The Dutch writer Etta Palm d'Aelders, who had spoken so passionately on behalf of women's rights at the Social Circle in 1790, was another woman arrested on 19 July, accused of subversive behaviour. Her arrest was seen as an effort to intimidate the club, and it was successful: within days the Social Circle's Confédération des Amis, and its female equivalent (des Amies) had shut down. Repressive measures taken against other popular societies like the Cordeliers' effectively declawed them too. ‘I need to see my trees again after watching so many fools and scoundrels,’ wrote Manon. By mid-August, an illusory calm had settled over Paris. ‘Paris is as still as the surface of a pond,’ wrote Rosalie Jullien de la Drôme, wife of the Jacobin deputy, ‘apart from the individual fights that occasion tragic scenes every day.’
The Rolands left Paris in September when Roland's job was finished, returning to Le Clos, their home outside Lyon, to oversee the grape harvest. During their absence a rumour had spread that Roland had been arrested as a counterrevolutionary, and the once friendly villagers there initially greeted Manon with cries of ‘Les aristocrates à la lanterne!’ Boundaries were being blurred: the word ‘aristocrat’—like ‘patriot’, ‘virtue’ and ‘popular will’—took on new meanings. Language was being used ritualistically, with totemic words invoked ‘as absolute, moral concepts’ that would somehow guarantee and preserve the revolution's integrity. Germaine de Staël was aware of this development, in 1791 attacking democrats (another word whose meaning was transformed in the 1790s) ‘who desecrate words merely by using them’.
From Le Clos, Manon initiated a correspondence with two of her so-called Incorruptibles, François Buzot and Maximilien Robespierre. To Robespierre she wrote in a deliberately classical, self-consciously historical style, addressing him as ‘one whose energy has not ceased to offer the greatest resistance to the claims and schemes of despotism and intrigue’ and predicting for him a brilliant career. She tried to engage him in a discussion of political and philosophical theory, tacitly presenting herself as a correspondent with whom he could debate ideas and policies, his partner in the fight for France's liberty. ‘One should work for the good of the species in the same manner as the Deity,’ she wrote, ‘for the satisfaction of being true to oneself, of fulfilling one's destiny and earning self-esteem, but without expecting either gratitude or justice from individuals.’ Manon signed her name with republican austerity: ‘Roland, née Phlipon’. There is no record of any response from Robespierre.
Buzot was more receptive. Manon ‘had already singled him out in our little circle for his breadth of vision and confident manner’; she admired his compassion, integrity and courage. Although she did not think his wife deserved him—he had married a cousin some years older than himself—the Rolands and the Buzots lived close to each other in Paris and saw each other frequently in the spring and summer of 1791. Their relationship grew closer while the Rolands were in Villefranche, and Buzot back at home in Évreux, that autumn. Through their letters, recorded Manon later, ‘our friendship became intimate and unbreakable’. Buzot came to represent for Manon a revolutionary ideal, vigorous and full of integrity. Beside his passion her worthy, pedantic husband faded to grey.
Louis XVI signed the constitution and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen on 30 September 1791, while the Rolands were away from Paris. It created a constitutional monarchy in which only propertied men were active citizens. All women were passive citizens, although the laws governing marriage, divorce and inheritance were made fairer; early proposals to allow wives property rights equal to their husbands' had been rejected outright.
At the end of the last meeting of the Constituent Assembly, which was dissolved by Louis's signature on the constitution, Robespierre and Pétion were garlanded with oak-leaf wreaths and carried on the shoulders of the people from the manège to their lodgings. Pétion became the new mayor of Paris, defeating Lafayette in the election in October with the covert support of the queen, who had long despised the general. Félicité de Genlis, last seen in a tricoloured dress and dancing to the ‘ça Ira’ as Citoyenne Brûlart, had decided that the time had come to flee France. Emigration was, after all, as much the fashion for aristocrats as revolution. Pétion, whom Genlis had befriended when popular politics were à la mode, found time to escort her, her adoptive daughter Pamela, Henriette de Sercey and the duc d'Orléans's daughter into exile in London in October.
The radical pamphlet-writer Olympe de Gouges published her own Déclaration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne as a response to the new constitution. ‘Women are now respected and excluded,’ she wrote; ‘under the old regime they were despised and powerful.’ The first article stated unequivocally, ‘Woman is born free and lives equal to man in her rights.’ Gouges demanded that women share with men both the burdens and the privileges of public services, taxation and representation. ‘Woman has the right to mount the scaffold; she must equally have the right to mount the rostrum,’ she wrote.
Gouges's appeal was passionate, but marred by her over-identification with her ideas and a lack of intellectual focus. ‘Woman, wake up; the tocsin of reason is being heard throughout the whole universe; discover your rights,’ she exhorted in her postscript. ‘Having become free, he [man] has become unjust to his companion. Oh, women, women! When will you cease to be blind? What advantage have you received from the revolution?’ Her claims that women deserved rights because they were superior to men in beauty and courage; her unfashionable devotion to the queen, to whom she dedicated the document; and her insistence on demanding equal rights for children born outside wedlock (Gouges herself was illegitimate, so it was a cause close to her heart) clouded her message, diluting her call for equality and her lucid analysis of the prejudice of most male revolutionaries.
Gouges's pronouncements made little impact on her contemporaries. Later, when the walls of Paris were plastered with her posters, the government spies said they produced no effect on the public. ‘One sees them, stops for a second, and says to oneself, “Ah, c'est Olympe de Gouges.” ’
The satire Mère Duchesne was published at about the same time as Gouges's Déclaration. It echoed the popular new journal Père Duchesne, published by Jacques Hébert, in its use of colourful street slang and coarse language, and its style, as if straight from the mouth of its speaker. ‘Although I am ignorant and not lettered, like former judges or the deputies, I don't lack a brain when it comes to political matters,’ held the fictional Mère Duchesne stoutly. ‘Can you believe in good faith that I would hesitate to stuff some good reasons up the noses of aristocrats?’ Although she stopped short at demanding political rights for her sex, she praised women for their readiness to fight for liberty, and called for them to be better educated. ‘Women have imagination and penetration; they are fertile in resources and expedients…Women aren't doomed, damn it, to be geese.’
Germaine de Staël spent the summer of 1791 at her father's house, Coppet, in Switzerland, arriving back in Paris in September in time for the opening session of the new Legislative Assembly. A motion proposed by Robespierre, that no deputy who had sat in the Constituent Assembly should be eligible for election to the Legislative, had been adopted, and so all the deputies were new to their responsibilities. The majority of them were Feuillants, constitutional monarchists who, by virtue of France's new constitution, considered the revolution over. The Feuillants' club, which had broken away from the increasingly radical Jacobins earlier in the year. They commanded 360 seats on the right of the hall; on the left sat 130 Jacobins, Manon's friends; in the centre sat the undecided remainder.
On her return, Germaine began agitating anew for the promotion of her lover, Louis de Narbonne. After the king's flight and subsequent arrest, Gustavus of Sweden had demonstrated his sympathy for his fellow-monarch by ordering the embassy on the rue du Bac closed to all social functions. Germaine was forced to use her friend Sophie de Condorcet's influential salon as her base—giving rise