Liberty: The Lives and Times of Six Women in Revolutionary France (11 page)

She was self-centred, but generous and passionate, taking delight in pleasing others as much as herself. The secularism of the early days of the revolution, its philosophical and political exaltation of liberty and the pursuit of happiness, had loosened private moral strictures; high-spirited Thérésia enjoyed these new freedoms to the full. The personal philosophy she would develop combined the worldliness and sexual licence enjoyed by married noblewomen before the revolution with the secular amorality of the new republic. Pleasure was her only responsibility, and Thérésia was as happy to find it in 1791 at revolutionary
fêtes
as she had been at royal receptions in 1788. Although she was not at first personally transformed by the revolution in the way that her friend Germaine, or Théroigne de Méricourt, were, Thérésia’s entire adult existence was coloured by the revolution and its upheavals. Fifteen years old in 1789, she knew nothing but change. The great lessons of her youth were opportunism and adaptability.

Thérésia’s whirl of parties and gossip continued, but imperceptibly every aspect of daily life, private as well as public, assumed political overtones. ‘When they converse, liberty is the theme of discourse; when they dance, the figure of the cotillion is adapted to a national tune; and when they sing, it is but to repeat a vow of fidelity to the constitution.’ Even the slang reflected the changing times, according to Helen Maria Williams. ‘Everything tiresome or unpleasant, “
c’est une aristocracie
!” [sic] and everything charming and agreeable is, “
à la nation
”.’ Jean-Jacques Devin de Fontenay may have been debauched, but he was sufficiently fashionable to keep up with politics, attending meetings at the Jacobin Club in December 1790.

Since it was stylish for women to take an interest in politics too, it is likely that Thérésia attended the National Assembly’s opening session in Paris, after the women’s march to Versailles, in the late autumn of 1789. Théroigne de Méricourt must have been present, taking the place in the tribunes of the
manège
that she had claimed as her own in Versailles; Germaine de Staël was sitting in the front row of the women’s galleries; nearby was Rose de Beauharnais, wife of a progressive aristocratic deputy and the future Empress Joséphine, and Félicité de Genlis, mistress of the liberal duc d’Orléans and governess to his children, one of whom, the future King Louis-Philippe, sat beside her.

The Assembly’s meetings were chaotic. Every deputy seemed ‘more inclined to talk than to listen’, recorded Helen Williams, but that did not stop women of all classes crowding the galleries at every session. Rosalie Jullien, wife of one of the deputies, went so regularly that she only mentioned
not
attending the Assembly in her letters. English visitors like Williams, Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Berry rushed to request tickets when they arrived in Paris. Lucy de la Tour du Pin said her sister-in-law, the former marquise de Lameth, watched the Assembly’s sessions every day.

Thérésia attended meetings of the Fraternal Society of Patriots of Both Sexes, branches of which counted among its members Théroigne
and Pauline Léon. She also became a sister at the Olympic Lodge of freemasons, following in her friend Lafayette’s footsteps, and was a member of the liberal Club of 1789 whose patron was the duc d’Orléans. Like other women of her background, Thérésia probably observed the early proceedings of the Jacobins many of whom, in 1790 and early 1791, were her friends.

A list of putative members of a 1790 Club of the Rights of Man
^*
numbered not Thérésia herself but several of her most intimate friends, and demonstrates the milieu in which she lived. Members were said to have included Thérésia’s best friend from convent days, Mme Charles de Lameth, and her husband; his brother Alexandre, close to both Thérésia and Germaine de Staël; Mathieu de Montmorency, also linked to Germaine; and the brilliant, lecherous comte de Mirabeau, with whom Thérésia toured the ruins of the Bastille.

True salonnières like Germaine de Staël and Félicité de Genlis had little time for popular societies. Their interest in politics was strictly personal and entirely exclusive. Genlis went just once to watch the Jacobins, and thought the more radical Cordeliers’ Club, because ‘women of the lower orders spoke in it’, was ‘a sight at once striking, shocking and ridiculous’. The young chocolate-maker Pauline Léon was a regular attendant of the Cordeliers’ sessions; she was exactly the kind of loud-mouthed working woman who would have offended Genlis’s elitist sensibilities. The political involvement of the lower classes of either sex worried Germaine de Staël, whose steady advocacy of a constitutional monarchy became less and less radical as the goal-posts shifted past her. ‘The Revolution naturally descended lower and lower each time that the upper classes allowed the reins to slip from their hands, whether by want of wisdom or their want of address,’ she lamented.

