Liberty: The Lives and Times of Six Women in Revolutionary France (33 page)

The robustly respectable market women of Les Halles, like the austere revolutionary government, viewed ‘public women’ as agents of counterrevolution whose corrupted morality would contaminate the Republic. Like gambling, fancy dress and pornography, prostitutes represented an aristocratic libertinism that was thought to ruin virtuous citizens. It was even rumoured that they were paid agents of the British prime minister, William Pitt. Several times in September police spies reported that women working in the Palais Royal were speaking out against the revolution and, ‘by their rudeness [
incivisme
] and other vices’, were contributing to the atmosphere of unrest and dissatisfaction that continued to prevail there. To the
marchandes
, if women who wore cockades defended and protected prostitutes, then women who wore cockades were little more than prostitutes themselves. Lacombe’s petitions on their behalf only underlined her personal immorality and political deviance.

Despite Lacombe’s brush with the Jacobins, on 21 September the républicaines-révolutionnaires succeeded in persuading the Convention to pass a law compelling women as well as men to wear cockades. The first failure to display one would result in eight days in prison; the second would provoke an enquiry into the offender’s politics.

A police report described how the issue of the
cocarde
inspired women with the disquieting ‘desire to share the political rights of men. They say, when women have the cockade, they will demand civic cards, they will want to vote in our assemblies, to share our administrative offices, and from this conflict of interests and opinions will result a disorder favourable to their projects.’ Wearing the cockade would be a statement of active citizenship. However, the report added, despite their ambitions the militant women did not appear to be counterrevolutionaries: in general, they showed the deepest respect for the nation and the government.

The market women were furious. Although they were vitally interested in politics when it affected their ability to make a living or to feed their children, they saw the political world as an exclusively masculine domain and the women trying to enter it as perverse and unnatural. Their energies were concentrated on survival; having time to fight for new rights would have been an unimaginable luxury. Wearing the cockade, they argued, would bring with it the responsibilities of full citizenship, including the obligation to bear arms in defence of the
patrie
. These they stoutly rejected.

Consternation greeted the new edict. ‘One can put it on the right, the left, in front, behind,’ wrote one government spy. ‘This frivolous question, which has already excited violent brawls, is not yet decided.’ On its first day the law caused a fracas on the rue des Petits Champs, around the corner from Lacombe’s lodgings and not far from Les Halles, in which a group of dandies were seen encouraging some market women as they attacked a group of ‘
citoyennes patriotes
’. Elsewhere fishwives snatched rosettes from breasts, and trod them into the mud.

Marchandes
and républicaines-révolutionnaires were not the only people embroiled in the drama. One middle-class woman who was accosted for refusing to wear the cockade was defiantly anti-revolutionary. A man appeared before the Committee of Public Safety to testify that he had stopped a Citoyenne Guérin for not wearing one, asking her if she was a republican. She replied that on the contrary, she was ‘very much an aristocrat’ and, though she finally gave in and bought one from a street seller, she said as she fastened it to her hat that ‘she would never betray her own way of thinking’. Called up before
the Committee to explain her words, Guérin said that she understood ‘being an aristocrat’ to mean ‘not doing evil to anyone, living off her revenue, doing good when she was able to, and bearing everything they might want her to bear’. Two of her neighbours were summoned, who declared that Guérin had been acting oddly for some weeks; after three days in custody she was released on grounds of mental instability. Only madness could have explained such a reckless disregard for revolutionary dress and vocabulary.

Their triumph over the cockade inspired the républicaines-révolutionnaires to press for their rights to bear arms and to hope to force women to wear the
bonnet rouge
as well. Hitherto only sans-culottes and the républicaines-révolutionnaires themselves, as they patrolled the capital’s streets, had worn the red Phrygian cap, ancient symbol of freedom. For these latter women, the
cocarde
was a simple badge of patriotism, but the
bonnet rouge
was laden with more potent meaning. Militant women who donned the cap, an explicitly masculine item of clothing, were implicitly claiming the rights and responsibilities of active revolutionary citizenship–they were claiming the rights of men.

