Читать книгу Liberty: The Lives and Times of Six Women in Revolutionary France - Lucy Moore - Страница 11

My spirit and my heart find everywhere the obstacles of opinion and the shackles of prejudice, and all my force is spent in vainly rattling my chains.

MANON ROLAND

SEVENTEEN-YEAR-OLD Thérésia de Fontenay inhabited a world in which politics was a fashion; for thirty-six-year-old Manon Roland, wife of a provincial civil servant and recently arrived in Paris, politics was an all-consuming obsession.

Manon Roland returned to Paris, the city in which she had grown up, in February 1791. Living for the most part outside the capital since her marriage eleven years earlier, she had devoted herself to realizing Rousseau's ideal of the citoyenne as a wife and mother whose political passivity was her patriotic duty. Although she acted as her husband's secretary, according to Rousseau's strictures she did not interest herself in public affairs. In 1783 she boasted to her friend Augustin Bosc d'Antic, Théroigne de Méricourt's future admirer, that she never bothered herself with politics; as late as 1787 she described herself as ‘yawning over the papers’.

But the revolution, as she phrased it, ‘engulfed’ her. By May the following year, when the the royal administration was challenged for the first time, all her indifference had dissolved. ‘But how can one speak of…private troubles,’ she demanded, ‘when there are public ones?’ In August 1789, writing to Bosc d'Antic again, she had to remind herself how to address him on a subject other than politics, but concluded, ‘We do not deserve to have a country if we are indifferent to public affairs.’

From the start, Manon was convinced the monarchy would have to go. She had emerged fully formed like Athena, clothed in her armour of uncompromising opinion, a republican from the outset. As she later wrote, ‘I had hated kings since I was a child and I could never witness without an involuntary shudder the spectacle of a man abasing himself before another man.’ In this she was more radical than her husband and their friends, most of whom were at first constitutional monarchists favouring the same type of reforms as the more progressive of Germaine de Staël's aristocratic friends.

She was also unashamedly belligerent. When her letters to Bosc d'Antic in Paris in 1789 and 1790 were intercepted and opened (as she imagined, by government spies), she responded by threatening the ‘cowards’ who had violated her rights: ‘Let them tremble to think that she [Manon] can make a hundred enthusiasts who will in turn make a million others.’ This was how she saw her role—as inspiration and support for the men who would destroy the crumbling edifice of the ancien régime and create a new, free France. The patriot, she told Bosc d'Antic, unwittingly describing her own effect on the men around her, should inflame people's courage, should ‘demand, thunder, scare’.

When she and Roland reached Paris, Manon lost no time in gathering around her an informal ‘petit comité’ of men with similar backgrounds and political views. Early in April she informed a friend that ‘the society of which I just spoke to you will form, and the meetings may even be in our house’. The regular visitors to her salon at the Hôtel Britannique, on the rue Guénégaud on the left bank, were mostly in their thirties, provincial lawyers, journalists or civil servants drawn from the educated middle classes. Its members crossed the Pont-Neuf into the rue Guénégaud most afternoons between four and six, after the National Assembly (in which many of them were deputies) closed and before the Jacobin Club (in which many of them sat) opened.

Some of them, like Manon's husband Jean-Marie Roland de la Platière, had tenuous links with the lower rungs of the nobility but had been largely excluded from the social and political advantages peers enjoyed before 1789. At fifty-seven, Jean-Marie Roland was distinguished among their friends by his age. He was a tall, stiff, spare man habitually dressed in a threadbare brown or black suit, with no wig covering his thinning hair above a mild face. Before 1791 he had worked as an inspector of manufactures, earning the respect of his colleagues through his diligence, energy and integrity.

His wife, twenty years his junior, was animated and immaculate in her plain amazone, her rich brown hair cut simply but modishly ‘en jockei’, and ‘an expression of uncommon sweetness’ (according to her friend Helen Maria Williams) in her full hazel eyes. Everything about Manon proclaimed her ‘most ardent attachment to liberty’: her self-control, her warmth, her penetration, her obvious virtue and modesty.

Even before they arrived in Paris Manon had been central to a set of men who shared her passionate commitment to reform, and who would form the core of the Brissotin (later known as Girondin) group coalescing at her salon in 1791. Bosc d'Antic and François Lanthenas had been friends with Manon and her husband for years; in their letters the quartet called each other brother and sister, a quiet statement of the ideals by which they hoped to live. Since 1787, Manon had been corresponding with Jacques-Pierre Brissot (from whom their loosely affiliated group, the Brissotins, would derive one of its names), and contributing anonymously to his Patriote Français under the byline, ‘Letters from a Roman Lady’.

Brissot, who before 1789 styled himself, with an aristocratic flourish, ‘de Warville’, was the son of a cook from Chartres. Before the revolution he had been a jobbing pamphleteer, selling information to the police when times were hard and, when that expedient failed, spending time in a debtors' prison and in the Bastille. The man Manon called ‘generous Brutus’ had been agitating for change throughout the 1780s, campaigning for the abolition of the slave trade and forming a Society of the Friends of the Negroes.

