Liberty: The Lives and Times of Six Women in Revolutionary France (7 page)

After much discussion, fifteen were chosen to appear with Maillard before the National Assembly. Maillard spoke for them, raising rumours of grain hoarding, which the women believed was an aristocratic plot. Deputy Robespierre, immaculate as usual, rose to his feet to confirm the rumours of hoarding. Maillard took the floor again, this time asking that the royal bodyguard be requested to adopt the tricolour cockade to make amends for the insult they were said to have made to it.

As he spoke, the women waiting outside flooded into the assembly hall, declaring that the bodyguards in the palace courtyard had fired on them. The mood in the hall became riotous, almost carnivalesque: the marchers levelled hostile remarks at the Bishop of Paris, threatened to murder a guard, derided the king’s failure to sign the Declaration of Rights and spread their wet clothes out to dry. One woman sat in the chair reserved for the president of the Assembly; others tried to participate in the debate and vote with the deputies. They mocked the rituals of government, shouting insults so as to disrupt proceedings, some dropping off to sleep on the deputies’ benches.

Outside, the town of Versailles had shut down. One of Marie-Antoinette’s ladies-in-waiting tried to get back into the palace at about nine on the evening of the 5th, but a National Guard sentry from Versailles recognized her at the gates and sent her back to her lodgings. ‘You must not be seen in the street,’ he told her. ‘You have nothing to fear for your friends, but there will not be a single lifeguardsman [royal bodyguard] left tomorrow morning.’

Meanwhile the Assembly’s president, Jean-Joseph Mounier, had taken a deputation of women to see the king himself. Much impressed by Louis’s paternal sympathy and concern (he fetched smelling-salts for a seventeen-year-old flower-girl, chosen as spokeswoman, who fainted at his feet), they returned to the assembly hall bearing a signed order for any delayed wheat to be delivered to Paris immediately. Mounier and some of the women now went back to Paris to inform the people of the king’s promises; the remainder stayed in Versailles, the lucky ones finding beds in stables and coach-houses, others huddling in the lee of buildings wrapped in their damp clothes. Many of them wept with exhaustion and confusion, saying they ‘had been
forced to march and did not know why they were there’, miles from home and without shelter on a cold, damp night.

The king then agreed without qualification to sign the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, which he had delayed doing for almost a month. He consulted his ministers about whether he should resist the hostile approaching National Guard by force, or flee, and decided to do neither. ‘Habits of formality’ stopped him escaping, then or later, according to the daughter of an aristocrat who urged flight.

When Lafayette arrived with the factious Guard it was almost midnight. Versailles was quiet, but wide awake: the tinderbox still smouldered. Alone and unarmed, the general was permitted into the palace to see the king, and told him – after swearing to die at his feet – that if Louis would guarantee food for Paris, allow the patriotic National Guard to replace the royal bodyguard, and agree to move his family, court and government from Versailles to Paris, the National Guard would be satisfied and a clash between them and the royal bodyguard would be averted. The king said he needed to think about the last proposal. Lafayette reported back to the National Assembly, then to his soldiers and officers, and spent the next few hours trying to maintain calm before snatching a few hours’ sleep on a sofa at his grandfather’s house.

Just before dawn, a crowd of armed men and women broke into the palace compound. Storming into the royal apartments, they called for the blood of the ‘Austrian whore’ (Marie Antoinette had been an Austrian princess before she became the French queen). Two soldiers were killed and their heads paraded around the courtyard on pikes. They chased the barefoot, frantic queen through the Hall of Mirrors to the king’s apartments, where the terrified royal family were reunited; outside, the National Guard finally turned against the mob and stemmed their advance.

Lafayette, awoken by the mayhem, ran to the palace. At his suggestion Louis took his family on to the narrow balcony outside his grandfather’s state bedroom and, addressing the crowd, promised to entrust himself to the love of his subjects, to their cheers below. Then Lafayette persuaded Marie-Antoinette to step out in front of the crowd alone, turned to her, and kissed her hand; the volatile crowd suddenly turned
royalist, and erupted with cries of ‘Long live the queen!’ as well as, brandishing loaves on pikes, ‘We have bread!’

