Liberty: The Lives and Times of Six Women in Revolutionary France (18 page)

On the same evening that she addressed the Minimes, Théroigne attended a dinner given in the working-class faubourg Saint-Antoine for the market porters. Also at the party were revolutionary royalty: ‘Queen’ Audu, heroine of the women’s march to Versailles, and Théroigne’s friend Jérôme Pétion, mayor of Paris and nicknamed King Pétion. Two weeks after the dinner, the city of Paris gave commemorative swords to Audu and Théroigne. Pétion praised Audu, who had been imprisoned after the October 1789 protest, for her patriotic conduct during the demonstration and ‘for having escaped the slavery of your sex’s education’. When the
patrie
was in danger, he said, women ‘do not feel any the less that they are
citoyennes
’. Someone in the crowd protested at such honours being granted to Théroigne, but he was told to shut up: ‘she will serve her country better than you’.

Théroigne began trying to muster recruits in the faubourg Saint-Antoine, urging women to arm themselves and join her battalion of
amazones
. Her activities brought her name to the attention of the Jacobins again, but this time in a less favourable light. On 13 April a delegation to the Club accused Théroigne of stirring up trouble in the neighbourhood, of arranging thrice-weekly political meetings for local women and promising them a civic banquet at which Robespierre–whom she had never met–and other prominent Jacobins would be present. A Jacobin friend, Antoine Santerre, whose wife’s signature Théroigne was accused of forging on a list of supporters for her proposed banquet, defended her cautiously, but suggested that the men of the faubourg preferred ‘to find their household in good order rather than to await the return of their women from meetings [which]…rarely inculcate a spirit of docility in them’. For this reason, said Santerre, he had asked Théroigne to stop her meetings in Saint-Antoine.

Santerre’s wary response to Théroigne’s efforts to bring women
into public life, especially when contrasted with Pétion’s enthusiasm for female patriots, demonstrates reformers’ wildly varying views on the issue of political women. Both men were considered progressive ideologically, and both were popular idols, but Santerre, following Rousseau, believed women could best support the
patrie
by creating a home for their husbands and children, while Pétion, closer to Condorcet ideologically, praised women who had risen above such limitations. As women, fired with enthusiasm for the revolution, moved into the public sphere, their actions were regarded with increasing mistrust by many male observers, however radical their views on other issues. The misogynist Robespierre, whose concern for universal suffrage was limited strictly to men, demonstrated his antipathy to women interfering in politics by refusing to dignify with a comment Théroigne’s misappropriation of his name for her own uses.

At about the same time, on 1 April 1792, Etta Palm d’Aelders, who had been arrested after the Champs de Mars massacre the previous July, received permission to address the National Assembly. ‘Women have shared the dangers of the revolution; why shouldn’t they participate in its advantages? Men are free at last, and women are the slaves of a thousand prejudices,’ she said. She asked the Assembly to educate girls and to grant them their majority at twenty-one, to make divorce legal, and to declare ‘that political liberty and equality of rights be common to both sexes’. Once again, d’Aelders was granted the honours of the session, but her suggestions were not implemented.

That same spring of 1792, Théroigne persuaded Jean-Lambert Tallien, the radical actor and writer Jean-Marie Collot d’Herbois, the painter David and his frequent collaborator the playwright Marie-Joseph Chénier to head a delegation of ‘our most illustrious patriots’, requesting permission from the Paris Commune, the municipal body that governed Paris, to commemorate the soldiers of Châteauvieux at a Liberty
fête
. The Châteauvieux regiment had mutinied in August 1790 after their demands for back pay were refused, and their rebellion had been sup
pressed with savage brutality. The soldiers were seen by many as martyrs, and their rising had become a rallying-call for some who feared the revolution was being diluted by moderates. Others, like Marie-Joseph Chénier’s poet brother André, and Camille Desmoulins who called it a ‘celebration of insurrection’, saw it as a counterrevolutionary plot.

Revolutionary festivals, as Mona Ozouf has described, ‘provide a mirror in which the revolution as a whole may be viewed’. From the joyous hopefulness of the Federation Day celebrations in July 1790 to the uncomfortable primness of the Festival of the Supreme Being four years later, they reflected the changing face of the revolution as each successive faction and regime sought an understanding of the events that had brought them to power, and tried to disseminate their interpretation of those events.