Brissot exposed the Rolands to an international network of liberal reformers. The English republican historian Catherine Macaulay had given him a letter of introduction to George Washington when he visited the United States in 1788, recommending him as a ‘warm friend to liberty’. Brissot's Travels in the United States was intended to hold up the American example as a model to Frenchmen. He called Americans ‘the true heroes of humanity’ because they had discovered the secret of preserving individual liberty by correlating their private morality with their public responsibility. But despite her respect for Brissot and for the way his private life reflected his ideals, Manon recognized that his political weaknesses were too much easy charm and too naïve a faith in mankind's goodness. His quiet wife ‘admired his devotion to the cause’ but was harder-headed: ‘she thought France unworthy of liberty and that anyone who attempted to promote it was wasting his time’.

It was Brissot who introduced the Rolands to three deputies of the National Assembly who were in 1791 the focus of progressive hopes: the cheerful, vain lawyer Jérôme Pétion, who had escorted Théroigne de Méricourt back to her lodgings in Versailles on the day of the women's march in October 1789; another lawyer, Maximilien Robespierre, whose sneering watchfulness did not yet excite Manon's distrust; and the passionate, principled François Buzot. They were regular frequenters of the Jacobin Club which was fast becoming a political elite to whom, in the words of Camille Desmoulins, Robespierre's schoolfriend, ‘only the witness of their conscience is necessary’. Manon nicknamed them the ‘Incorruptibles’; and another left-wing wife, in the classical vocabulary of the day, called them the ‘bons et précieux Triumvirs’. All three were soon frequent visitors to the rue Guénégaud.

A few others added their voices to the radical chorus in Manon's salon, but she was sparing in her approval and favoured those who shared her morals as well as her opinions. Mme Roland admired Tom Paine, author of Common Sense, more for his bold, original political principles than for his ability to realize them; she and the radical aristocrat Condorcet, Germaine's friend, respected one another's views and intelligence, but she was contemptuous of his crippling timidity.

Given Manon's continued adherence to Rousseau's disapproval of women involving themselves in public life, it was hardly surprising that no other women were invited to these meetings. She respected Brissot's wife and liked Pétion's; hers was one of the few houses at which Manon deigned to call. Buzot's older, less attractive wife she considered unworthy of him.

‘I knew the proper role of my sex and never exceeded it,’ Manon wrote later, describing how she sat at a separate table from the men, silently sewing or writing letters as they discussed the events of the day. Listening submissively to visitors who thought their every word a revelation to her and considered her capable of no more than stitching a shirt gave her a secret thrill. But although she insisted she had accepted her ‘proper role’, she still had to bite her lip to stop herself speaking out of turn. While she admired her guests' honourable intentions, powers of reasoning and personal enlightenment, she admitted she sometimes longed to box their ears when she heard them wasting ‘their time in pure cleverness and wit’ and failing either to reach conclusions or to establish objectives.

Although her guests were often as frustrating as they were inspirational, Manon thrived. ‘I loved political life, its talk, its intrigues,’ she wrote. ‘I do not mean the petty intrigues of a court or the sterile controversies of gossip and fools, but the true art of politics, the art of ruling men and organising their happiness in society.’

Having observed the events of the revolution from afar for so long, when she arrived in Paris Manon was hungry to witness for herself the new machinery of power. ‘I went to all the meetings,’ she remembered, watching among others ‘the powerful Mirabeau…[and] the astute Lameth’ at the National Assembly. She was unimpressed by what she saw. The Assembly, she wrote in March 1791, less than a month after her arrival, was divided, weak and corrupt, the government was ‘detestable’ and the Jacobins, among whom she counted her husband and their friends, neglected their responsibility to serve the cause of liberty. Worst of all, the interests of the old regime profited from these divisions to inhibit the revolution's progress.

Acquainting herself with the political climate also meant attending a session of the Social Circle in the library of the Jacobin Club. Manon was ‘very well satisfied with the meeting’, she told a friend that March. ‘I listened to the greatest principles of liberty outlined with force, warmth and clarity; I saw them applauded with delight.’ Her detached tone—she did not applaud herself but, rather, was pleased that others were applauding—suggests that she, like the aristocratic salonnières Germaine de Staël and Félicité de Genlis, viewed the Social Circle as more useful for other women than for herself; she had no need of it. Even though her writing did appear in the Mercure National (anonymously, as in the Patriote Français) edited by François and Louise Robert, organizers of the Social Circle, Manon attended meetings only rarely. Her own coterie was infinitely more engrossing.

Manon Roland did not see herself as part of a feminist movement like the one Pauline Léon was trying to initiate; instead she saw herself as a personal inspiration to individual patriots and republicans. Her relationship to the inner workings of politics convinced her, like Germaine de Staëlin 1789, that she could accomplish more through her private influence on the men who were shaping policy than through speaking or writing publicly as women like Pauline Léon and Théroigne de Méricourt, less well connected than her, were obliged to do. Their double handicap, of class as well as gender, forced them to act radically; Manon, whose friends were becoming among the most influential men in the nation, had no need to draw attention to herself in order to make her voice heard.

