Review: Liberty by Lucy Moore (original) (raw)

Liberty: The Lives and Times of Six Women in Revolutionary France
by Lucy Moore
464pp, Harper Press, £20

If the French revolution is arguably the most dramatic single event in European history before 1914, then what we choose to remember of it is a useful cultural indicator. Just recently there's been another surge of popular interest in Marie Antoinette. Lucy Moore's Liberty is a timely reminder that there were women rather more pertinent to us than the celebrity queen. Male historians tend to relegate them to bit-players, but in their fierce independence of thought and action, they represent a challenge not only to the revolution's inherent misogyny, but to subsequent interpretation.

Three of Moore's chosen six - Germaine de Staël, Théroigne de Méricourt, Manon Roland - faced this misogyny head on, while the glamorous socialites Thérésia Cabarrus Fontenay and Juliette Récamier worked with it to gain a subtle and substantial power. The shadowy sixth, Pauline Léon, was a shop-girl turned outspoken activist, who slipped back into obscurity when she married her fellow-radical lover. Around these six main actors dance extraordinary figures, such as the doomed Olympe de Gourges, her ideas roughly a century ahead of her time and dismissed as insane: she deserves a chapter to herself. The ghost at the feast is the emblematic figure of Liberty, who at her high point was shown as the bare-breasted suckler of the nation, before being replaced during the terror by a muscular hunk.

Moore makes it quite clear that, since the philosophical wellspring of the revolution was Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the odds were heavily against gender equality, whatever other types of equality were proposed. Rousseau empowered women through the mother-child relationship, but was firmly against them having a public role. Social equilibrium lay in sexual inequality. If the foppish Robespierre's suspicion of women was rooted in his peculiar psychology, it was also a matter of theoretical integrity.

This dangerous fusion was on display early on, when Marie Antoinette was accused at her show trial of sexually abusing her son. If the Jacobins wanted to suppress activist women, they pictured them as "sexually depraved". After Charlotte Corday stuck her kitchen knife just above the naked Marat's clavicle, it was only natural for her to be depicted as a "tortured virgin" who read porn, instead of someone who believed (quite rightly) that the brutish Marat was perverting the revolution. This didn't prevent onlookers at her execution falling instantly in love with her.

Women were, ironically, a hefty political force: as Moore states, "the revolutionary government knew exactly how they had come to power - with a speech at the Palais Royal and the women of Les Halles demanding bread". A perceived sin of the ancien régime was its corrupt reliance on the whispers of mistresses: it was the whispers of the market women that the new rulers feared. Unrest in the countryside was largely due to wives and mothers having to cope without their men (off fighting for the republic) through a succession of hopeless harvests and terrible winters. Female power was fully recognised - and therefore suppressed when it contradicted the revolution's aims.

Moore expertly captures the frustration of activist thinkers who happened to be female - especially acute in those who idolised Rousseau. At least three of her chosen six were linked to immensely powerful men. De Staël and Roland left a legacy of brilliant writings that are shot through with a vivid sense of "the shackles of prejudice", as Roland termed it while awaiting the guillotine. Roland comes across as a fascinating and deeply impressive figure, connected to the group of middle-class professionals that included Robespierre, Danton and Marat. The renowned De Staël straddled the aristocracy - her father was Louis XVI's finance minister - and the world of the reformers, her chief lover being the republic's war minister. Conscious of her physical plainness but "irresistibly seductive" in conversation, her salons were the focal point for pre-revolutionary reform, and eventually became the bane of Napoléon's rule.

The famously lovely De Méricourt was different: the 19th century saw this former courtesan as the very embodiment of romantic revolutionary passion, storming the palace in her blood-red riding coat and sword, free at last of the "private injustices" that had previously chained her. Disillusioned by her male counterparts, she nevertheless argued for the formation of all-female regiments, and engaged in some brutal action against the royalists. Unhinged by a mob-whipping in the street and imprisonment, she ended in the asylum, a pathetic remnant of the glory days, muttering long radical speeches to the rats until well after Napoléon's fall.

Fate dealt a much better hand to the reformist Fontenay and young Récamier - who was painted by a breathless David and described by De Staël as having both an "indescribable voluptuousness and a singularly likable innocence". Surviving the terror (by a whisker in Fontenay's case), they became the celebrated exemplars of the glitteringly louche, post-revolutionary regime known as the Directory. Moore lets the two women's seductive powers rise thickly from the page, without betraying their wily and rather modern intelligence: Fontenay wore diamond toe rings "to hide - or perhaps to draw attention to - the scars on her feet ... from the rat bites she had received in prison". She insisted it was by her persuasion that Tallien, her husband, threatened Robespierre with (her) knife and brought an end to the terror.

De Staël, who died in exile, believed that "a society's treatment of its female citizens was the measure of its civilisation". Moore's poised, scholarly and entertaining analysis reveals just how long and hard the road to civilisation always is, and how footsore it makes the vanguard.

#183; Adam Thorpe's most recent book is Is This the Way You Said? (Cape)