Liberty: The Lives and Times of Six Women in Revolutionary France. Lucy Moore
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Louis XV through the lubricious tale of a king who owned a magic ring that made women's vaginas speak.
Attacking the ancien régime meant, in one sense, attacking the power women were thought to wield from behind the scenes. Politically involved women, who were seen as preventing politics from being disinterested by promoting their favourites, were believed to contaminate both society and the state. For most revolutionaries, cleansing France of corruption could only be accomplished by preventing women from playing any kind of public role. Influenced by Rousseau, they believed that a society dominated by women was fundamentally tainted. In the ideal republic, according to their ‘natural’ roles, men would lead and women would serve. ‘The reign of courtesans brought on the ruin of the nation; the power of queens consummated it,’ wrote the journalist Prudhomme in 1791. Women, who ‘are born for perpetual dependence and are gifted only with private virtues’, should not be allowed to enter into public life.
By this thinking, any politicized woman, regardless of her private behaviour, was depraved and unnatural, and inventing lurid stories about her was a legitimate way of undermining her reputation and public influence. Although Théroigne was a revolutionary, and at this stage women's rights of citizenship were still on the constitutional table, her conduct was every bit as suspect as Marie-Antoinette's because they were both women. Théroigne became such a prominent figure because the idea of a former courtesan becoming a revolutionary campaigner was almost inconceivable at the time—and offered her opponents such irresistable ammunition with which to attack her.
The actress and writer Olympe de Gouges was another woman held in contempt by the press at the start of the revolution. Like Théroigne, she came from a humble background and had washed up as a kept woman in 1780s Paris—just as Lamartine had said of Théroigne, ‘as the whirlwind attracts things of no weight’. Like Théroigne, she saw the revolution as an opportunity to jettison her unhappy past, reinventing herself as a prolific and enthusiastic political pamphlet-writer. As an animal-lover and a believer in reincarnation, her campaigns were occasionally eccentric but always benevolent. Gouges advocated the abolition of slavery, rights for illegitimate children (a cause close to her heart—she claimed to be the bastard daughter of a marquis) and cleaner streets, and proposed setting up maternity hospitals, a national theatre for women and public workshops for the unemployed. But both the republican and the royalist papers reviled her.
Actors and actresses like Olympe de Gouges, inhabiting the same demi-monde as Théroigne in her incarnation as Mlle Campinado, were until 1789 not only automatically excluded from political life but excommunicated from the Church. Because of this treatment, many were immediately sympathetic to the revolutionary cause. The theatre's new star, François-Joseph Talma, used his traditional end-of-season speech in the spring of 1789 to speak out against prejudice and servitude and express the hope that the Estates-General (soon to be the National Assembly) would rid France of the last vestiges of feudalism. Marie-Joseph Chénier, an habitué of Germaine de Staël's salon and a new friend of Théroigne's, wrote Talma's footlights speech as well as the hit play of 1789, Charles IX, in which Talma played the murderous, manipulative, imbecile monarch. Although the play was suppressed after only thirty-three performances, patriotic audiences continued to clamour for the crucial scene in which the king acknowledged his betrayal of his country and his honour.
Talma's politicization was tacit as well as outspoken, evident as much in the way he interpreted roles, the way he moved and dressed, as in the words he spoke. Ancien régime theatre and festivals were seen as tawdry and elitist; revolutionaries, again taking their cue from Rousseau, idealized naturalism, innocence and purity. In popular celebrations, this meant replacing artificial tableaux with pastoral fêtes modelled on village life: country dancing, fresh, simple food, branches of greenery and bunches of flowers instead of tinsel. In the theatre, it meant Talma.
