Liberty: The Lives and Times of Six Women in Revolutionary France (28 page)

As recognition of the part they had played in ousting the Girondins, the Société des Républicaines-Révolutionnaires was allowed to march in the Convention’s official procession marking the adoption of the constitution. Pauline Léon expressed to the Convention the ‘joy and satisfaction’ of the
citoyennes
of her ward ‘over the completion of the Constitution’.

In the midst of these celebrations, a twenty-five-year-old woman named Charlotte Corday left her home in the Norman town of Caen, where François Buzot and other Girondins were preparing for their final struggle against Robespierre and the Commune. A fervent supporter of the Girondins, she saw the coup of 2 June as a degradation of the revolution’s purity. One of the anti-Jacobin tracts circulating in Caen in the spring of 1793 read, ‘Let Marat’s head fall and the Republic is saved!…Marat sees the Public Safety only in a river of blood; well then his own must flow, for his head must fall to save two hundred thousand others.’ Mlle Corday saw Marat as perverting France, and became convinced that if he were removed, the revolution would be saved. Before setting out for Paris, she left her Bible lying open to the story of Judith, and wrote to her father apologizing for leaving home without his permission.

When Charlotte Corday arrived in Paris on 11 July she was disappointed to find that Marat’s persistent arthritic psoriasis had confined him to his apartment near the Cordeliers’ Club on the left bank: she had hoped to kill him in public, at the Convention. Two days later, in the already blazing sunshine of a summer morning, she got up early and walked the short distance from her rented room to the Palais
Royal. She made several purchases: a newspaper reporting the recent demand in the Convention that the death sentence be pronounced on the expelled Girondins; a tall black hat with black tassels and a green cockade to replace her provincial white bonnet; and a kitchen knife with a wooden handle and a five-inch blade.

A hackney coach dropped Corday off outside Marat and Simone Évrard’s apartment in the rue des Cordeliers just before eleven thirty. Simone’s sister told her that Marat was too ill to see anyone. Charlotte left him a letter saying that she had important information about the Girondins hiding in Caen, but forgot to leave her address. She returned to her lodgings. That afternoon, Corday summoned a hairdresser to her room and changed into a spotted muslin dress with a pink fichu; she tucked the knife, her birth certificate and a letter to the French people into her bodice. She put on her new black hat with its jaunty green rosette.

At seven in the evening, Charlotte took another cab to Marat’s rooms. This time she was luckier: she arrived at the same time as a bread delivery, so she made it up the stairs before she was challenged by Simone. Marat heard her telling Simone about the escaped Girondins, and shouted out from the tiled bathroom next door that she should come in. In the summer heat, one of the only ways Marat could ease the itching, scaly sores on his body was to soak in cool kaolin baths. He kept an upturned wooden box beside his tin bath which he used as a desk; on one wall hung a map of France, on another a pair of crossed pistols beneath which was scrawled the word ‘Death’.

Simone, still suspicious, showed the young woman in. Charlotte told Marat about the situation in Caen, and listed the names of the Girondin plotters there. ‘Good,’ he replied, ‘in a few days I will have them all guillotined.’

When Simone left the room, Charlotte, who was sitting on a chair next to the bath, stood up and pulled the knife out of her bodice. She stabbed Marat once, at the top right of his chest, beneath his collarbone, and pierced an artery. Her blow was fatal; as she later said, it was just luck. Marat shrieked, ‘
À moi, ma chère amie!
’ and sank back into the rapidly staining water.

As Simone, one of Marat’s newspaper distributors and various
neighbours rushed into the room to try to save his life, Charlotte Corday sat quietly awaiting her fate. The news spread rapidly, and furious crowds soon thronged the street outside Marat’s home, baying for the murderess’s blood–one woman said she would like to cut her into pieces and eat her. But the officials called to the scene persuaded the mob that killing Corday would mean they would never discover what had really happened.

Corday was taken to the Abbaye prison (she was kept in the cell occupied by Manon Roland the month before) and the investigation into her crime began. People found it hard to believe that a woman had so premeditatedly killed Marat–his own brother and sister refused to accept it, holding that he had been ‘assassinated by a scoundrel wearing women’s clothes’–and that she had acted alone. Corday was fully aware of how much the fact of her femaleness changed the significance of her crime, writing, ‘No one is satisfied to have a mere woman without consequence to offer to the spirit of that great man.’

