Liberty: The Lives and Times of Six Women in Revolutionary France by Lucy Moore Read Free Book Online

equality’.

L IKE A CAROUSEL abandoned to centrifugal force, with respect for the government and tradition dissolving, France spun into revolution in 1789. The harvest the previous year had been destroyed by late hail storms and the winter was the worst for nearly a century. Bread prices had doubled and people were dying of starvation. Bands of brigands – and horrifying rumours of their brutality – swept through the countryside, taking advantage of the chaos caused by the abolition of feudal rights and dues, and the vacuum once filled by the king’s heavily centralized government.
    Alongside Germaine de Staël’s gilded cocoon teemed another world. Marie-Antoinette’s friend, the painter Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, was terrified in the summer of 1789 when she looked out of her window to find sans-culottes shaking their fists at her from the street and jumping on to the running-board of her carriage, shouting, ‘Next year, you’ll be behind the carriages and we’ll be the ones inside!’ When émigrés, including Vigée-Lebrun, began leaving France, the savage insults of passers-by floated in the wake of their heavy-laden carriages: ‘There go some more on the way out, those dogs of aristocrats.’
    Although Germaine and her friends passionately believed in reform, their ideas were largely conceptual. The aristocracy numbered several hundred thousand in a population of twenty-eight million; perhaps five thousand nobles lived in Paris, a city of about 550,000 inhabitants, in 1790. Isolated from the rest of France in their magnificent hôtels and crested carriages, the only common people with whom they came into contact tame peasants or liveried servants, they had little comprehension of what life was like for ordinary men and women. Rich and poor viewed each other as utterly alien beings; it seemed allthey had in common was their cynicism and their disaffection with the king and his government. The rich saw the poor as barely human–savage beings for whom it was certainly not worth stopping one’s carriage if they had had the bad luck to have been run over – while the poor viewed the rich as frivolous, mannered and cruel.
    Popular responses to the political upheavals taking place in Paris were marked by a defiant, unrestrained combination of violence and delight: ‘no riotous scene…did not have its festive aspect,’ writes Mona Ozouf in her study of revolutionary festivals, and there was ‘no collective celebration without a groundswell of menace’. Poissard , the Parisian slang dialect of the markets, exemplified this peculiarly French juxtaposition of levity and deadly seriousness in ‘comic and abusive verse, rhymed insults and a kind of tough, threatening talk’. Its jeering tone was fashionable among slumming aristocrats in the 1770s and 1780s, who performed poissard plays in their private theatres without any conception of the true resentment that lay beneath its rough mockery.
    The typical poissarde woman, literally a fish-seller, but including other market women, seamstresses or laundresses, was described in the revolutionary newspaper Pére Duchesne as a plain speaker, a frugal housekeeper and a chaste wife. She had an ugly face and despised finery, and was devoted to her family and capable of defending it savagely if need be. Her children were raised according to the political principles she and her husband held, a tradition of fierce egalitarianism and independence, and she claimed the right to sign petitions, fill the audience chambers of the National Assembly and denounce those she considered unpatriotic, deliberately addressing them by the familiar ‘ tu ’ rather than the more formal ‘ vous ’. Although the revolution was marked by violent anticlericalism, these women often continued to revere Mary, ‘ la bonne petite mére ’. Many of them lived in the faubourg Saint-Antoine, just east of the Bastille on the outskirts of Paris.
    Common women were praised by revolutionaries, generally