Liberty: The Lives and Times of Six Women in Revolutionary France (36 page)

In several venues across Paris, living women embodied Liberty in public tableaux. The most important of the festival sites was the recently deconsecrated cathedral of Notre Dame, renamed the Temple of Reason. Statues believed to be French kings (in fact they were Old Testament kings) on its façade were beheaded; its sacred treasures were looted and destroyed. The role of Liberty in the former Notre Dame was played by Sophie Momoro, the beautiful wife of a radical Parisian printer who had been the first, in 1789, to publish the writings
of Camille Desmoulins. She had been chosen by the Jacobin and Cordeliers’ Clubs as a woman whose ‘character renders beauty respectable and whose severity of morals and manners repulses licence’, although political opponents claimed that she was a former prostitute, forced on to the streets when her convent was sacked and closed in 1791, who had been the mistress of Jérôme Pétion before being handed over to Antoine Momoro.

Accounts vary, but anything from fifty to two hundred young girls dressed in white and wreathed with oak leaves, singing republican hymns, preceded Liberty into the flower-decked ‘Temple’. Sophie Momoro was wearing a white dress, a long blue cloak, like the Virgin, and a
bonnet rouge
. There was apparently no danger that she would try to usurp the rights of man. It was perhaps to her that the poet Pierre Jean de Béranger addressed his poem ‘The Goddess: on a person whom the author saw representing Liberty at one of the festivals of the revolution’:

Is it really you, so beautiful when I saw you,

With a whole people thronging round your chariot

Saluting you and calling you immortal…?

Four men carried Mme Momoro on her throne up the aisle towards a flame representing ‘the torch of truth’ that burned alongside busts of revered philosophers. An embroidery depicting a tree of liberty, equality and reason spreading its roots over the globe hung above the altar. The tree was surmounted by the red cap, and beneath it were scattered the remnants of religion and royalty: a torn-up Bible and fragments of crowns and sceptres.

The Commune’s president, Pierre-Gaspard Chaumette, who seven days later would turn the remaining républicaines-Révolutionnaires away from the city’s council, gave an impassioned speech decrying fanaticism. Cries of ‘
Vive la Montagne!
’, ‘
Vive la République!
’ and ‘
Vive la liberté!
’ greeted his words. Chaumette imagined, wrote Mercier bitterly, ‘that he had expelled the Deity from the Universe’.

A Feast of Reason was held in the
poissardes
’ Church of Saint-Eustache, former meeting-place of the Société des Républicaines-Révolutionnaires. The choir was decorated like a pastoral landscape,
with rickety paths winding between faux-rock precipices made of wood, clumps of trees and miniature cottages. Tables laden with hams, sausages and bottles of rough red wine–the only vice allowed to the sans-culottes–stood around the church. A drunken dance was held in the chapel of the Virgin at Saint-Gervais.

Similar celebrations were held across France, but
citoyennes
were not always accorded so prominent a place in them. In Pau, the women of the town applied to the commune for permission to take part in the procession, but were refused. Undaunted they turned up at the
mairie
ready to march all the same. In Lyon, the ruthless Jacobin Joseph Fouché enforced the revolutionary regime’s recapture and subjugation of the city with a rigorous programme of dechristianization during which all Christian iconography was removed from the churches and an ass, dressed in the robes of Lyon’s bishop and with a Bible and a missal tied to its tail, paraded through the streets. A Festival of Reason was held in the former Cathedral of Saint-Jean in which the city’s new officials prostrated themselves before a statue of Liberty and sang an ‘anti-hymn’ composed by Fouché praising ‘Reason as the Supreme Being’.

This official anticlericalism, to which Robespierre was violently opposed, was short-lived. In December an order of the National Convention reaffirmed the principle of freedom of worship.

It was perhaps not a surprise, given the turbulent political atmosphere of the Terror in Paris, that both Chaumette and Momoro would meet their ends on the scaffold only months after the Festival of Reason. Momoro left a letter for his wife, who was imprisoned two weeks after his death. ‘Republican woman, preserve your character. You know the purity of my patriotism. I shall preserve the same character until death,’ he wrote, unaware that his political guilt would implicate her. ‘Raise my son in republican principles. You cannot manage the printing press alone, so dismiss the workers. Hail to the Marat citizenesses! Hail to the Republicans! I’ll leave you my memories and my virtues. Marat has taught me to suffer.’

