Liberty: The Lives and Times of Six Women in Revolutionary France (53 page)

Juliette Récamier was idolized by consular society but gradually, under Germaine’s provocative influence, she came to view Napoléon as a tyrant. In the spring of 1802, after an abortive plan by the generals Moreau and Bernadotte to unseat him, Juliette made a hastily arranged visit to England. Some said that she was advised to leave because of her public friendship with the plot’s leaders; others that her departure was on account of the unwelcome admiration the First Consul had developed for her.

London worshipped Juliette as ardently as did Paris. She became friends with Georgiana Duchess of Devonshire and Lady Bess Foster, and flirted with the Prince of Wales. On the first Sunday in May, her visit to Kensington Gardens with the Duke of Hamilton and the Duchess of Somerset was recorded in the newspapers. Juliette looked like a goddess in a hat draped with a white veil that swept the ground, a fashion that had not been seen before in London; in the rush to try and touch her, she was almost stifled by the crowd.

Back in Paris, prints and engravings bearing her image multiplied on the stalls at the Palais Royal. A German friend described Juliette, on seeing a caricature of herself on a stand, asking the seller if it was a picture of a lady of ill-fame. ‘Nay, God forbid,’ he replied. ‘It is a lady of the most spotless reputation.’ He then praised her so highly–not realizing who she was–that she was consoled ‘for the bitterness of the libel she held in her hand’.

Two years later, Napoléon, an admirer of Juliette since his brother’s infatuation with her, began a pursuit in earnest. He sent Fouché to her country house at Clichy to present his suit. Fouché told Juliette how highly the emperor thought of her, and said that if she were to apply for a position at Joséphine’s court he knew her request would be granted. She immediately declined the offer, arguing that her shyness, her love of independence and the simplicity of her tastes made her unfit for such a position; furthermore, her responsibilities towards her husband would preclude serving at court. Her real reason was Napoléon’s treatment of Germaine. Fouché smiled–one can imagine how wolfishly–and said how useful she might be at court in arguing on behalf of the poor and oppressed, adding that a woman as noble and charming as she might exert a powerful influence over the emperor. ‘He has not yet met a woman worthy of him,’ he added significantly, ‘and no one knows what the love of Napoleon might be, if he attached himself to a pure person.’

Soon afterwards, Napoléon’s sister Caroline Murat invited Juliette to visit her. She spent the morning with Caroline, already a friend, and her husband, who tried to convince her to accept a position as Caroline’s lady-in-waiting. A role in her establishment would protect Juliette from the empress’s jealousy, they said, and would allow Caroline always to have Juliette near her.

As Juliette left, Caroline recalled her friend’s admiration for Talma, and offered her her box at the Théâtre Français. This box happened to be opposite Napoléon’s own, and both times Juliette used it she found him seated across from her, his opera-glass trained not on the stage but on her. Her surrender began to be spoken of as a certainty, though Juliette had avoided responding to Fouché’s offer.

Finally Fouché visited her again, this time offering her the position of lady-in-waiting in Napoléon’s own name. ‘You can no longer refuse,’ he said. But, knowing her husband supported her decision, refuse she did, incurring (as Thérésia Tallien had done) Napoléon’s lasting rancour. On hearing, soon afterwards, that three of his ministers had met at her house Napoléon irritably enquired when his council had last convened there. He declared that any foreigner who frequented the Récamiers’ house would be considered his personal enemy. Metternich,
then secretary at the Austrian embassy, was obliged to visit Juliette in secret to avoid the notice of Napoléon’s spies.

In late 1805 Jacques Récamier went catastrophically bankrupt. When Napoléon was asked to authorize the Bank of France to bail him out (Récamier, along with Gabriel Ouvrard, had been one of the few bankers upon whom Napoléon relied) he refused with the words, ‘I am not (Récamier’s lover, and I do not come to the aid of merchants who maintain a house that costs 600,000 francs a year.’

Juliette met her husband’s reversal of fortune with serene dignity and courage. Knowledge of her good works, hitherto accomplished in secret, began to leak out; the society beauty was revealed as an angel. Out of respect for her, and partly out of contempt for Napoléon, whose treatment of Récamier had been broadcast around Paris, Parisian society made a point of calling at the house in the rue du Mont Blanc (already on the market) to express their sympathy.