Five years earlier, a man or woman from Manon Roland's background would never have had access to the kind of power her ‘petit comité’ was contemplating in 1791. Manon herself came from a family of bourgeois Parisian artisans. She was born in 1754, the beloved only daughter of an ambitious engraver, Gatien Phlipon, and his gentle wife Marguerite, whom she described as ‘plain, undistinguished people’. Manon spent her earliest years with a wet-nurse in the country, returning to her parents in Paris a precocious child of two.

Manon's upbringing was middle-class: while her mother did not work, she ran the household, and little Manon was often sent out to market in her linen smock to fetch a bunch of parsley or a head of lettuce that had been forgotten. She knew how to make an omelette and shell peas, to mend sheets and polish the silver. Although the adult Manon was proud of her bourgeois housekeeping skills, it is hard to escape the feeling that she considered them beneath her: when she described how capable she was of making her own supper she could not resist adding, ‘yet no one who looked at me would have thought of burdening me with such a menial task’.

This sense of being somehow better than the circumstances into which she had been born was stimulated by her education. Unusually for a girl of the middling sort—probably because she was an only child—her parents indulged her obvious intelligence and aptitude for learning. As well as going to a parish catechism class on Sundays and receiving Latin lessons from her uncle, a priest, the young Manon was taught writing, geography, music and dancing by tutors in the family's first-floor apartment on the quai de l'Horloge, on the Île de la Cité, and her father taught her drawing and engraving. She was allowed to read anything she chose. Like Rousseau, she had absorbed the republicanism of Plutarch's Lives before she was ten; she wept to think that she had not been born in another time. ‘I should have been born a Spartan or Roman woman, or at least a French man,’ she lamented at twenty-two.

Manon's indomitable spirit and strong sense of self-righteousness were evident from an early age. If she was beaten unjustly by her father, she would bite his thigh. On one occasion, aged about seven, she refused to take some medicine; her father beat the hysterical child three times for refusing it, and still she would not give in. Finally a sort of ‘stiffness’ came over her, ‘a new strength flowed through my veins’. Manon tucked up her chemise and again offered her back to her father's blows. Her terrified mother, seeing the little girl's extraordinary, stubborn stoicism, persuaded her father to leave the room and put Manon to bed. Two hours later, with tears in her eyes, she persuaded Manon to take the medicine for her sake. The child finally swallowed it, but instantly threw it up and lapsed into a much more serious fever than the one the medicine had warranted in the first place. Her father never dared beat her again.

This story, as she tells it, is revealing on several counts. First, its triumphant conclusion shows Manon's confidence in her own judgement; even thirty years later, and a mother herself, she did not doubt her right to have refused the hated medicine. Second, the importance she placed on the experiences of her childhood self and her highly intimate tone, with the narrator playing the role of the innocent victim of injustice, are directly derived from Rousseau's Confessions. Finally, the context in which she remembered the incident—while she waited in prison to be tried by the Revolutionary Tribunal, knowing her probable fate would be the scaffold—is vital. Calling to mind her youthful conviction and courage gave her strength to face the future, whatever it held. ‘They can kill me,’ she concluded, ‘but they shall not conquer me!’

Manon's memories of the web of social relationships that dominated her childhood demonstrate the rigidity of ancien régime France, and her resentment of the invisible barriers that restricted her. She was never able to forget her place in society, describing in icy detail the humiliation she suffered when she was invited to dinner by a noble family only to be sent to the kitchen to eat their left-overs, and the fury she felt when, calling on an aristocratic connection of her grandmother's, she heard her beloved grandmother condescendingly addressed by her maiden name. When she visited Versailles she could not wait to leave: she resented seeing all that wealth and energy expended on ‘individuals who were already too powerful and whose personal qualities were so unmemorable’. She knew if she spent any longer there she would ‘detest these people so much that I shall not know what to do with my hatred…[it is] all so unfair and so absurd’.

Reading between the lines, though, a certain social fluidity is evident alongside the strict stratification. Manon was the daughter of an engraver, but her parents had such high hopes for her that they sent her to be educated at a convent, like the aristocratic Thérésia Cabarrus, and had her taught accomplishments like dancing and guitar-playing. She did meet rich, influential people, some of whom encouraged her intellectual pretensions. Manon may have resented not being the star of the literary salons and concerts to which she was taken, but she was taken to them. Compared to the childhood of someone like Théroigne de Méricourt, her perspective was far from enclosed; and it was from exactly this type of background that one of the most celebrated and powerful women of the ancien régime, Mme de Pompadour—Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson, daughter of a steward—had sprung. But for the young Manon, to whom virtue was as important as happiness, her station in life was as much an obstacle to her ambitions as her sex.

Her education and composure granted her access (albeit limited) to the nobility's exalted world at the same time as encouraging her to hope for its downfall. The ancients taught the young Manon to admire self-discipline, civic responsibility and virtue, and cast a critical light on the feckless aristocrats with whom she came into contact. Stories of courageous Roman matrons like Cornelia and Agrippina encouraged her to hope that she might one day be worthy of similar tales. ‘I thought of my own duty and the part I could play in the future,’ wrote Manon, revealing how far her ambition to play a role in history blinded her to the reality of her situation—for at fourteen what part could she have conceived of playing, other than wife and mother? ‘If souls were pre-existent to bodies and permitted to choose those they would inhabit,’ she told a friend in 1768, ‘I assure you that mine would not have adopted a weak and inept sex which often remains useless.’

