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Liberty: The Lives and Times of Six Women in Revolutionary France
Lucy Moore
The bestselling author of ‘Maharanis’ recreates the lives of six remarkable women who, in a time of violent revolution, leapt at the chance to exercise their considerable charm, intelligence and acumen, and make their mark on history.Germaine de Stael was an intellectual and an aristocrat, equally obsessed by politics and love affairs, who is said to have helped write the 1791 Constitution. Her fellow salonnière, Mme Roland, was a bourgeois housewife who became a fervent and influential revolutionary, until Robespierre’s regime sent her to the guillotine.While female intellectuals sipped wine in their salons, their working class counterparts patrolled the streets of Paris with pistols in their belts. Theroigne de Mericourt was an ill-treated mistress when she fell in love with revolutionary ideals and became an ardent anti-royalist until a mob beating by ‘sans-culottes’ ended her activism. The mob in question was made up of members of the Society of Revolutionary Republican Women, whose founder, Pauline Leon, agitated for women's rights.After the sans-culottes came the 'sans-chemises' – the glamorous (often skimpily clad) merveilleuses. Decadent Theresia Tallien combined sexual license with the secular amorality of the new Republic and reportedly helped engineer Robespierre's downfall. Her only rival for beauty was Juliette Recamier, whose elegance made her salons the most sought-after in Paris. When she refused Napoleon’s advances she was exiled from the city until his fall.Writing with vigour and passion, Lucy Moore reanimates these witty salonnières, fervent citoyennes and glittering merveilleuses to illuminate the brief, hopeful period in which the Revolution seemed to offer them the freedom they craved – and the ways in which it failed.
LIBERTY
The Lives and Times of Six Women in Revolutionary France
LUCY MOORE
for Justin
Table of Contents
Introduction: Citoyennes (#u3c444e61-9b27-5c55-8119-425fc2a38818)
1 SALONNIÈRE: Germaine de Staël, May-October 1789 (#u72df06bf-812c-5c14-88eb-669a3a2a669e)
2 FILLE SANS-CULOTTE: Pauline Léon, January 1789-March 1791 (#u8f6507c1-3863-5621-a863-66729b210fa4)
3 CLUBISTE: Théroigne de Méricourt, July 1789-August 1790 (#u7653ec96-c78f-5b93-9b4d-a17cbe32656d)
4 MONDAINE: Thérésia de Fontenay, May 1789-April 1791 (#u77ef3fe0-a78b-5dd1-bcb8-c8967d23abb3)
5 RÉPUBLICAINE: Manon Roland, February 1791-March 1792 (#ua8e313aa-fb09-55f2-a7c1-b67ffcb922c8)
6 AMAZONE: Théroigne de Méricourt, August 1790-August 1792 (#u7e4c406e-7e31-560f-bb5d-206072b2de9f)
7 ÉMIGRÉE: Germaine de Staël, August-September 1792 (#ua579cfa3-9581-5002-a2bd-a4329b7b25b6)
8 FEMME POLITIQUE: Manon Roland, August 1792–May 1793 (#uf4633032-a625-5786-a455-d91f18017470)
9 MARIÉE: Juliette Récamier, February-April 1793 (#ubabfc659-6a18-5b46-9421-0e120d62f0e7)
10 ACTIVISTE: Pauline Léon, May-August 1793 (#ucaf28994-c1fe-5130-8b6f-81270ceb1d59)
11 PRISONNIÉ RE: Manon Roland, June–August 1793 (#u73fec695-afbe-57fc-bdd9-aeca7104088b)
12 RÉVOLUTIONNAIRE: Pauline Léon, August–November 1793 (#u08cf051f-0d81-5ee4-bea5-4058688eb0be)
13 VICTIME: Manon Roland, August–November 1793 (#uadf2ddb7-49d0-510f-b80e-844d109d1210)
14 MAÎTRESSE: Thérésia Cabarrus Fontenay, April 1793–April 1794 (#u951540f3-91d5-57f0-9f55-9afce369b11b)
15 LIBÉRATRICE: Thérésia Cabarrus Fontenay, May–July 1794 (#u2e65d9fa-fe7b-50a5-a39f-9566d79cf16f)
16 ÉPOUSE: Thérésia Tallien, August 1794–October 1795 (#ud27d4d97-8e1e-5f1b-a68a-746a05e69d66)
17 RETOURNÉE: Germaine de Staël, May 1795–January 1798 (#u3f1caf9a-f926-584e-8d8f-a73cfd0aa32b)
18 ICÔNE: Juliette Récamier, April 1797-April 1811 (#u6cd6fcb9-1a93-5510-a393-819a60647f08)
