Liberty: The Lives and Times of Six Women in Revolutionary France (15 page)

Even the American attitude to women was admired by French radicals in the 1780s. Their austere, masculine republic had no time for boudoir politics, despite Abigail Adams’s vain plea to her husband John:

I desire you would Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands [she wrote in 1776]. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention is not paid to the Ladies we are determined to ferment
a Rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have not voice or Representation.

But events conspired to direct Brissot’s and the Rolands’ attention homewards. As Manon Roland told Brissot in 1790, ‘We regret this promised land less now that we have hopes for our own country.’

A few months in Paris were enough to convince Manon of the fragility of her hopes. In May 1791, three months after her arrival, she expressed the revulsion she felt when she attended sessions of the National Assembly – a revulsion caused by the intensity of seeing her sublime expectations disappointed. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed in one of the great early studies of the revolution, ‘disgust with the revolution and attachment to its results were almost contemporary with its birth’. ‘We must make another insurrection, or we will lose happiness and liberty; but I doubt that there will be enough vigour in the people for this rising, and I see things are given over to the hazard of events,’ Manon wrote bitterly to a friend in London. ‘Adversity forms nations like individuals, and even civil war, as horrible as it is, brings the regeneration of our character and our morals.’ More sacrifices were needed; more blood must flow. Behind her railing against the mediocrity of the revolutionaries, who cared more for ‘their little glory than the great interests of their country’, sounds relentlessly her own frustrated desire to act. ‘It is not spirit they lack, but soul!’ she exclaimed, sure that she possessed the soul required.

Manon’s initial willingness to grasp the necessity of violence to the revolution was echoed by the radical journalist Jean-Paul Marat in his popular newspaper,
L’Ami du Peuple
. In the same month as Manon’s tirade, he wrote that in 1790 ‘500 heads would have sufficed [to complete the revolution]; today 50,000 would be necessary; perhaps 500,000 will fall before the end of the year’. Even before the Reign of Terror the relationship between blood and liberty was direct and intimate: blood would make France free. As Simon Schama writes, viol
ence ‘was not just an unfortunate side effect’ of the revolution, but its ‘source of collective energy. It was what made the Revolution revolutionary.’ Manon Roland was as aware of this brutal truth as was Marat himself.

On the afternoon of 21 June, the Rolands, Robespierre, Brissot and François Buzot were at Pétion’s house when they heard news of the king and queen’s flight from the Tuileries, where the royal family had been living in virtual house arrest since the autumn of 1789, increasingly horrified by the direction the revolution was taking and their powerlessness to halt it. According to Helen Williams, in 1790 when the king called Marie-Antoinette, in jest, Mme Capet (the French dynasty’s family name–republicans would soon refer to him as Louis Capet), she replied wearily, addressing him as M. Capot–the word used at picquet, when the game is lost.

Across Paris on the same day, Pauline Léon, her mother and a friend, probably their neighbour Constance Évrard, were near the Palais Royal loudly protesting against the king’s ‘infamous treason’. She reported that they were ‘almost assassinated’ by Lafayette’s ‘
mouchards
’, or spies, and were saved by sans-culottes who succeeded in snatching them ‘from the hands of these monsters’, as she called the National Guardsmen.

Like Léon, Manon Roland despised kings and queens in general and the weak-willed Louis and his shallow wife in particular. The news that they had abandoned their pretence of accepting the revolution’s changes electrified her and her friends: at last, the king had undone himself. The coterie at Pétion’s on the 21st was convinced that the king’s true attitude towards the revolution and the constitution had now been revealed to the people, and that advantage should be taken of this moment to prepare the ground for a republic. Robespierre, described by Manon as biting his nails at the thought that the king would only have dared escape if he had left orders for every patriot in Paris to be murdered, sneered at the others and ‘asked what was meant by a republic’.

