INTRODUCTION CITOYENNES

      The women have certainly had a considerable share in the French revolution: for, whatever the imperious lords of the creation may fancy, the most important events which take place in this world depend a little on our influence; and we often act in human affairs like those secret springs in mechanism, by which, though invisible, great movements are regulated.

      HELEN MARIA WILLIAMS

      THE NATIONAL ASSEMBLY—France's first constitutional government—met between October 1789 and September 1792 in the covered riding-school of the Tuileries palace in Paris. The long, narrow manège [see ‘Words and Phrases’ p. 437] had been remodelled to accommodate the deputies with a classical austerity intended to correspond to the gravity of their new political responsibilities.

      Although women did not possess the rights either of voting or of holding office, they were permitted into the hall's galleries to observe and marvel at the workings of the administration and the debates on France's future. On any given day in the spring of 1791, four women might have been sitting among the onlookers gathered to watch the Assembly's proceedings.

      The first was a dark-haired, red-faced woman of twenty-five, looking perennially dishevelled despite her expensive, extravagantly décolleté dress. As she watched the men below her debate, it was clear that several of them were her friends and that she was well acquainted with every argument they put forth. She leaned eagerly forward to catch every word, fiddling distractedly with a twisted scrap of paper that showed off her fine hands.

      This was Germaine de Staël, one of the richest women in Europe, daughter of Louis XVI's former Finance Minister Jacques Necker [see ‘Secondary Figures’ p. 425], whose dazzling intelligence never quite consoled her for not being beautiful. She was at the heart of a group of progressive aristocrats she believed would shape a new, reformed France ruled by a constitutional monarchy; her centrist coterie included the hero of the American War of Independence, the marquis de Lafayette, toeing an uneasy line between his liberal principles and his loyalty to the king.

      Her critics found her over-bearing and even her friends called her self-centred, but such was the power of Germaine's intellect and conversation that within half an hour of meeting her most people, despite themselves, were utterly captivated. ‘I know of no woman, nor indeed any man, more convinced of his or her own personal superiority over every other person,’ wrote one of her lovers, Benjamin Constant, ‘or who allows this conviction to weigh less heavily on others.’

      Staël, as a novelist, social commentator and literary theorist, left behind a wealth of source material that, unusually, spans the entire period before, during and after the revolution. She is not