19 FEMMES (#u5eb4f998-0e64-54c2-a49a-5b0dc989418c)
Notes (#u5a3e46ec-c382-5012-8bcb-b6200d2cf123)
Bibliography (#u9e96d07f-b16a-5498-9001-53a70274aadc)
Secondary Figures (#ub02b950b-a98a-5050-987e-0d1fa6bf7dbb)
Words and Phrases (#u5d6b089e-440c-50ec-bdb4-da05660d5a98)
Acknowledgements (#u0e5dbea7-0e57-59ab-8838-66e2af9e0f84)
Index (#uaa9f262b-3a17-54b9-9860-5ce0820635a0)
About the Author (#u273b59a2-5833-56f7-b4fe-c60706c02870)
Praise (#u98a1dccb-0ecb-5c91-bbef-a48fdec5e806)
Copyright (#u6ae67ab2-f9bd-5d66-8f19-0a396dbb1d07)
About the Publisher (#ue240b158-1e05-5c02-bc1d-ee6709844003)
From my earliest days I had a feeling
that adventures lay in store for me.
Lucy de la Tour du Pin
INTRODUCTION CITOYENNES (#u92d26fae-8ef5-597f-8dd9-54c4220ddd54)
The women have certainly had a considerable share in the French revolution: for, whatever the imperious lords of the creation may fancy, the most important events which take place in this world depend a little on our influence; and we often act in human affairs like those secret springs in mechanism, by which, though invisible, great movements are regulated.
HELEN MARIA WILLIAMS
THE NATIONAL ASSEMBLY—France's first constitutional government—met between October 1789 and September 1792 in the covered riding-school of the Tuileries palace in Paris. The long, narrow manège [see ‘Words and Phrases’ p. 437] had been remodelled to accommodate the deputies with a classical austerity intended to correspond to the gravity of their new political responsibilities.
Although women did not possess the rights either of voting or of holding office, they were permitted into the hall's galleries to observe and marvel at the workings of the administration and the debates on France's future. On any given day in the spring of 1791, four women might have been sitting among the onlookers gathered to watch the Assembly's proceedings.
The first was a dark-haired, red-faced woman of twenty-five, looking perennially dishevelled despite her expensive, extravagantly décolleté dress. As she watched the men below her debate, it was clear that several of them were her friends and that she was well acquainted with every argument they put forth. She leaned eagerly forward to catch every word, fiddling distractedly with a twisted scrap of paper that showed off her fine hands.
This was Germaine de Staël, one of the richest women in Europe, daughter of Louis XVI's former Finance Minister Jacques Necker [see ‘Secondary Figures’ p. 425], whose dazzling intelligence never quite consoled her for not being beautiful. She was at the heart of a group of progressive aristocrats she believed would shape a new, reformed France ruled by a constitutional monarchy; her centrist coterie included the hero of the American War of Independence, the marquis de Lafayette, toeing an uneasy line between his liberal principles and his loyalty to the king.
Her critics found her over-bearing and even her friends called her self-centred, but such was the power of Germaine's intellect and conversation that within half an hour of meeting her most people, despite themselves, were utterly captivated. ‘I know of no woman, nor indeed any man, more convinced of his or her own personal superiority over every other person,’ wrote one of her lovers, Benjamin Constant, ‘or who allows this conviction to weigh less heavily on others.’
Staël, as a novelist, social commentator and literary theorist, left behind a wealth of source material that, unusually, spans the entire period before, during and after the revolution. She is not only the best and most consistently documented of this book's six women, in terms of her own letters and of being mentioned in other people's correspondence and memoirs, but also the one who wrote the most eloquently about the revolution itself.