Afterwards, much was made of the fact that the women who embodied variously Liberty, Equality, Nature, Victory and Reason at these festivities had not had spotless reputations. Several were actresses,
always viewed askance by the general public. The costume of one Liberty, Mlle Maillard, a singer–considered little better than an actress–scrupulously adhered to contemporary engravings of Liberty, complete with a red ribbon tied around her hair and bare breasts.

This was one explanation for why no second Festival of Reason was observed. Women of dubious character were thought to besmirch the pure ideals they were representing, and anyway women, who did not possess the qualities of reason or liberty, could not very well act their part. Nor could a regime that had made the exclusion of women from public life one of the foundations of its authority venerate women as personifications of its ideal virtues. The gap between theory–in which women were exalted–and practice–in which they were disparaged and denigrated–had become too great.

A week after the Festival, the Convention voted to replace the female figure of Liberty on the new Republic’s seal with a colossus representing the French people. Designed by Jacques-Louis David, this figure of a giant crushing federalism with a club succinctly expressed the two overriding concerns of the Montagnard Jacobins in the late autumn of 1793: destroying the federalism that threatened their control of the provinces, and removing women once and for all from the public sphere.

Manon Roland, who had appealed to Liberty at the moment of her death, would perhaps have seen in Liberty’s demotion the essence of the brutal injustices perpetrated by the regime that had destroyed her.

14

MAÎTRESSE

Thérésia Cabarrus Fontenay

APRIL 1793–APRIL 1794

As for Thérésia, she is always an enchantress.

P
IERRE
-É
TIENNE
C
ABARRUS

A
S THE
T
ERROR INTENSIFIED
in the late spring of 1793, Thérésia Cabarrus, former marquise de Fontenay, travelled south from Paris with her ex-husband, four-year-old son Théodore and three servants, heading for Bordeaux. Fontenay planned to leave France for Martinique, and the port of Bordeaux–not yet controlled by radical Jacobins–was his best hope for escape. Thérésia had no immediate plans to leave France. Her family, rich merchants, came from the south-west, so she was sure of a safe haven there. When they reached Bordeaux in early May, the newly divorced couple went their separate ways. At nineteen, for the first time in her life, Thérésia was free–her own woman, neither a daughter nor a wife.

Her brothers Domingo and Francisco and her uncles Dominique and Galabert were waiting to welcome her to Bordeaux, and a circle of admirers soon gathered at her shapely feet. Two young friends, Édouard de Colbert and Étienne de Lamothe, vied for Thérésia’s attentions, angrily stalked by her possessive brother Francisco. In the heat of the early summer, Thérésia, Francisco, her uncle Galabert and her two swains visited the spa-town of Bagnéres in the Pyrenees. On the way their rivalry spilled over into open antagonism. Lamothe, who had declared his love to Thérésia and been smiled upon, was challenged to a duel by the disappointed Colbert.

Lamothe described the
coup d’épée
he received at Colbert’s hands as a blessing, because it meant that Thérésia, touched by his gallantry, sent her brother, uncle and Colbert away and nursed him back to health. Lamothe later told a friend that he had never ‘met a woman so endowed with such power to seduce and arouse the sexual passions’. He was mad with lust, he said, and when Thérésia willingly surrendered
to him he experienced unparalleled ecstasy. ‘Thérésia and I, happy as one is when one loves and one is free, spent the period of my convalescence in the most beautiful countryside, feeling ourselves in the bosom of a joy that has never in my life been equalled.’ Their pleasure may have been deeply felt, but it was also fleeting: when he had recovered, Lamothe rejoined his regiment of hussars in the revolutionary army and Thérésia returned to Bordeaux.

