Liberty: The Lives and Times of Six Women in Revolutionary France (6 page)

But the women of Paris began participating in the revolution long before Madame Guillotine cast her shadow over the city. In January 1789, the women of the Third Estate addressed a petition to the king, a mirror of the
cahiers
the men of the nation had been asked by the king to draw up at the same time, stating the grievances and expectations of their classes and regions. At a time ‘when everyone is trying to assert his titles and his rights, when some people are worrying about recalling centuries of servitude and anarchy, when others are making every effort to shake off the last links which still bind them to the feudal system’, they began, neatly summing up both the political situation and women’s contradictory status in France, should not women, ‘continual objects of the admiration and scorn of men…make their voice[s] heard?’

Common women, they explained, had no fortunes or education, and were doomed to becoming prey for seducers if they were pretty or to unhappy dowerless marriages if they were not. Their plight was exacerbated by parents often refusing to help their daughters financially, preferring to concentrate their resources on their sons. Because of these disadvantages, the women had three demands. First, they requested that women’s trades, such as embroidery and dressmaking, be reserved for women; ‘if we are left at least with the needle and the spindle, we promise never to handle the compass or the square’. Second, they asked that prostitutes, ‘the weakest among us’, be required to wear a mark of identification so that honest women were not mistaken for them. They added tartly that if prostitutes did wear distinctive dress, ‘one would run the risk of seeing too many women in the same colour’. Finally, they implored the king to set up free schools where girls could learn religion and ethics. Science would not appear on the curriculum: teaching women such a ‘masculine’ subject would be flying in the face of nature, and would only make female students stupidly proud, not to mention producing unfaithful wives and bad mothers. ‘We ask to be enlightened, to have work, not in order to usurp men’s authority,’ they assured Louis, ‘but in order to be better esteemed by them.’

The escalation of the revolution’s pace throughout the spring of 1789 thrilled working-class women as much as men. Inflamed by a potent combination of resentment, patriotism and the desire for change, Pauline Léon said she felt ‘the liveliest enthusiasm’ when the Bastille, symbol of royal despotism, fell. Even though she was a woman she ‘did not remain idle’. She was on the streets from morning till evening, ‘inciting citizens against the partisans of tyranny, [urging them] to despise and brave aristocrats, barricading streets, and inciting the cowardly to leave their homes to come to the aid of the fatherland in danger’. France was not yet at war; the danger Léon refers to came from counterrevolutionaries – internal, rather than external, enemies.

Pauline does not say whether she saw the prison taken and the few prisoners it contained liberated on 14 July, but many women were present. The idealistic young British writer Helen Maria Williams, who moved to Paris in 1790, heard that women had patrolled the streets, as Pauline described doing, and brought their sons and husbands at
the Bastille food and drink, ‘and, with a spirit worthy of Roman matrons, encouraged them to go on’.

Throughout the remainder of the summer of 1789, Parisian women and girls wearing the white dresses they reserved for ceremonies and wreathed in orange blossom paraded in thanksgiving for the Bastille’s fall, demonstrating their gratitude ‘for the happy revolution which had just taken place’. They made offerings of bouquets, bread, brioches and vines at their local churches, just as liberal bourgeoises donated their silver and trinkets to the nation’s bankrupt treasury, as expressions of their patriotism.

On the feast of Saint-Louis at the end of August, the market women went to Versailles with the mayor and magistrates of the city of Paris, as they did every year, to present a bouquet to the king. Marie-Antoinette, well aware she was loathed by the common people for her foreignness, extravagance and perceived corruption, both physical and political, was cold and unfriendly to the deputations. Utterly resistant to the idea of reform, she was visibly shaking with rage when Lafayette presented the captains of the newly formed National Guard to her, and the fishwives also noticed how poorly they were received.

