Read Liberty: The Lives and Times of Six Women in Revolutionary France Online
Authors: Lucy Moore
Before midnight, the alarm bells in the wards began to sound out their ‘monotonous, mournful and rapid’ toll. Carrying a musket, the journalist Camille Desmoulins set out for the Hôtel de Ville beside his bear-like friend Georges Danton, an important figure in Parisian city politics who had been instrumental in organizing the anti-monarchist demonstration that provoked the massacre of the Champs de Mars the previous summer.
The tocsin rang throughout the night, and soon after dawn, while Louis reviewed his remaining loyal troops in the courtyard of the
Tuileries, the first blasts of cannonfire were heard in the faubourgs. As the people of Paris massed outside the palace, the king and his family were ushered to safety behind the bars of the National Assembly’s cell-like press gallery. The Assembly, submitting to the demands of the pike-bearing sans-culottes, formally suspended the monarchy and instituted a provisional Executive Council which would rule until a National Convention could be elected by universal male suffrage. Equality had finally prevailed over liberty; but while all men possessed civil rights from this date, women were still ‘
citoyennes
without citizenhood’.
Outside in the August sunshine, bands of sans-culottes and soldiers invaded the Tuileries and began murdering the Swiss guards still stationed in the palace. The fighting was frenzied, fierce and bloody. In the mêlée, any man in a red coat–the uniform of the Swiss guards–was a target; even the ultra-patriotic
fédérés
from Brest, who wore the same colour, were mistaken for them and blindly killed. People were ‘stabbed, sabred, stoned and clubbed’ to death, their bodies stripped and crudely mutilated, and then thrown on to either bonfires at the Tuileries or carts that took them to limed burial pits.
Some women fought alongside the men. Pauline Léon, who spent the night of 9 August at her local ward on the left bank while the decision was made to seize power, marched with her neighbours towards the Tuileries ‘to fight the tyrant and his satellites’ the next morning. Once there, she was persuaded to hand her pike over to a sans-culotte–but ‘only after I admonished him to make good use of it in my place’. She might have been among the women in the courtyard seen stripping corpses of their clothes and rifling their pockets. Reine Audu, heroine of the October days, and Claire Lacombe, an actress recently arrived in Paris, were more successful than Léon: both were granted civic crowns for their bravery in the battle by the new National Convention when it convened in September.
Théroigne de Méricourt also received a civic crown. At last her chance had come to prove that women were as brave and as worthy of glory as men. Wearing a black plumed hat and a blue
amazone
, with a pair of pistols tucked into her belt, she was seen standing on a stone holding her sabre aloft, addressing the people:
Citizens, the National Assembly has declared that the fatherland is in danger, that it was unable to save it, and that its safety depends on your arms, your courage and your patriotism; take up arms, then, and run to the château des Tuileries, for your enemies’ leaders are there. Exterminate this race of vipers, which for three years has done nothing else but conspire against you. If you are not victorious today, in a week’s time you will be exterminated. Choose between life and death, between liberty and slavery. Show due respect for the National Assembly and for property, justice is in your hands.
Théroigne fought beside the Marseille regiment, and was at the head of a gang which confronted the royalist journalist François Suleau and eight others who had been arrested outside the Tuileries earlier that morning and then seized by the mob. She recognized Suleau, or at least recognized his name, and leapt at his throat. He fought back, and was about to run her through with a sword he had grabbed out of someone’s hand when the crowd surged and brought him down. All nine royalists were killed and decapitated, and their heads paraded around on pikes.
Despite the brutality of the day, patriots and republicans counted it as a triumph, a second revolution. Dr Moore, who had arrived in Paris just in time to witness the events of 10 August, saw a weary National Guardsman return home to his shop that evening to be greeted by his wife and children. He went through the door ‘carrying one of his children in each of his arms; his daughter following with his grenadier’s cap in her hand, and his two little boys carrying his musket’. Moore depicts not a murderer, but a dutiful family man, defending his country and his children’s future. ‘Day of blood, day of carnage, and yet day of victory,’ wrote Rosalie Jullien, ‘which was watered by our tears.’
