Liberty: The Lives and Times of Six Women in Revolutionary France (39 page)
Read Liberty: The Lives and Times of Six Women in Revolutionary France Online
Authors: Lucy Moore
Tallien returned to Paris to find the city tense and cowering beneath Robespierre’s rule. ‘Anarchy from within, invasion from without. A country cracking from outside pressure, disintegrating from internal strain. Revolution at its height. War. Inflation. Hunger. Fear. Hate. Sabotage. Fantastic hopes. Boundless idealism,’ writes the historian Robert Palmer of this period. ‘And the horrible knowledge, for the men in power, that if they failed they would die as criminals, murderers of their king. And that dread that all the gains of the Revolution would be lost. And the faith that if they won they would bring Liberty, Equality and Fraternity into the world.’
Three weeks before Tallien’s arrival, on 5 February, Robespierre addressed the National Convention on behalf of the Committee of Public Safety. ‘If the mainspring of popular government in peacetime is virtue,…during revolution [it] is both virtue and terror–virtue, without which terror is disastrous, and terror, without which virtue is powerless,’ he declared. ‘Terror is nothing more nor less than prompt, severe and inflexible justice.’ He denounced tyrannies as if unaware that his own regime was becoming one. ‘We seek an order of things in which all the base and cruel passions are enchained,’ he said, while hundreds of people were going to their deaths each day. Individuals’ freedom and even their lives did not seem such precious commodities when the future of the French Republic, which he believed it was his mission to establish, was at stake.
Outside the Convention hall, half of Paris was going hungry. The
prices of meat and vegetables were at record highs. ‘The grocers continue to give the citizens garbage,’ reported a police spy. ‘Their brandy is abominable, the vinegar is as worthless as the oil; the best of it is not fit to be eaten on salad.’ Women on the streets were not only taking their own children with them to beg, but kidnapping other people’s so as to incite greater generosity from passers-by.
‘Do you believe that if this committee restrained their audacity, there would be so many unjust imprisonments?’ an old man asked a government agent. ‘No–you would see 3000 or 4000 or 5000 fathers returned to their children; for I do not let the small number given in the newspapers fool me; and the republic which seems to be covered with mourning cloth would become the haven of happiness.’
Popular discontent only strengthened the resolve of the Committee of Public Safety. ‘Some wish to moderate the revolutionary movement,’ said Collot d’Herbois, one of the most bloodthirsty of the Committee members, at the Jacobin Club. ‘What! Can a tempest be steered?’ Later, before the Convention, he declared that indulgence was a ‘dangerous weakness’: ‘we are hardened against the tears of repentance’. His colleague Saint-Just agreed. ‘A revolution like ours is not a trial, but a thunderbolt called down on the wicked.’
In the face of sentiments like these, Helen Williams was right in saying that Terror required ‘the most daring courage to be humane’. Tallien, his revolutionary ardour softened by love, would need courage to defend his humanity against his critics. Although the reception he received at the Committee’s meeting-room in the Tuileries was icy, his first address to the Convention was as successful as he could have hoped. After outlining his and Ysabeau’s successes in Bordeaux, he made an appeal for accusations to cease and for trust and respect to be restored among France’s rulers. Echoing Camille Desmoulins’s new journal, the
Vieux Cordelier
, he called for the true patriots–those who had been present at the first days of the revolution, ‘who were not hiding in their caves while we were at the Bastille’–to steer its course faithfully.
‘We will go home later to our gabled cottages, and there we will savour the pleasure of having fulfilled our noble responsibilities, of having responded to the needs of the nation, of having justified the trust placed in us,’ he concluded, appealing to his listeners’ pastoral
fantasies. ‘There we will enjoy in peace the happiness of having brought the people happiness: it is a boon that we prefer to all the treasures on earth.’ Although Tallien was elected president of the Convention (they rotated every fifteen days), Robespierre was unmoved by his arguments. ‘I cannot look at that Tallien without shivering,’ he said.
Robespierre’s fear of his political rivals was not restricted to Tallien. Anyone who did not accept his vision for France was viewed as a traitor; personal loyalty never clouded his resolve. Having eliminated the radical
hébertistes
(the supporters of the journalist Jacques Hébert, publisher of
Père Duchesne
, including Antoine Momoro and Pierre-Gaspard Chaumette) who dominated the Commune of Paris, at the end of March he turned his attentions to Georges Danton and his followers, who drew their strength from the Convention. By this stage, the
dantonistes
were ‘indulgents’, moderates, who were calling for Terror to be contained, for patriotism to be brought back into line with humanity.
