The typical poissarde woman, literally a fish-seller, but including other market women, seamstresses or laundresses, was described in the revolutionary newspaper Père Duchesne as a plain speaker, a frugal housekeeper and a chaste wife. She had an ugly face and despised finery, and was devoted to her family and capable of defending it savagely if need be. Her children were raised according to the political principles she and her husband held, a tradition of fierce egalitarianism and independence, and she claimed the right to sign petitions, fill the audience chambers of the National Assembly and denounce those she considered unpatriotic, deliberately addressing them by the familiar ‘tu’ rather than the more formal ‘vous’. Although the revolution was marked by violent anticlericalism, these women often continued to revere Mary, ‘la bonne petite mère’. Many of them lived in the faubourg Saint-Antoine, just east of the Bastille on the outskirts of Paris.
Common women were praised by revolutionaries, generally from middle-class backgrounds themselves, for their shrewdness, swift judgement and moral fibre. ‘The women of the people hide a fine character which finds expression when needed,’ wrote one patriotic journalist in 1789. They were barometers of the political environment: if things were really bad, the market women would be restless.
The activist Pauline Léon came from a typical lower-middle-class faubourg background—not the poorest of the poor but far from prosperous. Her father was a chocolate-maker—an artisan working in a luxury market supplying the rich—and, she said, a philosopher, who had raised his children according to his principles and without prejudices. She could read and write, although her family's modest means had not allowed for much education; girls from her background might have learned to read the mass in French and vespers in Latin, and then begun working in their early teens. When her father died, her mother took over his business and raised their five children, with help from Pauline, apparently the eldest.
Pauline was thirty-one and unmarried at the start of the revolution, still living at home and working with her mother, when the new ideas inflamed her. Mothers with young children stayed at home, so the politically minded women on the streets were either young and single, like Pauline, or middle-aged, sometimes widows, perhaps with sons fighting the revolution's foreign enemies at the front while their mothers and sisters guarded against the fatherland's ‘aristocratic’ enemies at home. Unlike in the salons of the nobility, sans-culotte men and women, though in accord ideologically, led separate political lives during the revolution. Radical lower-class women protested together, went to political clubs together and watched the guillotine's blade falling together.
But the women of Paris began participating in the revolution long before Madame Guillotine cast her shadow over the city. In January 1789, the women of the Third Estate addressed a petition to the king, a mirror of the cahiers the men of the nation had been asked by the king to draw up at the same time, stating the grievances and expectations of their classes and regions. At a time ‘when everyone is trying to assert his titles and his rights, when some people are worrying about recalling centuries of servitude and anarchy, when others are making every effort to shake off the last links which still bind them to the feudal system’, they began, neatly summing up both the political situation and women's contradictory status in France, should not women, ‘continual objects of the admiration and scorn of men…make their voice[s] heard?’
Common women, they explained, had no fortunes or education, and were doomed to becoming prey for seducers if they were pretty or to unhappy dowerless marriages if they were not. Their plight was exacerbated by parents often refusing to help their daughters financially, preferring to concentrate their resources on their sons. Because of these disadvantages, the women had three demands. First, they requested that women's trades, such as embroidery and dressmaking, be reserved for women; ‘if we are left at least with the needle and the spindle, we promise never to handle the compass or the square’. Second, they asked that prostitutes, ‘the weakest among us’, be required to wear a mark of identification so that honest women were not mistaken for them. They added tartly that if prostitutes did wear distinctive dress, ‘one would run the risk of seeing too many women in the same colour’. Finally, they implored the king to set up free schools where girls could learn religion and ethics. Science would not appear on the curriculum: teaching women such a ‘masculine’ subject would be flying in the face of nature, and would only make female students stupidly proud, not to mention producing unfaithful wives and bad mothers. ‘We ask to be enlightened, to have work, not in order to usurp men's authority,’ they assured Louis, ‘but in order to be better esteemed by them.’
The escalation of the revolution's pace throughout the spring of 1789 thrilled working-class women as much as men. Inflamed by a potent combination of resentment, patriotism and the desire for change, Pauline Léon said she felt ‘the liveliest enthusiasm’ when the Bastille, symbol of royal despotism, fell. Even though she was a woman she ‘did not remain idle’. She was on the streets from morning till evening, ‘inciting citizens against the partisans of tyranny, [urging them] to despise and brave aristocrats, barricading streets, and inciting the cowardly to leave their homes to come to the aid of the fatherland in danger’. France was not yet at war; the danger Léon refers to came from counterrevolutionaries—internal, rather than external, enemies.
Pauline does not say whether she saw the prison taken and the few prisoners it contained liberated on 14 July, but many women were present. The idealistic young British writer Helen Maria Williams, who moved to Paris in 1790, heard that women had patrolled the streets, as Pauline described doing, and brought their sons and husbands at the Bastille food and drink, ‘and, with a spirit worthy of Roman matrons, encouraged them to go on’.
Throughout the remainder of the summer of 1789, Parisian women and girls wearing the white dresses they reserved for ceremonies and wreathed in orange blossom paraded in thanksgiving for the Bastille's fall, demonstrating their gratitude ‘for the happy revolution which had just taken place’. They made offerings of bouquets, bread, brioches and vines at their local churches, just as liberal bourgeoises donated their silver and trinkets to the nation's bankrupt treasury, as expressions of their patriotism.
On the feast of Saint-Louis at the end of August, the market women went to Versailles with the mayor and magistrates of the city of Paris, as they did every year, to present a bouquet to the king. Marie-Antoinette, well aware she was loathed by the common people for her foreignness, extravagance and perceived corruption, both physical and political, was cold and unfriendly to the deputations. Utterly resistant to the idea of reform, she was visibly shaking with rage when Lafayette presented the captains of the newly formed National Guard to her, and the fishwives also noticed how poorly they were received.
In the summer of 1789, aged thirty-two (a year older than Pauline Léon), Lafayette had been made commandant of the National Guard, but it was a complicated role to play. Despite his immense personal popularity, he found it hard to please both the royalists and the ‘patriots’. As Germaine de Staël said, he supported the king ‘more from duty than attachment’, but he was drawn ‘towards the principles of the democrats whom he was obliged to resist’. Neither group trusted him. Pauline Léon attested that she was suspicious of Lafayette from the time he took office. In her eyes he was one of the internal enemies of the state, a counterrevolutionary in disguise; aristocrats, who had oppressed the nation for so long, could not be trusted. Caught between two extremes, anxious to satisfy both his liberal principles and his responsibilities to his office, Lafayette would end by fulfilling neither.
The National Guard he commanded was made up of the members of various volunteer militias, especially former members of the garde française, gathered together as a regular force and charged with defending the decrees of the new National Assembly on the one hand and protecting the people from revolution's excesses on the other. They had to pay for their own muskets and red, white and blue uniforms, so most were relatively prosperous. Progressive patriotism was their unifying sentiment. Germaine de Staël's army officer lover, Louis de Narbonne, would become commander of a regiment of the National Guard in Besançon the following summer.
The effects of recent failed harvests, droughts and bitter winters had accumulated and despite an adequate harvest in 1789