Liberty: The Lives and Times of Six Women in Revolutionary France (48 page)

During the Directory, as with the dissolute Barras, women were viewed merely as sensual creatures of emotion and superficiality. Only a few lonely voices dared contradict the prevailing view. Louis Theremin argued in 1798 that women had been ‘entirely neglected’ by the revolution, either because their indifference had been assumed or because they were thought to be unworthy of participating in it. Since the revolution, lamented Germaine, ‘men had found it politically and morally useful to reduce women to the most absurd mediocrity’. Theremin suggested that if women were given a stake in the new regime they might have an interest in its survival.

Louis-Sébastien Mercier condescendingly held that the reason women were supporting the counterrevolution was because, loving baubles like magpies, they had been distressed to see their lovers’ epaulettes, ribbons and robes swept away by the political changes. When ‘they perceived that there was something severe and serious in a revolution,’ he concluded, ‘they turned away from it’.

One female figure had quite literally turned away. In September 1792, the figure of Liberty chosen for the new national seal had stood proud and direct, facing towards the viewer with her pike at the ready in her hand. The Directory’s seal, by contrast, showed her turned away from the viewer, seated and pensive, a figure not of youth, courage and vigour but of matronly contemplation, even remorse.

Thérésia, Joséphine and the
merveilleuses
all personified the Directory view of femininity–indeed, they surpassed it. Despite their tender hearts and determined frivolity, their awareness of their beauty and its worth, of the power of public interest in their private lives, was astonishingly modern. Through their creative patronage of art, architecture and design they shaped the image of the Directory that survives to this day, moulding an entire aesthetic movement. The column inches devoted to the ever-changing extremes of fashion during this time were just one indication of the contemporary obsession with women and their place in society.

Some onlookers saw this as a positive development–‘Never have women occupied public opinion in a similar fashion; never have they influenced affairs in so apparent a manner,’ wrote one journalist–but others disagreed. ‘The Pompadours, the Dubarris [sic], the Antoinettes return to life, and they are the ones who govern,’ raged the
Tribun du Peuple
, ‘and who kill your revolution.’

Cultured, exclusive courtesans in the tradition of Mme de Pompadour and Mme du Barry had returned to high society; indeed many saw Thérésia herself as no more than a high-class prostitute. She played on these assumptions, dressing for parties as Aspasia, the Greek courtesan who became Pericles’ consort. Barras also compared his mistress to the hetaerae of ancient Greece. When he saw Thérésia and Talleyrand tête-à-tête at the Luxembourg, he called her his ‘beautiful Athenian’ and asked her if she wanted to govern like a second Aspasia.

Such comparisons were not always complimentary. A pamphlet addressed ‘to the greatest whore in Paris’ reviled Thérésia for her ‘revolting’ voluptuousness, her impudence and her decadence. ‘Your whims and your tastes are more closely observed than the decrees of the government,’ stormed the anonymous author, who signed himself Beelzebub, demanding to know who paid for her jewels and accusing her of corrupting innocent young men. The prostitutes on the streets were angels compared to her, he continued, and Thérésia set them their example. Lower-class whores flooded Paris’s streets in the late 1790s. They teemed beneath the arcades of the Palais Royal among the ice-sellers, pickpockets and lottery-ticket vendors–looking like cheap versions of Thérésia and her friends with their ‘breasts uncovered, heads tossing, colour high on their cheeks, and eyes as bold as their hands’–whispering obscenities to male passers-by.

The prostitutes interrogated by the police were on average in their early twenties and came mostly from the provinces. They had had no one to fall back on in Paris when they lost their position in a household or were left pregnant by a lover who failed to marry them as he had promised. Driven on to the streets because they could not afford to buy food or had a baby to feed, they lived desperate, itinerant lives, sleeping where they could find a bed, stealing handkerchiefs or a loaf of bread if an opportunity arose, and always hungry. Their experiences
underlined the vulnerability of women in revolutionary France and the hazards and insecurity facing them in a society that valued them so little.

