto over legislation in the new constitution, and if so how strong a veto) had been won; as she hoped, the ‘Necker–Lafayette’ partial veto had been adopted.
She had cause to feel possessive. In July, committees were created to compose France’s first constitution, and on them sat many of Germaine’s friends including Talleyrand, Lafayette and the Lameths. In August they produced the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen which established in its first article that all men are born and live free and equal. Torture and arbitrary imprisonment were abolished and innocence was presumed; freedom of the press and of worship was declared; citizens were to bear the weight of taxation according to their abilities; the army was defined as a public force and access to the officers’ ranks opened up to non-nobles.
Even though the real work of composing a constitution was still to come, these basic liberties were exactly those for which Germaine had been agitating behind the scenes and, looking back on the achievements of this period, she remained certain that politics and society had never been so intimately or valuably connected. ‘As political affairs were still in the hands of the elite, all the vigour of liberty and all the grace of old-fashioned manners were united in the same people,’ she wrote. ‘Men of the Third Estate, distinguished by their enlightened ideas and their talents, joined those gentlemen who were prouder of their own merit than of the privileges of their class; and the highest questions society has ever considered were dealt with by minds the most capable of understanding and debating them.’
This self-referential, unabashedly elitist idea of ‘communication of superior minds among themselves’ was the spirit of Germaine de Staël’s salon, and, though it was instrumental in bringing the revolution into being, it would have little place in it in the years to come. As Germaine herself said, from the day that the National Assembly moved from Versailles to Paris in the autumn of 1789, ‘its goal was no longer liberty, but equality’.
Everywhere, just like warriors,
We carried off the laurels and the glory,
And roused hopes for the glory of France.
Poissard
song, autumn 1789
L
IKE A CAROUSEL
abandoned to centrifugal force, with respect for the government and tradition dissolving, France spun into revolution in 1789. The harvest the previous year had been destroyed by late hail storms and the winter was the worst for nearly a century. Bread prices had doubled and people were dying of starvation. Bands of brigands – and horrifying rumours of their brutality – swept through the countryside, taking advantage of the chaos caused by the abolition of feudal rights and dues, and the vacuum once filled by the king’s heavily centralized government.
Alongside Germaine de Staël’s gilded cocoon teemed another world. Marie-Antoinette’s friend, the painter Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, was terrified in the summer of 1789 when she looked out of her window to find sans-culottes shaking their fists at her from the street and jumping on to the running-board of her carriage, shouting, ‘Next year, you’ll be behind the carriages and we’ll be the ones inside!’ When émigrés, including Vigée-Lebrun, began leaving France, the savage insults of passers-by floated in the wake of their heavy-laden carriages: ‘There go some more on the way out, those dogs of aristocrats.’
Although Germaine and her friends passionately believed in reform, their ideas were largely conceptual. The aristocracy numbered several hundred thousand in a population of twenty-eight million; perhaps five thousand nobles lived in Paris, a city of about 550,000 inhabitants, in 1790. Isolated from the rest of France in their magnificent
hôtels
and crested carriages, the only common people with whom they came into contact tame peasants or liveried servants, they had little comprehension of what life was like for ordinary men and women. Rich and poor viewed each other as utterly alien beings; it seemed all
they had in common was their cynicism and their disaffection with the king and his government. The rich saw the poor as barely human–savage beings for whom it was certainly not worth stopping one’s carriage if they had had the bad luck to have been run over – while the poor viewed the rich as frivolous, mannered and cruel.
Popular responses to the political upheavals taking place in Paris were marked by a defiant, unrestrained combination of violence and delight: ‘no riotous scene…did not have its festive aspect,’ writes Mona Ozouf in her study of revolutionary festivals, and there was ‘no collective celebration without a groundswell of menace’.
Poissard
, the Parisian slang dialect of the markets, exemplified this peculiarly French juxtaposition of levity and deadly seriousness in ‘comic and abusive verse, rhymed insults and a kind of tough, threatening talk’. Its jeering tone was fashionable among slumming aristocrats in the 1770s and 1780s, who performed
poissard
plays in their private theatres without any conception of the true resentment that lay beneath its rough mockery.
The typical
poissarde
woman, literally a fish-seller, but including other market women, seamstresses or laundresses, was described in the revolutionary newspaper
Pére Duchesne
as a plain speaker, a frugal housekeeper and a chaste wife. She had an ugly face and despised finery, and was devoted to her family and capable of defending it savagely if need be. Her children were raised according to the political principles she and her husband held, a tradition of fierce egalitarianism and independence, and she claimed the right to sign petitions, fill the audience chambers of the National Assembly and denounce those she considered unpatriotic, deliberately addressing them by the familiar ‘
tu
’ rather than the more formal ‘
vous
’. Although the revolution was marked by violent anticlericalism, these women often continued to revere Mary, ‘
la bonne petite mére
’. Many of them lived in the faubourg Saint-Antoine, just east of the Bastille on the outskirts of Paris.
Common women were praised by revolutionaries, generally from middle-class backgrounds themselves, for their shrewdness, swift judgement and moral fibre. ‘The women of the people hide a fine character which finds expression when needed,’ wrote one patriotic journalist in 1789. They were barometers of the political environment: if things were really bad, the market women would be restless.
The activist Pauline Léon came from a typical lower-middle-class faubourg background–not the poorest of the poor but far from prosperous. Her father was a chocolate-maker – an artisan working in a luxury market supplying the rich – and, she said, a philosopher, who had raised his children according to his principles and without prejudices. She could read and write, although her family’s modest means had not allowed for much education; girls from her background might have learned to read the mass in French and vespers in Latin, and then begun working in their early teens. When her father died, her mother took over his business and raised their five children, with help from Pauline, apparently the eldest.
Pauline was thirty-one and unmarried at the start of the revolution, still living at home and working with her mother, when the new ideas inflamed her. Mothers with young children stayed at home, so the politically minded women on the streets were either young and single, like Pauline, or middle-aged, sometimes widows, perhaps with sons fighting the revolution’s foreign enemies at the front while their mothers and sisters guarded against the fatherland’s ‘aristocratic’ enemies at home. Unlike in the salons of the nobility, sans-culotte men and women, though in accord ideologically, led separate political lives during the revolution. Radical lower-class women protested together, went to political clubs together and watched the guillotine’s blade falling together.