Liberty: The Lives and Times of Six Women in Revolutionary France (22 page)

By the next day Moore was hearing rumours–rife on the streets of Paris since before the massacres began–that the Duke of Brunswick, commanding the Prussian and Austrian troops, was in league with certain unnamed traitors ‘long concealed under the mask of patriotism’ who were about to open the gaol gates, arm the prisoners and set them free to plunder, rape and murder all patriots. Robespierre himself
accused Brissot of having been bought by Brunswick. Although Brissot’s name was cleared, the taint of treachery was less easy to erase.

Moore saw Parisians not exulting in the bloodshed, but rather ‘lamenting their fate’. The people he observed were terrified above all by the stories of conspirators and the sight of bands of assassins moving from prison to prison, their alarm heightened by the sound of the cannon and the tocsin and by fears of invasion. By 6 September the ardent Robespierrist Rosalie Jullien–who four days earlier had written of the people avenging ‘three years of cowardly treasons’–was of the opinion that, ‘inconceivable as it may seem’, Paris had thrown a veil over the recent scenes of carnage and was preparing to meet the impending invasion. The streets were full of people marching to the noise of the drum and crying ‘
Vive la nation!
’ ‘We have the air not of a threatened people, or an embattled people; but of a great family which is in jubilation,’ she wrote. ‘If you have another idea of the capital, you do not know the French.’

Despite Mme Jullien’s composure, during the first two weeks of September a wave of violence spread across France. On the 18th, a report from Neuville-aux-Bois, in the Loiret, was sent to Paris. ‘Anarchy is rampant; there is no more authority,’ it began. ‘There is a state of frenzy that we can hardly describe to you. All we hear is threats to kill, break down houses and ransack them…Finally all these people are saying that they want no more administration, no more courts, that the law is in their hands and that they will enforce it.’

The elections for the new National Convention were held between 5 and 9 September, while the bloodstained streets and prisons of Paris were scrubbed down and doused with vinegar. The deputies to the Convention, which would replace the National Assembly, were elected for the first time by universal male suffrage. Despite this democratic opportunity, perhaps only 6 per cent of France’s seven million eligible voters exercised their new right. Paris’s deputies were chosen, according
to a suggestion of Robespierre’s, by open ballot at the Jacobin Club. Unsurprisingly, Robespierre was the first to be picked. Sixteen of Paris’s twenty-four deputies were members of the insurgent Commune; all were Robespierrists, who would acquire the name Montagnards (
montagne
, mountain) from their usual seats in the Convention, high up at the left of the hall.

Prominent among the Parisian deputies were Georges Danton, Camille Desmoulins and Jean-Paul Marat. Jean-Lambert Tallien was rejected by Robespierre’s electors because he boasted that ‘he was neither Brissot nor Robespierre’, although Robespierre, who had disapproved of the Châteauvieux festival Tallien had helped Théroigne de Méricourt to organize that spring, said it was because he ‘blew hot when the people blew hot and cold when they blew cold’. Tallien was elected instead by the neighbouring district of Seine-et-Oise. At twenty-five he was among the youngest of the Convention’s deputies; 46 per cent of them were under forty.

The other dominant group in the Convention were the Brissotins, elected from the provinces and from this point known as Girondins because several of them came from the Gironde region around Bordeaux. Roland was elected deputy for the Somme region, Brissot for the Loiret, and François Buzot for the Eure.

On 21 September, the day after the French army decisively turned back the Prussian advance at Valmy, the National Convention met for the first time. The following day it declared France a republic. ‘Kings are to the moral order what monsters are to the physical order,’ declared one deputy. Standardization and modernization were decreed: henceforth every Frenchman was to speak the same language and use the same money and the same measurements. The metric system was introduced. Gilbert Romme, Théroigne de Méricourt’s partner in the short-lived Society of the Friends of the Law, would be one of the chief architects of the new revolutionary calendar, in which the first day of the first year was 23 September 1792. As Tom Paine had said of the American Revolution, it was indeed a new dawn.

The royal crown and sceptre–accoutrements of the Bourbons’ majesty–were melted down into republican coins. Louis’s personal seal was replaced by an abstract female figure of Liberty, new symbol
of the Republic. On this first national seal (they were changed with each successive regime), Liberty is standing alert, youthful and vigorous, holding a pike topped by a red Phrygian cap.

