We have consoled ourselves for our inability to contribute to the public good by exerting our most intense efforts to raise the spirits of our children to the heights of free men. But if you deceive our hope, then indignation, sorrow, despair will impel and drag us into public places…Then we shall save the Fatherland, or, dying with it, we will uproot the torturous memory of seeing you unworthy of us.
Like Germaine de Staël, these women made a point of accepting feminine political passivity as essential to society's greater good; but they were utterly committed to the revolutionary cause. They did not want rights for themselves, but they wanted rights for all Frenchmen. If men failed to deliver the new liberties they had promised, they insisted, women would not be afraid to step on to the public stage as they had in October 1789.
All over France, common women gathered together in clubs of different types to demonstrate their patriotism and their devotion to the revolution. Some dared call for girls to be better educated; others demanded the privilege of fighting for the patrie, or rights of consent over marriage and inheritance. In Saint-Sever, a Mme Lafurie argued that custom did not prove the law: contrary to popular belief, she declared, women were neither too weak to work nor too depraved to play a role in public life.
Twenty-seven cities had auxiliary clubs of the Fraternal Society of the Friends—calling themselves Amies rather than Amis—of the Constitution. In Breteuil in August 1790 a group of unmarried ‘Sisters of the Constitution’ offered a hand-sewn national flag to the town; the women of Alais formed a Patriotic Club which met to read the decrees of the National Assembly to their children. Female companies of the National Guard were formed across the country: at Creil, at Angers, at Villeneuve-la-Guyard, Aunay, Bergerac and Limoges. In the summer of 1791, the women of Les Halles, Paris's central market, donated to the National Assembly their guild treasure, in silver plate and cash, amounting to almost fifteen hundred livres. Before the revolution, they said, ‘all politics and all refinements’ had been foreign to them; since then, ‘the idea of liberty [had] enlarged souls, inflamed spirits, electrified hearts’, and they were willing to make any sacrifice to acquire and safeguard it.
Most rural Frenchwomen were not revolutionaries; all they wanted was bread to feed their children and fuel for their fires. Counterrevolutionary sentiments were strong in the west of the country. In September 1790, women protesting at the price of bread cried, ‘We want to save the monks! Long live the clergy! Long live the nobility!’ A royalist newspaper, L'Ami du Roi, reported in 1791 that ‘a Frenchwoman inflamed with love for her country’ had suggested forming a club of female ‘Amazons’ to defend France and the king.
Louis-Marie Prudhomme, editor of the left-wing Révolutions de Paris, wrote in November 1791 that many of his female readers were complaining of being excluded from participating in the revolution. Some claimed that in ancient Gaul women had had a voice in government and questioned why these rights were not returned to them. Prudhomme responded savagely: ‘we do not venture to come and teach you how to love your children, spare us the trouble then of coming to our clubs and expounding our duties as citizens to us’. His chauvinism was not unusual, and would only become more widespread. Jacobin Clubs across the country increasingly resisted women's attempts to participate in their activities, fearing what they saw as their corrupting influence; in Tonneins, the local Jacobins succeeded in segregating the men and women watching their debates and in banning women and men from conversing with each other on their premises.
The month after the women of Saint-Germain addressed the Cordeliers, Pauline Léon presented to the National Assembly a petition bearing over three hundred signatures. In the event of a foreign war, she argued, women would be left defenceless at home; they needed weapons in order to defend the patrie from its hidden, internal enemies. ‘Your predecessors deposited the Constitution as much in our hands as in yours,’ she argued. ‘Oh, how to save it, if we have no arms to defend it from the attacks of its enemies?’
Women did not want to abandon their homes and families, she insisted, but having been ‘raised to the ranks of citoyennes [citizennesses]’, having ‘sampled the promises of liberty’, they could never again submit to ‘slavery’; the irony of her argument was that the ‘rank’ of citoyenne carried with it neither civic liberties nor political rights. Politicized by the march to Versailles in October 1789, Léon and her associates claimed not the vote but a greater role in the defence of the nation. She demanded ‘the honour of sharing their [men's] exhaustion and glorious labours and of making tyrants see that women also have blood to shed for the service of the fatherland in danger’.
3 CLUBISTE Théroigne de Méricourt JULY 1789–AUGUST 1790
[Théroigne] crossed the Assembly floor with the light pace of a panther and mounted the tribune. Her pretty, thought-filled head seemed to shine among the depressing, apocalyptic figures of Danton and Marat.
CAMILLE DESMOULINS
ONE WOMAN popularly thought to have been willing to shed her own blood on behalf of the fatherland, as Pauline Léon hoped to, was the former courtesan Théroigne de Méricourt. Although she was mentioned only five times, in contradictory reports, in the nearly four hundred official depositions on the women's march to Versailles in October 1789, Théroigne was described again and again by nineteenth-century historians of the revolution as having been at the vanguard of the mob storming the palace, astride a jet-black charger and dressed in a riding-habit ‘the colour of blood’, with her sabre unsheathed—as the poet Baudelaire later put it, ‘amante de carnage’. For these romantics, she represented all that was most savage and most noble about the revolution: passionate and untamed, and ultimately crushed by the forces she had helped unleash. Michelet called her ‘the fatal beauty of the revolution’, ‘la belle, vaillante, infortunée Liégoise’; and so she was, although he exaggerated most of the facts of her life.
Anne-Josèphe Terwagne (or Théroigne) was born into a family of prosperous peasants in 1762 in Marcourt (or Méricourt) near Liège, in the Ardennes region of the Low Countries, at the time just over the French border in Austria. Anne-Josèphe's childhood was a desperately unhappy one. Her mother died when she was five, and the little girl was initially sent to live with an aunt in Liège, a hundred kilometres from her home, where her two younger brothers remained. The aunt sent her to a convent to learn dressmaking, but soon stopped paying Anne-Josèphe's keep there and took her in as a maid, treating her cruelly. Anne-Josèphe returned home when her father remarried, but her stepmother, busy with children of her own, did not make her welcome; her father's fortunes were also declining rapidly.
At thirteen, Anne-Josèphe sent one of her brothers to one branch of her mother's family and she and her other brother went to live with her mother's parents. Again she found herself unloved, forced to do heavy work, the victim of injustice and neglect. She returned to her aunt's, but received the same ill-treatment as before, and ran away once more.
This time she set out alone, working as a cowherd and then as a nursemaid before finding a post as companion to a woman in Anvers. Mme Colbert was the first person to show the sixteen-year-old Anne-Josèphe any kindness. She taught her to write, encouraged her to read, and arranged for her to study singing and the pianoforte, at first so that she could accompany her daughter and then because she showed talent. In an atmosphere of affection and comfort, Anne-Josèphe blossomed, and dreamed of a glorious musical career.
When she was twenty, a young English army officer seduced her and then reneged on his promise to marry her when he came of age, instead making her his mistress and living with her between London and Paris. He did provide well for her, giving her 10,000 louis which she invested carefully, but, in the language of the day, she was ruined, and could no longer hope for marriage and respectability. For the next few years Anne-Josèphe lived uneasily, as her modern biographer puts it, ‘suspended between literary bohemianism, polite society and moral degradation’. Although