Charlotte Corday was guillotined on 17 July. She went to her death remorseless and composed. ‘Her beautiful face was so calm that one would have said she was a statue,’ wrote one onlooker. ‘Behind her, young girls held each other’s hands as they danced. For eight days I was in love with Charlotte Corday.’ The Girondin Pierre Vergniaud, in hiding, said of her, ‘She has killed us, but she has taught us how to die.’

Threatened by her femininity, the Jacobins did all they could to besmirch Corday’s myth. Four days after her death, a vilely misogynistic notice about her was posted throughout Paris. This woman being called pretty was not pretty at all, it thundered.

She was a virago, chubby rather than fresh, slovenly, as female philosophers and sharp thinkers almost always are. Moreover, this remark would be pointless were it not generally true that any pretty woman who enjoys being pretty clings to life and fears death…Her head was stuffed with all sorts of books; she declared, or rather she confessed with an affectation bordering on the ridiculous, that she had read everything from Tacitus to the
Portier des Chartreux
[a book of pornography very popular in the eighteenth century]…All these things mean that this woman has hurled herself completely outside of her sex.

The discovery, at her autopsy, of the unmarried Corday’s virginity added further fuel to Jacobin flames: her chastity was used–just as proof of sexual activity would have been used–to confirm their theories that she was an unnatural, unfeminine woman.

Marat became a revolutionary martyr. David’s portraits of him and of Michel Lepeletier, murdered in January 1792, flanked the president’s chair in the hall of the National Convention; his bones were interred in the Panthéon.

The Société des Républicaines-Révolutionnaires carried Marat’s boot-shaped tin bath in his funeral procession on 16 July, and afterwards continued to parade it and his bloodstained shirt through the streets like relics or fetishes. On the following day, the day of Corday’s death, they swore before the Convention ‘that they will people the land of liberty with as many Marats as children borne by the Revolutionary Republican Women, that they will raise these children in the cult of Marat, and swear to put in their hands no gospel other than Marat’s works, with verses in his memory, and curse the infernal fury brought forth by the race of Caen’.

Ten days after Corday was killed, with the enemy again at France’s frontiers and half the country in open revolt against the revolutionary regime in Paris, Maximilien Robespierre took his place for the first time on the Committee of Public Safety, recently created by the National Convention as a means of centralizing and strengthening executive power. Twelve men sat on the Committee, which met around a large green-paper-covered table in the gilded Pavillon de Flora at the top of the queen’s staircase in the Tuileries–the room which had once been Louis XVI’s private office.

The consolidation of authority in the hands of the Committee of Public Safety ushered in a new revolutionary era. Having scrambled to power on the backs of the Parisian militants of the Commune, the Montagnards now turned sharply around to kick their makeshift ladder away. The path of the revolution had changed: from the summer of
1793 it was about not reform, but Terror. In the words of Antoine Saint-Just, one of the Committee’s chief propagandists,

There is no prosperity to be hoped for so long as the last enemy of liberty shall breathe. You have to punish not only the traitors, but even those who are indifferent; you have to punish whoever is passive within the Republic and does nothing for her; for, from the time that the people manifested its will, everything that is opposed to it is outside sovereignty; everything that is outside sovereignty is enemy.

In the same month, the Société des Républicaines-Révolutionnaires moved their meeting-place from the Jacobin Club to the former Church of Saint-Eustache, beside the central marketplace of Les Halles. This physical move reflected their ideological move away from the Montagnards and a personal veneration of Robespierre towards the anarchic philosophy of the
enragés
, who were pressing for stricter control of prices and trade and ever more direct democracy.

The
enragés
were led by a militant curé named Jacques Roux, ‘the red priest of the
bon sans-culotte
Jesus Christ’. Roux was a sectional representative to the Commune for one of the poorest, most marginal and most desperate areas of Paris. He had accompanied Louis XVI to the scaffold and encouraged the laundresses to riot and pillage in February. In late June he issued an
enragé
manifesto calling for another September massacre, directed this time against hoarders and speculators, and demanding that the government force shopkeepers to trade without making any profit themselves.

