Liberty: The Lives and Times of Six Women in Revolutionary France (24 page)

Roland was reconfirmed as minister in late October, after more efforts on Danton’s part to undermine him and a campaign of public accusations against him throughout the autumn. Tallien criticized his policies in
L’Ami des Citoyens
; Jean-Paul Marat went further in
Père Duchesne
. ‘It was past midnight and the “virtuous” Roland slut was relaxing in the arms of the nigger Lanthenas from those pleasures which her bald old husband has to procure for her…’ He called Manon a modern Circe, compared her to Lucrezia Borgia, accused her of seducing every Girondin associate of her husband’s and, still worse, of running his ministry.

Roland’s speeches were thought pompous and laboured by many younger deputies. Dr Moore overheard two of them discussing his rhetoric. The first said peevishly, ‘His only object is to make us admire the beauty of his style.’ The second replied, ‘In which he sometimes succeeds, with the help of his wife.’

Moore was an admirer of Roland’s, describing him, in his drab suit lined with green silk, as a thorough republican, scrupulous, modest and trustworthy. Although he had not met Manon, Moore had heard she was an agreeable woman of good taste. He thought Roland’s fatal flaw was to show his enemies how shaken he was by the attacks made on him: ‘this is one reason perhaps for their being continued with such spirit’. Some of these disputes were marked by mutual misunderstandings and small-mindedness. Moore reported in October that Roland protested to the Commune that a list of the addresses of the Convention’s deputies had been approved for publication by a forgery of the mayor’s signature. The Commune responded that Roland’s complaints diminished public confidence in the government.

The Girondins, losing ground in Paris, were heartened by the news from the frontiers. The war had begun to go in France’s favour. By 8 October, all foreign troops had been pushed back over the border, and at Jemappe on 6 November the French army won another significant victory. But in the Jacobin Club, Jean-Paul Marat croaked out criticism of the Girondin General Dumouriez, according to Moore, with ‘affected solemnity’ and ‘eyes of menace, or contempt’.

On 29 October the editor of
La Sentinelle
, Jean-Baptiste Louvet–unlike Marat, one of the editors to whom Roland had granted government funds–accused Robespierre in print of creating a personality cult and conspiring to set himself up as dictator. Robespierre counterattacked by turning Louvet’s criticisms on their head. He managed to make his obsessive personal identification with the popular will a virtue rather than a fault–he was simply the agent of France’s destiny–and defended the recent surge of violence by explaining that the revolution required it and must not be judged by ordinary standards of morality. ‘Do you want a Revolution without a revolution?’ he asked dramatically.

Dr Moore, an eyewitness of the debates, observed that although many people like speaking about themselves Robespierre was exceptional, seeming ‘as much enlivened by the eulogies he bestows upon himself, as others are by the applause of their fellow citizens’. The dispute had come to perhaps the worst possible conclusion for the interests of the nation, wrote Moore, ‘for the parties remain too nearly equal in force, and likely to ruin the common interest by their mutual animosity’.

Once again, Moore commented on the heavy preponderance of women cheering Robespierre on from the visitors’ galleries–five or six hundred women as opposed to perhaps two hundred men watched him defend himself against Louvet on 5 November. Some of these women admitted they were paid to be there; most simply worshipped his stance as impartial defender of the poor and the weak. When Robespierre had dinner at the home of Rosalie Jullien a few months later, despite his powdered hair and stiff silk coat, she found him simple and natural–the loftiest revolutionary praise–and, although a thinker, as ‘sweet as a lamb’. ‘I would like to believe that he wants the best for humanity, more from justice than from love,’ she wrote. As Condorcet said,
Robespierre was like nothing more than the leader of a sect: the high priest of the holy revolution.

Moore agreed with Condorcet. He thought Robespierre was a zealot, ruled by his craving for popularity rather than avarice, and an arch-manipulator of events. ‘He retires before danger, and nobody is so conspicuous as he when the danger is over,’ said Moore; he ‘refuses offices in which he might be of service, takes those where he can govern; appears when he can make a figure, disappears when others occupy the stage’. It was only with difficulty, he added, that Robespierre concealed ‘the hatred and malice which is said to exist in his heart’.

