But it was with the sober mathematician Gilbert Romme, whom Théroigne had met in the gallery of the Assembly and who became a quasi-father figure to her, that she founded the short-lived Society of the Friends of the Law in January 1790. The association, which never numbered more than about twenty members, was dedicated to disseminating the Assembly's work to the people and teaching them their rights—exactly what Théroigne had had to learn herself when she began attending the Assembly's debates. It met first in Théroigne's lodgings near the Palais Royal and later in Romme's larger apartment. Théroigne was its only female member and its secretary. While the National Assembly struggled to create a workable constitution from the principles established by the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, Théroigne and the Friends of the Law met to discuss the issues themselves.
From the Assembly's earliest debates, the issue of ‘active’ and ‘passive’ citizenship had been a provocative one. Active citizens had the right to vote for representative assemblies and to sit in them themselves; they had the freedom to make moral choices and to act independently. Passive citizens had to allow other people to think, speak and act for them. In order to sit in the National Assembly, a man had to pay annual taxes of a silver mark, or fifty days' wages for an unskilled worker; those who paid ten days' wages' worth of taxes qualified to sit in local government; those who paid three days' wages in tax were eligible to vote. It was not just the poor who were counted as passive citizens: even if they paid taxes, women, blacks, non-Catholics, domestic servants and actors were all forbidden the vote and considered incapable of participating in public life.
Robespierre was one of the earliest champions of universal male suffrage, arguing against the Abbé Sieyès's contention that property should define civil status. When the question of Jewish citizenship was raised in December 1789, Robespierre spoke out against persecution. ‘We should bear in mind that it can never be politic,’ he said, ‘to condemn to humiliation and oppression a multitude of men who live in our midst.’ In January 1790, after this debate, the Society of the Friends of the Law denounced discrimination against Jews. They called the law of the silver mark unjust and expressed the hope that an alternative way of distinguishing between citizens be found. They backed the complete freedom of the press, also being debated in the Assembly at the time.
At the last session of the month, in a discussion on natural rights, one member of the Society asserted that a man's rights over his wife and children ‘are those of a protector over his protégés’. Despite Romme's progressive views on women's rights, Théroigne was the only member of the group to voice her objections to this statement; like Robespierre, most revolutionaries were too busy defending men's rights to concern themselves with women's. Although she never drafted her views on the matter, as she had intended, she put down in her notebook her thoughts on ‘the liberty of women, who have the same natural rights as men, so that, as a consequence, it is supremely unjust that we have not the same rights in society’. The prejudice and discrimination she had encountered in her own life made her desire for freedom and equality all the more poignant.
One member of the Society of the Friends of the Law was Augustin Bosc d'Antic, a mineralogist and botanist. He had seen Théroigne in the galleries of the National Assembly in Versailles and written to a friend about a beautiful, patriotic stranger who had captured his imagination. A few months later, he joined the Society and may have confessed his feelings to her. If so, the former courtesan Théroigne, who in her new incarnation rejected any amorous advances ‘with Spartan pride’, did not respond.
Because of her regular attendance at the National Assembly, and because of her remarkable appearance which had so fascinated Bosc d'Antic—Théroigne's slight figure and delicate, gentle face contrasted unintentionally picturesquely with the strict cut of her signature ama-zone and plumed hat—she became a celebrity. The people and the deputies respected her, she said proudly, ‘because of my patriotism and my personal conduct’. By the end of 1789, she was popularly known as ‘la belle Liégoise’.
The royalist press had different words for her: trollop, nymph, second-rate courtesan, débauchée, whore. The name Théroigne de Méricourt (which she never acknowledged) was first used in a November 1789 article in the royalist paper the Apostles: ‘One might call her the muse of democracy, or else think of her as Venus giving lessons in public right. Her company is itself a college; her principles are those of the Porch. She would adopt those of the Arcades [the prostitutes' haunt in the Palais Royal], if the need arose.’
Théroigne was also the heroine of a satirical play entitled Théroigne et Populus, ou le triomphe de la démocratie, in which she was linked to a deputy to the National Assembly whose name, Populus, made him a cypher for the average Frenchman. Although the pair did not know one another, their names were often joined by journalists implying that Théroigne sold her favours to the entire French nation. Another royalist newspaper described her in lurid detail giving birth to the ‘National embryo’, with labour brought on by her excitement at Robespierre's eloquence, and suggested Talleyrand, Mirabeau or the young orator Antoine Barnave might be the imaginary infant's father.
It was at this time, too, that the rumours of Théroigne as a bloodthirsty warrior who had stormed the Bastille in July, then Versailles in October, became current. She was depicted in an engraving wearing, inevitably, the amazone in which, sword aloft and pistols smoking, she supposedly ‘bested a brigade of bodyguards [at Versailles]…She was ever to be found where the unrest was greatest.’ While the attacks against Théroigne in the press demonstrate the prominence she had attained—in a 1791 etching she represented French women alongside a generic cleric, nobleman and peasant as witnesses to the birth of France's new constitution—they are also evidence of how threatening emancipated women were to the majority of Frenchmen, from members of the political elite to the man in the street.
Women who were outsiders and did not have reputations to protect were practically the only ones who dared speak out against the social injustices women faced, and to which they were especially vulnerable
—fallen women like Théroigne or Mary Wollstonecraft, living in Paris in the early 1790s with an American merchant to whom she was not married and with whom she had a child; actresses, who were viewed as little more than prostitutes; and foreigners.
It was no accident that Théroigne, although she counted among her male acquaintances friends of both the liberal aristocrat Germaine de Staël and the republican bourgeoise Manon Roland, never met either woman. She would not have been welcome in their worlds. The aristocratic adulteresses Germaine de Staël and Thérésia de Fontenay were, arguably, greater sinners than the newly virtuous Théroigne, who had rejected her degrading past; but while they were embraced by society, she was despised by it.
Their already ambiguous moral roles freed female outsiders to express discontent with the status quo. This was partly because they had less to lose—no families to disown them, no legitimate children to disgrace, no respectability to sacrifice in the name of idealism—and partly because any woman who did have a voice in eighteenth-century France, from the queen down, was denounced for immorality.
Marie-Antoinette had been married at fourteen to the future Louis XVI, who had a medical condition that made sex almost impossible; their union was unconsummated for seven years. Despite living in a society which considered love affairs completely normal, she might in twenty years of marriage have taken a single lover (Axel von Fersen). Her actual sins were thus completely incommensurate with those of which she was accused by the revolutionary scandal-sheets: of sleeping with her brother-in-law and various ministers, not to mention fleets of footmen, and of lesbian orgies with her ladies-in-waiting during which she committed incest with her prepubescent son. These egregious crimes were salaciously reported alongside her real political ‘crimes’—her influence over the king and her fear of the changes taking place in her world. The association between politics and pornography, which were sold alongside each other in the stalls lining the Seine