Liberty: The Lives and Times of Six Women in Revolutionary France (34 page)

Having finished her account of the revolution, her own and Roland’s part in it and her observations of the men with whom she had been thrown into contact, Manon began to recall happier times, using the memories of her childhood to block out the desperate reality of her present situation. Following Rousseau, she resolved to ‘paint the good and the bad with equal freedom’. She had been hardened by adversity, she wrote, and aspired to nothing more than candour.

Her account of her youth is a remarkable document, passionate and fiercely self-aware. The events she had endured over the past three years had done nothing to lessen her innate sense of drama or
self-worth. As she contemplated martyrdom, Manon did not underestimate the importance of her story. ‘Perhaps one day these artless pages may lighten the darkness of some other unfortunate captive, helping him to forget his own misery in thinking of mine,’ she wrote. ‘Possibly, too, those who seek to understand the human heart through a novel or a play may find something worth studying in my story.’ Steeped as she was in the works of Rousseau and the sentimental novels of her youth, suffering all the tortures of doomed, unfulfilled love, she sought to understand and come to terms with her own intensely lived emotional life, the ‘sensibility of the heart’ and the ‘soul that was too great to be confined’ but which had so often been curbed and frustrated.

Eventually, as news from outside filtered into Sainte-Pélagie, Manon grew impatient with her work. On 3 October the National Convention outlawed the fugitive Girondins (who included Roland and Buzot), charged forty-one more and ordered the arrest of another seventy-six. The newspapers reported that the government believed it was closing in on the wanted men. ‘How Robespierre loves blood!’ Manon burst out. ‘I cannot go on writing in the midst of all these horrors which are tearing my country apart,’ she wrote, rushing her account of her life before the revolution to its conclusion. ‘I cannot live among its ruins. I prefer to be buried beneath them.’

Hearing the news, Manon decided that she could best defeat her enemies not by waiting for release or for the chance to speak from the scaffold, but by refusing to allow them to make an example of her. ‘Every hour that I remain alive gives tyranny new scope for boasting,’ she wrote. ‘I cannot beat them, but I can at least defraud them.’ Before she began to starve herself to death, Manon wrote a series of letters in which she apologized to her husband and daughter for abandoning them, gave instructions for her small assets and various possessions to be given to Eudora, and expressed her hopes for her daughter’s future. Her last thought was of Buzot. ‘Farewell, dear—,’ she began. ‘No, I am not saying farewell to you. Leaving this world brings me nearer to you.’

On the 14th, Manon was taken to the prison hospital, where she wrote a letter to Robespierre that she did not send. It was not a plea for mercy–her innocence was, she said, its own witness–nor an
appeal to the man she had once valued and believed to be a ‘sincere and ardent friend of liberty’. Instead she asked him why it was that as a woman, and thus necessarily a passive citizen, she was to be exposed to the same fate as active citizens. She was not asking for her own sake, she wrote, but for the future well-being of France: how could the Republic mete out the same treatment to her, a loyal woman who had made all the sacrifices of which she was capable for her country, as to selfish, perfidious enemies of the state? ‘Assuredly,’ she concluded, ‘justice and liberty no longer reign here.’

Two days later, Marie-Antoinette was executed. Despite the fabricated and humiliating charges against her, at her trial on 12 October the queen had ‘made no defence, and called no witnesses, alleging that no positive fact had been produced against her’, wrote Helen Williams. The guillotine democratized death. Meeting her end, her white hair roughly cropped for the blade and her hands bound, Marie-Antoinette was no more and no less than any of the machine’s other victims, although her dignity in death elevated her more than her status in life ever had.

That August, Germaine de Staël had braved public opinion once more to issue from her exile in Switzerland a heartfelt
Reflections on the Trial of the Queen, by a Woman
. Staël portrayed Marie-Antoinette as a despised and vulnerable widow torn from her young son and facing her own death, and urged the women of France to rise to the defence of one of their own. Perhaps because of the heartbreak caused by Narbonne leaving her, Germaine was sympathetic to Marie-Antoinette’s suffering; all women, she argued, could understand each other’s tragedies and ought to extend to each other mercy and humanity.

