Liberty: The Lives and Times of Six Women in Revolutionary France

by Lucy Moore

In March 1793, the Convention decreed the formation of a revolutionary court, the Revolutionary Tribunal. Its public prosecutor, Antoine Fouquier-Tinville, was given permission a few weeks later to have any citizen arrested, charged and tried on the grounds of a single denunciation. Trials could be neither appealed against nor quashed.

These women were poissardes, the wives and daughters of sans-culottes, and by 1793, with their daily lives as hard as ever, they were beginning to question what the revolution had achieved. During the riots in February a drunkard among them was heard to say that in the old days there had been only one king; now there were thirty or forty.

although Robespierre was celebrated as a champion of the rights of previously passive male citizens like black men, Jews and servants, he did not even address the subject of women possessing natural and inalienable rights.

For her–as for Robespierre, Marat and many other revolutionaries–one of the defining characteristics of the ancien régime’s immorality was its domination by women. As the historian Dorinda Outram observes, ‘to the degree that power in the Old Regime was ascribed to women, that meant that the discourse of the Revolution was committed to anti-feminine rhetoric’. The revolution became a crusading instead of a destructive force: it would replace the unnatural world of boudoir politics with virtue–government by men alone, whose intrinsic qualities (so the argument went) made them the natural leaders of society.

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.

Nor could a regime that had made the exclusion of women from public life one of the foundations of its authority venerate women as personifications of its ideal virtues. The gap between theory–in which women were exalted–and practice–in which they were disparaged and denigrated–had become too great.

Thérésia believed that it was for her sake that Robespierre fell. On 25 July (7 Thermidor) she claimed to have smuggled a letter out of La Force to Tallien,

Thérésia rejoiced when she heard the news of Robespierre’s death, years afterwards calling 9 Thermidor ‘the most beautiful day of my life, since it was in part by my little hand that the guillotine was overturned’.

Both men and women, released from the fear of death, now abandoned themselves to a post-apocalyptic pursuit of physical gratification as a way of reminding themselves that they were alive. People’s affections, as Helen Williams put it, ‘burst forth with uncontrollable energy’. Everyone understood the need to test boundaries, to escape limitations, to feel free.

Guests invited to dinner parties at this time committed ‘an unheard-of impoliteness’ if they did not bring with them their own bread and candles.

Germaine de Staël (who had been escorted out of Paris by Tallien in September 1792), questioned their intentions. ‘The new revolution which has just occurred has put the villains-for-the-love-of-profit in place of the villains-for-the-love-of-crime,’ she wrote.

Thérésia, accompanied by Stanislas Fréron and a band of muscadins, ceremoniously locked its doors, shutting the Club down for good, and presented the keys to the National Convention. ‘That woman is capable of closing the gates of hell,’ commented the British prime minister, William Pitt.

to have been in prison during the Terror was ‘a necessary introduction to good society’.

Jean-Baptiste Isabey

Thérésia loved jewellery, wearing diamond toe rings and anklets to hide–or perhaps to draw attention to–the scars on her feet and legs from the rat bites she had received in prison. Hoops of diamonds set in gold around her thighs glittered through her muslin dresses. ‘One could not be more richly undressed,’ commented Talleyrand.

Old-fashioned scruples had disappeared: men appeared in drawing-rooms in their boots; they did not scruple to compliment women to their faces (something that was seen before the revolution as an insult to their modesty); friends addressed one another by their first names. Women sat on sofas with their legs tucked up under them, displaying their feet and ankles, and went out in public unaccompanied.

The most notorious of these ticketed parties was the bal des victimes, held on the first floor of the Hôtel Richelieu, to which only those who had lost a near relative during the Terror were invited. The room was draped in black: black ribbons tied on to the musicians’ violins, black hangings on the walls, black crêpe on the chandeliers. Dancers of both sexes had their hair cut short at the back, à la victime; women wore thin shifts like the ones in which their mothers and sisters had gone to the scaffold, and narrow red ribbons around their necks, as if to show where the guillotine’s blade had missed. They greeted each other with sharp, awkward nods in imitation of the motion made by severed heads as they dropped into the basket below.