The unifying elements of revolutionary festivals–girls in simple white dresses, fresh flowers and greenery instead of tarnished tinsel for decorations, a move away from elaborate, creaking machinery and towards didactic speeches to provide the entertainment of the day–derived from Rousseau, who loathed the artifice of ancien régime festivals and theatre. ‘Plant a stake crowned with flowers in the middle of a marketplace,’ he recommended. ‘It is in the open air, it is beneath the sky that you must assemble and give yourself up to the sweet spectacle of your happiness.’

Théroigne’s Festival of Liberty was held on 15 April and the Jacobin deputy’s wife Rosalie Jullien enjoyed it so much that in her diary the following day she exulted, ‘I was there, I was there!’ She thought it exemplified ‘all the pomp, all the magnificent simplicity and all the profound tranquillity of a festival of the people’. Women dressed in white marched arm in arm with soldiers. The streets were full of people dancing and the strains of the ‘Ç a Ira’ floated out of every window. Because of the protests made against her in Saint-Antoine two days earlier, Théroigne made no public appearance as the celebration she had initiated came to life.

At the beginning of June another
fête
, this one called the Festival of the Law, was held in honour of the mayor of Étampes who had been killed trying to maintain order during a food riot. The
Révolutions de Paris
criticized the women who participated in the celebrations, led
by Olympe de Gouges who, the writer commented condescendingly, resembled nothing so much as a drum major in charge of unruly troops. A band of mothers in white, crowned with oak leaves, symbolically received the book of laws from the Constituent Assembly, but the theatricality of the performance grated with the
Révolutions
’ contributor, who saw it as overly feminizing the masculine majesty of the Law. ‘Whatever one may say,’ he concluded, ‘women seemed out of place on that great day.’

Given the prominence of Théroigne’s activities after her return from Austria, it was only a matter of time before she would once again be the object of journalistic venom. In March, the
Journal général
announced the sale of patriotic playing-cards, in which Théroigne was the
dame de piques
(queen of spades)–a pun on her well known desire, as an
amazone
, to carry a pike (
pique
) herself. The pike was an emblem of independence, equality and surveillance, according to a February 1792 piece in the
Révolutions de Paris
. ‘The pikes of the people are the columns of French liberty,’ it proclaimed. But ‘let pikes be prohibited for women; dressed in white and girded with the national sash, let them content themselves with being spectators’.

The king in Théroigne’s suit was the duc d’Orléans, who was said to have paid her to rabble-rouse at Versailles in October 1789, and her knave was Antoine Santerre, the rich brewer who would shortly chastise her for trying to drum up support for her female regiment in the faubourg Saint-Antoine; both were well known womanizers and therefore, in the eyes of her political adversaries, apt partners for a former courtesan like Théroigne. The other queens in the pack were Thérésia de Fontenay’s friend Dondon de Lameth, Sophie de Condorcet and Germaine de Staël.

Satirical attacks rained down on Théroigne: the ‘Jacobins’ strumpet’ was depicted in the
Journal général
drilling a regiment of Les Halles market women wearing false moustaches; the
Chronique du manége
called her ‘a manhunter, mad for men’; an etching showed her in her
amazone
leading an army of women including Mmes de Staël, Condorcet and Genlis against the Austrian troops, vanquishing them by showing them her ‘
république
’.

A miscellaneous and often sensationalist selection of revolutionary writings published in England in 1806 includes a speech Théroigne was said to have made at the Palais Royal in June 1792 extolling free love and calling for marriage to be banned. Its tone is so salacious that it must have been written by a royalist journalist–for whom Théroigne represented the most terrifying incarnation of womankind–seeking to associate political liberty with the worst excesses of immorality. The putative Théroigne asked if ‘our shameful institutions, imposed by rogues and submitted to by fools’, were not less natural than the unrestrained freedoms and equality enjoyed by lovers and seducers. ‘Yes, I, Théroigne de Méricourt, rejoice in being among those called harlots by aristocrats; I rejoice in prostituting myself to everybody, without belonging to anybody,’ she is said to have said. ‘I am as free as the birds that wing the air, or the animals that range the forests.’

