Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear . . . And Why (24 page)

For her, it was a political statement:
“I had always been extremely humiliated by the servitude and prejudices, under which the pride of men holds my oppressed sex.” She dressed as a man to prove she was any man’s equal. For the world at large, it was pure spectacle: Theroigne, a woman who consorted with men, spoke in public like men, tried to participate in government like a man, appeared before the world in a man’s blood-red riding habit (though some reports said it was a black one, or maybe a white one—or was it purple, or green?) turning the accepted order of things upside-down with her image just as the Revolution was turning the world upside-down with its war on the divine right of kings.

She made such a perfect symbol, you could hardly blame people for seeing her everywhere. And they did: People claimed they saw Theroigne ride a cannon through the walls of the Bastille. (She wasn’t even in Paris.) People claimed they saw Theroigne, at the head of a mob of women, storming Versailles. (She was sound asleep.) Her political enemies saw her as often as her supporters did, and often in a much uglier light: Plays were staged in which Theroigne fell madly in love with Deputy Populus (the name of an actual representative, but also meaning “The Populace”—Theroigne,
whose refusal to sleep with her male colleagues had once been newsworthy, was now said to be sleeping with literally every man in France). One report saw a heavily pregnant Theroigne give birth on the floor of the National Assembly:
“This nymph is a trollop, and obsessed by men; indeed, every representative may fairly claim to be the father of her child.” Like Wollstonecraft, mere prose was not enough to express the extent of people’s dislike for her. There were also, God help us, the poems:

Theroigne in the district, as well as in the brothel

has used her various talents to experiment

with her tongue and arse, which are so precious to France

her name will live forever
.

Presumably it rhymes in French.

People liked seeing Theroigne. They just didn’t like hearing her. While all these articles were being written, Theroigne’s
actual
attendance at the National Assembly was spent getting into increasingly futile debates over assertions such as
“the rights of a man over his wife and, likewise, the rights of a father over his children are those of a protector over his protégés,” a very left-wing Revolutionary statement which Theroigne was the sole attendee to protest. By the time she was picked up and interrogated by the Austrian government (a process that involved an attempted rape), not only was she
not
a major part of the Revolutionaries’
plans—
“I cannot bring myself to admit that she could have played as important a role in the events in Paris as has been attributed to her,” was the official finding—she had more or less dropped out:

“I left the French Revolution without too much regret,” she said, “for every day I had suffered some degree of harassment in the public galleries of the National Assembly; there were invariably some aristocrats who, being offended by my zeal and my frankness, would heap sarcasms on me … while the patriots, instead of encouraging me and treating me justly, ridiculed me. This is the plain and simple truth. I was therefore, so to speak, disgusted.”

Strangely—yet, somehow, inevitably—the one woman in France with whom Theroigne had the most in common was also the one woman she most relentlessly opposed: Marie Antoinette, the Austrian queen, the face of the decadent aristocracy at its worst. “L’Autrichienne,” as the Revolutionary press called her. It was a clever little play on words from Theroigne’s progressive brotherhood,
chien
meaning
dog
: Marie Antoinette, the Austrian Bitch.

“Let them eat cake?” She never said it. That necklace she supposedly stole? She was framed. Her husband was most likely asexual—Louis refused to sleep with Marie for the first seven years of their marriage, and there are no reports of his ever having a mistress or male partner; this, despite the fact that the French court was so sexually tolerant that “Official Mistress” was an actual job title—and she
did eventually take one lover, the Swedish Count Abel von Fersen, though some will say there’s no firm proof she ever had sex with him, either. But this was hardly enough for the people, or for their preferred media, which constructed entire
Game of Thrones–
level plotlines for Marie Antoinette daily: She was a lesbian, she slept with every lady in the court, she was sexually insatiable, she slept with every
man
in the court, she
particularly
slept with her brother-in-law, all the royal heirs were bastards.