In November 1792 the National Convention turned its attention to the problem of the king. With what some deputies found an infuriating smugness, Roland declared that incriminating documents had been found in a safe in Louis’s former apartments in the Tuileries. His air of mystery–Roland hinted darkly that several deputies might also be compromised by the papers–caused rumours to fly. Roland was suspected of tampering with the evidence, because he had taken no witnesses from the Convention with him when he went to open the safe. The papers’ most dramatic revelation was that before his death Mirabeau had been accepting money from the king for advice about how to regain his power. More damningly for Louis, they also showed he had had dealings with France’s enemies and had unwillingly accepted the constitution he privately described as detestable in order to buy himself time.

The Convention began to debate the procedures for the trial of France’s former king. Robespierre argued that he needed no trial–that, as the ‘solitary rebel’ of the Republic, he already stood condemned. ‘Louis must die that the country may live,’ he declared. His young follower, Antoine Saint-Just, echoed Robespierre: ‘There is no innocent reign…every king is a rebel and a usurper.’ Tallien also called for Louis’s death, but with a slightly different emphasis: ‘He knows that he is condemned…to keep him in suspense is prolonging his
agony. Let us, in tenderness for his sufferings, decree his immediate execution and put him out of anguish.’

Olympe de Gouges, irrepressible champion of lost causes, offered to defend Louis and demonstrate that women were as capable of generosity of spirit and heroism as men. Although she said she was a republican, she saw Louis as a victim. ‘The blood, even of the guilty, eternally defiles a revolution,’ she said, arguing that deprived of his crown, Louis was no longer guilty of the faults he had committed as king. Furthermore, if he were executed he would become a martyr. ‘To kill a king, you need to do more than simply remove his head, for, in such circumstances, he will live a long time after his death; he would only be really dead if he were to survive his fall.’

On the streets of Paris, where signatures (including Pauline Léon’s) were being added to petitions calling for Louis’s death, Gouges’s plea for humanity provoked outrage. Her lodgings were besieged by a furious mob, and when she went downstairs to reason with them, she was grabbed by the waist and her distinctive white headdress knocked off. ‘Who’ll bid me 15 sous for the head of Olympe de Gouges?’ cried her assailant. Her bold reply–‘I’ll bid you 30, and I demand first refusal’–may have saved her life. The crowd’s mood switched from menace to laughter, and they dispersed.

Gouges posted placards all over the city, calling for a referendum on Louis’s fate and condemning all the Montagnard leaders but Danton, whom she admired. She called Robespierre an ‘amphibious animal’ and described the invalid Marat as having ‘neither the physique nor the morals of a man’. As with Théroigne de Méricourt, her energetic, eccentric attachment to their cause only harmed the Girondins, whose tolerance of political women was criticized by the misogynist Montagnards and whose reluctance to condemn Louis to death was seen as weakness.

In early January 1793, having heard the arguments, the deputies to the Convention began to cast their votes on Louis’s fate. At Marat’s insistence, each man was required to stand before the bar and state aloud his judgement as to whether Louis was guilty and whether or not he should be killed. No one defended his innocence. Three hundred and sixty-one votes were cast for unconditional death; 319, for impris
onment followed by exile. Philippe Égalité voted for his cousin’s execution.

The evening before Louis was killed, one of the best known of the Convention’s Jacobin deputies was fatally stabbed in a café in the Palais Royal. Michel Lepeletier was a rich former marquis who from 1789 had become a committed reformer, drafting an impressive plan for free compulsory elementary education and contributing to the new penal code drawn up by the Constituent Assembly. Out of principle, Lepeletier had voted for the king’s death; his murderer was a former royal bodyguard who believed that as a
ci-devant
noble Lepeletier had betrayed his former master. Lepeletier’s last words were said to have been, ‘I die content that the tyrant is no more.’

Jacques-Louis David painted Lepeletier as a revolutionary
pietà
and planned his funeral so as to present him as a martyr to the fatherland, happy to die if it furthered the causes of liberty and equality. The cortège paused outside the Jacobin Club, where Lepeletier’s daughter was declared a ward of the nation. Walking at the head of the mourners was his younger brother Félix, Thérésia de Fontenay’s first great passion.