It was these frightened, lonely young women who drove up the suicide rates. Richard Cobb gives the example of Louise-Émilie-Charlotte Harmond, aged fourteen, whose body was fished out of the Seine at Sévres in July 1799. The description of the clothes she was wearing when she died survives in poignant detail: the embroidered muslin dress over a toile slip stitched with her initials, a pair of dirty cotton stockings and shoes, a scarf of blue and white striped silk around her neck, and a tiny piece of soap wrapped in chiffon.

All through the spring and summer of 1797, émigrés streamed back into Paris and the royalists mustered their strength. Lucy de la Tour du Pin and her husband came back from their farm in the United States hoping to recover some of their lost fortune. One new way of making money was surprising and unwelcome to her: when she landed in France Lucy sent for a hairdresser, who astonished her by offering her 200 francs for her long fair hair. The blond wigs popularized by Thérésia were still the height of fashion.

One of Lucy’s first calls was to La Chaumière to thank Thérésia, to whom she owed her escape from Bordeaux. Thérésia, who was just pregnant (probably with Barras’s child), wept as she told Lucy how unhappy she was with Tallien, describing what she called his unreasonable suspicions, the speed with which he took offence and how he threatened to kill her when he was jealous. The scenes she had enjoyed provoking in Bordeaux had acquired a dark new import; on one occasion, when she arrived home late after a party, she had been forced to flee the house as he loaded his pistol. That March, she had instituted divorce proceedings against him on the grounds of irreconcilable differences but, persuaded out of it by her friends and hoping they might still make peace, she abandoned them soon afterwards.

Other observers confirm that Thérésia was, during this period,
trying in vain to justify why she had felt obliged to marry Tallien in the first place, saying that she had never loved him but had sacrificed herself ‘to his wishes in order to spare the blood of many who were likely to be victims of the then established tyranny’. As Lucy was leaving La Chaumiére, Tallien arrived. Frostily, she thanked him for the favour he had performed for her in Bordeaux and he replied that she could always count on him.

The elections had brought a majority of moderate royalists into the two houses of the Directory in April 1797, and only the Directors themselves (three of the five, Barras, Louis La Révellière and Jean-François Reubell, were committed republicans) stood between them and control of a France longing for a new regime of peace and stability. Lucy was amazed to see how indiscreetly confident her former friends were, loudly discussing their hopes and plans in front of servants and republican deputies. When she told them she was sure Talleyrand knew of every plot they were hatching, they laughed at her. Nearly every day she saw Germaine, whom she described at this time as ‘all powerful’.

Over the summer Barras, supported by his two fellow-Directors, Talleyrand, the republican deputies and the army, decided that military action was the only means by which he could safeguard the Republic and his own power. In early September, as the streets filled with soldiers and the air of crisis intensified, Barras advised Thérésia, who was seven months pregnant with his child, to leave Paris for a few days. On the night of 3 September, Barras dined with Talleyrand, Germaine and Benjamin Constant, while outside the army, commanded by one of Napoléon’s officers, peacefully occupied the city. Paris awoke the next day (18 Fructidor Year V) to discover its walls plastered with justifications of the coup and the news that anyone wishing to restore the monarchy or the 1793 constitution would be shot without trial.

About midday Lucy de la Tour du Pin and a friend, dressed inconspicuously, set out through streets full of soldiers to call on Germaine and find out what was happening. They were forced to take a circuitous route, as so many roads were blocked, and as they walked they were terrified by a ‘number of those horrible women who appear only during revolutions or disorders, [and who] began insulting us, shouting “Down with the royalists”’. Much shaken, they arrived at the rue du Bac to
find Germaine and Constant arguing about the inevitability of the coup and its possible repercussions.

Germaine’s fears about the consequences of the coup were realized the following day when Barras and the Directors re-established their control over the dispirited and passive deputies. Prominent royalists were deported; press censorship was re-imposed; the spring elections were proclaimed invalid; and, on pain of death, refractory priests and returned émigrés were ordered to leave Paris within twenty-four hours and France within a week. The Republic’s triumph had come at a price. Individual liberties and the principles of liberalism had been sacrificed, and Napoléon’s support for the coup had left the government dangerously in his debt. As Barras had predicted earlier in 1797, ‘we will all perish by the generals’.