Over the next few years, Juliette’s life consisted of close friends and visits to Germaine at Coppet. Other regulars there included Constant, Mathieu and Adrien de Montmorency, Prosper de Barante, the German scholar August Wilhelm von Schlegel, the Swiss writer Charles-Victor de Bonstetten, Chateaubriand and various German princes. Most fell in love with Juliette and were gently guided towards devoted friendship. Only Chateaubriand succeeded in breaking down her defences and their love would endure till their deaths, his in 1848 and hers, from cholera, the following year.

In 1811, after the publication of Germaine’s
On Germany
, Napoléon took advantage of one of Juliette’s many absences to forbid her returning to Paris. The innocent Juliette’s intimacy with Germaine, her independence of mind, had finally become a political issue.

19

FEMMES

Resist, keep resisting, and find the centre of your support in yourself.

G
ERMAINE DE
S
TAËL

U
NDER
N
APOLÉON’S RULE
women were granted fewer rights than before the revolution and their voices were relentlessly suppressed. All the passion and optimism of the women of the early revolutionary period, exemplified by Germaine de Staël, by Manon Roland, Pauline Léon and Théroigne de Méricourt, and all the influence enjoyed during the Directory by Germaine, Thérésia Tallien and Juliette Récamier, had apparently come to nothing.

Manon Roland’s bones lay in a common grave beside hundreds of others guillotined under Robespierre. Pauline Léon, released from prison after Robespierre’s fall, does not reappear in the official records. After her turbulent years of political activism, she seems to have decided that a quiet life was worth more than the rights for which she had once fought. She was not alone. After the riots of Prairial in the spring of 1795 common women no longer involved themselves with political protest. It would take the upheavals of 1848 to bring them back on to the streets–with the Société des Républicaines-Révolutionnaires as their inspiration.

Thérésia Cabarrus, formerly marquise de Fontenay and Mme Tallien, died as princesse de Chimay in 1835, having spent the last years of her life in seclusion at her husband’s estates doting on her many children and grandchildren and indulging her love for music and painting. The fact that despite her respectable third marriage she was never welcomed back into European high society (although her husband and children were) was a continual source of regret. ‘If I should deign to defend myself, I should say to you,’ she wrote to a friend in 1826, with her extraordinary ability to view the facts of her life as she wished them to be, ‘is it my fault if M. de Fontenay betrayed and abandoned me, if
M. Tallien left for Egypt when his responsibilities required him in Paris?’ In fact much of the blame for her exclusion from the world she had once almost reigned over can be attributed to Napoléon’s inability to forget a slight or forgive a rejection–especially if it came from a woman.

When the unreliable memoirs of a revolutionary government agent called Sénart, which were overwhelmingly hostile to Tallien, were published in 1824 (four years after Tallien’s lonely death) Thérésia declared herself heart-broken–especially on behalf of their daughter. Rose-Thermidor Tallien, called Joséphine during her childhood (Joséphine continued to pay for her god-daughter’s education even after her break from Thérésia), took the name of Laure after her marriage to Félix de Narbonne-Pelet as a final rejection of the controversial circumstances of her birth which had so coloured the lives of her parents.

Although Napoléon had been able to ensure that Thérésia lost her best friend and was ostracized from her husband’s world, he could not control his children. Thérésia’s son by Chimay, Joseph, married one of Napoléon’s illegitimate daughters; their four children could claim both Napoléon and Thérésia as their grandparents.

Juliette Récamier, who better conformed to the new ideal of a virtuous, modest woman, became one of the great literary muses of the nineteenth century through her long-standing friendships with Benjamin Constant, Pierre-Simon Ballanche, François-René de Chateaubriand–her only real love–and Germaine de Staël. She returned to Paris in 1814 after Napoléon’s fall. In the 1830s, when she was in her fifties, she was described as still possessing an irresistible ‘velvetiness’ of manner.

The Duke of Wellington, who met Juliette in Paris in 1815 after the final defeat of Napoléon at Waterloo, was another of her admirers. ‘I own, madame, that I do not greatly regret that urgent business will prevent me from calling on you this afternoon, since each time after seeing you I quit your person more than ever penetrated by your attractions, and less disposed to give my attention to politics,’ he wrote. ‘I will, however, wait upon you tomorrow…if you should be at home, notwithstanding the effect which these dangerous visits produce on me.’

