Liberty: The Lives and Times of Six Women in Revolutionary France. Lucy Moore
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derided the king's failure to sign the Declaration of Rights and spread their wet clothes out to dry. One woman sat in the chair reserved for the president of the Assembly; others tried to participate in the debate and vote with the deputies. They mocked the rituals of government, shouting insults so as to disrupt proceedings, some dropping off to sleep on the deputies' benches.
Outside, the town of Versailles had shut down. One of Marie-Antoinette's ladies-in-waiting tried to get back into the palace at about nine on the evening of the 5th, but a National Guard sentry from Versailles recognized her at the gates and sent her back to her lodgings. ‘You must not be seen in the street,’ he told her. ‘You have nothing to fear for your friends, but there will not be a single lifeguardsman [royal bodyguard] left tomorrow morning.’
Meanwhile the Assembly's president, Jean-Joseph Mounier, had taken a deputation of women to see the king himself. Much impressed by Louis's paternal sympathy and concern (he fetched smelling-salts for a seventeen-year-old flower-girl, chosen as spokeswoman, who fainted at his feet), they returned to the assembly hall bearing a signed order for any delayed wheat to be delivered to Paris immediately. Mounier and some of the women now went back to Paris to inform the people of the king's promises; the remainder stayed in Versailles, the lucky ones finding beds in stables and coach-houses, others huddling in the lee of buildings wrapped in their damp clothes. Many of them wept with exhaustion and confusion, saying they ‘had been forced to march and did not know why they were there’, miles from home and without shelter on a cold, damp night.
The king then agreed without qualification to sign the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, which he had delayed doing for almost a month. He consulted his ministers about whether he should resist the hostile approaching National Guard by force, or flee, and decided to do neither. ‘Habits of formality’ stopped him escaping, then or later, according to the daughter of an aristocrat who urged flight.
When Lafayette arrived with the factious Guard it was almost midnight. Versailles was quiet, but wide awake: the tinderbox still smouldered. Alone and unarmed, the general was permitted into the palace to see the king, and told him—after swearing to die at his feet
—that if Louis would guarantee food for Paris, allow the patriotic National Guard to replace the royal bodyguard, and agree to move his family, court and government from Versailles to Paris, the National Guard would be satisfied and a clash between them and the royal bodyguard would be averted. The king said he needed to think about the last proposal. Lafayette reported back to the National Assembly, then to his soldiers and officers, and spent the next few hours trying to maintain calm before snatching a few hours' sleep on a sofa at his grandfather's house.
Just before dawn, a crowd of armed men and women broke into the palace compound. Storming into the royal apartments, they called for the blood of the ‘Austrian whore’ (Marie Antoinette had been an Austrian princess before she became the French queen). Two soldiers were killed and their heads paraded around the courtyard on pikes. They chased the barefoot, frantic queen through the Hall of Mirrors to the king's apartments, where the terrified royal family were reunited; outside, the National Guardfinally turned against the mob and stemmed their advance.
Lafayette, awoken by the mayhem, ran to the palace. At his suggestion Louis took his family on to the narrow balcony outside his grand-father's state bedroom and, addressing the crowd, promised to entrust himself to the love of his subjects, to their cheers below. Then Lafayette persuaded Marie-Antoinette to step out in front of the crowd alone, turned to her, and kissed her hand; the volatile crowd suddenly turned royalist, and erupted with cries of ‘Long live the queen!’ as well as, brandishing loaves on pikes, ‘We have bread!’
For the moment, the crisis had been averted.
Later that morning, Lafayette escorted the royal family back to Paris through the rain at the heart of a procession of perhaps sixty thousand people flanked at either end by the National Guard. Ministers and deputies marched too, alongside flour wagons from the king's own stores and triumphant market women arm in arm with Guardsmen whose caps they were wearing. Green branches were tied to rifle butts, the two cannon brought from the Hôtel de Ville the morning before were wreathed in laurel, and the two murdered bodyguards' heads were carried aloft on pikes beside bloody loaves of bread. Many women lifted their skirts and flashed their bottoms as they passed, a traditional expression of female mockery and contempt. They were bringing the baker, the baker's wife and the baker's boy (the king, queen and dauphin) to Paris, sang the mob.
The harlequin makeup of the crowd during those October days excited much comment at the time. The eight-year-old daughter of a courtier remembered the streets of Versailles flooded with ‘horriblelooking people, uttering wild cries’. Edmund Burke, from the safety of England, denounced the ‘horrid yells, and shrilling screams, and frantic dances, and infamous contumelies, and all the unutterable abominations of the furies of hell, in the abused shape of the vilest of women’. ‘Probably,’ responded Mary Wollstonecraft icily, ‘you mean women who gained a livelihood by selling vegetables or fish, who never had any advantages of education.’
Some of the October women undoubtedly were violent, bloodthirsty and deliberately intimidating. On the way to Versailles, a few shouted that they were going to the palace ‘to bring back the queen's head’. When the palace was stormed, some were heard calling for the queen's liver to be fricasséed. On the whole, though, it was not until the National Guard arrived late on the night of the 5th that the mood turned bloody.
Mme de Tourzel, governess to the royal children, thought that many of the ‘women’ who entered the palace early on the morning of the 6th were men in female clothing. It was not unusual for eighteenth-century Frenchmen to adopt women's clothes and women's names, such as Mère Folle, when demonstrating for political or economic purposes; peasants had dressed as women and blacked their faces to attack surveyors during a land dispute in the Beaujolais in the 1770s. Like poissard humour, like the joy taken in entering forbidden places and challenging long-established authorities, this grim fancy dress was another element of black carnival, the combination of festivity and menace that characterized the popular revolution.
Most of the marchers were proud of their participation, and saw the precedent set by women seizing the political initiative as a positive one. The following month, a woman writer in Les Étrennes Nationales des Dames hailed the Parisiennes for proving that they were at least as courageous and enterprising as the men. ‘We suffer more than men who with their declarations of rights leave us in the state of inferiority and, let's be truthful, of slavery in which they've kept us so long,’ she continued. ‘If there are husbands aristocratic enough in their households to oppose the sharing of patriotic honours, we'll use the arms we've just employed with such success against them.’
The poissardes, for their part, had a new song:
To Versailles, like braggarts,
We dragged our cannon. Although we were only women, We wanted to show a courage beyond reproach. We made men of spirit see that just like them, we weren't afraid; Guns and musketoons across our shoulders…
Pauline Léon did not say whether she had been in Versailles on 5 and 6 October, but she did say that Lafayette's behaviour on those days, the evident conflict between his political principles and his loyalty to the king, and his efforts to bring about a compromise between the royalists and the populists, had confirmed her mistrust of him. She saw him as a traitor, and her words echo Fournier l'Américain's portrait of a wretched, perfidious general stalling for time to save his king at the cost of his countrymen: ‘Since that time [the women's march] I have sworn eternal hatred of him, and I have used all possible means to unmask him.’
The march on Versailles gave the women of Paris like Pauline Léon a new political self-confidence. The guts and initiative they had shown gave credence to their demands. Ceaselessly they urged the continuance of the work of the revolution. Eighteen months later a group from Saint-Germain, mostly widows and single women, addressed the Cordeliers' Club, a popular revolutionary assembly which had met, since April 1790, on the rue des Cordeliers. Léon may have been among them: she lived in Saint-Germain and regularly attended the club, which met at the bottom of her street.
‘Watch with more exactitude