Liberty: The Lives and Times of Six Women in Revolutionary France (44 page)

Permissiveness in fashion was reflected in familiar, licentious manners. People spoke freely, slangily, with abandon. Ladies used words that ten years earlier would have caused duels if they had been uttered in their presence. Old-fashioned scruples had disappeared: men appeared in drawing-rooms in their boots; they did not scruple to compliment women to their faces (something that was seen before the revolution as an insult to their modesty); friends addressed one another by their first names. Women sat on sofas with their legs tucked up under them, displaying their feet and ankles, and went out in public unaccompanied.

Good health had become fashionable. Fresh air was all the rage. A
cult of the physical, derived from the ancients, inspired men and women to take vigorous exercise, walking, riding and swimming. Chariot races were held in the Champs de Mars. For women, though, the appearance of delicate health was still considered attractive; powder was a valuable tool in producing this effect.

Released from their corsets, ladies ceased to swoon and ate and drank in public for the first time, despite the consternation this caused in some masculine hearts. ‘The beloved is always pictured to the fancy like some airy spirit,’ wrote a German visiting Paris in 1795, ‘and it really grieves one to see her eat with a
great appetite
.’ Restaurants serving luxuries unaffordable to nine-tenths of the population opened up all over Paris, run by formerly private chefs made redundant by the revolution.

Another German visitor was shocked to see pregnant women out in public. These ‘fecund belles’ had lost all their delicacy and reserve, he said, and he attributed it not to an innate desire to begin again after the devastation of the Terror, nor to the new fashions for unrestrictive clothing which revealed swelling bellies, but to loose women indulging in light liaisons. He might have been thinking of Thérésia.

The showplace for the
merveilleuses
’ insouciant beauty was the immensely popular public balls which began during the freezing winter of 1794–5; it was to one of these that Rose and Thérésia planned to wear their matching outfits. Anyone who could pay could buy a ticket for these frenzied events, when men and women forgot their troubles, singing wildly as they danced, ‘intoxicated by the speed and the voluptuous music’, while outside on the frosty streets emaciated children were begging for bread.

‘Despairing of escape from their hardships,’ wrote Alexis de Tocqueville, Parisians ‘tried not to think of them.’ Dancing was not just the pursuit of pleasure but a way to escape, almost to protest against grief. The poor had their own riotous dances, held on both Sundays and
décadis
(after Thermidor they kept both of these days as
holidays) in smoky cellars dimly lit by cheap tallow candles or earthen oil-lamps, where they drank rough brandy and danced jigs in their wooden clogs to the tune of a single fiddle. Other balls were held in the ruins of empty hotels and churches, in cemeteries, in the yards of former prisons and on the very boulevards themselves.

The most notorious of these ticketed parties was the
bal des victimes
, held on the first floor of the Hôtel Richelieu, to which only those who had lost a near relative during the Terror were invited. The room was draped in black: black ribbons tied on to the musicians’ violins, black hangings on the walls, black crêpe on the chandeliers. Dancers of both sexes had their hair cut short at the back,
à la victime
; women wore thin shifts like the ones in which their mothers and sisters had gone to the scaffold, and narrow red ribbons around their necks, as if to show where the guillotine’s blade had missed. They greeted each other with sharp, awkward nods in imitation of the motion made by severed heads as they dropped into the basket below.

These extraordinary, macabre balls were for the survivors one way of making sense of the devastating events through which they had lived, of coming to terms with their shared trauma. In the words of the historian Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, they were a form of ‘collective cultural mourning’. But they were seen by disapproving contemporaries as evidence of a worrying moral decline. The insolent extravagance, the cynicism and lack of conscience or inhibition in their quest for pleasure that marked Thérésia and her set were seen either as an insult to the memories of those who had died during the Terror or as the destruction of the revolution’s legacy.

La Chaumiére was at the heart of this corruption. It became known as a salon in which business was done. ‘What do they do at Mme Tallien’s?’ asked the journal
Le Thé
. ‘They negotiate.’ For Thérésia, used since her spell in Bordeaux to asking and granting favours, it was a small step to the lobbying culture endemic to these post-Thermidor times. She ‘enjoyed the only role fitting to her sex,’ remembered Antoine Thibaudeau. ‘She took over the department of favours.’ Nothing was too much trouble: ‘the beautiful Mme Tallien always loved to please her friends’.