Women were granted civil but not political rights by the Convention. After 1792, both men and women might marry without parental consent when they reached the age of twenty-one; hitherto it had been thirty. The Girondins, always more sympathetic to the cause of women’s rights than the Montagnards, backed plans to allow women greater participation in public life when their standards of education had reached those of men.

Divorce was also made legal. Over three thousand couples in Paris alone took advantage of this new liberty in its first year. One of the law’s early beneficiaries was Thérésia de Fontenay, who had been among the crowds of onlookers at the Champs de Mars on Federation Day in July 1792.

Étienne-Denis Pasquier remembered a conversation with her that day. ‘She shared all my fears about the present and all my worries about the future,’ he wrote later; given the timing, four months before she filed for divorce from Fontenay, it is more than likely that her worries centred on her unpleasant husband.

According to the unreliable Arsène Houssaye, Thérésia had watched Jean-Lambert Tallien speaking at one of the last sessions of the National Assembly before the massacres, and was impressed by his good looks and thrillingly patriotic views. Rosalie Jullien also saw Tallien speaking at this time, and approvingly noted his eloquence and energy. He was one of the men who had pressed, earlier in August, for the demolition of all ‘symbols of despotism’, calling for the replacement of statues of Louis XIV with statues of Liberty.

Tallien was beginning to develop a following among the tribunes of the Assembly, appealing to the crowds by speaking dramatically, like Robespierre, of the will of the people. Since 1791 he had published a newspaper,
L’Ami des Citoyens
, which informed readers that he could
be found every morning until ten in his rooms at 17 rue de la Perle in the Marais, or at the Jacobin Club. Its tone was eager and idealistic. He addressed his readers as ‘
concitoyens
’, and throughout the autumn of 1792 attacked the perfidious Philippe Égalité, former duc d’Orléans, as well as prominent Girondins including Jean-Marie Roland and François Buzot.

Despite his ardently revolutionary views–and his obvious ambition–Tallien was by no means prejudiced against aristocrats. As well as helping Germaine de Staël escape and not informing on her friends, he had also used his influential position in the Commune to save several other ‘designated victims’ of the September massacres, including the king’s former valet François Hue, perhaps sympathetic to him because of his own father’s role as butler in a noble household.

Thérésia applied for a divorce from her debauched husband on grounds of incompatibility in November 1792. While she waited for the decree to be approved she remained in Paris, although some fourteen thousand people fled the city that autumn and winter, forfeiting their fortunes by becoming émigrés, but too afraid to stay. Late that September in Calais, Dr Moore saw someone he knew waiting to board a boat for England. She was a ‘woman of rank’, but she was dressed as a maid; the maid was wearing her mistress’s clothes. They were impatient, agitated, scared. Dr Moore turned away lest his acquaintance recognize him and fear exposure.

The frivolous, extravagant life Thérésia had once lived had vanished completely. From January 1792 fashion magazines had advised women to stop wearing conspicuous colours–even red, white and blue, however patriotic, drew too much attention to the wearer. By the winter, fashion magazines themselves were no longer being published. Women of all classes went hatless when they ventured on to the streets, wearing wooden clogs on their feet and shawls over their chemises; heavy rouge was their only concession to style. Lucy de la Tour du Pin’s former maid, in her spotless white apron, was drawn aside one day on the street by a cook who told her she would be arrested as an aristocrat for going out in such unpatriotically clean clothes; she was advised to wear coarse cloth instead.

Aggressive beggars wore huge tricolour cockades. Men went
unwashed and unshaven. ‘The visible signs of patriotism,’ said Helen Williams, ‘were dirty linen, pantaloons, uncombed hair, red caps or black wigs.’ Radical deputies to the Convention wore rough pantaloons and short coarse jackets; the Girondins favoured floppy muslin cravats. Only Robespierre, who was said to resemble ‘a tailor of the
ancien régime
’, continued to appear ‘
poudré
,
frisé
,
parfumé
and a hundred times more
muscadin
[foppish] than any of us’.

Courtesy was seen as absurd and unpatriotic. Hand-kissing had long since gone out of practice.
Tutoiement
was now not only used universally, but made mandatory by several ward administrations: ‘
Toi
suits citizen, just as
vous
suits monsieur.’ The Girondins protested against ‘this breach of good manners’ but many others approved of it. Helen Williams thought the ancien régime’s gallantry had been replaced with something far better: ‘a mutual estimation, a common interest in the great questions of the day’.