For the moment, the crisis had been averted.

Later that morning, Lafayette escorted the royal family back to Paris through the rain at the heart of a procession of perhaps sixty thousand people flanked at either end by the National Guard. Ministers and deputies marched too, alongside flour wagons from the king’s own stores and triumphant market women arm in arm with Guardsmen whose caps they were wearing. Green branches were tied to rifle butts, the two cannon brought from the Hôtel de Ville the morning before were wreathed in laurel, and the two murdered bodyguards’ heads were carried aloft on pikes beside bloody loaves of bread. Many women lifted their skirts and flashed their bottoms as they passed, a traditional expression of female mockery and contempt. They were bringing the baker, the baker’s wife and the baker’s boy (the king, queen and dauphin) to Paris, sang the mob.

The harlequin makeup of the crowd during those October days excited much comment at the time. The eight-year-old daughter of a courtier remembered the streets of Versailles flooded with ‘horrible-looking people, uttering wild cries’. Edmund Burke, from the safety of England, denounced the ‘horrid yells, and shrilling screams, and frantic dances, and infamous contumelies, and all the unutterable abominations of the furies of hell, in the abused shape of the vilest of women’. ‘Probably,’ responded Mary Wollstonecraft icily, ‘you mean women who gained a livelihood by selling vegetables or fish, who never had any advantages of education.’

Some of the October women undoubtedly were violent, bloodthirsty and deliberately intimidating. On the way to Versailles, a few shouted that they were going to the palace ‘to bring back the queen’s head’. When the palace was stormed, some were heard calling for the queen’s liver to be fricasséed. On the whole, though, it was not until the National Guard arrived late on the night of the 5th that the mood turned bloody.

Mme de Tourzel, governess to the royal children, thought that many of the ‘women’ who entered the palace early on the morning of the 6th were men in female clothing. It was not unusual for eighteenth-
century Frenchmen to adopt women’s clothes and women’s names, such as Mère Folle, when demonstrating for political or economic purposes; peasants had dressed as women and blacked their faces to attack surveyors during a land dispute in the Beaujolais in the 1770s. Like
poissard
humour, like the joy taken in entering forbidden places and challenging long-established authorities, this grim fancy dress was another element of black carnival, the combination of festivity and menace that characterized the popular revolution.

Most of the marchers were proud of their participation, and saw the precedent set by women seizing the political initiative as a positive one. The following month, a woman writer in
Les Étrennes Nationales des Dames
hailed the Parisiennes for proving that they were at least as courageous and enterprising as the men. ‘We suffer more than men who with their declarations of rights leave us in the state of inferiority and, let’s be truthful, of slavery in which they’ve kept us so long,’ she continued. ‘If there are husbands
aristocratic
enough in their households to oppose the sharing of patriotic honours, we’ll use the arms we’ve just employed with such success against them.’

The
poissardes
, for their part, had a new song:

To Versailles, like braggarts,

We dragged our cannon.

Although we were only women,

We wanted to show a courage beyond reproach.

We made men of spirit see that just like them, we weren’t afraid;

Guns and musketoons across our shoulders…

Pauline Léon did not say whether she had been in Versailles on 5 and 6 October, but she did say that Lafayette’s behaviour on those days, the evident conflict between his political principles and his loyalty to the king, and his efforts to bring about a compromise between the royalists and the populists, had confirmed her mistrust of him. She saw him as a traitor, and her words echo Fournier l’Américain’s portrait of a wretched, perfidious general stalling for time to save his king at the cost of his countrymen: ‘Since that time [the women’s march] I have sworn eternal hatred of him, and I have used all possible means to unmask him.’

The march on Versailles gave the women of Paris like Pauline Léon a new political self-confidence. The guts and initiative they had shown gave credence to their demands. Ceaselessly they urged the continuance of the work of the revolution. Eighteen months later a group from Saint-Germain, mostly widows and single women, addressed the Cordeliers’ Club, a popular revolutionary assembly which had met, since April 1790, on the rue des Cordeliers. Léon may have been among them: she lived in Saint-Germain and regularly attended the club, which met at the bottom of her street.