In twenty-four hours the aspect of Paris was changed…
Nobody dared to show himself to be rich, or to be superior to anyone else.
A
UGUSTE
-F
RANÇOIS DE
F
RÉNILLY
D
URING THE RISING
outside the Tuileries on 10 August Germaine de Staël–who was six months pregnant with their second child–heard that her lover Louis de Narbonne, as a member of the palace’s exterior guard, had been slaughtered. She immediately got into her coach, and tried to cross the river to the palace to seek news of him. But she was held up for two hours because the streets were so full of raging
fédérés
and sans-culotte men and women. Some men signified to her green-liveried coachman with a silent, expressive gesture that anyone who did pass, especially in such a grand carriage, would probably have their throat cut. Finally Germaine heard that Narbonne was alive–he had rushed to fight at the king’s side but the courtiers had not allowed him into the palace–and turned her horses homeward.
That night, this time on foot, stepping over drunken, half-sleeping men in doorways raising their heads only to utter curses, Germaine went out into the streets and found Narbonne and Mathieu de Montmorency in their hiding places, and brought them back to the embassy where she put them in the remotest room of the house. Warrants were out for their arrest; other friends had already been imprisoned, and one of the most brilliant of their number, Stanislas de Clermont-Tonnerre–the man Germaine had once called ‘
mon orateur
’ and who had tried, in the early days of their affair, to woo her away from Narbonne and earned such a loving rejection–had been thrown out of a window at the Tuileries and trampled to death.
Although Dr Moore thought Narbonne ‘as much distinguished by his talents as by his birth…[and] a warm friend to freedom’, the prejudice against his and his friends’ noble origins was too strong for them to remain any longer in Paris. Brissot might have been able to
believe ‘that men were born equal; and that there was no birth either illustrious or obscure’; but the man on the street, who sensed his power growing through the late summer of 1792, wanted to punish aristocrats simply for existing. Nor did Narbonne want to stay. After Louis had been bullied and humiliated that June, he wrote to a friend in England that it was ‘no longer possible for a man of honour to stay [in France], if the whole of France neither refutes nor avenges this act. As for me, I cannot hold on any longer.’ Like many aristocratic liberals, Narbonne had favoured a constitutional monarchy, but he could not bear to see his king dishonoured and removed from the throne.
Overnight Paris was transformed. ‘Not a carriage was to be seen…The city gates were closed. At night the red-capped members of the
sections
made domiciliary visits.’ The word ‘royal’ was erased from shops, hotels and street names. Public statues, regardless of their historical or artistic value, were to be destroyed and replaced with monuments to liberty. Property belonging to émigrés was to be sold off.
‘Liberté Fraternité, Égalité ou Mort
’ was scrawled on the walls.
When the local patrol arrived at the Swedish embassy late one August night, saying that they had heard Monsieur de Narbonne was hiding there, Germaine, ‘with death in my heart’, forced herself to greet them with her usual brio. She was alone: her husband had been recalled to Sweden by Gustavus for consorting with revolutionaries–his wife’s friends. Narbonne crouched beneath the altar of the embassy’s chapel while Mme l’Ambassadrice, pregnant with his child, lectured the sans-culottes in the hall on the inviolability of embassies, the sanctity of international law and the warlike vigour and might of Sweden–which, she said, was an easily roused nation just across the Rhine. The guards were confused, but when Germaine managed to joke with them about ‘the injustice of their suspicions’ they allowed themselves to be led to the door without searching the house. ‘Nothing pleases men of this class better than jokes,’ Germaine observed, with the very condescension for which the aristocracy were loathed, ‘for in their boundless hatred of the nobles they enjoy being treated by them on an equal footing.’