He was the first actor to play his roles in authentic costumes rather than the tights and doublets of traditional theatre-wear. His friend the painter Jacques-Louis David, who often collaborated with Talma in set-design, congratulated him for making his Charles IX look like a Fouquet painting; when Talma played Rousseau's ghost to celebrate the fall of the Bastille, he wore the same clothes in which Rousseau was pictured in his memorial portraits; as Proculus in Vol-taire's Brutus, in November 1790, David designed him a short toga modelled on antique statues, with bare legs, sandalled feet and cropped hair.
This desire to be genuine and uncontrived was revolutionary in itself. The liberal press contrasted Talma's Roman haircut with the powdered ringlets of the court party. Brissot's publication the Patriote Français declared it the only suitable republican hairstyle, praising its economy of money (hair-powder, made of flour, was unpatriotically wasteful) and time (elaborate aristocratic hair-dos took hours to perfect). ‘It is care-free and so assures the independence of a person,’ the paper continued, ‘it bears witness to a mind given to reflection, courageous enough to defy fashion.’ Even liberal society women stopped powdering their hair, letting it fall on to their shoulders in loose curls. Théroigne's iconic riding-habits were demonstrations of this same impulse towards free-thinking, simplicity and classlessness in appearance, with an added frisson of transgression—the idea of a woman in a man's clothes. By wearing such a deliberately masculine outfit, Théroigne imagined that she would be better respected by men: seen as a public woman, not a femme publique. She hoped looking less feminine would compel people to respond not to her appearance but to her words and conduct.
Under the ancien régime, people had been identified by their dress; in the new France, people were still defined by what they wore. Even though the ceremonial costumes of the three governing estates were abolished in October 1789, republican men continued to take pride in the unadorned black coats, breeches and shoes they had been required to wear as members of the Third Estate, in contrast to the glowing colours, velvet and lace of the other two estates. Théroigne urged her fellow-women to give up their luxuries, which were ‘incompatible with liberty’.
Several ironies were concealed behind the cult of naturalism. In the first place, it was often as artfully contrived as any ancien régime salonnière's conversation: the great revolutionary orator Hérault de Séchelles had lessons in declamation from the actress Mlle Clairon, Germaine de Staël's elocution teacher; later Napoléon would be tutored by Talma. Secondly, when republicanism became stylish—Théroigne's amazones soon adorned many society figures—its original intention of being outside fashion was defeated.
The unhappiest side-effect of this craze for simplicity was the destruction of the stay-making, embroidery and silk-making industries, which put thousands of workers, principally women, out of work. Starchers and laundresses saw less business when plain muslin cravats replaced stiffened lace jabots; coiffeurs became redundant when smart ladies no longer wanted model ships to float in their headdresses. Lace-makers rioted in Normandy and Velay in 1793; Lyon, centre of the textile industry, was defiantly anti-revolutionary. After the revolution, the duc d'Orléans's mistress Félicité de Genlis recounted a conversation she overheard between an old stay-maker and an old hoop-maker bemoaning the new fashions. ‘As soon as they began to introduce bodices, instead of whalebone stays,’ concluded the stay-maker darkly, ‘I immediately prophesied the revolution.’
Théroigne's riding-habit had not been intended as a fashion statement, but it soon became one. When she arrived at the newly formed Cordeliers' Club in February 1790, the sight of her crimson amazone and her sword provoked a flattering reaction. Camille Desmoulins greeted her: ‘It is the Queen of Sheba, come to see the Solomon of the sections [the Paris wards].’ Théroigne delivered her speech in her soft Walloon accent, proposing that a temple dedicated to Liberty, a home for the National Assembly and an altar to the fatherland be built on the ruins of the Bastille. It prompted wild applause.
Although a committee was set up to consider her suggestion, the conclusion to Desmoulins's article on her appearance at the Cordeliers' demonstrated her fellow-patriots' true attitude to women involving themselves in politics. With her Society of the Friends of the Law dissolving, Théroigne had requested membership of the Cordeliers' Club, which would allow her a consultative vote in the Assembly. While she was granted the honours of the session for her address, Desmoulins evaded her demand for an official political voice as a member of the Cordeliers':
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