In the summer of 1789, aged thirty-two (a year older than Pauline Léon), Lafayette had been made commandant of the National Guard, but it was a complicated role to play. Despite his immense personal popularity, he found it hard to please both the royalists and the ‘patriots’. As Germaine de Staël said, he supported the king ‘more from duty than attachment’, but he was drawn ‘towards the principles of the democrats whom he was obliged to resist’. Neither group trusted him. Pauline Léon attested that she was suspicious of Lafayette from the time he took office. In her eyes he was one of the internal enemies of the state, a counterrevolutionary in disguise; aristocrats, who had oppressed the nation for so long, could not be trusted. Caught between two extremes, anxious to satisfy both his liberal principles and his responsibilities to his office, Lafayette would end by fulfilling neither.

The National Guard he commanded was made up of the members of various volunteer militias, especially former members of the
garde française
, gathered together as a regular force and charged with defending the decrees of the new National Assembly on the one hand
and protecting the people from revolution’s excesses on the other. They had to pay for their own muskets and red, white and blue uniforms, so most were relatively prosperous. Progressive patriotism was their unifying sentiment. Germaine de Staël’s army officer lover, Louis de Narbonne, would become commander of a regiment of the National Guard in Besançon the following summer.

The effects of recent failed harvests, droughts and bitter winters had accumulated and despite an adequate harvest in 1789 a flour shortage became cruelly evident on the streets of Paris as September wore on. In the public mind, the subsistence crisis was intimately connected to the political crisis. The despised representatives of the Crown were held responsible for the people’s hunger; it was thought that bread was being withheld from them in order to crush their spirit of revolt. Lafayette, who was responsible for ensuring that supplies reached the Parisian markets, was a particular focus for their resentment.

Women began stopping carts of grain and dragging them to the Hôtel de Ville for distribution. On 17 September, after another morning when riflemen had been stationed at the bakers’ to prevent rioting when the bread was handed out, they requested an audience with the mayor, saying ‘men didn’t understand anything about the matter [the lack of grain] and they wanted to play a role in affairs’.

The issue of the veto (what Germaine de Staël had described as ‘her’ veto–Louis was delaying his assent to his new constitutional role, approved by the National Assembly on 10 September) exacerbated popular discontent and suspicion of the king and queen, who were scathingly known as Monsieur and Madame Veto. In revolutionary newspapers, firebrand journalists like Jean-Paul Marat urged their readers to ‘sweep away the corrupt, the royal pensioners and the devious aristocrats, intriguers and false patriots. You have nothing to expect from them except servitude, poverty and desolation.’

Given the atmosphere of starvation and destitution, an extravagant dinner held at Versailles on 1 October by the royal bodyguard was ill conceived. An additional regiment from Flanders had been summoned to Versailles as a precautionary measure, and the royal forces extended to them their traditional welcome of a banquet. Unusually, the king and queen made an appearance, bringing the gold-ringleted dauphin
with them; toast after toast was drunk, royalist songs were increasingly blurrily sung, and court ladies handed out cockades in white and black, respectively – the Bourbon (for Louis) and Hapsburg (for Marie-Antoinette) colours.

The next day, the liberal press denounced this royalist ‘orgy’, repeating the words of one officer who had said, ‘Down with the cockade of colours [the tricolour]; may everyone take the black, that’s the fine one.’ It was said the guards had stamped underfoot the tricolour cockade, since the fall of the Bastille in July the potent emblem of a new, reformed France. Marie-Antoinette later expressed her ‘enchantment’ with the guards’ banquet, and this was taken to mean that she was enchanted by the insult offered to France. Black and white cockades seen on the streets of Paris began provoking fistfights; the people grew still hungrier.

At dawn on the morning of 5 October, a young market woman began beating a drum in the street in central Paris. By seven o’clock, perhaps two thousand women had gathered in front of the Hôtel de Ville, calling out for bread and for the punishment of the royal bodyguard. They broke into the building, threatening to burn all the council’s papers, combing it for weapons, blockading the doors – refusing to let any men inside on the grounds that the city council was made up of aristocrats–and denouncing the mayor Jean-Sylvain Bailly, and Lafayette, who they said deserved to be strung up from streetlights for not ensuring that Paris had bread. They declared that ‘men were not strong enough to be revenged on their enemies and that they [the women] would do better’.