This scare prompted Germaine to arrange Narbonne’s escape as quickly as she could. She found a young German willing to provide
him with one of his friend’s passports and so, disguised as a German traveller, Narbonne reached England on 20 August. When she heard the news of his arrival five days later, Germaine laid aside the opium she had carried with her for the past four months, ready to kill herself if the worst should have befallen her lover. ‘At last I can hope that I do not need it, that your baby will be born and that as long as I live I will hold in my arms his adored father, the object of such tender and passionate idolatry,’ she wrote to him. To the young man who had escorted Narbonne to England she wrote simply, ‘You have saved my life and more than my life.’
Germaine had also hoped to help the king and queen escape, having sent a message to them in July with her plan of buying a small estate at Dieppe, going there twice with servants resembling the royal family, and then one day going with the royal family themselves, disguised as her servants. Narbonne would drive the coach; Lafayette had promised to send support. But Marie-Antoinette refused to accept the help of Germaine, Lafayette and the constitutionalists; she sent a frosty message back saying that there was no very pressing reason for the royal family to leave Paris. Three weeks later, having narrowly escaped death, she and her family were moved from the ransacked Tuileries into imprisonment in the Temple, a former monastery on lands once owned by the Knights Templar, now transformed into the royal prison.
On the night of 11 August, Robespierre was elected to the Paris Commune as representative for the Place Vendôme ward in which stood the rooms he rented on the rue Saint-Honoré, a short walk from the Jacobin Club. He led the Commune in the last few weeks of August as they incarcerated the king and his family and defended their localized seizure of power against the outmanoeuvred Brissotins in the National Assembly, defying the national government to establish their own revolutionary regime.
When Dr Moore visited the Jacobin Club on the 17th, he found Robespierre’s partisans there so vocal in support of their hero that whenever someone dared oppose Robespierre’s views he was drowned out entirely and had to step down from the tribune. ‘A little English phlegm would be of use in their councils,’ observed Moore drily.
Women were very much in evidence in the galleries of the Jacobin
Club. ‘Applauders and murmurers are to be had at all prices,’ Moore’s companion told him, ‘and as females are more noisy, and to be had cheaper than males, you will observe there are generally more women than men in the tribunals [
sic
].’ Ironically, most of the women were there because they revered the grave, priestly Robespierre, whose antipathy to their taking part in public life was unshakeable. Rosalie Jullien described him at this time as ‘a man devoted to public affairs, with the generosity of the greatest men of antiquity’.
Moore saw only one woman enter the Jacobins’ main hall and take her seat among the members. Although he did not name her, it is clear from his description that this was Théroigne de Méricourt: she was wearing a blue jacket modelled on the National Guard uniform, and Moore reported that she was known to have ‘distinguished herself in the action of the tenth, by rallying those who had fled, and attacking a second time at the head of the Marseillois [the Marseille contingent]’.
The guillotine, which had been in sporadic use in front of the Hôtel de Ville since April 1792, mostly for forgers, was moved to the Place du Carrousel outside the Tuileries. Its first victims were scapegoats for the bloodshed at the Tuileries: royalists accused of instigating the violence on 10 August, convicted, significantly, in front of a newly created Communal Committee of Surveillance rather than by due process of law. Under the auspices of this radical revolutionary committee over a thousand people deemed unsympathetic to the new regime–from the dauphin’s devoted governess to royalist journalists to refractory priests to admirers of Lafayette (dismissed from his post at this time, he crossed enemy lines and spent the rest of the revolution in an Austrian prison)–were imprisoned in the last weeks of August.
The National Assembly reinstated the Brissotin ministers dismissed in June (including Roland, back at the Ministry of the Interior) in the provisional Executive Council, and added two Jacobins to their number: the mathematician Gaspard Monge and the jovial lawyer Georges Danton, who became Minister of Justice.
Danton’s powerful voice dominates this period. He had been an adored figure in the Cordeliers’ Club from the start of the revolution, and had become a popular hero. In July 1791 at the Champs de Mars and in June, July and August of the next year, he had learned to use
his influence with the people to instigate mass demonstrations. As minister, Danton authorized emergency police powers, including domiciliary visits. Heavily armed ward patrols, sometimes numbering up to ten people, were ordered to search houses–ostensibly for weapons, but also for counterrevolutionary suspects or for incriminating evidence against them.