After a pious girlhood, during which she hoped at one stage to become a nun, Manon's reading led her to Voltaire. His belief in an aristocracy of intellect appealed to her, as did his profound scepticism. While she retained her faith in God, the Catholic Church became for her from her late teens nothing more than a hypocritical and often harmful institution—‘a scene where feeble-minded people…worship a piece of bread’. ‘I cannot digest, among other things, the idea that all those who do not think like me will be damned for all eternity,’ wrote Manon, ‘that so many people will be cast into the eternal flames because they have never heard of a Roman pontiff who preaches a severe morality which he does not often practise.’ Like Voltaire, however, she believed organized religion played an essential social role, the poor's only consolation for the deprivation of their lives. The Church, like the Social Circle, had its place; but she, Manon Roland, had no need of it.

Manon discovered Rousseau when she was twenty-one. His impact on her was as profound as Plutarch's had been when she was eight, putting into words feelings and ideas she had sensed before reading him but had never articulated herself. Looking outward, Rousseau's books validated her anger at the social injustice she saw around her, and allowed her to imagine challenging the accepted order of things; turning inward, with his exaltation of romantic and maternal love, he showed her ‘the possibility of domestic happiness and the delights that were available to me if I sought them’.

So great was her devotion to Rousseau's principles that, like many other women of her generation, Manon accepted unquestioningly his belief that women should never venture outside domestic life. She would have agreed with the words of Germaine de Staël, another devotee of Rousseau's: ‘it is right to exclude women from public affairs. Nothing is more opposed to their natural vocation than a relationship of rivalry with men, and personal celebrity will always bring the ruin of their happiness.’ When someone predicted a future for Manon as a writer, she replied that she would chew her fingers off before publishing her work and pursuing renown. ‘I am avid for happiness and I find it most in the good which I can do,’ she wrote, much later. ‘I have no need for fame. Nothing suits me better than acting as a sort of Providence in the background.’

While Manon argued that women should avoid public lives, her desire to play God, even from the background, belied her protestations. The paradoxical nature of Rousseau's philosophy fed Manon's conviction that intense sensibility was the mark of greatness. Her egotism, critical nature, moodiness and tendency to introspection were for her the necessary price of attributes she prized: spontaneity, candour and passion. As she wrote to Roland before their marriage, when she read a novel, she never played the secondary role: ‘I have not read of a single act of courage or virtue without daring to believe myself capable of performing it myself.’ ‘Life was to her a drama in which she had been destined to play the main part,’ comments a modern biographer. ‘That this part was to turn out to be that of a tragic heroine she could not, at first, suspect, but when the time came to play that role, she would almost welcome the opportunity.’

The inescapable burden under which the young Manon laboured was her knowledge that despite her superiority to everyone she saw around her—in her intelligence, her good looks, her energy and discipline—nothing would change her fate as a woman of the middling ranks. ‘I knew that I was worth more,’ she wrote. Like Rousseau, she felt keenly the ‘unbearable contrast between the grandeur of my soul and the meanness of my fortune’. Her only chance to shape her destiny lay in her choice of husband.

Bourgeois Parisians arranged marriages for their children as assiduously as aristocrats at Versailles, and with as little reference to those children's feelings. Manon, the pretty only daughter of respectable, prosperous parents, was an attractive prospect. When she reached her teens, men began writing to her father requesting the chance to make her acquaintance, but none of them appealed. M. Phlipon was concerned only about setting Manon up with someone rich and well established; Manon had a more stringent list of requirements. Despite her background, she refused to consider tradesmen, because she saw commerce as avaricious: ‘having concerned myself since childhood with the relationships of men in society, having been nourished on the purest morality and steeped in the ideas of Plutarch and the philosophers, how could I possibly marry a merchant who would not think or feel like me about anything?’

Manon Phlipon did not meet the serious, intellectual Jean-Marie Roland de la Platière until she was twenty-two, by which time her mother had died, she herself had rejected a string of suitors and her father had gone through most of her dowry. Roland, the youngest of five sons from an ancient Beaujolais family which had claims to nobility (but no actual patent), was attracted to Manon but found her background and connections distasteful; it took him four years to propose.

The unflattering thought that Roland's love had taken so long to conquer his scruples was not lost on Manon, but, at twenty-six, few romantic illusions remained to her. She accepted Roland because she respected his morals and intellect; because the fact that he had overcome what she called ‘the external disadvantages of an alliance with me’ showed her that she could be sure of his esteem, once won; and because she could see no other role for herself than that of wife and mother. Just as Rousseau's heroine Julie had accepted her older suitor, Wolmar, Manon ‘married in a spirit of solemn rationalism, without reservation, and devoted myself completely to the role’.

