"The Lives and Times of Six Women in Revolutionary France." - could well be the book title of a book written in our own time. Only, the title would probably read "The lives and times of eight Women in Revolutionary France" -- as I reported on the seven women in Sarkozy's government -- and then we would have to add the eighth, namely Cecilia Sarkozy, who, I have no doubt, is going to leave her deep footprints in this era of this current revolution in France.In the New York Times this week, Judith Warner reviews a book about the women that marched to Versailles in October 1789.
In 1791, Olympe de Gouges, a radical pamphleteer, published a response to the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, which proclaimed France a constitutional monarchy and gave all men of property the right to vote. “Woman is born free and lives equal to man in her rights,” reads the first article of her Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen, which demanded full political rights and responsibilities for women. Since “woman has the right to mount the scaffold,” Gouges noted, “she must equally have the right to mount the rostrum.”
The book, "Liberty", is subtitled "The Lives and Times of Six Women in Revolutionary France." and is by the author, Lucy Moore. (HarperCollins)
The review:
Gouge’s ideas were considered so laughable that they didn’t threaten — or even interest — the revolutionary powers of the day. She plastered the walls of Paris with her posters, the British historian Lucy Moore writes in her marvelous new book, “Liberty: The Lives and Times of Six Women in Revolutionary France,” but no one cared. “One sees them, stops for a second, and says to oneself, ‘Ah, c’est Olympe de Gouges,’ ” a government spy reported.
And so it went with women’s efforts to include themselves in the effervescence of liberté, égalité and fraternité that swept France in the revolutionary period. France’s citoyennes were used in the streets of Paris as stooges and enforcers or idolized as keepers of the revolutionary home and heart, but when they drew attention to themselves as individuals rather than symbols, they were disdained, despised and sometimes, like Gouges, condemned to death. Women soon discovered, Moore writes, that “the ‘rank’ of citoyenne carried with it neither civic liberties nor political rights,” and “any woman who did have a voice in 18th-century France, from the queen down, was denounced for immorality.”
As the revolution unfolded, female influence came to be associated with the corrupt court intrigues of the ancien régime. Robespierre, Moore observes, was a particular misogynist, hating the “flesh-and-blood” degradation he associated with womankind. In deference to — and, it seems, genuine belief in — the prevailing sentiments of the day, women like the liberal aristocrat Germaine de Staël and the civil servant’s wife Manon Roland, who kept the most influential salons in revolutionary Paris, took care to distance themselves from overt expressions of ambition or ownership of ideas.
De Staël had a particular talent, a contemporary wrote, of declaiming for the benefit of her male guests “in strokes of fire the ideas they thought they held.” Roland, who lived, breathed and wrote about politics until her dying day, let it be known that she would rather chew off her fingers than publish her thoughts. Yet her attempts to ape respectable female modesty couldn’t save her; because of the influence she wielded in her husband’s world, she was called a monster by the press and sent to the guillotine. “Even though she was a mother, she sacrificed nature by trying to raise herself above it,” wrote one contemporary journalist. “The desire to be learned led her to forget the virtues of her sex.”
De Staël, buttressed by her enormous wealth and privilege, avoided the guillotine but was denounced as an intriguer and a nymphomaniac. Most pitiably of all, Théroigne de Méricourt, a former courtesan who believed she could escape the bounds of her “ruined” life by joining forces with the friends of the revolution, was publicly whipped by a band of virtuous street women. Reviled as a whore, she descended into madness and spent the rest of her days chained to the walls of an asylum, raving about liberty, equality and royalists long after the revolution had ended.
The women of the Paris street, represented here by the chocolate-maker Pauline Léon, were repudiated as “bloodthirsty Furies” and in many cases arrested. No woman with any kind of public standing was safe; even the “delectable” Thérésia de Fontenay, who, Moore suggests, probably took an initial interest in politics because it was fashionable to do so, emerged from the revolution “wearing diamond toe rings and anklets to hide — or perhaps to draw attention to — the scars on her feet and legs from the rat bites she had received in prison.”
In Moore’s telling, only Juliette Récamier, the “icon” of womanhood in the Directory and early Napoleonic period, enjoyed renown but escaped the revolution more or less unscathed. In the public imagination, she was, apparently, a woman emptied of all bodily reality, living in what was said to be a white marriage — pure abstraction, pure projection, made flesh.
The revolution, Moore shows, brought women many tributes to their maternal graces, their high-minded morals, their “natural” homebound virtues. Yet the veneration of Woman and hatred of real women were one and the same. “Ah!” Lucile Duplessis, later the wife of the revolutionary journalist Camille Desmoulins, wrote of the men in her world. “That they would worship us less and set us free!”
It is going to be very interesting to see what roles such strong independent women as Cecilia Sarkozy, Rachida Dati, Penelope Fillon and 'MAM'will play in the new revolution that has started in France today -------- this might well be a space worth while watching!...........
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