On 1 Prairial (20 May) women occupied the tribunes of the Convention while their husbands and sons outside armed themselves with pikes and cannon. The crowd cried, ‘Bread or death!’

The Thermidorians had re-established religious tolerance, and on 11 Prairial the Convention was persuaded to authorize worship in former churches. A few days later mass was celebrated in fifteen churches in Paris for the first time in three years.

Tallien had been accused of corresponding with royalists, and, desperate to prove himself a true republican, he argued instead that rigour rather than clemency be shown to the rebels. About 750 men were executed. Thérésia was devastated by the deaths.

‘Too much blood [stained] the hands of that man,’ Thérésia told a friend later. ‘I was always repelled by him.’ But she never reproached herself for her association with Tallien, considering herself not an accomplice to his crimes, but rather the only

On 22 August, the Convention approved a new constitution which returned control of France to men of property–a return, as some had it, to the state of affairs in 1789.

Throughout the autumn and winter of 1793 Germaine embarked on an expensive programme of expatriation, helping more than twenty friends and friends of friends escape from Terror-struck France.

The love affair engineered by Barras between Bonaparte and his mistress Rose de Beauharnais began at about the time of Vendémiaire.

On the night of 3 September, Barras dined with Talleyrand, Germaine and Benjamin Constant, while outside the army, commanded by one of Napoléon’s officers, peacefully occupied the city. Paris awoke the next day (18 Fructidor Year V) to discover its walls plastered with justifications of the coup and the news that anyone wishing to restore the monarchy or the 1793 constitution would be shot without trial.

The ambitious expedition was to be funded by annexing Switzerland and its rich resources of gold. Germaine managed to get an appointment with Napoléon to try to dissuade him from invading, but as ever with him her impassioned appeals fell on deaf ears. He would only repeat to her that the Swiss–who had been the happy citizens of a thriving republic for centuries–needed ‘political rights’.

Juliette felt that her ‘heart was made to love and to suffer…As I loved nothing and only suffered from indifference, I considered that I was forgoing my destiny’.

It was fashionable for women of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to develop intense, almost romantic friendships like those between Germaine and Juliette and between Thérésia and Joséphine. Inspired by the intimacy between fictional heroines like Julie and Claire in La Nouvelle Héloïse, women looked to each other to provide them with companionship and emotional (and perhaps physical) solace and comfort, especially when the men in their lives were remote or unloving.

‘The wealth of France had passed into the pockets of the tradespeople, and it was they who entertained,

Talleyrand, who called treason ‘merely a question of dates’, had decided that his alliance with Napoléon meant more to him than his friendship with Germaine.

Institutions based upon force may simulate everything about liberty, except its workings.’ Napoléon tried to rise above On Literature’s popularity;

‘In short,’ Napoléon said to Joseph, ‘what does she want?’ ‘My God,’ replied Germaine, when this question was put to her, ‘it is not a matter of what I want but of what I think.’

‘Advise her not to block my path, no matter what it is, no matter where I choose to go,’ Napoléon said to Lucien and Joseph, from his bath, as fresh instances of her defiance were relayed to him. ‘Or else, I shall break her, I shall crush her. Let her keep quiet,’

Juliette declared that the man who could banish such a woman ‘could never appear to me except as a despot’.

Napoléon’s Civil Code became law in March 1804, two months before he was declared emperor. Unsurprisingly, the laws concerning women were designed to restrict their independence. Women were viewed as legal minors all their lives, passing from the custody of their fathers into that of their husbands.

It was Michelet who first attributed to women a prominent role in the revolution. He argued that the daily deprivations suffered by ordinary women–hunger, disease, the sight of their husbands and sons going off to war–made them overcome their traditional political passivity to become bold instigators of change. ‘What is most people in the people, I

Napoléon was defeated by an alliance of British, Russian, Austrian and Prussian troops in 1814 and Germaine returned to Paris in triumph after a decade-long exile. Once again, her salon was the most important in Paris; once again, the circle she dominated drew up France’s constitution,