Germaine had little time for other women, but one acquaintance who might have been sitting nearby was the delectable Thérésia de Fontenay. Just eighteen years old, already married for four years and the mother of a little boy, tender-hearted Thérésia was the toast of Parisian society; the only thing she enjoyed more than pleasure was attention. She would have been wearing fashionably simple, patriotic clothes—a white muslin dress with a tricolour sash fastened with a brooch made out of one of the shards of the fallen Bastille. At her side was her radical lover whose brother, a former marquis, was closely allied to the most extreme-left deputies including Maximilien Robespierre.
Manon Roland, the thirty-seven-year-old wife of a provincial civil servant, sat in another part of the gallery, well away from the world of high society. Demurely dressed, eyes downcast, her virtuous exterior concealed an ardent, rebellious heart. Drawn to Paris in 1791 by the events taking place there, she and her husband became central members of a group of middle-class republican lawyers and journalists who included Robespierre and the progressive journalist Jacques-Pierre Brissot. Unlike Thérésia de Fontenay, Manon had chafed at the old order of things. When the revolution came it was the fulfilment of all her dreams.
Manon watched the debates as keenly as Germaine, knowing the deputies speaking, and their arguments, because many of them met regularly in her drawing-room. But while Germaine would have given her guests champagne; Manon proudly served sugar-water. With her love of order, she deplored the chaos of the Assembly's sessions: the uncontrollable deputies shouted over one another to make their voices heard, preventing the business of the day from being accomplished.
Pauline Léon had no such scruples. She heckled from the galleries, shouting down moderates like Lafayette and cheering her hero Robespierre. No portrait of her survives—if one was ever made—but as a thirty-three-year-old single woman of the streets, who helped her widowed mother run the family chocolate-making business and look after her five younger brothers and sisters, it is likely that she was well made and strongly built. A fresh white handkerchief covered her hair, pinned up with a tricolour rosette, and she was wearing a blue woollen waistcoat over a white chemise, the sleeves pulled up to expose her tanned forearms; a red and white striped skirt with an apron; and wooden clogs.
Sixty-five per cent of French women of the late eighteenth century could not write their names; the illiterate would have been slightly fewer in Paris. Pauline Léon could read and write—she had been educated by her father—but she was a woman of the people and, as with most of them, it is harder to build up a rounded picture of her life because the sources concerning her are so scarce. No onlookers described her behaviour as a child; she left no diaries or letters. In a rare document produced while she was in prison in 1794, Léon testified to roaming Paris from 1789 onwards, frequenting political assemblies, demonstrating on the streets as well as ‘manifesting my love for the fatherland’. She was less forthcoming about harassing and beating up passers-by for not being good ‘patriots’—a synonym for devotion to the revolution.
A notable absence from the galleries on this imaginary afternoon was the former courtesan Théroigne de Méricourt, who before leaving Paris in the late summer of 1790 had been such a regular observer of the Assembly's sessions that she had her own seat reserved for her. She was known for always wearing a riding-habit of an austerely masculine cut, either in red, black or white. Although she had intended her trademark costume to compel men to treat her as an equal rather than as a woman, by wearing it she became one of the feminine icons of the revolution.
Abandoned by a faithless lover and reviled for having lost her reputation, Théroigne was very much alone in the world. She had suffered more at the hands of men than any of the other women here, and she was the most passionate and lonely campaigner for the liberties which the revolution seemed to promise women but ultimately failed to deliver. For nineteenth-century historians the image of pretty Théroigne in her red riding-habit, her bloody sword held aloft, represented all the savage excesses of the popular revolution; but this portrait of her bore very little relation to the earnest young woman whose early hopes were so disappointed by that revolution.
Another figure completes the sextet described in this book, but in the spring of 1791 Juliette Bernard, the future Madame Récamier, was still a bourgeois schoolgirl of thirteen, absorbed in studying English, Italian, dancing and the harp.
One further feminine image appears and reappears throughout these pages: not a real woman, but a constant, ghostly presence alongside her six flesh-and-blood sisters. Throughout this period Liberty—the ideal, or hope, that inspired the revolution—was represented as a goddess and exalted, pursued, manipulated and betrayed by turns.