Thérésia dispensed kisses to Jacobins who promised they would
convert, and to journalists like Lacretelle who wrote flattering things about her. People sought protectors for new business ideas and help in recovering confiscated fortunes or obtaining official pardons for émigré friends and relatives. ‘Contracts might be for anything, from oats to cavalry sabres, and as likely as not carried off by a woman wearing flesh-coloured tights and diamonds on her bare toes.’ Paul Barras said that Thérésia did happily accept money for favours, but it was ‘not the main object…[rather] the means of obtaining the pleasures she was fond of which she procured for others’.

Perhaps because he felt emasculated by his rich wife, Tallien increasingly became known for his avarice. Although he saved nothing, his enemies claimed that he made fortunes several times over through stock-jobbing, speculating and trafficking in black-market necessities like candles and soap. Journalists (he had reopened his newspaper,
L’Ami des Citoyens
) and deputies to the Convention earned very modest wages; Tallien may have felt obliged to resort to these schemes just to keep up with Thérésia and her profligate friends.

Voices of opposition to the new regime and to those who were seen to be profiting from it had been heard towards the end of 1794, and by early the next year the complaints were growing louder. The ostentatious wealth of the new rich only served to highlight the destitution of the rest of society. Tallien’s willingness to surrender to the luxuries bought by his wife’s wealth was seen as moral weakness; his devotion to a woman who embodied such unrepublican virtues as opulence and sexual liberation undermined his political reputation. ‘It is impossible, no matter how much strength of character one has, not to be influenced by the society one frequents,’ wrote one former Jacobin, Antoine Thibaudeau, commenting on how easily members of the Convention were seduced, mocked and used in the new salons of Thermidorian Paris.

The similarity between La Chaumiére and Marie-Antoinette’s toy farm at Versailles was not lost on Tallien’s opponents. As early as January 1795, newspapers that obsessed over Thérésia’s every appearance were calling her ‘
une nouvelle Antoinette
’ as often as they described her as a goddess. Boudoir politics was thought to have returned, and Thérésia, who exemplified this new corruption, was condemned. ‘The airs of a
courtesan suffice to make her a sensation,’ commented one journalist sniffily in January 1795.

That same January women waiting in bread lines were saying that the counterrevolution was not far away and that the market women who had started the revolution would bring it to an end. The contrast between rich and poor, between the sated and the starving, had become too great to bear. By March the women were protesting on the streets and calling for a king who would give them bread; others were heard to say that at least under Robespierre their bellies had been full. Bread was limited to four ounces per person per day and the price of a loaf was soaring. An insurrectionary poster was pasted on to the city walls, calling for the wives of sans-culottes to occupy the tribunes of the Convention to prevent the counterrevolution taking place.

In early April hungry, angry men and women surged into the Convention hall and scuffled with guards and
muscadins
, calling for bread. When calm was restored, the Thermidorians used the disturbance to expel the remaining Jacobins from their number. The most prominent of them, Barère, Collot d’Herbois and Billaud-Varenne, who had been arrested the previous month, were deported to Guiana. Marat, patron saint of the Jacobins, had been officially de-Pantheonized two months earlier.

Counterrevolutionary reaction, known as the White Terror, was spreading across France. Jacobin prisoners were massacred and ‘aristocrats’ released from gaol. National conscription meant that deserters from the army were officially viewed as traitors, but in many conservative areas of the country they were welcomed home. Royalists–constitutional monarchists rather than agitators for a return to the ancien régime–gathered beneath their banners a whole variety of followers with new grievances and resentments. In Amiens they cried, ‘
Du pain et un roi!
’

In Paris the people’s demands for bread had not been satisfied, and in early May women were observed taunting and provoking their men ‘to rebellion and to pillage’, calling them cowards and haranguing them for allowing their families to starve. By then a baguette from the baker’s cost 16 livres; they had been 8 or 9 sous in 1789. Women were goading their husbands–in the words of a police spy, ‘firing them up with their
seditious propositions and stimulating the most violent excitement’, communicating all their rage to them. ‘If you go to present a petition about it [the lack of affordable bread] to the National Convention, you are arrested,’ one woman was heard to say to a friend on 18 April. ‘The popular societies have been closed. That was in order to plunge us back into slavery. We are all suckers.’