‘Watch with more exactitude and severity than ever over the governing of the state,’ they exhorted the Cordeliers. If Frenchmen failed in their duty, if they trusted perfidious tyrants – like Lafayette – who hoped to return the French people to slavery, the women swore that they themselves would defy established social roles to fight in defence of liberty.

We have consoled ourselves for our inability to contribute to the public good by exerting our most intense efforts to raise the spirits of our children to the heights of free men. But if you deceive our hope, then indignation, sorrow, despair will impel and drag us into public places…Then we shall save the Fatherland, or, dying with it, we will uproot the torturous memory of seeing you unworthy of us.

Like Germaine de Staël, these women made a point of accepting feminine political passivity as essential to society’s greater good; but they were utterly committed to the revolutionary cause. They did not want rights for themselves, but they wanted rights for all Frenchmen. If men failed to deliver the new liberties they had promised, they insisted, women would not be afraid to step on to the public stage as they had in October 1789.

All over France, common women gathered together in clubs of different types to demonstrate their patriotism and their devotion to
the revolution. Some dared call for girls to be better educated; others demanded the privilege of fighting for the
patrie
, or rights of consent over marriage and inheritance. In Saint-Sever, a Mme Lafurie argued that custom did not prove the law: contrary to popular belief, she declared, women were neither too weak to work nor too depraved to play a role in public life.

Twenty-seven cities had auxiliary clubs of the Fraternal Society of the Friends–calling themselves
Amies
rather than
Amis
– of the Constitution. In Breteuil in August 1790 a group of unmarried ‘Sisters of the Constitution’ offered a hand-sewn national flag to the town; the women of Alais formed a Patriotic Club which met to read the decrees of the National Assembly to their children. Female companies of the National Guard were formed across the country: at Creil, at Angers, at Villeneuve-la-Guyard, Aunay, Bergerac and Limoges. In the summer of 1791, the women of Les Halles, Paris’s central market, donated to the National Assembly their guild treasure, in silver plate and cash, amounting to almost fifteen hundred livres. Before the revolution, they said, ‘all politics and all refinements’ had been foreign to them; since then, ‘the idea of liberty [had] enlarged souls, inflamed spirits, electrified hearts’, and they were willing to make any sacrifice to acquire and safeguard it.

Most rural Frenchwomen were not revolutionaries; all they wanted was bread to feed their children and fuel for their fires. Counterrevolutionary sentiments were strong in the west of the country. In September 1790, women protesting at the price of bread cried, ‘We want to save the monks! Long live the clergy! Long live the nobility!’ A royalist newspaper,
L’Ami du Roi
, reported in 1791 that ‘a Frenchwoman inflamed with love for her country’ had suggested forming a club of female ‘Amazons’ to defend France and the king.

Louis-Marie Prudhomme, editor of the left-wing
Révolutions de Paris
, wrote in November 1791 that many of his female readers were complaining of being excluded from participating in the revolution. Some claimed that in ancient Gaul women had had a voice in government and questioned why these rights were not returned to them. Prudhomme responded savagely: ‘we do not venture to come and teach you how to love your children, spare us the trouble then of coming to
our clubs and expounding our duties as citizens to us’. His chauvinism was not unusual, and would only become more widespread. Jacobin Clubs across the country increasingly resisted women’s attempts to participate in their activities, fearing what they saw as their corrupting influence; in Tonneins, the local Jacobins succeeded in segregating the men and women watching their debates and in banning women and men from conversing with each other on their premises.

The month after the women of Saint-Germain addressed the Cordeliers, Pauline Léon presented to the National Assembly a petition bearing over three hundred signatures. In the event of a foreign war, she argued, women would be left defenceless at home; they needed weapons in order to defend the
patrie
from its hidden, internal enemies. ‘Your predecessors deposited the Constitution as much in our hands as in yours,’ she argued. ‘Oh, how to save it, if we have no arms to defend it from the attacks of its enemies?’