Not only were Theroigne and Marie said to have equally Brobdingnagian sex lives—one pamphlet, which claimed to be the “confessions” of Marie Antoinette herself, has her describe herself as
“barbaric queen, adulterous wife, woman without morals, soiled by crime and debauchery,” and goes on to cheerfully note that she is “a despicable prostitute”; still another claimed that, among the supporters of monarchy,
“all its members have drawn from the vagina of the Austrian Woman … [that] infectious cavern is the receptacle of all vices, where each comes and takes his required dose”—Marie was lucky enough to have pornography produced in her name, for people who needed an aid to the imagination. One portrait, entitled
“The Royal Dildo,” shows the Queen happily greeting General Lafayette as he rides toward her on a disembodied dick the size of a pony.

With leftists like these, it was no wonder that Theroigne had trouble getting a hearing. But sex wasn’t all of it. Sex was most of it, but not all. The Austrian Bitch was
also
Madame Deficit
, the greedy, decadent drain on an entire country’s wealth; if the French government was broke, it was because Marie Antoinette broke it by doing too much shopping. Granted, Marie was hardly the heroic type. She had only two jobs: First, to secure an alliance between the French and the Austrians by getting married, and second, to secure the continuity of the French monarchy by having children. She did both dutifully, if not always well. And unlike Theroigne, her outfits were not chosen as political protests. But they sure did enrage people: While the French people were starving, Marie Antoinette constructed an entire fake farm and posed for portraits dressed as a milkmaid.

Theroigne slept with everybody. Marie slept with everybody. Theroigne was the living symbol of a political party’s outrageousness. Marie was the living symbol of a political party’s decadence. If you were on Theroigne’s side, she was a shining light, an “Amazon of Liberty,” a heroine. If you were on Marie’s side, she was a beautiful princess, a persecuted mother, our rightful queen. No matter which side you chose, the other was a disgraceful whore and a symbol of everything wrong with the world. For Theroigne and for Marie, the same stereotypes always came up, and for Theroigne and for Marie, the press held to one simple rule: The facts never mattered. What mattered was the story.

Somehow, in the midst of the French Revolution, we, as humans, managed to stumble onto one more crucial insight. The media could advance any political agenda it wanted,
and whip up people’s emotions in any direction they felt necessary, and they didn’t even have to tell the truth to do it,
as long as the other side was projected onto the body of an unlikable woman
. There and then, in Theroigne and Marie, in war and blood and turmoil, the contemporary trainwreck was forged.

May God have mercy on their souls.

Trainwrecks end in blood or obscurity, and Theroigne and Marie are no exception. Marie’s end is more famous: Imprisoned, sick, bereaved, given a show trial in which, in one last sickening twist, the legend of her promiscuity broadened to include accusations that she was molesting her infant son. She was beheaded, her famous last words—“Pardon me, sir, I did not mean to do it”; she had stepped on the executioner’s foot—seemingly standing in for any number of real or imagined sins. The next day, the Revolutionary newspaper
Pere Duchesne
reported
“the greatest of all the joys of the Pere Duchesne, having with his own eyes seen the head of the [Queen] separated from her fucking tart’s neck.”

Theroigne has no last words. Or she has thousands, which were never recorded. Theroigne was greeted as a hero, when the Austrians let her go, and became a more potent symbol than ever. She immediately squandered it, as she always did, on her ridiculous “rights for women” thing. At one point, a man in the Assembly mentioned enjoying the chance to hear her speak at a café, upon which his male colleagues started laughing at him. Theroigne, unfortunately,
was in the audience, and caused a minor scandal by climbing out of the women’s section and physically throwing herself at the bench. And, at a moment when the party was purifying itself (which meant, naturally, killing moderates to preserve true leftism) Theroigne issued a pamphlet warning against Revolutionary infighting:
“I propose that each section appoint six women citizens, the most virtuous and the most serious for their age, who would have the task of reconciling and uniting the men citizens,” she wrote.

This particular choice—moderatism! Centrism! Opposing the true brotherhood of the Left!—was the one that could not be forgiven. Theroigne was taken aside and physically whipped. Her clothes were half torn off. It is probable that they meant to kill her. Marat, then a hero to this contingent, pulled her out of the center of the dogpile, and it was believed that he saved her life.