The result of that afternoon’s discussion was the publication of a short-lived journal,
The Republican
, produced in association with Condorcet and Tom Paine as well as Manon’s group. It proposed in
its first issue, in July 1791, that the king’s flight had released the nation from its loyalty to him. The king had abandoned his people; the people consequently owed him nothing. At the end of June, another member of this loose affiliation of republicans and a former soldier in the United States’ War of Independence, Achille Duchastellet (former marquis du Chastellet), declared that the monarch was a ‘superfluity’. Manon agreed: ‘keeping the king on the throne is an ineptitude, an absurdity, if not a horror’. In the National Assembly, the king was declared
hors de cause
– irrelevant. Although no motion was passed against him, when the topic was debated ‘three times the entire Assembly was lifted to its feet, arms lifted, hats in the air, with an indescribable enthusiasm’. Finally it was decided that the king’s flight must be presented as an abduction, staged in order to re-establish his authority.

Jérôme Pétion was one of the two official representatives of the Assembly sent to Varennes to escort the royal family back to Paris. Louis was still king, but the mystique of royalty was gone for ever. Pétion and Antoine Barnave climbed into the coach and sat down between the king and queen without asking their permission. Barnave cast infatuated glances at the queen, and invited the dauphin to show him how well he could read by spelling out the revolutionary slogan ‘Live free or die’ on his buttons. A sign posted across Paris forbad onlookers from either applauding or insulting the king when he arrived back in the city, but the Jacobins recommended Parisians keep their hats on when he passed to demonstrate their disapproval of his attempt at escape.

On 24 June, a thousand people gathered between the faubourg Saint-Antoine and the Tuileries, where a sign had been hung reading, ‘
Maison à louer
’ (To Let). The demonstration had the air of a festival: men carrying pikes, the traditional weapon of the common man, mingled with women singing the ‘Ça Ira’ and shouting out their desire to send the king and all aristocrats to the devil. Manon was impressed by the crude energy of the scene, and regretted the fact that instead of using it to their advantage ‘the Jacobins [her friends] passed their time in pitiful discussions’. She described to her friend Henri Bancal, in London, the celebratory atmosphere on the streets, the chaotic sessions at the National Assembly, the Jacobins in the weeks following the
flight to Varennes and the king’s chastened return: ‘one lives here ten years in twenty-four hours’. Twice in less than ten days she used the phrase ‘sea of blood’ when describing to Bancal the obstacles that needed to be surmounted before liberty could be achieved.

At the Jacobins’ on the 22nd, the members cried, ‘Live free or die!’ as Robespierre took the floor. Manon’s account of him at Pétion’s, sneering and craven, was written later, with the benefit of hindsight; now, in June 1791, she described him as full of energy, courage and virtue, his noble heart oppressed by the vacillations and corruption of the Assembly. Their political styles and convictions at this time were similar: both Maximilien and Manon were tenacious, sentimental, fastidious and driven; both were suspicious of moderates and of the Church and detested the monarchy. By contrast Manon was concerned that Brissot, whose lightness of character she considered ‘incompatible with liberty’, would not prove worthy of the times.

Less than a month later, on 17 July, a crowd of fifty thousand men, women and children met in the Champs de Mars to deliver petitions demanding a referendum on the monarchy and declaring the people sovereign. Versions of similar petitions were circulated by different fraternal societies. On one, forty-one ‘women, sisters, and Roman women’ signed separately from the men. François and Louise Robert circulated another declaring that Louis’s desertion of his ‘post’ was, in effect, an abdication.

Confirming all Pauline Léon’s suspicions of him, Lafayette, who had persuaded the mayor to declare martial law in Paris, ordered the National Guard to open fire on the demonstrators. Perhaps fifty people were killed. There was talk of Robespierre being put on trial because of his role in writing the Jacobin Club’s petition, which had been withdrawn by the Jacobins the day before, at the last minute, for being too radical. Late that night the Rolands had themselves driven to his house in the Marais to offer him asylum, but he was already in hiding.

Pauline Léon, her mother, and Constance Évrard were among the hundreds of people arrested in the aftermath of the massacre. Évrard was twenty-three, a few years younger than León, and lived in the same street as Léon and her mother; she had been working as a cook in the household of a former aristocrat since 1788. She was arrested for
insulting the wife of a National Guardsman, and asked why she had been on the Champs de Mars. Évrard replied that she and the Léon women, ‘
comme tous les bons patriotes
’, had been there to sign a petition calling for the reorganization of executive power.