Lucy de la Tour du Pin and her family were once again trapped without passports in a France hostile to their cause. Her husband approached Talleyrand who, despite the fact that he had spent the day of the coup playing whist, was too preoccupied by his own future to help anyone else. Remembering his previous helpfulness, Lucy went to see Tallien, who drew up a statement outlining their circumstances and delivered it by hand to the Minister of Police, returning it with his signature and recommendation to her after several anxious hours and with a note apologizing for not having been able to do more. ‘The end of the letter,’ she wrote, ‘might have been construed to mean: “I wish you a good journey.”’

Given the state of his marriage and the damage that helping royalists would have done to his shattered political career, it is surprising that Tallien was so ready once again to help his wife’s aristocratic friends, but he seldom refused an appeal to his heart. Victorine de Chastenay was another desperate young woman who asked for Tallien’s assurance after Fructidor and found him a gentle, obliging, trustworthy man–a far cry from the violent, gun-brandishing monster depicted by his unhappy wife or the self-serving hypocrite painted by his political enemies.

After Fructidor, Germaine fell once again under official suspicion. Extremists of both sides portrayed her as an intriguer and a threat to political stability. Despite her republicanism, her closeness to Talleyrand
and Barras and the fact that her salon had been at the centre of the government’s plans to crush the counterrevolution, she continued to make every effort to help and protect her royalist friends, calling it a woman’s duty to come to the aid of her friends whatever their opinions, and even enlisting Thérésia’s help in obtaining the release of Charles de Lacretelle and a friend of his. Talleyrand observed with his customary cynicism that Germaine enjoyed throwing people overboard simply to have the pleasure of fishing them out of the water again. Only Barras’s generous arguments on her behalf prevented her arrest.

Fresh from his victorious campaign in Italy, three months after Fructidor Napoléon returned to Paris a conquering hero, clothed like a wolf in the guise of a man of peace and humility. He pretended to be prouder of honours such as his election to the newly created academic Institute of France than of his military triumphs. Affectedly republican, he made a point, at a time when using ‘
Citoyen
’ as a form of address had fallen into disuse, of continuing to address people thus. The general rejected the ostentatious fancy dress so beloved of the period, wearing austere, modest clothes, appearing on even the grandest of occasions in a plain grey greatcoat. His carriage, drawn by just two horses, was conspicuously unadorned.

Germaine was as enthralled by Bonaparte as was the rest of France. She spoke the words on everyone’s lips when she told a friend in July that he was ‘the best republican in France, the most-freedom loving of Frenchmen’–the man who could save France from itself. His ‘tone of noble moderation’, she said, inspired confidence: ‘in those days, the warrior spoke like a judge, while the judges used the language of military violence’. Having received no reply to the letters of admiration with which she had already bombarded Napoléon, apparently urging him to discard his ‘insignificant’ wife in her favour, she begged Talleyrand to allow her to be present when her hero made his first official call at his ministry on 6 December.

Still exhausted from his campaign and the journey back to Paris, a sallow Napoléon arrived at Talleyrand’s offices punctually at 11 o’clock. Germaine had been waiting there for an hour. For once, she was overwhelmed: the ‘confusion of admiration’ made her uncharacteristically speechless at first, and she found she had difficulty breathing
when faced with those cold, marble eyes. But Napoléon ‘bestowed very little attention upon her’, as Talleyrand noted; he was more interested in meeting Talleyrand himself, to whose flattering letters he
had
been replying.

Subsequent encounters did not lessen Napoléon’s fearsomeness. Germaine, admitting that he ‘constantly’ intimidated her, sensed he was impervious to her charms. ‘I had a confused feeling that no emotion of the heart’–by extension, Germaine herself, the embodiment of passion–‘could act upon him’. He was, she felt, ‘not like a creature of our species’: ‘his face expressed a sort of casual curiosity about all those human shapes he planned to bring into subjection as soon as he had the power to do so’.

Still she persevered in the belief that he would one day recognize her worth, continuing to send him letters that he did not read and attempting to engage him in debate. One day, calling on him unannounced, she was told that the general was in the bath. To Napoléon’s horror, she tried to push her way upstairs, exclaiming, ‘Genius has no sex!’ Joséphine’s daughter Hortense said that Germaine pestered Napoléon so much during this period ‘that he did not, and perhaps could not, sufficiently try to hide his annoyance’.