The people who whipped Theroigne were women. Every report that we have about Theroigne de Mericourt going mad agrees that it started here: After she’d done so much, risked so much, been imprisoned, been mocked, been sexually assaulted, all for a female Revolution, the people who finally, fully kicked Theroigne out of the Revolution, the people who actually made an attempt on her life, were
other women
. She simply never got over it.

She retired, for good this time. She started writing her memoirs. The next time anyone heard about her, she had been locked in a mental institution by her brother. She was
writing pleading letters to the Revolution’s leaders, asking to be released—
“I have neither paper nor light, in fact I have nothing; even so, I must be free in order to write; it is impossible for me to do anything here,” she wrote to St. Just—but they were not answered.

The Revolution was falling apart. The Revolutionaries had killed the monarchs, and then the leftist Revolutionaries had killed the moderate ones, and then the remaining leftists had killed the slightly more moderate leftists, and, sure enough, it had gotten to the point at which Robespierre had just started killing people for cursing, and so they had to kill Robespierre, and they also had to kill St. Just for supporting Robespierre, and by the time Theroigne was begging the Revolution to come and save her, nothing really held it all together any more. Everyone, it turned out, had someone else that they felt like killing. So Theroigne had actually been right, that you could overdo it with the infighting—this was
twice
now, when you counted her women’s-rights obsession; chalk up another big mark in the Wins column for Theroigne—but once again, it did her no good. There was no one left who could save her.

The next time Theroigne de Mericourt was presented with paper and pen, by her doctor, she scarcely recognized them:
“She outlined a few words, but she never managed to form a whole sentence. She never gave any sign of hysteria,” he wrote.

By then, years later, she was where women like her always
wound up: Theroigne was in La Salpêtrière. She was a remarkable case, this woman, a striking example of the madness that had led people to believe there could be a Revolution. Theroigne did not know what year it was; she asked for people (Robespierre, St. Just) who were long since dead. She appeared to give speeches to no one, using words no one used any more:
“She acted as if she were involved in very important matters; she smiled at the people around her … [she] spoke to herself in a low voice, using disjointed sentences composed of words such as ‘fortune,’ ‘liberty,’ ‘committee,’ ‘revolution,’ ‘wretches,’ ‘decree,’ ‘ruling,’ etc. She had a real grievance against the moderates,” her doctor wrote.

But this was, more or less, her obituary. And it was one last inaccurate thing written about Theroigne: Esquirol, the head of Salpêtrière, recorded for posterity that she
“gave herself to various leaders of the party,” was instrumental in most of the Revolution’s key events, and that “she was to be seen with a red cap on her head, a sabre at her side, a pike in her hand, commanding an army of women.” Then he recorded the results of her autopsy: Pneumonia. He cut her skull open to check for malformations of the brain (you had to do the research, it might help eventually). And then Theroigne was done. The woman no one wanted to listen to, finally finished giving one long speech that no one wanted to hear.

•

Sexual overabundance, emotional overabundance, all the too-muchness and too-bigness that comes with being a flaming wreck of a woman: Is there anything, really, wrong with it?

I’m not talking about being
hurt
, here; I’m not talking about the damage to body and mind we associate with addiction or mental illness. I’m talking about
moral
wrong, evil, the choice to make the world worse for the people in it. Getting addicted is the result of a bad decision, in many cases, but bad decisions aren’t evil; we all make them, every day. And you can get sick, get injured, you can even die, without that being inherently immoral: Hurting yourself, or more accurately, having a disease that hurts you, is painful for you and for your loved ones, but it is not the same as intentionally victimizing another person or a group of people. We don’t picket people with diabetes. We don’t tell cancer patients that it makes us sick to look at them. And hating illnesses doesn’t cure them. If you want people to stop being heartbroken about mentally ill and addicted loved ones, or if you want people to stop being mentally ill and addicted, decriminalizing drug use and getting everyone to a nice, free, socialized-medicine-provided doctor is probably your best bet.