At about the same time, the laundresses seized a boatload of soap on the Seine and distributed it amongst themselves, protesting again about high prices. The laundresses and market women were not
enragées
, although they shared many of the same concerns. They formed a distinct group separate from and increasingly hostile to the républicaines-révolutionnaires, who had further antagonized them by moving their headquarters to Saint-Eustache. These women were
poissardes
, the wives and daughters of sans-culottes, and by 1793, with their daily lives as hard as ever, they were beginning to question what the revolution had achieved. During the riots in February a drunkard among
them was heard to say that in the old days there had been only one king; now there were thirty or forty.

Some républicaines-révolutionnaires were from less deprived backgrounds than the market women, but they were politically more extreme. For them, as for the
enragés
, the revolution would not be over until true equality had been established. As Théophile Leclerc, one of the
enragé
leaders, wrote in August, ‘A state is on the verge of ruin when you find extreme poverty and abundant wealth existing side by side.’ Society, he said, should take from the rich to give to the poor.

Twenty-two-year-old Leclerc was an engineer’s son from near Montbrison. Inflamed with revolutionary ideas in 1789, when he was eighteen, he had tried to join the National Guard but was turned down because of his age and small size, joining the army instead and going to Martinique as a soldier. After a short but turbulent army career–during which, aged only twenty, he saved his companions by addressing the National Assembly on their behalf–he fought in Lyon alongside the most extreme revolutionaries. Arriving in Paris in the spring of 1793, he became a passionate disciple of Jacques Roux. The vehemence with which he attacked the Girondins in the days leading up to their fall led to his being expelled from the Jacobin Club.

The week after Marat’s funeral, Leclerc began publishing
L’Ami du Peuple par Leclerc
, taking the name as homage to the
patrie
’s new martyr and attempting to step into Marat’s shoes. Leclerc’s causes were radical, protosocialist: he petitioned for utilitarian, egalitarian schools, arguing that every child should have the same education; he preached that true justice could only be exercised by the people; he claimed that ‘food supplies belong to everyone’ and proposed that the state buy food directly from the producers and distribute it evenly to all.

Leclerc moved into the rooms of Rose Lacombe, who was seven years his senior. His youthful radicalism energized the Société des Républicaines-Révolutionnaires. He and the other
enragés
were unique among revolutionary groups in that they valued women contributing to political life. ‘Victory is assured when women join with the sans-culottes,’ wrote Roux that August. Another
enragé
, Jean Varlet, who wore a badge proclaiming himself an ‘apostle of liberty’, told the Convention earlier in 1793 that he wished the Jacobins’ apathy would
‘be replaced by the energy of the women of 5 and 6 October [1789]’.

‘It is your special duty to warn of [hoarders and aristocrats], Republican Revolutionary Women, generous women truly above all praise for the courage and energy you have developed; your sex, gifted with a much greater sensibility than ours, will feel more vividly the misfortunes of our country,’ wrote Théophile Leclerc in his newspaper on 4 August. ‘Go–by your example and your speech awaken republican energy and reanimate patriotism in lukewarm hearts! Yours is the task of ringing the tocsin of liberty! Time is short, the peril extreme! You have deserved first place, fly, glory awaits you!’

Inspired by Leclerc, Rose Lacombe, Pauline Léon and the Society rose to the challenge. Throughout August, as the anniversary of the storming of the Tuileries drew closer and bread queues grew longer, the républicaines-révolutionnaires joined the
enragés
in ever more persistent demands for influence–or further insurrection.

The writer Pierre-Joseph-Alexis Roussel took Lord Bedford, a visiting Englishman, to witness one of their meetings in the crypt of the former Church of Saint-Eustache. They counted sixty-seven women sitting on two rows of benches on either side of the room, with the president and officers of the Society, in their red caps, opposite the entrance. Visitors watched from the rear of the room, separated from the members by a chest-high bar. Roussel and Bedford did not share the
enragés
’ views on political women. They described the meeting as a ridiculous, grotesque spectacle–they could hardly stop themselves from laughing as they watched the proceedings, they commented.