The world of these six women, centred on Paris, was a small and intimate one. Less than six hundred thousand people lived in the capital in 1791 and their lives touched tangentially, crossed over without pausing and sometimes intersected. Respectable Manon Roland would never have received Théroigne de Méricourt at her salon, but one of her dearest friends fell hopelessly in love with her; Thérésia de Fontenay would not have known who Pauline Léon was, but before she met him her future husband gave a speech at a popular political club of which Léon was a member; despite the gap in their ages and backgrounds, Juliette Récamier would become one of Germaine de Staël's most intimate friends.
From the start, the revolution coloured every facet of their daily lives. It politicized everything, from clothing to modes of address to what was taught in schools to slang to food. Women, who had no direct influence over the political changes taking place around them, were intimately involved with these cultural changes; after all, they had read the same books and been inspired by the same ideas as their brothers. As the nineteenth-century historian Alexis de Tocqueville wrote of the period leading up to the revolution, even ‘women, amidst their petty household tasks, sometimes dreamed about the great problems of existence’. Many found that they were swept away by the exhilaration and optimism that infused French society, and became as absorbed by the revolution as their husbands and lovers.
The six women whose experiences form the basis of this book were each transformed by their experiences during the revolution. As Simon Schama writes in his book Citizens, the revolution ‘had the deepest craving for heroes’ embodying the abstract principles they were trying to make real. It also created heroines.
Although they came from a range of backgrounds and, like looking through different sides of a prism, each illuminates different aspects of the period—from the tomboy Pauline Léon with a brace of pistols tucked into her belt, haranguing the deputies of the National Convention, to the exquisite Juliette Récamier abandoning her inhibitions on the dance floors of the public balls during the Directory—these six women had in common courage, vitality, a youthful energy and a passion that marked the revolution as much as it marked them. Each of them, in her own way, burned to distinguish herself in the great drama unfolding in front of her.
1 SALONNIÈRE Germaine de Staël MAY–OCTOBER 1789 (#u92d26fae-8ef5-597f-8dd9-54c4220ddd54)
Mme de Staël's salon is more than a place where one meets for pleasure: it is a mirror in which we see reflected the image of the times.
ADAM DE CUSTINE
EVERY TUESDAY EVENING in the early years of the revolution, Germaine de Staël held a small dinner at her hôtel in the rue du Bac, on Paris's left bank. She invited a catholic assortment of liberal, anglophile nobles, their glamorous wives and mistresses, and ambitious young men of middling rank. ‘Go hence to Mme de Staël's,’ wrote Gouverneur Morris, the one-legged American envoy to Paris, in his apple-green journal in January 1791. ‘I meet here the world.’
For Germaine's guests, these evenings were a chance to discuss the latest news: books, plays, affairs and, above all, politics, the shared obsession of the day. Thomas Jefferson, a frequent visitor to the rue du Bac, called Paris in 1788 a ‘furnace of politics…men, women and children talk nothing else’. In the words of a foreign observer, the entire country felt ‘that they were on the eve of some great revolution’. For Germaine, her salons, combining her three passions–love, Paris and power—were ‘the noblest pleasure of which human nature is capable’.
‘We breathed more freely, there was more air in our lungs,’ she wrote of this optimistic period; ‘the limitless hope of infinite happiness had gripped the nation, as it takes hold of men in their youth, with illusion and without foresight’. If her friend the marquis de Talleyrand could say that no one who had not lived before 1789 could know the true sweetness of living, then Germaine could equally truly declare that for her, nothing could compare to the exquisite flavour of those days between 1788 and 1791 when she was in love and believed a new France was being created within the four gold-embroidered walls of her drawing-room.
Germaine de Staël was twenty-three in July 1789, the month that her father Jacques Necker, on-and-off Finance Minister to Louis XVI, was sacked by the king. Louis's powers permitted him to appoint, dismiss and banish ministers at will, so there was nothing unusual in this; what was unusual this time was the response it provoked.
Necker had made himself unpopular at court by advising the king to make wide-ranging changes to his archaic administration, urging modernization (particularly of the system of taxation, which weighed most heavily on the poor) and greater accountability to the French people. He had encouraged the king to summon the Estates-General, France's only national representative assembly, for the first time since 1614 and, partly at his daughter's urging, argued that the three estates (clergy, nobles and commons, known respectively as the First, Second and Third Estates) should vote individually -thus preventing the nobles and clergy from grouping together to block the Third Estate's demands.