The
dantonistes
went to their deaths with dignity and remorse for the excesses to which they had been witness. In prison, Helen Williams reported Danton as saying that he had instituted the Revolutionary Tribunal ‘not to become the scourge of humanity’ but ‘to prevent the renewal of the massacres of September [1792]’. ‘In revolutions the power always remains in the hands of villains,’ he said. ‘It is better to be a poor fisherman than to govern men. Those fools! They will cry “Long live the Republic!” on seeing me pass to the scaffold.’ Robespierre had offered him the chance to betray his friends in return for his life, but he had refused it.
Even Camille Desmoulins’s childhood closeness to Robespierre could not protect him. He went to the scaffold alongside Danton, just as the two men had gone together to the Tuileries on the night of 9 August 1792. His wife had come each day with their baby to gaze up at his window, much like the little boy described by Helen Williams who came every day to the Luxembourg and asked the guard, with his hat in his hands, ‘
Citoyen, vous me permettrez de saluer mon papa?
’–‘Citizen, will you allow me to wave to my father?’–and stood beneath the prison walls, blowing kisses up to his father’s window while his father inside wept.
‘Adieu Loulou, adieu my life, my soul, my divinity on earth,’ wrote Camille to his wife from prison, in a turmoil of romanticism, desperation and grief. ‘I feel the river banks of my life receding before me, I see you again Lucile, I see my arms locked about you, my tied hands embracing you, my severed head resting on you. I am going to die…’
Lucile Desmoulins perished a week after her beloved husband. At the Luxembourg, Camille had made friends with another prisoner, Arthur Dillon–Lucy de la Tour du Pin’s father. After Camille’s death Dillon tried to smuggle a letter of sympathy and some money out to Lucile, but it was intercepted and used as evidence of a conspiracy between them. She was executed, wearing white, on the same day as Dillon. ‘Among the victims of the tyrants, the women have been particularly distinguished for their admirable firmness in death,’ wrote Helen Williams. ‘Perhaps this arose from the superior sensibility which belongs to the female mind, and which made it feel that it was less terrible to die, than to survive the objects of its tenderness.’
‘One can no longer go out, some said, without seeing the guillotine or those being taken to it,’ a police spy reported. ‘Our children are getting cruel and it is to be feared that pregnant women will bring forth children with marks on their necks or still as statues because of the distressing sights they are subjected to in the streets.’ Another spy heard some apprentices talking as the tumbrels rumbled past them. ‘Good Lord, when will we have had enough of shedding blood?’ said one. ‘When we’ve no longer any guilty left,’ replied another. A third said, ‘A man’s death doesn’t cost much.’ ‘If they guillotined people for thinking, how many people would have to die?’ asked a fourth, and then added, ‘Don’t let’s talk so loud…’
Tallien survived the purge of the
dantonistes
; while he shared some of their views he was not close enough to their leaders to be condemned alongside them. Although a Montagnard radical, Marc-Antoine Jullien, had been dispatched to Bordeaux to continue the Committee of Public Safety’s revolutionary work there, and the investigation against Tallien and Ysabeau was ongoing, for the moment Tallien was free–waiting and planning for the day when his enemies would be vanquished and his mistress back in his arms.
A general deliverance, a universal resurrection.
C
HARLES DE
L
ACRETELLE
E
VEN WITHOUT
T
ALLIEN
in Bordeaux to protect her, Thérésia continued to help all those who appealed to her tender heart. She persuaded the ‘fierce’ Ysabeau to pardon a few more souls, including the Girondin Jean-Baptiste Louvet, whose newspaper Roland had once funded, and helped set up the Hospice de Sainte-Croix for the aged indigents of Bordeaux.
She knew she could threaten or tease Ysabeau into complying with her demands, but when nineteen-year-old Marc-Antoine Jullien (son of Rosalie Jullien), an ardent Robespierrist charged with purifying and regenerating the revolutionary regime in Bordeaux, arrived there on 10 April it was clear that her reign of mercy was over. Thérésia’s emollient beauty would not melt his glacial revolutionary virtue.