Thérésia, little Théodore, her man-servants William Bidos and Joseph and her lady’s-maid-cum-secretary, the pretty Frenelle, moved into a spacious apartment on the first floor of the Hôtel Franklin, overlooking the city’s public gardens. Its contents attested to its mistress’s accomplishments: a piano stood open by the flower-covered balcony, near a harp and a guitar lying on a sofa; books, pages of music and an abandoned piece of embroidery were scattered over the parquet-floored room; a half-sketched miniature leaned on an easel beside an ivory palette and a box of oil-paints. In her airy rooms, scented with orange-blossom, Thérésia was both artist and muse. Her languid, graceful presence made the horrors of the revolution seem far away.

But much of Bordeaux, capital of the Gironde region after which Manon Roland’s moderate friends had been named, openly opposed the radical regime in Paris. Virtual anarchy raged on the streets beneath Thérésia’s window. In August 1793, the National Convention appointed Jean-Lambert Tallien and Claude Ysabeau
représentants en mission
to Bordeaux, charged with bringing the area under central control. Although Ysabeau had arrived in Bordeaux in August, it was not until 16 October that the
représentants
made their formal entrance into the city, wearing their official blue redingotes, tricolour sashes and plumed hats, and accompanied by three battalions of infantry. Richard Cobb describes ‘the roving
représentant
’ coming into town ‘in a clatter of majesty, with the dust of an escort and to the sound of trumpets, that left the villager gaping and made the urban tailor anxious to be seen at the table of the great man’.

They made their headquarters at the former Grand Séminaire and erected a guillotine beneath their windows in the Place Nationale. Price maximums were imposed on foodstuffs so grocers refused to sell
what goods they did have, bringing further hardship to an already hungry population; rationing was introduced, granting each adult a pound of meat and a pound of rough black bread (two pounds for breast-feeding mothers) a day. Every household was required to post by the door an official notice, on paper headed with the words ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity or Death’ and edged with red, white and blue, listing the names of everyone who lived inside. People tried to make these forms as hard to read as possible–in pale ink, posted as high up as they could reach. Between October and December Tallien and Ysabeau condemned 126 opponents of the revolutionary regime, executing forty-two and acquitting a further forty-three.

Tallien had spent five months on mission in Tours in the spring and summer of 1793, where his energy, charm and organizational flair won him local approval and respect.
Représentants
, or ‘people’s representatives’, were as often homicidal monsters as reasonable administrators–the most notably power-crazed being Joseph Fouché and Jean-Marie Collot d’Herbois in Lyon–so for the inhabitants of Tours to consider Tallien the best of a bad lot was high praise. No ambitious republican could afford to avoid the militant language of the times, and Tallien was not immune to the muscle of phrases like ‘Bleed the purses and level the heads’; but when one Mercier du Rocher met Tallien in Tours in May he found him ‘severe and sweet at the same time’.

One of Tallien’s early reports back to Paris from the Gironde confirms Rocher’s observation. A few days before their official entry into the town, Tallien wrote that there was much work to be done there. ‘You think that Bordeaux is subject to the law,’ he wrote. ‘Well, you fool yourselves, none of the revolutionary laws decreed by the Convention are executed in Bordeaux.’ Enemies of the state were concealed throughout the population, he said. The letter concluded with a fond salutation–incongruous after his fighting words–‘
Ysabeau et moi vous embrassons
.’

Lucy de la Tour du Pin said that Thérésia and the dashing
représentant
met–or renewed their acquaintance, after exchanging glances in Paris–at a spa, probably Bagnéres, before Tallien arrived in Bordeaux in October. Since Tallien was in the Pyrenees in September
this is highly likely, although Tour du Pin’s extra detail, that the smitten Thérésia followed Tallien to Bordeaux, is less probable because she was already established there. ‘He had rendered her some service or other which she repaid with an unbounded devotion she made no effort to conceal.’

The bond between the privileged young divorcée and the up-and-coming republican may have seemed strange to their contemporaries–their friends on both sides of the social divide found the match hard to comprehend–but, apart from the obvious chemistry between them, there were some significant points of contact, or gaps in one into which the other fitted. Both, in one way or another, were outsiders, longing for approval and recognition. Thérésia may have been rich, beautiful and well connected, but she was a foreigner and a parvenu. Even by eighteenth-century standards, she had been brought up without affection, shunted from place to place and used as a pawn by her ambitious parents.