In the summer of 1789 Thérésia held a dinner at the Fontenay château in Fontenay-aux-Roses just outside Paris. The theme and decorations were inspired by the Rousseauesque pastoral ideals of simplicity and nature so valued by liberals. Girls dressed in white handed guests bunches of flowers as they arrived, ‘
comme dans une pastorale antique
’; they dined on the grass beneath spreading chestnut trees, ‘
comme en Arcadie
’. Thérésia was toasted not as queen but as goddess of the
fête
. Her guests, she remembered later, were the progressive aristocrats of her circle, like Mirabeau, as well as a sprinkling of political radicals including Camille Desmoulins and his old schoolfriend Maximilien Robespierre; she lacked the elitist scruples of Mme de Staël. ‘That day was the true celebration of my youth,’ Thérésia recalled, years later. ‘They did not yet call me Notre Dame de Thermidor, but nor did the cowards call me Notre Dame de Septembre: I was simply Notre Dame de Fontenay.’

These pastoral idylls were a fashionable way for the liberal elite to demonstrate their virtuous sentimentality and their solidarity with the ‘people’. In the 1780s, when the celebrated lawyer Guy-Jean Target had won back for the villagers of Salency in Picardy the right to choose their own
rosière
, or annual rose queen (instead of their lord, who claimed the right for himself), Félicité de Genlis had gone to Salency to play the harp at their
fête
. The song based on that popular victory, ‘La Rosière de Salency’, was played at Thérésia’s own
fête champêtre
.

The following summer, a similar festival was held to celebrate the anniversary of the so-called Tennis Court Oath. The deputies of the National Assembly processed to Versailles bearing the oath of allegiance inscribed on a bronze tablet alongside stones from the fallen Bastille. They renewed their oaths in the palace’s tennis court, then returned to Paris, stopping in the Bois de Boulogne for a feast held under the trees at which they were attended by women dressed as shepherdesses. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen was read as grace. Georges Danton, crowned like the rest of the deputies with an oak-leaf wreath, proposed a toast to the liberty and happiness of the entire world. In one of the elaborately symbolic set-pieces so beloved of the revolutionaries, a model of the Bastille was set on the table and smashed, hopefully with great care, since revealed inside lay a real baby swaddled in white, representing oppressed innocence liberated by the revolution. A red Phrygian cap, modelled on those given to Roman slaves when they were freed, was placed on its head.

In Paris, meanwhile, rapturous preparations for the anniversary of the Bastille’s fall were under way, as men and women of all ages and
classes, ‘inspired by the same spirit’, helped turn the Champs de Mars into a vast amphitheatre. Even the king took his turn with a spade. The worksite became the backdrop for scenes of revolutionary virtue and brotherhood as Parisians competed with one another to contribute to the cause of freedom and the
patrie
. Women and men saw themselves as equal contributors to the effort: ‘I honour no less that multitude of citizens and citizenesses who do not think that they have consecrated those works by their hands but their hands by those works,’ wrote Camille Desmoulins. The atmosphere was fervently emotional. It would have been impossible, wrote Louis-Sebastien Mercier, to have beheld the scene without being moved.

Women of gentle birth were eager to be a part of Federation Day. ‘Ladies took the instruments of labour in their hands, and removed a little of the earth,’ wrote Helen Williams, ‘that they might be able to say that they had assisted in the preparations.’ Pauline de Laval – beloved by Thérésia’s and Germaine’s friend Mathieu de Montmorency – caught pneumonia after spending the whole night before the celebrations helping cart dirt on the Champs de Mars, and died a few days later, ‘victim to an excess of patriotic zeal’.

Their unpowdered hair falling loosely on to their shoulders, wearing blue military-style jackets with red collars and cuffs based on National Guard uniforms, or straw bonnets and white muslin dresses trimmed with tricolour ribbons and sashes, or riding-habits
à la
Théroigne – all as expressions of their modish political sympathies – fashionable ladies like Thérésia de Fontenay brought drinks to the men toiling at the Champs de Mars. Even the colours of their clothes echoed the mood of the times: a shade of red known as ‘Foulon’s blood’ was named after an unpopular minister killed in the aftermath of the Bastille’s fall.