Jullien wrote to inform Robespierre that ‘Bordeaux seems to have been until now a labyrinth of intrigues and waste. Revolutionary justice here is hungrier for money than blood. One woman has captivated the authorities of the entire town. The favourite is called Thérésia Cabarrus. It is she who forced the Committee of Surveillance to give free rein to her corruptions,’ he wrote, his tone rising to shrill hysteria. ‘I denounce the free union between Tallien and this foreign woman. I accuse Tallien of softness and moderation.’
Thérésia made a final attempt to demonstrate her unimpeachable republicanism four days after Jullien’s arrival, when she delivered a second sermon, this time to Bordeaux’s National Club. Her subject was women, that ‘portion of the human race which exercises such a great influence on morals’. Despite the lack of humanity Robespierre and his followers had recently shown women as varied as Marie-Antoinette, Manon Roland and the members of the Société des
Républicaines-Révolutionnaires, Thérésia hoped that her eloquence would soften their hearts towards her, but she could hardly have chosen a less auspicious subject.
She opened conventionally, insisting that she did not want women to develop ‘the absurd ambition of appropriating men’s rights, and thus lose the virtues of their own sex’. But, she continued, in a republic, ‘everything must be republican’: everyone must serve their country. How could women instil modesty and morality into their children, if they were not first taught them? How could they acquire the character, sentiment and goodwill necessary to be wives and mothers if they were not educated and respected? In particular, Thérésia requested for women a role as nurses of the unfortunate, the sick and the dying, for which their quality of compassion especially fitted them. Compassion–which she had shown so fearlessly in Bordeaux–she described as ‘the germ inherent in all virtues…not a sterile, fleeting emotion but a profound and bravely active sentiment’. She urged her listeners to allow women to take the name of
citoyenne
, ‘the veritable title of their public-spiritedness’, not as an empty description but with pride and faith, and concluded by expressing her own hope of being ‘one of the first to carry out these sweet, these delightful duties’.
Thérésia’s discourse was published and distributed, as her last one had been, and delivered to the National Convention. On 24 April it was read out in front of the deputies there, who applauded it and gave it an honourable mention in their minutes. But Robespierre, who had lost his own mother’s love (he was orphaned as a child) and was incapable of forming an intimate, adult relationship with a woman, was hardly likely to be moved by her appeal. Impulsive, spoiled, untroubled by conventional morality, easily swayed by her emotions, Thérésia represented all that Robespierre despised politically and distrusted personally–a warm-hearted, flesh-and-blood symbol (to a man who was wary of the flesh above all else) of all he hoped to eradicate from France. If, as Thérésia said, they had met in the early years of the revolution, the motives behind his almost obsessive interest in destroying her become even clearer.
On 4 May, in Bordeaux, Thérésia received a passport permitting her to travel to Orléans (in these times passports were necessary for
domestic as well as international travel) where she said she planned to live in retirement. ‘
Signalement: taille cinq pieds 2 pouces, visage blanc et joli, cheveux noirs, front bien fait, sourcils clairs, yeux bruns, nez bien fait, bouche petite, menton rond
’–‘Description: height five feet 2 inches, face pale and pretty, hair black, forehead well made, light eyebrows, brown eyes, nose well made, small mouth, round chin.’ Leaving Théodore behind with an uncle and the faithful Joseph, she set out for Paris via Orléans. Along the way, her carriage made a stop near Blois where she met another young fugitive, Joseph de Camaran, comte de Chimay. Her distress and her beauty would stay in his mind.
Just after her arrival in the capital, on 20 May, Robespierre personally signed the warrant for Thérésia’s arrest, his tiny writing isolated at the bottom of the page. Also in his hand was the order that when she was arrested, she was to be held in solitary confinement and forbidden any privileges, like exercise, that might allow her to communicate with anyone. His interest was unusual: in the month of Prairial, Robespierre wrote only fourteen of the 608 documents issued by the Committee of Public Safety for which an author can be ascertained, and his cramped signature on their decrees was equally rare. ‘All the papers relating to the Cabarrus woman must be gathered together,’ he wrote, assigning two men to her case. ‘Never did Robespierre pursue a victim more remorselessly,’ remembered one of his associates.