High-minded and cerebral, Manon was entirely innocent when she married. Her wedding night, she said later, disproved her theory that she could endure great suffering ‘without crying out…though it must be said that surprise played a large part in that’. Roland did not awaken her sensuality and the desire to be a virtuous wife led her to suppress it. ‘But of course, that does not protect one from the agony of a real passion,’ she wrote, long afterwards. ‘In fact, it may simply store up fuel for it!’

In her memoirs Manon would describe in bald detail her first sexual experience, at twelve years old, when one of her father's apprentices clumsily tried to seduce her—grabbing her hand and putting it into his trousers, pulling her down on to his lap. After the first incident, she wrote, ‘the world began to seem a strange place’, and she was curious. The second time, fear outweighed inquisitiveness and she confessed everything to her mother. Mme Phlipon ‘skilfully exploited the repugnance which my youth and bashfulness had already made me feel’, making the naïve, ignorant Manon feel she was ‘the greatest sinner in the universe’. ‘I did not dare to be passionate,’ she wrote of her girlhood self.

Determined to find happiness in her domestic life even if it did not include romantic love or physical satisfaction, the young Mme Roland threw herself into her relationship with the husband she thought of as having ‘no sex’. She honoured and cherished him ‘as an affectionate daughter loves a virtuous father’ and found, when his younger friends made advances to her, a ‘voluptuous charm in remaining virtuous’.

The newly-wed Rolands moved to Amiens, where Roland was the local Inspector of Manufactures. In 1784, Manon spent some months in Paris trying to acquire for him the patent of nobility which his family claimed but had never purchased. It was typical of the way things were done under the ancien régime that Manon, rather than her husband, was entrusted with this responsibility. While she resented having to go to Versailles to solicit an honour for which she considered Roland's experience and knowledge more than qualified him, Manon pursued her objective with characteristic drive. The experience only confirmed to her the despicable nature of the system in which they lived: when she heard his suit had been rejected, she wrote to Roland, ‘in truth, we are people too honourable to succeed!’

Although she did not achieve her original aim, Manon did manage to get Roland transferred to Lyon, near his family home, Le Clos. From 1784 they lived with his mother near Villefranche for most of the year, spending the winter months in Lyon. Manon acted as Roland's housekeeper, secretary, copyist and proof-reader; she ran the household and saw to the education of their daughter Eudora, born in 1781. The Rousseauian doctrine that governed this stage of her life was neatly summed up on the other side of France by the young Maximilien Robespierre in 1784: ‘virtue produces happiness as the sun produces light’.

Like many men and women of their background who saw themselves as excluded from influence and privilege simply by virtue of their birth, and who chafed against the inequalities of the old system, during the 1780s the Rolands considered emigrating to the United States. The American War of Independence had inflamed them with the same sense of highly emotional anticipation as the liberal aristocrats who rushed to serve under Washington. It seemed to herald a momentous era of change: as Tom Paine wrote, ‘the birthday of a new world is at hand’.

Early America, seen through European eyes, was stylized into a paradigm of revolutionary ideals, from pastoralism to the fashion for the antique. Brissot wrote with misty romanticism that he would have liked to have been born ‘under the simple and rustic roof of an American husbandman’. It was said that the creators of the American nation had gathered in a peaceful wood, and on a grassy bank had chosen Washington as their leader. Washington's own rejection of an American crown was seen as surpassing the virtuous republicanism even of the Greeks and Romans. Brissot thought the Americans ‘greatly superior to these ancients’, and expressed the hope that Frenchmen would ‘be capable of surpassing their ancestors when the circumstances are favourable’.

Even the American attitude to women was admired by French radicals in the 1780s. Their austere, masculine republic had no time for boudoir politics, despite Abigail Adams's vain plea to her husband John:

I desire you would Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands [she wrote in 1776]. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention is not paid to the Ladies we are determined to ferment a Rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have not voice or Representation.

But events conspired to direct Brissot's and the Rolands' attention homewards. As Manon Roland told Brissot in 1790, ‘We regret this promised land less now that we have hopes for our own country.’

A few months in Paris were enough to convince Manon of the fragility of her hopes. In May 1791, three months after her arrival, she expressed the revulsion she felt when she attended sessions of the National Assembly—a revulsion caused by the intensity of seeing her sublime expectations disappointed. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed in one of the great early studies of the revolution, ‘disgust with the revolution and attachment to its results were almost contemporary with its birth’. ‘We must make another insurrection, or we will lose happiness and liberty; but I doubt that there will be enough vigour in the people for this rising, and I see things are given over to the hazard of events,’ Manon wrote bitterly to a friend in London. ‘Adversity forms nations like individuals, and even civil war, as horrible as it is, brings the regeneration of our character and our morals.’ More sacrifices were needed; more blood must flow. Behind her railing against the mediocrity of the revolutionaries, who cared more for ‘their little glory than the great interests of their country’, sounds relentlessly her own frustrated desire to act. ‘It is not spirit they lack, but soul!’ she exclaimed, sure that she possessed the soul required.