Another radical Englishwoman, Mary Wollstonecraft, arrived in Paris in the autumn of 1792 and found manners, which she called ‘gay ornamental drapery’, a thing of the past; and fashion, the badge of feminine slavery, no longer an obsession. She took up lodgings in the Marais, close to where Jean-Lambert Tallien lived. Between the beautiful
hôtels
of the area, the streets were dirty, narrow, and ill-lit: ‘very disagreeable’. Unlike in London, there were no pavements. Carriages no longer bore the family crests of their owners, and there were a great deal fewer of them around, but their drivers still careened furiously over the cobbles heedless of pedestrians.

The last thriving remnant of ancien régime life was the theatre. That November, eight or ten theatres were still putting on plays four times a week. The subjects of these plays were, like Chénier’s sensations
Brutus
and
Caius Gracchus
, adapted to the times: kings and princes were always voluptuous, corrupt and tyrannical; nobles were craven and insolent; priests were wicked and hypocritical. The only heroes were ordinary people.

Germaine de Staël arrived at Coppet, her father’s house in Switzerland, on 7 September. No letter was waiting for her from Narbonne, and she sat down immediately to beg him to write. ‘Do not kill me with your silence…Do not forget one whose soul, heart and thoughts are entirely yours,’ she wrote. ‘God, how you toy with me!’ She was determined to divorce Staël and fly to Narbonne’s side as soon as she had borne their child. Increasingly hysterical, demanding and self-indulgent–especially as Narbonne’s inadequate letters arrived so infrequently, sometimes even carelessly addressed to the wrong place–by turns she railed at his ungratefulness, forgave him all his sins, reproached him with his cruelty, threatened suicide and pleaded for his love. ‘Frivolous man, what evil you do!’ she wrote in October, after another anguished period during which she had had no news from him.

Narbonne, devastated by news from Paris of the imprisonment and trial of the king, made ineffectual attempts to discourage her from coming. He was staying with a congenial group of émigrés including Mathieu de Montmorency and Théodore de Lameth at Juniper Hall in Surrey, for which Germaine, through Narbonne as ‘Sir John Glayre’, paid the rent; Talleyrand made frequent trips from London to visit them. ‘There can be nothing imagined more charming, more fascinating, than this colony,’ wrote a dazzled neighbour, the novelist Fanny Burney. ‘Between their sufferings and their
agrémens
[pleasures] they occupy us almost wholly.’

Perhaps twenty-five thousand French men and women were living in exile in England by 1794; after the revolutionary government passed a law confiscating the property of all émigrés, almost all of them were impoverished. Germaine was an exception because her assets were held abroad and because her husband’s status conferred diplomatic immunity on her. Men and women who had dreamed of nothing more than ornamenting society now learned to make their livings teaching French or music; convent-educated ladies put to good use the skills of embroidery, fan-painting, tatting and dressmaking they had been taught as children. Félicité de Genlis, in Berlin, continued her career as an author while Talleyrand’s mistress Adèle de Flauhaut alternated making straw bonnets with writing what became a bestselling romance,
Adèle de Sénange
. Books, jewels, silver and works of art were sold off; luxuries like candles and sugar were hoarded and shared; conversation, which cost nothing, was more highly prized than ever.

In Switzerland, her disapproving parents tried to persuade Germaine to be reconciled with her husband, whom she had not seen for over nine months (making the baby she carried very obviously not his), but she refused. It was typical of her that when they sent a friend to reason with her, Germaine described her lover and their relationship with such ardent eloquence that instead of convincing her to remain with Staël he found himself lending her the money for her passage to England.

After long and heated arguments, Germaine agreed not to see Narbonne for three months on condition that if she still wanted to be with him at the end of that time, she and Staël could formally separate. ‘I love you like a madwoman,’ she wrote to Narbonne. ‘I am frightened by your hold over me.’ But Narbonne was no longer in love with the woman who hoped to give up everything for him. ‘You are so cold in your letters and I am so passionate,’ she wrote, distraught, after receiving a letter in which he urged her to delay her departure. ‘You seem to have so little wish to see me again that my heart is withered by fear and open to every kind of doubt.’