Almost everyone except the républicaines-révolutionnaires viewed women wearing red caps as a terrifying threat to masculine authority and an augury of more violence and upheaval on the city’s streets. The républicaines-révolutionnaires insisted they were as free to wear the
bonnet rouge
as a cockade, and openly paraded in their bonnets, provoking angry retaliation–they were snatched off their heads and trampled underfoot, and the women were called bitches and whores. ‘Pull off their
bonnets
,’ people cried, ‘because the only people who have them are prostitutes and women paid off by the aristocracy to wear them.’

At the end of October, after almost a month of unrest and escalating scuffles on the streets, a group of drunken market women stormed a meeting of the Société des Républicaines-Révolutionnaires in the crypt of Saint-Eustache. Crying, ‘Down with red bonnets! Down with Jacobin women! Down with Jacobin women and cockades! They are all scoundrels who have brought misfortune upon France!’, they attacked the group’s members, beating them up and knocking several unconscious, and tried to destroy the Society’s symbols, an
oeil de vigilance
, a tricolour flag and four pikes. A man who tried to intervene on behalf of one
citoyenne
, who was being battered senseless with a wooden clog, was stabbed.

It did not take the revolutionary government long to realize that this violence–even though the républicaines-révolutionnaires were its victims–provided them with an excuse to disempower these tiresome women for good. The following day, a deputation of
poissardes
petitioned a sympathetic National Convention with their complaints against the républicaines-révolutionnaires and demanded the right to wear what they pleased. Fabre d’Églantine, Jacobin deputy and member of the Committee of Public Safety, stood up to attack female societies, declaring that if women were allowed to wear the red cap, they would soon demand the right to carry pistols. He argued that the groups were composed not of mothers, daughters or sisters, ‘but adventurers, knights errant, emancipated girls [meaning whores] and female grenadiers’. Women must be defined by their relation to men; their autonomy would threaten the very foundations of the Republic. At the end of the session, possibly prompted, the market women returned to the bar of the Convention to request that all female clubs be abolished.

A day later, on behalf of the Committee of Public Safety, the lawyer André Amar delivered a theatrical report on the disturbances at the National Convention that revealed the depth of the Jacobins’ fears of women involving themselves in public life. On 28 October, he said, six thousand women had gathered in Les Halles to protest against the ‘violence and threats’ of a group of women wearing pantaloons and red bonnets whom they accused of trying to force them to wear an outfit intended for men. The riots that ensued, he said, were believed by the local ward to have been fermented by ‘malevolent persons [who] have put on the mask of exaggerated patriotism’ hoping to bring about counterrevolution in Paris. The ward requested that female societies be banned and freedom of dress be re-established.

Amar said that the Committee’s investigation of these events had prompted it to ask itself some basic questions: ‘Can women exercise political rights and take an active part in affairs of government?’ and ‘Can they deliberate together in political associations or popular societies?’ To both questions, the Committee had decided the answer was no.

Participating in government, declared Amar, required ‘extensive knowledge, unlimited attention and devotion, a strict immovability, and self-abnegation’–qualities most women did not possess. Nor did they have the physical and moral strength necessary to debate, to deliberate, or to resist oppression. Even meeting in popular societies was wrong, since doing so would require women ‘to sacrifice the more important cares to which nature calls them’ as well as their ‘natural’ modesty and timidity. Nature and morality had granted women certain immutable functions: looking after the home and family, educating their children in republican ideals and elevating the souls of those close to them through their softness and moderation. ‘We must say that this question is related essentially to morals, and without morals, [there is] no republic,’ said Amar, making explicit the link in Jacobin patriarchal, bourgeois philosophy between women leading a purely domestic life and greater civic virtue. He recommended that women’s groups should be banned.

Only one deputy dared to question Amar’s conclusions. ‘Unless you are going to question whether women are part of the human species,’ asked Citoyen Chalier, ‘can you take away from them this right [to assemble peaceably] which is common to every thinking being?’