Manon's initial willingness to grasp the necessity of violence to the revolution was echoed by the radical journalist Jean-Paul Marat in his popular newspaper, L'Ami du Peuple. In the same month as Manon's tirade, he wrote that in 1790 ‘500 heads would have sufficed [to complete the revolution]; today 50,000 would be necessary; perhaps 500,000 will fall before the end of the year’. Even before the Reign of Terror the relationship between blood and liberty was direct and intimate: blood would make France free. As Simon Schama writes, violence ‘was not just an unfortunate side effect’ of the revolution, but its ‘source of collective energy. It was what made the Revolution revolutionary.’ Manon Roland was as aware of this brutal truth as was Marat himself.

On the afternoon of 21 June, the Rolands, Robespierre, Brissot and François Buzot were at Pétion's house when they heard news of the king and queen's flight from the Tuileries, where the royal family had been living in virtual house arrest since the autumn of 1789, increasingly horrified by the direction the revolution was taking and their powerlessness to halt it. According to Helen Williams, in 1790 when the king called Marie-Antoinette, in jest, Mme Capet (the French dynasty's family name—republicans would soon refer to him as Louis Capet), she replied wearily, addressing him as M. Capot—the word used at picquet, when the game is lost.

Across Paris on the same day, Pauline Léon, her mother and a friend, probably their neighbour Constance Évrard, were near the Palais Royal loudly protesting against the king's ‘infamous treason’. She reported that they were ‘almost assassinated’ by Lafayette's ‘mouchards’, or spies, and were saved by sans-culottes who succeeded in snatching them ‘from the hands of these monsters’, as she called the National Guardsmen.

Like Léon, Manon Roland despised kings and queens in general and the weak-willed Louis and his shallow wife in particular. The news that they had abandoned their pretence of accepting the revolution's changes electrified her and her friends: at last, the king had undone himself. The coterie at Pétion's on the 21st was convinced that the king's true attitude towards the revolution and the constitution had now been revealed to the people, and that advantage should be taken of this moment to prepare the ground for a republic. Robespierre, described by Manon as biting his nails at the thought that the king would only have dared escape if he had left orders for every patriot in Paris to be murdered, sneered at the others and ‘asked what was meant by a republic’.

The result of that afternoon's discussion was the publication of a short-lived journal, The Republican, produced in association with Condorcet and Tom Paine as well as Manon's group. It proposed in its first issue, in July 1791, that the king's flight had released the nation from its loyalty to him. The king had abandoned his people; the people consequently owed him nothing. At the end of June, another member of this loose affiliation of republicans and a former soldier in the United States' War of Independence, Achille Duchastellet (former marquis du Chastellet), declared that the monarch was a ‘superfluity’. Manon agreed: ‘keeping the king on the throne is an ineptitude, an absurdity, if not a horror’. In the National Assembly, the king was declared hors de cause—irrelevant. Although no motion was passed against him, when the topic was debated ‘three times the entire Assembly was lifted to its feet, arms lifted, hats in the air, with an indescribable enthusiasm’. Finally it was decided that the king's flight must be presented as an abduction, staged in order to re-establish his authority.

Jérôme Pétion was one of the two official representatives of the Assembly sent to Varennes to escort the royal family back to Paris. Louis was still king, but the mystique of royalty was gone for ever. Pétion and Antoine Barnave climbed into the coach and sat down between the king and queen without asking their permission. Barnave cast infatuated glances at the queen, and invited the dauphin to show him how well he could read by spelling out the revolutionary slogan ‘Live free or die’ on his buttons. A sign posted across Paris forbad onlookers from either applauding or insulting the king when he arrived back in the city, but the Jacobins recommended Parisians keep their hats on when he passed to demonstrate their disapproval of his attempt at escape.

On 24 June, a thousand people gathered between the faubourg Saint-Antoine and the Tuileries, where a sign had been hung reading, ‘Maison à louer’ (To Let). The demonstration had the air of a festival: men carrying pikes, the traditional weapon of the common man, mingled with women singing the ‘ça Ira’ and shouting out their desire to send the king and all aristocrats to the devil. Manon was impressed by the crude energy of the scene, and regretted the fact that instead of using it to their advantage ‘the Jacobins [her friends] passed their time in pitiful discussions’. She described to her friend Henri Bancal, in London, the celebratory atmosphere on the streets, the chaotic sessions at the National Assembly, the Jacobins in the weeks following the flight to Varennes and the king's chastened return: ‘one lives here ten years in twenty-four hours’. Twice in less than ten days she used the phrase ‘sea of blood’ when describing to Bancal the obstacles that needed to be surmounted before liberty could be achieved.

At the Jacobins' on the 22nd, the members cried, ‘Live free or die!’ as Robespierre took the floor. Manon's account of him at Pétion's, sneering and craven, was written later, with the benefit of hindsight; now, in June 1791, she described him as full of energy, courage and virtue, his noble heart oppressed by the vacillations and corruption of the Assembly. Their political styles and convictions at this time were similar: both Maximilien and Manon were tenacious, sentimental, fastidious and driven; both were suspicious of moderates and of the Church and detested the monarchy. By contrast Manon was concerned that Brissot, whose lightness of character she considered ‘incompatible with liberty’, would not prove worthy of the times.