The most vicious misogynist amongst the royalist hacks was François Suleau, who in the most demeaning and revolting terms, described in April 1792 ‘the women who have harnessed themselves to the chariot (or, more exactly, to the dung-cart) of the revolution’. The young women–he did not specify Théroigne here, though she was the frequent butt of one of the newspapers he wrote for, the
Acts of the Apostles
–who ‘have hurled themselves into the [frying pan] of the rights of man’ were, according to Suleau, despite their ‘pretty little faces’, their ‘frisky appearance and their air of being a proper little madam’, covered with the marks of promiscuity and madness: ‘itch, scabs, ringworm,
fleurs à la Pompadour
, scurf, yaws, blisters on the nape of the neck, suckers on the breast, ulcers on the thigh, and plasters on all their scars’. Théroigne, always so conscious of humiliating insults directed at her sex, would remember Suleau’s name.

The dissension between Robespierre and Brissot over war with Austria was becoming increasingly overt, and even Théroigne’s name was drawn into it as the political lines were drawn. In the days immediately following the declaration of war on 20 April 1792, Robespierre and his friends attacked Brissot and his political allies. Robespierre attacked
Lafayette at the Jacobin Club while Jean-Lambert Tallien, becoming more and more prominent politically, denounced Condorcet, who was accused at the same time of being dominated by his spirited young wife.

During one of these debates, someone said as an aside that he had heard Théroigne, at a café near the
manége
, angrily withdrawing her support from Robespierre because of his opposition to the war. The deputies burst out laughing at the thought that a woman’s backing could count for anything in a debate of such gravity. Théroigne, embarrassed and furious, tried to insist on speaking, but her move towards the tribune caused such an uproar that the session had to be suspended. ‘Since we cannot find men capable of being ministers, why don’t we call on women, such as Mme Condorcet and Mlle Théroigne de Méricourt?’ asked the right-wing
Petit Gautier
the next day. ‘They have the vocation, the talent to be
femmes publiques
[literally, public women or prostitutes].’

Jean-Marie Roland, as Minister of the Interior, was at the heart of the Brissotin administration that had declared war on Austria. At this stage Roland hoped the king accepted that his interests would be best protected by their government, and he and his associates, believing in Louis’s sincerity, were trying to work with him. But the temporary alliance between court and Brissotin parties was based on mutual mistrust. For his part, Louis welcomed war, numbly hoping he would be restored to his former powers in the aftermath of a French defeat, while Marie-Antoinette was doing her best to provide the Austrians with treacherous information about the French army. As Manon Roland said, Louis ‘constantly undermined the arrangements which he was professing to support’.
Pére Duchesne
put it more succinctly, calling the king ‘
Louis le Faux
’.

Germaine de Staël’s view of the Brissotin ministry was that they were talented but inexperienced unknowns who ‘aimed at a republic and succeeded only in overturning the monarchy’. She saw them as principled, but made hypocritical by their desire for power–‘some of
them offered to support royalty, if all the places in the ministry were given to their friends’–and it did not occur to her that her own efforts to advance her friends might be interpreted in a similar light. Principles do not preclude ambition, and the Brissotins, like Germaine herself, would have countered that their principles were the best for France and that they were the only people capable of realizing them.

As the wife of a minister, Manon Roland found herself in the spring of 1792 ‘at the centre of affairs’. In her memoirs she attempted to emphasize her continued distance from public life, insisting that she did not join in political talk or distribute political favours, but her use of the pronoun ‘we’ when she described the events of Roland’s ministry belied her efforts to demonstrate her non-involvement. Roland confided everything in her; and Manon, claiming that their methods, spirit and principles were as one, acted less as her husband’s secretary than as his muse and inspiration. She guarded personal access to him from her little office, where friends and petitioners used her to sound out ideas or pass messages on to Roland. Manon wrote later that she found ‘it hard to describe my agitation at that time. I was passionate for the revolution…I burned with zeal for my country. Public affairs had become a torment to me, a moral fever which left me no rest.’