Liberty: The Lives and Times of Six Women in Revolutionary France. Lucy Moore
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harp at their fête. The song based on that popular victory, ‘La Rosière de Salency’, was played at Thérésia's own fête champêtre.
The following summer, a similar festival was held to celebrate the anniversary of the so-called Tennis Court Oath. The deputies of the National Assembly processed to Versailles bearing the oath of allegiance inscribed on a bronze tablet alongside stones from the fallen Bastille. They renewed their oaths in the palace's tennis court, then returned to Paris, stopping in the Bois de Boulogne for a feast held under the trees at which they were attended by women dressed as shepherdesses. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen was read as grace. Georges Danton, crowned like the rest of the deputies with an oak-leaf wreath, proposed a toast to the liberty and happiness of the entire world. In one of the elaborately symbolic set-pieces so beloved of the revolutionaries, a model of the Bastille was set on the table and smashed, hopefully with great care, since revealed inside lay a real baby swaddled in white, representing oppressed innocence liberated by the revolution. A red Phrygian cap, modelled on those given to Roman slaves when they were freed, was placed on its head.
In Paris, meanwhile, rapturous preparations for the anniversary of the Bastille's fall were under way, as men and women of all ages and classes, ‘inspired by the same spirit’, helped turn the Champs de Mars into a vast amphitheatre. Even the king took his turn with a spade. The worksite became the backdrop for scenes of revolutionary virtue and brotherhood as Parisians competed with one another to contribute to the cause of freedom and the patrie. Women and men saw themselves as equal contributors to the effort: ‘I honour no less that multitude of citizens and citizenesses who do not think that they have consecrated those works by their hands but their hands by those works,’ wrote Camille Desmoulins. The atmosphere was fervently emotional. It would have been impossible, wrote Louis-Sebastien Mercier, to have beheld the scene without being moved.
Women of gentle birth were eager to be a part of Federation Day. ‘Ladies took the instruments of labour in their hands, and removed a little of the earth,’ wrote Helen Williams, ‘that they might be able to say that they had assisted in the preparations.’ Pauline de Laval—beloved by Thérésia's and Germaine's friend Mathieu de Montmorency—caught pneumonia after spending the whole night before the celebrations helping cart dirt on the Champs de Mars, and died a few days later, ‘victim to an excess of patriotic zeal’.
Their unpowdered hair falling loosely on to their shoulders, wearing blue military-style jackets with red collars and cuffs based on National Guard uniforms, or straw bonnets and white muslin dresses trimmed with tricolour ribbons and sashes, or riding-habits à la Théroigne—all as expressions of their modish political sympathies—fashionable ladies like Thérésia de Fontenay brought drinks to the men toiling at the Champs de Mars. Even the colours of their clothes echoed the mood of the times: a shade of red known as ‘Foulon's blood’ was named after an unpopular minister killed in the aftermath of the Bastille's fall.
On 14 July the statue of the king most admired by the revolutionaries, Henri IV, sported a tricolour scarf. Priests and National Guardsmen in their bright new uniforms of red, white and blue danced in the streets with white-clad girls. Lamps hung in the trees lining the Champs-Élysées, the palace of the Louvre was illuminated and the site of the Bastille had been turned into a park. Representatives from the newly created French regional departments processed beside the deputies of the National Assembly, the National Guard and the king and queen. Talleyrand celebrated mass on the monumental Altar of the Fatherland while Lafayette administered the oath to the people, who, right arms upheld, swore ‘to be faithful forever to the nation, the law and the king’. Fireworks fizzled in the pouring rain, and the hundreds of thousands of patriotic onlookers cried, ‘The French revolution is cemented with water, instead of blood!’ ‘What is it to me if I'm wet,’ sang the poissardes, ‘for the cause of liberty?’ As one historian comments on the ecstatic mood of the day, ‘no fatal gap had yet opened up between principles and reality’. Only the queen could not hide her ill-humour.
The air of celebration permeated the nation. ‘This memorable day was like an experiment in electricity,’ wrote Mercier. ‘Everything which touched the chain partook of the shock’. Helen Williams thought it ‘the most sublime spectacle’ ever witnessed, while her countryman William Wordsworth, landing in Calais on Federation Day, was struck by how ‘individual joy embodied national joy’. Everywhere, ‘benevolence and blessedness spread like a fragrance’.
Although Parisian women had been refused permission by the Constitution Committee to take part in the main ceremony—they were permitted instead to organize a tableau representing the confederation being offered to St Genevieve—across the country women celebrated alongside the men. In Beaufort-en-Vallée, eighty-three women disappeared during the ceremony and returned, as a surprise, in costumes representing the eighty-three departments; the women of Dénezé-sous-le-Lude received the municipality's reluctant consent to hold their own Federation Day celebrations. As an expression of the benevolent atmosphere of the day in Angers, ‘each of the municipal officers insisted on taking the arm of one of those women that are called women of the people’.
Motivated by the same spirit that led fine ladies to pick up shovels for the first time in their lives, donating one's jewels to the caisse patriotique became far more chic than wearing them. Félicité de Genlis 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.
‘Every man seems at pains to show that he has wasted as few moments as possible at his toilette,’ wrote Helen Williams, commenting on the trend for negligence in dress, ‘and that his mind is bent on higher cares than the embellishment of his person.’ There was an element of fancy dress in all this artful simplicity that characterized every stage of the revolution except the darkest moments of the Terror. It was almost as if people were trying on new identities with each change of their political faith, or struggling to define themselves through their appearance when everything around them was shifting and uncertain. Talma's classical costume for his role in Voltaire's Brutus, combined with the early revolutionaries' hero-worship of the Greeks and Romans, made a craze of antiquity. ‘We were transformed into Spartans and Romans,’ remembered the actress Louise Fusil. Helen Williams even took lessons in Roman history from a private tutor. When Brutus was performed, with its noble revolutionary theme of a father sacrificing his sons to save the Roman republic, the subject was considered so incendiary that weapons were banned from the theatre and extra police forces were marshalled in case of trouble.
David's monumental history painting, The Lictors Bringing Back to Brutus the Bodies of his Sons, had been shown for the first time at the Salon of August 1789. Louis XVI, David's patron, had requested for the exhibition a painting of Coriolanus, the fifth-century Roman leader who had safeguarded the rights of the aristocracy over the people. When David defied him by submitting the Brutus painting instead, at first the king banned it, but then submitted to public pressure. Art students wearing the uniform of the newly created National Guard watched over it in the gallery. It caused a sensation: as the newspaper Père Duchesne observed, David's paintings ‘had inflamed more souls for liberty than the best books’.
In the background of David's drawing of the Tennis Court Oath, exhibited in the Salon of 1791, a bolt of lightning—symbol of liberty—strikes the Chapel-Royal at Versailles. Félicité de Genlis's response to this sketch demonstrated the underlying conservatism of her liberal views. She challenged him about it, arguing that it seemed to show ‘the destruction of the royal family’; he responded that it was meant to indicate merely ‘the destruction of despotism’. They never spoke again.
Helen Williams later commented on the hypocrisy of nobles like Félicité de Genlis, who claimed to be revolutionaries, but who despite their genuine enthusiasm for change never betrayed their class. ‘I have found out that an aristocrate always begins a political conversation assuring you he is not one—that no one wished more sincerely than him for reform,’ she wrote in 1794. They would continue, she said, by protesting, ‘But to take away the King's power, to deprive the clergy of their revenues, is pushing things to an extremity, at which every honest mind