For whom, I wonder, is this book written? Will people interested in the “lives and times” of women in revolutionary France really be as ignorant of history as Lucy Moore seems to expect? Will they need to be told, in a list of “secondary figures”, that Napoleon Bonaparte was a “revolutionary general who became French emperor”, or that Marie Antoinette was “an Austrian princess before she became the French queen”? Perhaps readers coming so fresh to the subject would do well to read a book about Napoleon, or Marie Antoinette, or, indeed, the French revolution, before embarking on this account of six women caught up in those turbulent times. But maybe the book is written primarily for those interested in the cause of female emancipation — in which case I fear they will find it a dispiriting read.
The six women in question are the writer and social commentator Germaine de Staël; her friend Thérésia de Fontenay; Manon Roland, the wife of a civil servant who became minister of the interior under Louis XVI; Pauline Léon, a working-class woman who earned her living as a chocolatier; Théroigne de Méricourt, a former courtesan; and Juliette Bernard, who became the beautiful and witty Madame Récamier. Their hopes and dreams are summed up in the title of the book, Liberty.
But the reality was rather different, as liberty was the last thing any of them experienced, either before, during or after the revolution. In November 1791, the left-wing journalist Louis-Marie Prudhomme addressed his female readers with ferocity: “We (men) do not venture to come and teach you how to love your children;spare us the trouble then of coming to our clubs and expounding our duties as citizens to us.” As Moore observes, and makes abundantly clear, the belief that women should be confined to hearth and home was widely held. Robespierre, whom many women initially idolised, had an “unshakeable” antipathy to their taking part in public life. And, after the revolution, Napoleon was no different from his predecessors in this respect. Moore herself, who dislikes Napoleon with a vengeance, seems pretty depressed by her last chapter. “All the passion and optimism of the women of the early revolutionary period,” she writes, “had apparently come to nothing.”
Not that the women themselves always demonstrated female solidarity — far from it. In May 1793, Léon was a founder member of the Société des Républicaines-Révolutionnaires, which was intended to hasten the revolution and issue in a glorious new era. The members sound a thoroughly unpleasant lot, making it their business to stalk the streets of Paris hunting for counter-revolutionaries to whom they could administer a whipping. One of their victims was de Méricourt. A few months later, a rival group of women burst drunkenly into one of the society’s meetings, calling out “Down with red bonnets!” and beating up the members. Before long, this unfortunate society was squashed by the men, and a journalist was able happily to report that women were no longer permitted “to organise in clubs”.
Some women combated their lack of liberty in less obvious ways. Roland pretended to agree with the role assigned to her while laughing up her sleeve: “Listen- ing submissively to visitors who thought their every word a revelation to her . . . gave her a secret thrill. But although she insisted she had accepted her ‘proper role’, she still had to bite her lip to stop herself speaking out of turn.” She was also something of a puritan, serving only one course at the twice-weekly dinner she provided for her husband’s colleagues and associates, along with sugar-water instead of wine.
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To deal with the stories of six women in one book is no easy task, and Moore is not entirely successful in bringing it off. She has organised her narrative into chapters that concentrate on one woman at a time, in chronological but overlapping chunks. This two-steps-forward, one-step-back approach persists throughout the book and does not aid sustained concentration. And when Fontenay re-enters after an absence of nearly 100 pages, the reader may have forgotten who she was.
I suspect that to make a real contribution to the understanding of this turbulent period, and of the part played by — and against — women during it, a writer really needs to be steeped in its history and culture, not to mention its language (only a small percentage of the “primary sources” listed in the bibliography are in French), and Moore, in her determination to follow up her previous book, Maharanis, with another collection of interesting females, has not had the time to do this. That the lives and times of these women were fascinating is beyond doubt, but their times at least have been better examined elsewhere.
Roland was executed in November 1793, her last words being, “Oh, Liberty, what crimes they commit in your name!” Léon, released from prison after Robes-pierre’s fall, faded from view, opting for a quieter life away from political activism. The thrice married de Fontenoy became a respectable grandmother, devoted to music and painting — while poor de Méricourt went mad, and ended her days in La Salpêtrière asylum, babbling of liberty. Récamier, who seems the odd one out in this book, hardly participated in the revolution, but wins the author’s approval by her opposition to Napoleon. It is de Staël, another woman who fell foul of Napoleon, whom Moore seems to view as her chief heroine. She was certainly a survivor, and was convinced of her own superiority, but even Moore appears unsure as to what she actually achieved.
Rebel spirits
Although Madame de Staël is better known by history, her friend Thérésia de Fontenay, right, was more embroiled in the revolution. Saving many from arrest, she was adoringly dubbed, “Notre Dame de Thermidor” after her involvement in Robespierre’s downfall that month.
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