It may have taken until the late 1960s for the expression ‘the personal is political’ to condense an important truth, but — as Lucy Moore’s fascinating new book shows — that truth is not a new one. Liberty tells the story of the French Revolution through the lives of the great salonnière Germaine de Staël, the passionate middle-class ideologue Manon Roland, the kind-hearted flibbertigibbet Thérésia de Fontenay, the feisty former courtesan Théroigne de Méricourt and the much younger Juliette Récamier — whose beauty and chastity (a very rare thing, to judge by this book) caused her to become an icon of the Republic. This book takes them, jointly and severally, through exile, intrigue, imprisonment in rat-infested jails, multiple lovers, bloodbaths and reversals, not to mention some fabulous parties.
Naturally, there’s much more material available on the more upper-class sans- chemises than on the sans-culottes — which is why it is so important to the completeness of Moore’s tableau that she includes the story, too, of Pauline Léon, the daughter of a chocolatier, and someone for whom insurrection was more than an intellectual conceit. At 35, Léon co-founded the powerful radical group, the Société des Républicaines-Révolutionnaires — a gang of cross-dressing militant enragées who, when not haranguing the Commune, patrolled the streets like 18th-century Riot Grrls, intimidating moderates and biffing suspected aristocrats.
Her views — in particular, that female citizens should be entitled to bear arms in defence of the Revolution — were further out than most. The background to the Revolution, for intellectuals such as de Staël and Roland, was Rousseau; for the fishwives and sans-culottes, it was, as much as anything, starvation. Rousseau’s conviction that ‘nature’ fitted women only for a supportive domestic role — the great disconnect in the rationalist argument for equality — was swallowed whole not only by the patriarchs of the Revolution, but also by many of its most fervent and intelligent female supporters. They spoke out; they schemed for the advancement of their favourites; they used sexual intrigue and the leverage of their fame and beauty to advance their political ideas… but few at this stage were arguing for suffrage.
Nevertheless, the role of women was a source of real anxiety. Liberty was personified as female. The ideas that directed the Revolution took hold, in large part, in the salons, and many of its decisive popular events — the march on Versailles and the Prairial bread riots, for example — were centred on women. But the fear of women exerting political influence was a live one, and one freighted with memories of Madame de Pompadour and the hated Marie Antoinette.
The misogynistic virulence of the response speaks for itself. The royalist hack François Suleau wrote — with Théroigne in mind — that women political agitators suffered from ‘itch, scabs, ringworm, fleurs à la Pompadour, scurf, yaws, blisters on the nape of the neck, suckers on the breast, ulcers on the thigh, and plasters on all their scars’. Charmant. Théroigne can’t much have regretted seeing his head stuck on a pike.
More subtle, later on, was the way the Jacobins sought to dilute the political influence of the Républicaines-Révolutionnaires by painting motherhood as the crowning female achievement and breastfeeding as a patriotic duty. Liberty was depicted with bare breasts, and inscribed with the legend, ‘We are all your children’. It was for women to be ‘passive citizens’ rather than ‘active citizens’; to nurture the heroes of the patrie, not to be them.
Moore is exceptionally good and subtle on the real importance of signs and symbols —not just in the way that the Jacobin ultras so expertly took ownership of the language of the Revolution, but in the significance that fashion played in it. The vapidest belches of the advertising industry now routinely talk of fashion as ‘revolutionary’ — but in an age when, from day to day, whether you did or didn’t wear a red, white and blue cockade could make the difference between being stabbed to death in the street or passing unmolested, the stakes were rather higher.
One of the astounding, and sometimes hilarious, aspects of Moore’s book is the extent to which revolutionary political praxis was dragged down to the matter of playing with Daddy’s dressing-up box. At one point, a petition was submitted to the Convention insisting that the cockade should become compulsory for women by law. Equally, for a woman to wear the male bonnet rouge — the Phrygian symbol of emancipation from slavery, usually carried by Liberty on the end of her pike rather than on her head — had the threatening political implication that the citoyenne arrogated to herself the right to bear arms. Even in the time of the Directory, a ludicrous amount of time and energy was spent deciding on the showy, toga-style flowing red capes the councillors and deputies were to wear.
How you dressed, wore your hair, and even how often you bathed, was a badge of your revolutionary integrity. The ‘whore’s habit of bathing daily’ contributed to the diagnosis of ‘revolutionary hysteria’ laid against the feminist writer Olympe de Gouges. By contrast, there was the fabulously smelly Marat, who, as Moore rather nicely puts it, ‘took revolutionary disregard for his appearance so far that Danton had to remind him patriotism did not preclude a clean shirt’. Marat, mind you, died in the bath.
At the other end of the scale — and both ends of the Revolution — irony was not at a premium. In 1789 the novelist Félicité de Genlis, writes Moore, ‘had the ultimate revolutionary accessory: a polished shard of the fallen Bastille made into a brooch. Her stone was set in a wreath of emerald laurel leaves tied at the top in a jewelled tricolour rosette, and inlaid with the word “Liberté” in diamonds.’ After the fall of Robespierre, there was a fresh release of decadence among the so-called merveilleuses. It was less innocent, perhaps — demonstrating the sort of therapeutic cynicism that you can see in today’s kitschy, Soviet-themed Russian nightclubs. Thérésia’s lapdog ate out of a diamond-studded bowl, but was trained to bark at the word ‘aristocrat’; she owned 50 wigs, said to be made from the hair of victims of the guillotine. At a lavish bal des victimes, relatives of those killed in the Terror paraded through a black-draped room in cropped hair and scaffold shifts, with narrow red ribbons tied round their necks. ‘They greeted each other with sharp, awkward nods in imitation of the motion made by severed heads as they dropped into the basket below.’ Some party.
It’s the abundance of such details, and the verve with which she presents them, that makes Moore’s story so enjoyable; it is a complex and, potentially, daunting one. Told, broadly, in chronological order, it nevertheless jumps back and forth between its six subjects, so with its huge supporting cast and ever-shifting political currents you’re grateful for its appendix listing secondary characters, and its full and helpful index.
Perhaps the high point of Moore’s narrative is the Terror — with Robespierre, that misogynist zealot, providing its magnetic anti-hero. At one point each household was required to post an official notice on the door listing the inhabitants of the house. At the head of the paper was: ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity or Death!’ What would have been a rallying-cry during the early days of the Revolution had, by the time of the Terror, taken on the complexion of a threat.
All too many of these women, their husbands and lovers ended up sans-chemise, sans-culottes, sans head, sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything… .
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