Hard-line royalists, who feared the changes sweeping France, were convinced Necker would betray the king to his people, and welcomed his downfall. In the royal council, two days before Necker was dismissed, the king's brother, the comte d'Artois, told the minister to his face that he ought to be hanged; on the same day, in Paris, a well dressed woman was publicly spanked for spitting on his portrait.
Necker's defiant attitude towards the king had prompted his discharge and cemented his status as a popular hero; his reputation for financial acumen was matched only by his reputation for probity. Reformers who idolized him saw his expulsion as a manifestation of outmoded arbitrary power and an unwelcome confirmation of the king's distaste for reform. They rallied to the cause of their champion.
News of Necker's dutifully silent departure from Versailles reached Paris on Sunday, 12 July. A large crowd had gathered in the Palais Royal, as it did every Sunday, to eat ices, buy caricatures, ribbons or lottery tickets, ogle scantily dressed femmes publiques and magic lantern shows, and listen to orators declaiming against the government. The Palais Royal, owned by the king's cousin the duc d'Orléans, was a vast, newly built piazza surrounded by colonnaded shops, theatres and cafés. By the mid-1780s, protected from police regulation by its royal owner and encouraged by that owner's well known antipathy to the court party at Versailles, it had become a city within a city, a place where anything could be seen, said or procured, and the centre of popular opposition to royal abuses.
On that July afternoon the crowd gathered around a passionate young journalist, Camille Desmoulins, who stood on a table urging his fellow-citizens to rise up against the king's ‘treachery’ in sacking Necker. ‘To arms, to arms,’ he cried; ‘and,’ seizing a leafy branch from one of the chestnut trees that edged the Palais Royal, ‘let us all take a green cockade, the colour of hope.’ With Desmoulins carried triumphantly aloft, the shouting, clamouring, bell-ringing mob surged on to the streets to search Paris for the weapons that would transform them into an army.
The king was not unprepared for this type of rising; indeed, one of the underlying causes for the popular uproar that greeted Necker's dismissal was distrust of the troops—about a third of whom were Swiss or German soldiers rather than French—with which Louis had been quietly surrounding Paris during late June and early July as preparation for a show of force that would silence his critics for good. But the democratic germs of patriotism and reform that had infected the French people had penetrated as far as the lower ranks of the army, for so long a bastion of aristocratic privilege and tradition, and their leaders' response to the crisis was hesitant. The Palais Royal mob, by evening numbering perhaps six thousand, met a cavalry unit of the Royal-Allemands at the Place Vendôme and the Place Louis XV (later, Place de la Révolution, and still later Place de la Concorde) just to the north-west of the Tuileries palace, and, reinforced by the popular Paris-based gardes françaises, forced the German and Swiss soldiers, in the early hours of 13 July, to retreat from the city centre. After a day of chaos and plunder, on the 14th the people's army reached the Bastille, and the revolution received its baptism in blood.
The storming of the Bastille was by no means the first act of the revolution. Since 1787, extraordinary developments had been witnessed in government. France was a nation trembling on the brink of change. Its causes were many and varied: ideological, fiscal, constitutional, personal, economic, historical, social, cultural. ‘The Revolution must be attributed to every thing, and to nothing,’ wrote Germaine. ‘Every year of the century led toward it by every path.’ In the summer of 1789 the fateful mechanism that would exchange absolute for representative government (and back again) was already in motion. Nor was Necker's dismissal the sole cause of the Bastille's fall. But Germaine de Staël can be forgiven for thinking that her adored father—and through him, she herself—was at the heart of events.
It was no accident that green, the colour Camille Desmoulins chose as the emblem of hope in the Palais Royal, was the colour of Necker's livery—and typical of the confusion inherent in the revolution itself that it should be replaced soon after with the tricolour because it was also the livery colour of the king's unpopular brother, the comte d'Artois. The tricolour contained within it a multitude of references: red and blue for Paris, combined with white for the Bourbon dynasty; red and blue were also the colours of the popular duc d'Orléans. Like everything during this period, these colours were laden with symbolism: white for the revolutionaries' purity, blue for the heavenly ideals they were pursuing, red for the blood which was already seen as the necessary price of France's liberation. The tricolour was immediately invested with an almost mystical aura. It became a sacrosanct emblem of the new France that the revolution was creating, materially revered in bits of ribbon representing the fatherland.