Young aristocrats like Félix and Thérésia who had ‘donned its [the revolution’s] costume and borrowed its language’ still believed that they were safe in Paris in the winter of 1792–3, but in most cases their sense of security would turn out to be illusory. Félix Lepeletier was one exception: he remained faithful to the Montagnard ideology espoused by his brother, and survived the Terror. Thérésia de Fontenay waited until her divorce came through in April and then, as Citoyenne Cabarrus, fled south towards Spain.

Mary Wollstonecraft watched Louis’s carriage pass by her window on his way to the guillotine, which had been moved from the Place du Carrousel to the Place de la Révolution on a foggy January morning. The eerie silence of the empty streets was rendered more awful by the slow beating of drums. People ‘flocked to their windows’ to watch him go by, but at the Commune’s order ‘the casements were all shut, not a voice was heard’.

Louis looked more dignified than Wollstonecraft had expected, ‘in a hackney coach, going to meet his death’. The sight made her cry. ‘I
want to see something alive; death in so many frightful shapes has taken hold of my fancy,’ she wrote that night. ‘I am going to bed–and, for the first time in my life, I cannot put out the candle.’

As soon as the blade fell on Louis’s neck, a cheer went up, students lifted their hats up into the air, and the crowd rushed forward to dip their pike tips, handkerchiefs, and even their fingers into his blood. The executioner sold little packets of the king’s hair and pieces of the rope that had bound his hands. Germaine de Staël’s friend Mathieu de Montmorency, at the head of his band of National Guards, had witnessed the execution. Having made remarks that would incriminate him in revolutionary eyes, the once-liberal former aristocrat fled Paris, going into exile a confirmed royalist.

To many, it was hardly even an event. ‘At half past ten, the gates were opened and the life of the city resumed its course, unchanged,’ wrote Lucy de la Tour du Pin. After the execution Louis-Sébastien Mercier saw the onlookers, apparently unmoved, walking about arm in arm, talking and laughing as if it were a holiday. One city official said that many women were sad to see Louis die, explaining that ‘it would be unreasonable of us [men] to expect them immediately to grasp the significance of political events’. ‘There were perhaps a few tears shed; but we know that women abound in tears,’ he continued. ‘There were some reproaches also, and even some insults. All this is quite excusable, in a frail and light-headed sex, which has seen the radiant last days of a brilliant court.’

Louis had not been the only one to face the National Convention in December 1792. Manon Roland appeared before it on the 7th, accused of corresponding with French refugees–including, improbably, Germaine’s friends Talleyrand and Louis de Narbonne–and of masterminding a royalist conspiracy. Her defence was eloquent, patriotic and restrained and her name was cleared; she received an ovation and was accorded the honours of the session.

But Manon’s moment of glory did not guarantee their security.
Even before Roland gave up his portfolio, on 22 January, the Rolands had begun to fear arrest or assassination. Roland had his bed moved into Manon’s chamber so that they would share the same fate if someone tried to murder them as they slept. Manon kept a pistol beneath her pillow ‘to protect my honour if need be’. She tried to be stoical, writing to a Swiss friend the week before Roland resigned that ‘if we did not possess that peace of conscience that resists everything, we might very well be weary of life. But…one becomes accustomed to the most painful thoughts, and courage becomes only a matter of habit.’

Roland had become an object of controversy and public derision; the very mention of his name before the Convention provoked an uproar; he could no longer make his voice heard. When he decided to resign, it was ‘because he was not prepared to share the blame for crimes and follies which he could not prevent’. Idealistic Helen Williams, who had known the Rolands since 1791, said that he ‘retired from office for no other reason than that he was too pure to hold it’.

The Rolands moved back into their rooms at the rue de la Harpe and returned to their formerly modest existence. They arranged for her governess to take responsibility for eleven-year-old Eudora if anything were to happen to them. Although their friends advised them only to venture on to the streets in disguise, and to sleep away from home to avoid a midnight arrest, Manon scorned such defences. ‘I am ashamed to have to act like this,’ she declared. ‘If they wish to murder me they can do it in my own house.’

According to her best friend Sophie Grandchamp, in the weeks following what Manon called not Roland’s but ‘our’ removal from office, the inverse of her defiance was an all-consuming languor. The secret ambitions she had nourished of one day finding a ‘theatre where she could deploy all her talents’ had failed her. Sophie said Manon deplored ‘the success of men who did not value her husband, [and] the unimportance to which she found herself reduced’ and feared she would never ‘recover her empire’.