Less than a month later, on 17 July, a crowd of fifty thousand men, women and children met in the Champs de Mars to deliver petitions demanding a referendum on the monarchy and declaring the people sovereign. Versions of similar petitions were circulated by different fraternal societies. On one, forty-one ‘women, sisters, and Roman women’ signed separately from the men. François and Louise Robert circulated another declaring that Louis's desertion of his ‘post’ was, in effect, an abdication.

Confirming all Pauline Léon's suspicions of him, Lafayette, who had persuaded the mayor to declare martial law in Paris, ordered the National Guard to open fire on the demonstrators. Perhaps fifty people were killed. There was talk of Robespierre being put on trial because of his role in writing the Jacobin Club's petition, which had been withdrawn by the Jacobins the day before, at the last minute, for being too radical. Late that night the Rolands had themselves driven to his house in the Marais to offer him asylum, but he was already in hiding.

Pauline Léon, her mother, and Constance Évrard were among the hundreds of people arrested in the aftermath of the massacre. Évrard was twenty-three, a few years younger than Léon, and lived in the same street as Léon and her mother; she had been working as a cook in the household of a former aristocrat since 1788. She was arrested for insulting the wife of a National Guardsman, and asked why she had been on the Champs de Mars. Évrard replied that she and the Léon women, ‘comme tous les bons patriotes’, had been there to sign a petition calling for the reorganization of executive power.

Her interrogator wanted to know whether she attended political meetings and clubs, and what newspapers she read. Évrard's replies show the high level of politicization among working-class Parisian women. She answered that she did go sometimes to the open spaces of the Palais Royal and the Tuileries gardens, which became rallying points for protestors at certain crucial moments such as before the destruction of the Bastille; although she was not a member of the Cordeliers' she had sometimes watched sessions there—perhaps with Léon, who elsewhere declared she attended it ‘without interruption’; and she read the incendiary newspapers of, among others, Jean-Paul Marat and Camille Desmoulins.

Léon's response to the Champs de Mars massacre was one of indignation. Just as during their demonstration on the day of the king's flight, she, her mother and Évrard were threatened by Lafayette's Guardsmen and, when they returned home, insulted by their neighbours and threatened with imprisonment by their local ward. Like Évrard, and along with Anne Colombe, the publisher of Marat's L'Ami du Peuple; a female cousin of Georges Danton; and the wife of the president of the Cordeliers' Club, Léon was arrested and interrogated in the days following the demonstration as part of a government crackdown on popular radicalism—made all the more terrifying, to the authorities, when women were the radicals.

The Dutch writer Etta Palm d'Aelders, who had spoken so passionately on behalf of women's rights at the Social Circle in 1790, was another woman arrested on 19 July, accused of subversive behaviour. Her arrest was seen as an effort to intimidate the club, and it was successful: within days the Social Circle's Confédération des Amis, and its female equivalent (des Amies) had shut down. Repressive measures taken against other popular societies like the Cordeliers' effectively declawed them too. ‘I need to see my trees again after watching so many fools and scoundrels,’ wrote Manon. By mid-August, an illusory calm had settled over Paris. ‘Paris is as still as the surface of a pond,’ wrote Rosalie Jullien de la Drôme, wife of the Jacobin deputy, ‘apart from the individual fights that occasion tragic scenes every day.’

The Rolands left Paris in September when Roland's job was finished, returning to Le Clos, their home outside Lyon, to oversee the grape harvest. During their absence a rumour had spread that Roland had been arrested as a counterrevolutionary, and the once friendly villagers there initially greeted Manon with cries of ‘Les aristocrates à la lanterne!’ Boundaries were being blurred: the word ‘aristocrat’—like ‘patriot’, ‘virtue’ and ‘popular will’—took on new meanings. Language was being used ritualistically, with totemic words invoked ‘as absolute, moral concepts’ that would somehow guarantee and preserve the revolution's integrity. Germaine de Staël was aware of this development, in 1791 attacking democrats (another word whose meaning was transformed in the 1790s) ‘who desecrate words merely by using them’.

From Le Clos, Manon initiated a correspondence with two of her so-called Incorruptibles, François Buzot and Maximilien Robespierre. To Robespierre she wrote in a deliberately classical, self-consciously historical style, addressing him as ‘one whose energy has not ceased to offer the greatest resistance to the claims and schemes of despotism and intrigue’ and predicting for him a brilliant career. She tried to engage him in a discussion of political and philosophical theory, tacitly presenting herself as a correspondent with whom he could debate ideas and policies, his partner in the fight for France's liberty. ‘One should work for the good of the species in the same manner as the Deity,’ she wrote, ‘for the satisfaction of being true to oneself, of fulfilling one's destiny and earning self-esteem, but without expecting either gratitude or justice from individuals.’ Manon signed her name with republican austerity: ‘Roland, née Phlipon’. There is no record of any response from Robespierre.