Germaine had been dining with her parents in Versailles when Necker received Louis's notice on 11 July. Saying nothing, but squeezing his daughter's hand beneath the table, Necker got into his carriage with his wife as if for their regular evening drive; instead of idling round the park in Versailles, they headed straight for the border with the Low Countries. Germaine returned to Paris that night (fourteen kilometres, a carriage journey of about two hours) and found there a letter from her father informing her of his departure and advising her to go to his country house at Saint-Ouen. Ignoring, despite herself, the crowds already gathered in the rue du Bac to hear news of Necker, she rushed to Saint-Ouen with her husband, only to find there another letter summoning them to Brussels, where they arrived on the 13th. There she found her parents, still wearing the same clothes in which they had sat down to dinner two days earlier.
After a week Necker received a courier from the king recalling him to Versailles. He deliberated for three days and then began the journey back to Paris with his wife, daughter and son-in-law. Fifteen years later, Germaine remembered how intoxicated she was by the accolades showered on her father, the bliss of basking in his popularity. Women working in the fields fell to their knees as the Neckers' coach passed by; as they entered each town, their carriage was unhitched from the horses and drawn through the streets by the inhabitants. When they reached the Hôtel de Ville in Paris, where a massive crowd was waiting to greet the man on whom their hopes for reform and prosperity rested, Germaine fainted, feeling she had ‘touched the extreme limits of happiness’.
The excitement even made her write affectionately to her husband, uncharacteristically sending him in a note, soon after they returned to Paris, ‘mille et mille tendresses’. The same letter concluded, more characteristically, with a message for her father: ‘Tell my father that all of France does not love or admire him as much as I do today.’
It was in this heady atmosphere that Germaine de Staël's salon became the most important in Paris. The tradition of the salon, in which an intelligent woman (never her husband) held regular ‘evenings’ for a circle of friends and acquaintances, was a long-established one in France and had ordained Woman, according to the Goncourt brothers a century later, as ‘the governing principle, the directing reason and the commanding voice’ of eighteenth-century high society. The salon may have brought women extraordinary behind-the-scenes influence; but this influence came at a price.
On the surface, salons might seem nothing more than parties attended by bored, frivolous socialites whose daily lives were governed by their toilettes—aristocratic women changed their clothes several times a day, often while receiving favoured visitors—but the details of these lives in fact reveal the social developments of the times. In an age of rigorous formality, for example, in which behaviour itself seemed bound up in whalebone stays, the ritual of the toilette provided a release, allowing people to see each other in relaxed circumstances. In an age that had almost institutionalized extramarital affairs, it also gave women the chance to display themselves to current or potential lovers beyond the citadel of their petticoats, hoops and corsets: in 1790 it was fashionable to receive friends from the luxury of one's milk-bath.
Although she was famously badly dressed, Germaine never lost the ancien régime custom of receiving visitors during her toilette, all through her life carrying on metaphysical conversations with a horde of people while one maid dressed her hair and another did her nails. Her doctor in England in 1792 was surprised to be greeted by Germaine in her bedroom wearing ‘a short petticoat and a thin shirt’, and astonished by her energy. She talked and wrote all day long, he reported, her green leather portable writing-desk permanently open on her knees, whether she was in bed or at dinner. Even when she gave birth there were fifteen people in her bedroom and within three days she was talking as much as ever.
Before the revolution, every different outfit served a different purpose, and each one minutely indicated the wearer's status. Wearing unsuitable clothes was an implicit rejection of the hierarchy that controlled society. Inelegant Germaine, who always showed too much flesh—even her travelling dresses had plunging necklines—was by these criteria deeply suspect. Riding-habits were worn to ride or drive in the Bois de Boulogne or go out hunting with the court; day dresses were worn to receive guests at home, to go shopping in the Palais Royal or to attend lectures in the thrilling new sciences of electricity and botany; in the evening, to attend the theatre or a court ball, three-inch heels, heavy makeup and elaborate, pomaded headdresses, snowy-white with powder and sprinkled with jewels, flowers and feathers were de rigueur. Their hair arrangements were often so tall that women had to travel crouching on the floor of their carriages.