‘Here is how the suspension of these societies can be justified,’ responded Deputy Basire, with typically Jacobin disregard for the rights of the individual when they conflicted with his party’s power. ‘You declared yourselves a revolutionary government; in this capacity you can take all measures dictated by the public safety.’

The measure was passed.

A jubilant article in the
Révolutions de Paris
reported that women were no longer permitted ‘to organise in clubs; they will be tolerated as spectators, silent and modest, in the patriotic societies; in effect women can no more go searching for news outside their homes; there they will wait and receive it from the mouths of their fathers or their children or from their brothers or husbands’. Women could and still did observe the proceedings of all-male public associations–continuing to heckle the speakers, cheer their favourites, clatter their knitting-needles, eat and drink, scream insults across the floor and refuse to leave when asked to. But they could no longer comment independently on public affairs.

At first, some former républicaines-révolutionnaires vainly tried to challenge the law that had dissolved their society. A group of them reached the bar of the Convention a few days later and tried to protest against the law ‘occasioned by a false report [which] forbids us to assemble’, but their voices were drowned out by the scornful hooting and laughter of the deputies, and they left the hall ‘precipitously’.

On 17 November, in front of the General Council of Paris, the last defiant républicaines-révolutionnaires made a final bid to be heard. The galleries erupted when the women appeared in their red caps, and the president of the Commune, Pierre-Gaspard Chaumette, launched a furious attack. ‘Impudent women who want to become men, aren’t you well enough provided for?’ he thundered, to warm applause. ‘What else do you need? Your despotism is the only one our strength cannot conquer, because it is [the despotism] of love, and consequently the work of nature. In the name of this very nature, remain what you are, and far from envying us the perils of a stormy life, be content to make us forget them in the heart of our families, in resting our eyes on the enchanting spectacle of our children made happy by your cares.’

His emotive appeal clearly touched the women, because apparently they immediately removed their red caps and replaced them with headdresses ‘suitable to their sex’. One of them may have been Pauline Léon, whose marriage to Théophile Leclerc would take place two days later. Despite the bombast of her earlier speeches and petitions, by the end of 1793 Léon seems to have been almost relieved to slip into obscurity as a loving wife to a ‘poor and persecuted patriot’, as she described Leclerc.

It is unlikely that she kept in touch with her co-founder of the Société. Rose Lacombe drifted around France for a year or two, odd prison spells alternating with occasional acting work, before sinking out of the official records.

‘I devoted myself altogether to the care of my household, and I set an example of the conjugal love and domestic virtues which are the foundation for love of the Fatherland’, Pauline Léon wrote later. One of the revolution’s most ardent campaigners for women’s rights had finally surrendered to republican segregationist rhetoric–or, perhaps, simply, to love.

13

VICTIME

Manon Roland

AUGUST–NOVEMBER 1793

One can no longer hope for any good or be surprised at any evil.

M
ANON
R
OLAND

W
HILE CHAOS RAGED
on the streets of Paris in the autumn of 1793, inside the prison of Sainte-Pélagie Manon Roland sat serenely finishing her memoirs. But her proud show of calmness was a front, designed to confound her enemies, reassure her friends and shore up her own shaky courage. To visitors, she presented a face of persecuted but tranquil innocence; alone, she spent hours staring out of her barred windows, weeping. ‘I can feel my resolve weakening,’ she wrote on 28 August. ‘I am agonised by the suffering of my country and the loss of my friends.’

Since July, Manon had received no further letters from Buzot, though he remained the focus of all her fondest dreams. She still allowed herself to imagine he had escaped to the United States, ‘sole asylum of liberty’, but she no longer hoped to join him there to help him find the ‘domestic happiness’ she felt certain he deserved. ‘But I myself, alas, am done for; I shall never see you again.’ Tears flowed down her cheeks as she wrote those words, and, to distract herself, she turned once again to her memoirs.