Buzot was more receptive. Manon ‘had already singled him out in our little circle for his breadth of vision and confident manner’; she admired his compassion, integrity and courage. Although she did not think his wife deserved him—he had married a cousin some years older than himself—the Rolands and the Buzots lived close to each other in Paris and saw each other frequently in the spring and summer of 1791. Their relationship grew closer while the Rolands were in Villefranche, and Buzot back at home in Évreux, that autumn. Through their letters, recorded Manon later, ‘our friendship became intimate and unbreakable’. Buzot came to represent for Manon a revolutionary ideal, vigorous and full of integrity. Beside his passion her worthy, pedantic husband faded to grey.

Louis XVI signed the constitution and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen on 30 September 1791, while the Rolands were away from Paris. It created a constitutional monarchy in which only propertied men were active citizens. All women were passive citizens, although the laws governing marriage, divorce and inheritance were made fairer; early proposals to allow wives property rights equal to their husbands' had been rejected outright.

At the end of the last meeting of the Constituent Assembly, which was dissolved by Louis's signature on the constitution, Robespierre and Pétion were garlanded with oak-leaf wreaths and carried on the shoulders of the people from the manège to their lodgings. Pétion became the new mayor of Paris, defeating Lafayette in the election in October with the covert support of the queen, who had long despised the general. Félicité de Genlis, last seen in a tricoloured dress and dancing to the ‘ça Ira’ as Citoyenne Brûlart, had decided that the time had come to flee France. Emigration was, after all, as much the fashion for aristocrats as revolution. Pétion, whom Genlis had befriended when popular politics were à la mode, found time to escort her, her adoptive daughter Pamela, Henriette de Sercey and the duc d'Orléans's daughter into exile in London in October.

The radical pamphlet-writer Olympe de Gouges published her own Déclaration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne as a response to the new constitution. ‘Women are now respected and excluded,’ she wrote; ‘under the old regime they were despised and powerful.’ The first article stated unequivocally, ‘Woman is born free and lives equal to man in her rights.’ Gouges demanded that women share with men both the burdens and the privileges of public services, taxation and representation. ‘Woman has the right to mount the scaffold; she must equally have the right to mount the rostrum,’ she wrote.

Gouges's appeal was passionate, but marred by her over-identification with her ideas and a lack of intellectual focus. ‘Woman, wake up; the tocsin of reason is being heard throughout the whole universe; discover your rights,’ she exhorted in her postscript. ‘Having become free, he [man] has become unjust to his companion. Oh, women, women! When will you cease to be blind? What advantage have you received from the revolution?’ Her claims that women deserved rights because they were superior to men in beauty and courage; her unfashionable devotion to the queen, to whom she dedicated the document; and her insistence on demanding equal rights for children born outside wedlock (Gouges herself was illegitimate, so it was a cause close to her heart) clouded her message, diluting her call for equality and her lucid analysis of the prejudice of most male revolutionaries.

Gouges's pronouncements made little impact on her contemporaries. Later, when the walls of Paris were plastered with her posters, the government spies said they produced no effect on the public. ‘One sees them, stops for a second, and says to oneself, “Ah, c'est Olympe de Gouges.” ’

The satire Mère Duchesne was published at about the same time as Gouges's Déclaration. It echoed the popular new journal Père Duchesne, published by Jacques Hébert, in its use of colourful street slang and coarse language, and its style, as if straight from the mouth of its speaker. ‘Although I am ignorant and not lettered, like former judges or the deputies, I don't lack a brain when it comes to political matters,’ held the fictional Mère Duchesne stoutly. ‘Can you believe in good faith that I would hesitate to stuff some good reasons up the noses of aristocrats?’ Although she stopped short at demanding political rights for her sex, she praised women for their readiness to fight for liberty, and called for them to be better educated. ‘Women have imagination and penetration; they are fertile in resources and expedients…Women aren't doomed, damn it, to be geese.’

Germaine de Staël spent the summer of 1791 at her father's house, Coppet, in Switzerland, arriving back in Paris in September in time for the opening session of the new Legislative Assembly. A motion proposed by Robespierre, that no deputy who had sat in the Constituent Assembly should be eligible for election to the Legislative, had been adopted, and so all the deputies were new to their responsibilities. The majority of them were Feuillants, constitutional monarchists who, by virtue of France's new constitution, considered the revolution over. The Feuillants' club, which had broken away from the increasingly radical Jacobins earlier in the year. They commanded 360 seats on the right of the hall; on the left sat 130 Jacobins, Manon's friends; in the centre sat the undecided remainder.

On her return, Germaine began agitating anew for the promotion of her lover, Louis de Narbonne. After the king's flight and subsequent arrest, Gustavus of Sweden had demonstrated his sympathy for his fellow-monarch by ordering the embassy on the rue du Bac closed to all social functions. Germaine was forced to use her friend Sophie de Condorcet's influential salon as her base—giving rise to rumours that Narbonne had seduced Mme de Condorcet as well as Mme de Staël—but their alliance in Narbonne's cause was successful. Mary Berry, visiting Paris that autumn, was disappointed to find Germaine so preoccupied (as she thought) with Talleyrand that she had no time to spend with her old friend; in fact it was Narbonne who was distracting her. The newspapers reported Germaine in her petticoats, ‘rushing around from nine o'clock in the morning to all the journalists to give them the official papers; the letters and reports which she herself has dictated to her darling lover’.