But Staël’s emotive appeal could not compete with the feverish anti-monarchism that was electrifying Paris, distracting the people from their hunger and fear. During the same month as Marie-Antoinette’s execution, the bodies of all the French kings since St Louis were exhumed from their resting-places in Saint-Denis, thrown into common burial grounds and covered with quicklime. The bestselling play of the moment was Sylvain Maréchal’s melodramatic
The Last Judgement of the Kings
, showing at the Théâtre de la République.
Despite the desperate shortage of gunpowder due to the war effort, the government granted the producers twenty pounds each of saltpetre and powder for the explosive climax, in which all the monarchs of Europe were killed. The play’s theme was considered so stirringly patriotic that copies of the script were sent to the troops fighting on the frontiers.

Although Manon’s first suicide attempt failed, like many of her imprisoned Girondin friends she continued to consider it an option. Their veneration of the ancients, who were bound by no Christian taboos, led them to see suicide as heroic, a completely free act that expressed supreme courage and stoicism in the face of death and the unknown. Contemporaries spoke of suicides as being made ‘Romans again’. Closely allied to that other revolutionary fantasy, martyrdom, suicide was also a public, political act–an expression of defiance to the regime that had destroyed their hopes for France. In addition, it was explicitly masculine; Manon was determined to show that women could die as boldly as men. In death at least she would be their equal.

But her old friends Bosc d’Antic and Sophie Grandchamp refused her requests for poison, and, when she heard that the trial of the Girondins was set for 24 October, Manon steeled herself to stand witness for her friends, convincing herself that their cause could be better served by her courage in court. On the 24th she was taken from Sainte-Pélagie to the Palais de Justice, where she waited all day, only to be returned to prison that night without having been called. It was not until 30 October that the Revolutionary Tribunal announced that no witnesses would be called in the Girondins’ defence.

‘We are accused of doing nothing, but has our position been realised?’ asked Robespierre, from the tribune of the National Convention, on the 25th.

Eleven armies to direct, the weight of all Europe to carry, everywhere traitors to unmask, agents paid by the gold of foreign powers to confound, faithless officials to watch over, everywhere obstacles and difficulties in the execution of wise measures to smooth away, all tyrants to combat, all conspirators to intimidate, almost all of them of that caste once so powerful by its riches, and still strong in its intrigues–these are our functions.

In prison, awaiting execution, Jacques-Pierre Brissot and his associates were, according to Helen Williams, ‘in such a state of elevation, that no one could approach them with the common-place and ordinary topics of consolation’. Pierre Vergniaud told her ‘that he would rather die than live a witness to his country’s shame’. Manon was living on a similarly intense plane of impassioned rectitude and nervous energy. Like her friends, she almost welcomed her impending martyrdom because it brought her closer to the historical vindication she felt sure would one day be hers. When Sophie Grandchamp visited her, she saw shining in Manon’s eyes a strange ‘
sorte de joie
’.

For Manon, there was a secret joy in the knowledge that in death, unlike in life, she would be treated as the peer of the men whose political hopes and dreams she had shared. The fact that, despite her sex, she was considered dangerous enough to be executed alongside her one-time associates was something to be proud of; the possibility of being a martyr to the cause of freedom and justice, like the Romans she had worshipped as a child, made death hold fewer terrors.

During their trial one of the Girondins, Charles Éléonor Dufriche-Valazé, hid a knife in his papers and killed himself when the predictable verdict of guilty was declared, just as the Robespierrist Camille Desmoulins is said to have cried out, ‘My God I am sorry for this!’ Vergniaud had gone into prison bearing a phial of poison but, on finding that two of his friends, whom he had hoped would escape the guillotine, were to be executed with him, he gave the poison away, ‘resolving to wait the appointed moment, and to perish with them’. The following March, Condorcet was one of the few Girondins who successfully committed suicide in prison, taking poison on the night he was arrested.

Those Girondins who chose the scaffold over suicide went to their deaths on 31 October in a spirit of proud defiance. The twenty-two men, who included Brissot and Vergniaud, were said to have ‘displayed a villainous courage’. As they climbed into the tumbrel, they sang the ‘Marseillaise’; many laughed as they mounted the scaffold. The executioner Charles-Henri Sanson gave a remarkable demonstration of revolutionary efficiency, dispatching them all in about half an hour, but
the effect of the deaths was not all that the Committee of Public Safety had hoped for. A police report described many onlookers walking away from the spectacle ‘with sad expressions and in the greatest consternation’.