Théroigne de Méricourt, officially declared insane in September 1794, was transferred from one grim asylum to another over the next thirteen years. Pierre Villiers, once Robespierre’s secretary, visited her in 1797. He described her as a ‘revolutionary Fury’ still obsessed with the ideas of equality and liberty–as if those deluded hopes were proof of her madness. It is more than likely that Théroigne was treated during this period by Philippe Pinel, an early specialist in mental disorders. He believed that revolution ‘expanded the soul’ but he also argued that it caused a greater incidence of mental disorders and insanity because it acted as a powerful emotional stimulant. Revolutions, according to his theory, drove people to such extremes of emotion that many simply went mad.

Théroigne was finally placed in La Salpêtrière in 1807; here she would spend the last decade of her life ministered to by keepers who were little more than gaolers, clothed in filthy rags, fettered to the walls and fed like an animal through the bars of her damp, dirty, airless cell. Abandoned by her family to these inhumane conditions, the desperate Théroigne degenerated rapidly. If someone approached her she would threaten them, swear, accuse them of royalism and speak wildly of liberty and the Committee of Public Safety. Her world was still that of 1794.

By 1810, the asylum’s records describe her as completely dislocated from reality, speaking to herself for hours on end, muttering ritualized incantations about committees, decrees, villains, liberty and the revolution, at times smiling at an imaginary audience. Often naked, even in the coldest weather, she punctuated her monologues with purifying baths of freezing water or self-abasement in muddy excrement.

Since her death in 1817 Théroigne’s case has been seized upon by generation after generation of historians who have used her as a metaphor for the ruined idealism of the first years of the revolution. In the mid-nineteenth century Jules Michelet (basing his analysis on distorted reports of her life, since discredited) saw her as the fatal personification of revolutionary fury, savage, bloodthirsty and anarchic. In fact she seems to have been more victim than aggressor, a tragic casualty of her own exalted hopes for freedom.

It was Michelet who first attributed to women a prominent role in
the revolution. He argued that the daily deprivations suffered by ordinary women–hunger, disease, the sight of their husbands and sons going off to war–made them overcome their traditional political passivity to become bold instigators of change. ‘What is most
people
in the people, I mean what is most instinctive and inspired,’ he wrote, ‘is assuredly the women.’

Later historians, like the socialist Albert Mathiez at the start of the twentieth century, looked at women more sceptically, generally viewing their counterrevolutionary activity–their calls for a return to king and Church–as their most important contribution to the history of the period. To Mathiez, such women were political and religious fanatics who undermined the achievements of true (male) revolutionaries like Robespierre. On the other hand his contemporary, Jean Jaurés, commended the role women played in bringing the king to Paris in 1789 and forcing him to sign the Declaration of the Rights of Man. It was female hands, Jaurès wrote, ‘that received for humanity its new, glorious title’.

But humanity’s new, glorious title contained nothing within it for women. As Olympe de Gouges had pointed out, France still needed a declaration of the rights of women. Modern feminist historians have turned their focus to this central inconsistency in revolutionary history: the fact that when women became politically active, either from behind the scenes, like Germaine de Staël and Manon Roland, or on the streets, like Pauline Léon and Théroigne de Méricourt, they were agitating for rights from which they, as women, were actively excluded. A female figure might have represented Liberty, but for real women she remained an unattainable ideal.

Although women were silenced by the revolution, their role as republican mothers had been politicized. Remaining in the domestic sphere had become their essential contribution to the virtuous new republic. The message was that female independence, especially sexual independence, threatened the stability and security of the French nation. Thus the revolution, as Dorinda Outram suggests, ‘succeeded perfectly in carrying out its “hidden agenda” of the exclusion of women from a public role’.

Helen Williams, the British writer living in Paris throughout this
period, observed in 1801 that women only enjoyed the benefits of the new regime second-hand. The real question, she said, was not ‘whether they [women] have gained by the revolution, but whether they have gained as much as they ought’. Her answer was an unequivocal no. Despite revolutionary champions of female rights like the marquis de Condorcet and Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès, she wrote, women were still woefully ill-educated and lacked basic political and civil rights: