On the streets of Versailles, crowds ‘drunk with hope and joy’, according to another observer, lined the route to wish the Estates-General well, but Mme de Montmorin, the wife of a royal minister standing beside Germaine, was pessimistic. ‘You are wrong to rejoice,’ she said to Germaine. ‘This will be the source of great misfortune to France and to us.’ She was right, as far as she and her family were concerned: she would die on the scaffold beside one of her sons; another son drowned himself; her husband and one daughter died in prison and another daughter died before she was thirty.
Maximilien Robespierre was invited to Necker's Versailles residence later that summer. Deputies to the National Assembly* were much in demand in the grand salons of Paris and Versailles. ‘His features were ignoble, his skin pale, his veins of a greenish colour,’ Germaine recalled. ‘He supported the most absurd propositions with a coolness that had the air of conviction.’ From the start, Robespierre saw himself as France's saviour. ‘La patrie est en danger,’ he had written in April 1789. ‘Let us fly to its aid.’ A provincial lawyer from a modest but comfortable background (at the start of the revolution he signed his name using the aristocratic ‘de’), he became a regular speaker at the National Assembly and was already attracting attention for his lofty democratic principles, arguing in favour of freedom of the press and insisting suffrage should be granted to all men, including servants and the poor; he did not mention votes for women.
Alongside Germaine's friends Lafayette and the Lameth brothers, Robespierre was a prominent member of a club formed at Versailles in the summer of 1789 by a group of progressive deputies with the purpose of debating issues before they came before the National Assembly. The Society of the Friends of the Constitution would become known as the Jacobin Club because, when the Assembly moved to Paris that October, they hired the hall of a Dominican (Jacobin, in French slang) monastery on the rue Saint-Honoré, almost opposite the manège where the Assembly met.
As her opinions of Robespierre and Mirabeau demonstrate, Ger-maine's view of politics was intensely personal, coloured by her firsthand observation of people and her sense of being at the centre of events. She called Clermont-Tonnerre ‘my speaker’, meaning speaker on her behalf in the Assembly, and in September 1789 she scribbled an urgent note to Monsieur de Staël in Versailles to find out whether or not ‘my bill on the veto’ (whether or not the king should have a veto over legislation in the new constitution, and if so how strong a veto) had been won; as she hoped, the ‘Necker–Lafayette’ partial veto had been adopted.
She had cause to feel possessive. In July, committees were created to compose France's first constitution, and on them sat many of Ger-maine's friends including Talleyrand, Lafayette and the Lameths. In August they produced the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen which established in its first article that all men are born and live free and equal. Torture and arbitrary imprisonment were abolished and innocence was presumed; freedom of the press and of worship was declared; citizens were to bear the weight of taxation according to their abilities; the army was defined as a public force and access to the officers' ranks opened up to non-nobles.
Even though the real work of composing a constitution was still to come, these basic liberties were exactly those for which Germaine had been agitating behind the scenes and, looking back on the achievements of this period, she remained certain that politics and society had never been so intimately or valuably connected. ‘As political affairs were still in the hands of the elite, all the vigour of liberty and all the grace of old-fashioned manners were united in the same people,’ she wrote. ‘Men of the Third Estate, distinguished by their enlightened ideas and their talents, joined those gentlemen who were prouder of their own merit than of the privileges of their class; and the highest questions society has ever considered were dealt with by minds the most capable of understanding and debating them.’
This self-referential, unabashedly elitist idea of ‘communication of superior minds among themselves’ was the spirit of Germaine de Staël's salon, and, though it was instrumental in bringing the revolution into being, it would have little place in it in the years to come. As Germaine herself said, from the day that the National Assembly moved from Versailles to Paris in the autumn of 1789, ‘its goal was no longer liberty, but equality’.
* The Estates-General had changed its name to the ‘National Assembly’ on 17 June 1789, three days before the Tennis Court Oath in which the deputies swore to remain in session until France had a constitution; over the next three years it would become, successively, the Constituent Assembly and the Legislative Assembly. As contemporaries usually did, in the main I have referred to it as the National Assembly.
2 FILLE SANS-CULOTTE Pauline Léon JANUARY 1789–MARCH 1791
Everywhere, just like warriors, We carried off the laurels and the glory, And roused hopes for the glory of France.
Poissard song, autumn 1789
LIKE A CAROUSEL abandoned to centrifugal force, with respect for the government and tradition dissolving, France spun into revolution in 1789. The harvest the previous year had been destroyed by late hail storms and the winter was the worst for nearly a century. Bread prices had doubled and people were dying of starvation. Bands of brigands—and horrifying rumours of their brutality—swept through the countryside, taking advantage of the chaos caused by the abolition of feudal rights and dues, and the vacuum once filled by the king's heavily centralized government.
Alongside Germaine de Staël's gilded cocoon teemed another world. Marie-Antoinette's friend, the painter Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, was terrified in the summer of 1789 when she looked out of her window to find sans-culottes shaking their fists at her from the street and jumping on to the running-board of her carriage, shouting, ‘Next year, you'll be behind the carriages and we'll be the ones inside!’ When émigrés, including Vigée-Lebrun, began leaving France, the savage insults of passers-by floated in the wake of their heavy-laden carriages: ‘There go some more on the way out, those dogs of aristocrats.’
Although Germaine and her friends passionately believed in reform, their ideas were largely conceptual. The aristocracy numbered several hundred thousand in a population of twenty-eight million; perhaps five thousand nobles lived in Paris, a city of about 550,000 inhabitants, in 1790. Isolated from the rest of France in their magnificent hôtels and crested carriages, the only common people with whom they came into contact tame peasants or liveried servants, they had little comprehension of what life was like for ordinary men and women. Rich and poor viewed each other as utterly alien beings; it seemed all they had in common was their cynicism and their disaffection with the king and his government. The rich saw the poor as barely human—savage beings for whom it was certainly not worth stopping one's carriage if they had had the bad luck to have been run over—while the poor viewed the rich as frivolous, mannered and cruel.
Popular responses to the political upheavals taking place in Paris were marked by a defiant, unrestrained combination of violence and delight: ‘no riotous scene…did not have its festive aspect,’ writes Mona Ozouf in her study of revolutionary festivals, and there was ‘no collective celebration without a groundswell of menace’. Poissard, the Parisian slang dialect of the markets, exemplified this peculiarly French juxtaposition of levity and deadly seriousness in ‘comic and abusive verse, rhymed insults and a kind of tough, threatening talk’. Its jeering tone was fashionable