Fluttering a fan in a certain way or placing a patch near the eye as opposed to on the cheek revealed a person's character without them having to speak. The sociologist Richard Sennett observes of this period that it is hard to imagine how people so governed by ‘impersonal and abstract convention [can] be so spontaneous, so free to express themselves…their spontaneity rebukes the notion that you must lay yourself bare in order to be expressive’. Contemporaries were fully aware of this dichotomy between word and action. ‘A man who placed his hand on the arm of a chair occupied by a lady would have been considered extremely rude,’ wrote the comtesse de Boigne, looking back on the pre-revolutionary period of her youth, and yet language ‘was free to the point of licentiousness’.
But by the mid-1780s contemporary medical and philosophical views were transforming women's fashions and habits. In 1772 one doctor described corsets as barbarous, impeding women's breathing and deforming their chests, and especially dangerous during pregnancy; he was also concerned about the moral effects they produced by displaying the bosom so prominently. His advice was echoed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, prophet of naturalness and sensibility in Émile and La Nouvelle Héloïse, who recommended that children wear loose clothes that would not constrict their growing bodies.
For the first time, women's clothes allowed them to breathe and eat freely: the new fashions quite literally liberated their bodies from an armour of stays, panniers and hoops at the same time as the ideological implications of the change in fashion began to liberate their behaviour. In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman written in 1792 Mary Wollstonecraft declared that stiff, uncomfortable clothes, like the ‘fiction’ of beauty itself, were a means by which society kept women submissive and dependent. Shedding these restrictions would empower them. By this definition Germaine, who rose above her plainness (Gouverneur Morris thought she looked like a chambermaid) and paid scant attention to her dress, was already halfway to emancipation.
Perhaps the most celebrated proponent of these progressive ideas was the queen, Marie-Antoinette, who was painted by Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun in 1783 in a simple white chemise dress tied at the waist with a satin sash. This seemingly innocent act raised eyebrows for a number of reasons. Chemises were muslin shifts, previously worn only in the intimacy of a toilette (or by prostitutes), so to eighteenth-century eyes Vigée-Lebrun had painted the queen in a shocking state of undress. Furthermore, for the queen herself to reject the formality of court custom—she was traditionally portrayed in carapace-like court dress—carried seditious undertones of disrespect to the traditions she represented. Finally, the chemise de la reine (as it came to be called) was a style anyone could afford. As Mary Robinson, the courtesan who popularized the chemise de la reine in England, commented, ‘the duchess, and her femme de chambre, are dressed exactly alike’. Dress, which had once distinguished between people, was becoming dangerously democratic.
Manners, too, were changing. As with clothing, the fashion for informality initially came from the top down: in the artificial world of the salon, being able to give the impression of naturalness and ease had long been considered the highest of the social arts. ‘Do not people talk in society of a man being a great actor?’ asked the philosopher Denis Diderot. Just as the cut flowers in her headdress were kept fresh with tiny glass vases hidden in her hair, the salonnière achieved the sparkling effect of spontaneity in conversation through study and discipline. Every day, Mme Geoffrin, celebrated pre-revolutionary hostess to the great Enlightenment philosophers, wrote two letters (in those days an art form) to keep her brain sharp.
Germaine de Staël's favourite game was called the Boat, in which everyone present was asked who they would save from a sinking ship. She asked her first lover, Talleyrand, who he would rescue, her or his other mistress Adèle de Flauhaut. He replied that she was so talented she could extricate herself from any predicament; gentility would oblige him to save the resourceless Adèle. Another version of this story has Germaine and Talleyrand actually in a boat, talking about devotion and courage. To her question as to what he would do if she fell in, he reportedly replied, ‘Ah, Madame, you must be such a good swimmer.’
Word games, jokes, debates, making up poems and proverbs and amateur theatricals were salon pastimes designed to stimulate and heighten conversation, which Germaine described as an instrument the French above all other nations liked to play, producing a sublime ‘intellectual melody’. Conversation, she said, was
a certain way in which people act upon one another, a quick give-and-take of pleasure, a way of speaking as soon as one thinks, of rejoicing in oneself in the immediate present, of being applauded without making an effort, of displaying one's intelligence by every nuance of intonation, gesture and look—in short, the ability to produce at will a kind of electricity.