This violent appropriation of previously proscribed places ‘was the first delight of the revolution’: ‘the beating down of gates, the crossing of castle moats, walking at ease in places where one was once forbidden to enter’. For ordinary women, restricted by their gender as well as by their status, these new liberties were all the more potent. What is evident in the accounts of these October days is that the women
revelled in their own boldness and determination. They were driven to act by desperation, but they seem to have surprised even themselves, and they were proud of what they did.

Men, who had failed in their duties as administrators and providers, were deliberately barred from the Hôtel de Ville. The only man the women allowed in was a National Guardsman called Stanislas Maillard. At first, because of his black coat (members of the Third Estate wore plain black coats), they thought he was a councillor; but then they recognized him as a
vainqueur
, one who had participated in the sacking of the Bastille, and opened the doors to him.

Despite Maillard’s initial efforts to dissuade them, the women insisted they were going to Versailles to present their demands to the king and the National Assembly. Maillard decided to go with them, explaining to a colleague that in this way warning could be sent ahead of the crowd of angry women and control maintained over them. He was also sympathetic to their cause, as were many National Guardsmen who were husbands or sons of those protesting. Lafayette, knowing this, tried to keep the National Guard under his command from joining up with the marchers for as long as possible, fearing violence.

Another Guardsman, known as Fournier ‘l’Américain’, who defied ‘the sycophant Lafayette’ to assemble troops to follow the women to Versailles, believed, like the women, that royalists were plotting to starve the nation into submission. Writing during the Reign of Terror, he remembered rallying straggling women in Paris with the words, ‘Your children are dying of hunger; if your husbands are perverted and cowardly enough not to want to go look for bread for them, then the only thing left for you to do is to slit their throats.’

Maillard began beating a drum to call the women to order, but the area in front of the Hôtel de Ville was too small to hold them all and they moved their assembly point first to the Place Louis XV at the end of the Tuileries gardens and then spilled over into the open Place d’Armes on the Champs Élysées. Children blowing bugles and ringing bells went round the market area of Les Halles to assemble the throng. Women converged on the site carrying makeshift weapons like pitchforks and broomsticks as well as pikes, swords and muskets. ‘The town is in alarm,’ reported Gouverneur Morris. ‘All carriages were stopped’,
and any passing woman was swept along by the crowd and ‘obliged to join the female mob’. Later, respectable bourgeois women would testify that they had been forced to join the crowd; onlookers were surprised to catch sight of pale-complexioned women in fine clothes alongside the rough market women.

Numbering by this stage about six thousand, the women set off for Versailles, fourteen kilometres distant, through driving rain. Maillard and six drummers headed the procession alongside two cannon, ridden by women. The cannon were taken for effect; they had no powder, but all the same Maillard persuaded the women to place them at the back of the cavalcade when they reached Versailles so as not to intimidate the townspeople. The marchers wore tricolour cockades and carried leafy branches, just as Camille Desmoulins’s mob had three months earlier when they stormed the Bastille. They sang
poissard
songs such as the ‘Motion of the Market Women of La Halle’, which just tipped the balance between coarsely amusing and threatening:

If the High-ups still make trouble

Then the Devil confound them,

And since they love gold so much

May it melt in their traps –

That’s the sincere wish

Of the Women Who Sell Fish.

With cries of ‘
Vive le roi!
’ the women reached Versailles at about five in the afternoon, just as dusk was beginning to fall, marching down the broad
allée
that leads straight up to the palace. Germaine de Staël, who had driven to Versailles by the back roads as soon as she heard news of the march, had already arrived, but a reluctant Lafayette, at the head of the seditious National Guard, was some hours behind her. The great gates had been drawn across the palace entrance for the first time in its history. ‘Every eye was turned towards the road that fronts the windows of the palace of Versailles,’ recalled Germaine. ‘We thought that the cannon might first be pointed against us, which occasioned us much alarm; yet not one woman thought of withdrawing in this great emergency.’ Both inside and outside the palace women were preparing themselves to participate in history.