On 14 July the statue of the king most admired by the revolutionaries, Henri IV, sported a tricolour scarf. Priests and National Guardsmen in their bright new uniforms of red, white and blue danced in the streets with white-clad girls. Lamps hung in the trees lining the Champs-Élysées, the palace of the Louvre was illuminated and the site of the Bastille had been turned into a park. Representatives from the newly created French regional departments processed beside the deputies of the National Assembly, the National Guard and the king
and queen. Talleyrand celebrated mass on the monumental Altar of the Fatherland while Lafayette administered the oath to the people, who, right arms upheld, swore ‘to be faithful forever to the nation, the law and the king’. Fireworks fizzled in the pouring rain, and the hundreds of thousands of patriotic onlookers cried, ‘The French revolution is cemented with water, instead of blood!’ ‘What is it to me if I’m wet,’ sang the
poissardes
, ‘for the cause of liberty?’ As one historian comments on the ecstatic mood of the day, ‘no fatal gap had yet opened up between principles and reality’. Only the queen could not hide her ill-humour.

The air of celebration permeated the nation. ‘This memorable day was like an experiment in electricity,’ wrote Mercier. ‘Everything which touched the chain partook of the shock’. Helen Williams thought it ‘the most sublime spectacle’ ever witnessed, while her countryman William Wordsworth, landing in Calais on Federation Day, was struck by how ‘individual joy embodied national joy’. Everywhere, ‘benevolence and blessedness spread like a fragrance’.

Although Parisian women had been refused permission by the Constitution Committee to take part in the main ceremony – they were permitted instead to organize a tableau representing the confederation being offered to St Genevieve – across the country women celebrated alongside the men. In Beaufort-en-Vallée, eighty-three women disappeared during the ceremony and returned, as a surprise, in costumes representing the eighty-three departments; the women of Dénezé-sous-le-Lude received the municipality’s reluctant consent to hold their own Federation Day celebrations. As an expression of the benevolent atmosphere of the day in Angers, ‘each of the municipal officers insisted on taking the arm of one of those women that are called women of the people’.

Motivated by the same spirit that led fine ladies to pick up shovels for the first time in their lives, donating one’s jewels to the
caisse patriotique
became far more chic than wearing them. Félicité de Genlis had the ultimate revolutionary accessory: a polished shard of the fallen Bastille made into a brooch. Her stone was set in a wreath of emerald laurel leaves tied at the top in a jewelled tricolour rosette, and inlaid with the word
Liberté
in diamonds.

‘Every man seems at pains to show that he has wasted as few moments as possible at his toilette,’ wrote Helen Williams, commenting on the trend for negligence in dress, ‘and that his mind is bent on higher cares than the embellishment of his person.’ There was an element of fancy dress in all this artful simplicity that characterized every stage of the revolution except the darkest moments of the Terror. It was almost as if people were trying on new identities with each change of their political faith, or struggling to define themselves through their appearance when everything around them was shifting and uncertain. Talma’s classical costume for his role in Voltaire’s
Brutus
, combined with the early revolutionaries’ hero-worship of the Greeks and Romans, made a craze of antiquity. ‘We were transformed into Spartans and Romans,’ remembered the actress Louise Fusil. Helen Williams even took lessons in Roman history from a private tutor. When
Brutus
was performed, with its noble revolutionary theme of a father sacrificing his sons to save the Roman republic, the subject was considered so incendiary that weapons were banned from the theatre and extra police forces were marshalled in case of trouble.

David’s monumental history painting,
The Lictors Bringing Back to Brutus the Bodies of his Sons
, had been shown for the first time at the Salon of August 1789. Louis XVI, David’s patron, had requested for the exhibition a painting of Coriolanus, the fifth-century Roman leader who had safeguarded the rights of the aristocracy over the people. When David defied him by submitting the Brutus painting instead, at first the king banned it, but then submitted to public pressure. Art students wearing the uniform of the newly created National Guard watched over it in the gallery. It caused a sensation: as the newspaper
Père Duchesne
observed, David’s paintings ‘had inflamed more souls for liberty than the best books’.