On the same day, Manon Roland was transferred from Sainte-Pélagie to the Conciergerie, the fourteenth-century round-towered fortress on the Île de la Cité in which the Revolutionary Tribunal was held, and from which her friends had departed on their last journey that very morning. The Conciergerie was a normal prison, but it also served as the final stop for prisoners on their way to the scaffold across the Seine in the Place de la Révolution; in the two years leading up to July 1794, 2,700 condemned people would spend their last moments there.

Accused of ‘conspiring against the unity and the indivisibility of the Republic and attempting to introduce civil war’, Manon knew with grim certainty that when she arrived at the Conciergerie there would be no going back. ‘As for me…it is all over. You know the malady that the English call “heartbroken”? I have it without remedy, and I have no wish to delay its effects; the fever grows and develops,’ she had written to a friend before leaving Sainte-Pélagie. ‘It is as well. My liberty will never be returned to me; heaven is my witness that I was loyal to my unhappy husband!’ Buzot she believed captured; she had nothing else to live for.

On 1 November, Manon was questioned for the first time. Although her cook Lecocq and her maid Fleury refused to testify against her–for which disturbing personal loyalty they were imprisoned–they had confirmed that many of the executed and fugitive Girondins had regularly dined with the Rolands. Mlle Mignon, Eudora’s fifty-five-year-old clavichord teacher, had been persuaded to denounce the Rolands, but her evidence was largely inconsequential. Manon was forced to answer questions about her relationship with Buzot, but she insisted on referring to him solely in association with Pétion and Brissot as particular friends of both her and her husband.
Further interrogated, she said only that she had for each of them the degree of estimation and attachment that each merited.

Returning to her cell, Manon spent the next few days reading, writing letters and speaking words of comfort to her fellow-prisoners. She ‘seemed absorbed in profound meditations’, her soul calm as she awaited death. Beugnot, a moderate Girondin who had expected to find her vain, intolerant and probably cruel was surprised to discover that although they disagreed politically, she was a sensitive, gentle woman. Her serenity and generosity transformed even her prison cell, where she dispensed money, advice and hope to other prisoners.

Beugnot described Manon as being not beautiful but agreeable-looking, with an expressive face. Another prisoner noticed that ‘misfortunes and a long confinement had left upon it [her face] traces of melancholy which tempered its natural vivacity’. Beugnot found her voice rather than her looks the most striking thing about her. ‘No woman could speak so purely, gracefully and elegantly,’ he remembered, praising the harmony and rhythm of her speech, the grace of her gestures and the noble expression in her eyes. Despite himself, he was captivated by her words, as well as how she spoke them. Her broad education and natural intellect made her a stimulating conversationalist, even if she did express views to which he was ardently opposed. When Beugnot tried to make her admit that the king ‘had met death with true magnanimity,’ Manon responded, ‘Very well, he was fine enough on the scaffold; but there is no reason for giving him credit for it. Kings are reared from childhood to act a part.’ Her own suffering had not diluted her political radicalism.

Manon’s unfaltering republicanism did not shake Beugnot, though. ‘The tender and delicate foot of woman is unfitted to tread these paths bristling with iron and stained with blood,’ he reflected, pondering the issue of feminine emancipation. ‘In order to walk there steadily she must make herself a man, and a masculine woman is a monster.’

Beugnot was impressed to find that despite her outspokenness she was a devoted wife and mother. When they discussed the ideal of virtuous marriage and what it entailed, she declared proudly, ‘The coldness of the French astonishes me. If I had been at liberty and my husband led to execution, I should have stabbed myself at the foot of
the scaffold; and I am convinced that when Roland learns of my death he will pierce his own heart.’

When Manon saw Sophie Grandchamp for the last time, she gave her a small packet of letters and embraced her warmly. Just over a week earlier, in Sainte-Pélagie, Manon had wept as they shared a miserable supper together. ‘It is for my country that I spill these tears; my friends are dying martyrs to liberty,’ she had said. ‘These are not the marks of weakness their memory demands. Now my fate is fixed; I have no more uncertainty. I will join them soon and I will summon the dignity to follow them.’