On 1 Prairial (20 May) women occupied the tribunes of the Convention while their husbands and sons outside armed themselves with pikes and cannon. The crowd cried, ‘Bread or death!’ and ‘
Du pain et la constitution de 1793!
’, storming the hall in defiance of the guards, who tried to herd the women out of the galleries with whips and the butt ends of their bayonets. When the deputy who had been charged with provisioning Paris confronted the mob he was shot and his head stuck on to a pike. The protesters forced the Convention to pass a series of Jacobin measures that would have bolstered the dwindling power of the wards, and of the revolutionary committees, before being expelled from the hall by the National Guard late that night; the measures taken were repealed then and there.

The Convention responded to the violence–of the same kind that two or three years earlier had been coordinated and manipulated by men like Danton, Hébert and Tallien himself–by disarming the faubourgs. The women of faubourg Saint-Antoine at first resisted handing over their cannon, but without success. From this point onwards, it would no longer be possible for the people of the streets to generate political change through protest and uprising.

Common women, described as bloodthirsty Furies, were seen as instigators of this violence. One hundred and forty-eight were arrested for inciting the revolt. Most had previous records as militants; most were wage-earners whose brothers, husbands or sons were fighting in the republican army; none were young mothers. Pauline Léon, so recently released from prison, was not among them.

Women were barred from attending the Convention without a male companion, and from participating in political meetings. Gathering in public in groups of five or more was forbidden. The Société Fraternelle des Deux Sexes was denounced as a ‘hotbed of insurrection’ but its female members resisted attempts to close it down.

Even the national spinning workshops set up in 1790 were dismantled; women were officially encouraged to work at home. In this way, said the official report to the Convention, the unfortunate classes would avoid long and miserable journeys to work, thus saving time they could devote to their families. The manufacturers’ expenses would be lessened and quality improved. Working at home would also prevent ‘inconveniences that might result–for morals or for public tranquillity–from numerous gatherings of simple people who are credulous and easily led astray by perfidious suggestions of malevolence and seduction’.

For these women of the Parisian streets, whom the revolution in all its incarnations had failed to provide with food for their children, the response to the riots of Prairial was one betrayal too many. How else could the working woman ‘assess the revolution except by examining her wrecked household’, asks the historian Olwen Hufton, ‘by reference to her children aborted or born dead, by her own sterility, by the disappearance of her few sticks of furniture, by the crumbling of years of effort to hold the frail family economy together, and what could her conclusion be except that the price paid for putative liberty had been far too high?’

From 1795 many returned to the old ways, once again finding the support and succour they needed in the Church. The Thermidorians had re-established religious tolerance, and on 11 Prairial the Convention was persuaded to authorize worship in former churches. A few days later mass was celebrated in fifteen churches in Paris for the first time in three years.

In late June, encouraged by the change in the political atmosphere since the events of Thermidor, royalist forces landed at Quiberon in Brittany. By July Rose de Beauharnais’s ex-lover, General Hoche, had defeated them and taken nine thousand men prisoner. As émigrés returning to France in arms, they were all automatically subject to the death penalty. Hoche and Tallien, there as a
répresentant
, hesitated to
carry out the sentences, and told the prisoners they would sue for acquittal. Tallien returned to Paris to present their case to the Convention.

But in Paris Tallien had been accused of corresponding with royalists, and, desperate to prove himself a true republican, he argued instead that rigour rather than clemency be shown to the rebels. About 750 men were executed. Thérésia was devastated by the deaths. Weeping, she told Charles de Lacretelle afterwards that if she had been there, she believed she could have prevented the killings. On a political level, Tallien had endeared himself neither to the increasingly powerful constitutional monarchist faction nor to the remaining radicals.