Her interrogator wanted to know whether she attended political meetings and clubs, and what newspapers she read. Évrard’s replies show the high level of politicization among working-class Parisian women. She answered that she did go sometimes to the open spaces of the Palais Royal and the Tuileries gardens, which became rallying points for protestors at certain crucial moments such as before the destruction of the Bastille; although she was not a member of the Cordeliers’ she had sometimes watched sessions there – perhaps with Léon, who elsewhere declared she attended it ‘without interruption’; and she read the incendiary newspapers of, among others, Jean-Paul Marat and Camille Desmoulins.

Léon’s response to the Champs de Mars massacre was one of indignation. Just as during their demonstration on the day of the king’s flight, she, her mother and Évrard were threatened by Lafayette’s Guardsmen and, when they returned home, insulted by their neighbours and threatened with imprisonment by their local ward. Like Évrard, and along with Anne Colombe, the publisher of Marat’s
L’Ami du Peuple
; a female cousin of Georges Danton; and the wife of the president of the Cordeliers’ Club, Léon was arrested and interrogated in the days following the demonstration as part of a government crack-down on popular radicalism – made all the more terrifying, to the authorities, when women were the radicals.

The Dutch writer Etta Palm d’Aelders, who had spoken so passionately on behalf of women’s rights at the Social Circle in 1790, was another woman arrested on 19 July, accused of subversive behaviour. Her arrest was seen as an effort to intimidate the club, and it was successful: within days the Social Circle’s Confédération des Amis, and its female equivalent (des Amies) had shut down. Repressive measures taken against other popular societies like the Cordeliers’ effectively declawed them too. ‘I need to see my trees again after watching so many fools and scoundrels,’ wrote Manon. By mid-August, an illusory calm had settled over Paris. ‘Paris is as still as the surface of a pond,’
wrote Rosalie Jullien de la Drôme, wife of the Jacobin deputy, ‘apart from the individual fights that occasion tragic scenes every day.’

The Rolands left Paris in September when Roland’s job was finished, returning to Le Clos, their home outside Lyon, to oversee the grape harvest. During their absence a rumour had spread that Roland had been arrested as a counterrevolutionary, and the once friendly villagers there initially greeted Manon with cries of ‘
Les aristocrates à la lanterne!
’ Boundaries were being blurred: the word ‘aristocrat’–like ‘patriot’, ‘virtue’ and ‘popular will’ – took on new meanings. Language was being used ritualistically, with totemic words invoked ‘as absolute, moral concepts’ that would somehow guarantee and preserve the revolution’s integrity. Germaine de Staël was aware of this development, in 1791 attacking democrats (another word whose meaning was transformed in the 1790s) ‘who desecrate words merely by using them’.

From Le Clos, Manon initiated a correspondence with two of her so-called Incorruptibles, François Buzot and Maximilien Robespierre. To Robespierre she wrote in a deliberately classical, self-consciously historical style, addressing him as ‘one whose energy has not ceased to offer the greatest resistance to the claims and schemes of despotism and intrigue’ and predicting for him a brilliant career. She tried to engage him in a discussion of political and philosophical theory, tacitly presenting herself as a correspondent with whom he could debate ideas and policies, his partner in the fight for France’s liberty. ‘One should work for the good of the species in the same manner as the Deity,’ she wrote, ‘for the satisfaction of being true to oneself, of fulfilling one’s destiny and earning self-esteem, but without expecting either gratitude or justice from individuals.’ Manon signed her name with republican austerity: ‘Roland,
née
Phlipon’. There is no record of any response from Robespierre.

Buzot was more receptive. Manon ‘had already singled him out in our little circle for his breadth of vision and confident manner’; she admired his compassion, integrity and courage. Although she did not
think his wife deserved him – he had married a cousin some years older than himself – the Rolands and the Buzots lived close to each other in Paris and saw each other frequently in the spring and summer of 1791. Their relationship grew closer while the Rolands were in Villefranche, and Buzot back at home in Évreux, that autumn. Through their letters, recorded Manon later, ‘our friendship became intimate and unbreakable’. Buzot came to represent for Manon a revolutionary ideal, vigorous and full of integrity. Beside his passion her worthy, pedantic husband faded to grey.