Naturally, Germaine herself excelled at this art: ‘If I was queen,’ said a friend, ‘I should order Mme de Staël to talk to me always.’ When she spoke, constantly fiddling with a small twig or twist of paper which the unkind said was a way of drawing attention to her fine hands, her captivated listeners forgot her scruffy clothes, red face and large frame, noticing only the beautiful expression in her eyes.
These showers of sparks, as Staël defined the words and ideas that brought a salon to life, showed the importance to French society of writers and philosophers. Salonnières acted as confidantes, editors, muses and patrons to their talented guests, corresponding with them, intriguing to have them elected to the Academy or appointed to political office and erecting statues in their honour. Women were, according to a 1788 pamphlet entitled Advice to the Ladies, ‘the arbiters of all things…Business, honours, everything is in your hands.’ These roles set a dangerous precedent by giving women powerful identities outside marriage and motherhood.
Another dangerous precedent set by the salons was the relatively open access to them. Women who wanted to have the best thinkers in Europe at their feet were unconcerned about their breeding, and willing to run the moral and political risks of being exposed to their exciting new philosophies. It was at Versailles and in the most exclusive salons in Paris that the ‘bourgeois’ works of Diderot, Rousseau and the artist Jean-Baptiste Greuze were celebrated.
Contemporary opinion was divided over the wisdom of women occupying such a prominent place in society. On the whole, the philosophers who frequented salons and benefited from their hostesses' efforts on their behalf were liberal-thinking, although many believed that trying to impose uniformity on men and women was to challenge nature's own distinctions. To equalize men and women, wrote the novelist Restif de la Bretonne in 1776, ‘is to denature them.’ Implicit in all this was the understanding that of the two sexes, the masculine was undoubtedly the superior. Diderot held that ‘beauty, talents and wit’ would in any circumstances captivate a man, ‘but these advantages peculiar to a few women will not establish anywhere a general tyranny of the weaker sex over the robust one’.
Many reformers saw the influence women wielded as evidence of the corruption of the ancien régime. Boudoir politics, as it was called, when women manipulated their family, friends and, still worse, their lovers, to gain personal influence in the political world from which they were theoretically excluded, was held up before the revolution as one of the chief problems with the French system. Thomas Jefferson told Washington in 1788 that women's solicitations ‘bid defiance to [natural] laws and regulation’ and had reduced France to a ‘desperate state’. The fact that women could play a role in politics at all was, for reformers of all stripes, one of the essential justifications for change.
‘The influence of women, the ascendant of good company, gilded salons, appeared very terrible to those who were not admitted themselves,’ conceded Germaine de Staël. While she acknowledged that ancien régime women ‘were involved in everything’ on behalf of their husbands, brothers and sons, she maintained they had no effect on ‘enlightened and natural intelligence’ like that her father possessed; in this as in everything, she believed herself an exception.
The prevailing view, propounded by the great naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, was that women, inherently more gentle and loving than men, played a valuable social role by moderating masculine energies. Germaine agreed, arguing that French women were accustomed to take the lead in conversation in their homes, which elevated and softened discussions on public affairs. This more temperate view did allow that wives and mothers were essential elements of a civilized society, and some radical thinkers went so far as to suggest that if women were educated they would make their husbands happier and their sons more successful. Mankind would enter into ‘all its vigour, all its splendour’, wrote Philibert Riballier in 1779, if women could be made ‘strong, robust, courageous, educated and even learned’.
Riballier's ‘even learned’ is crucial, because it reveals, even in works that were outwardly sympathetic to women, a belittling tone beneath the praise. The duchesse d'Abrantes commented that before the revolution women seemed to be esteemed but in fact had only the appearance of influence. In 1785 Mme de Coicy said that although France was called ‘the paradise of women’ its female subjects were ‘unworthily scorned and mistreated’, despite their superiority to all other European women. The privileged few who became powerful, like Mme de Pompadour, Louis XV's mistress, generally acquired that power at the cost of their reputations.
