Читать книгу Liberty: The Lives and Times of Six Women in Revolutionary France - Lucy Moore - Страница 9

[Théroigne] crossed the Assembly floor with the light pace of a panther and mounted the tribune. Her pretty, thought-filled head seemed to shine among the depressing, apocalyptic figures of Danton and Marat.

CAMILLE DESMOULINS

ONE WOMAN popularly thought to have been willing to shed her own blood on behalf of the fatherland, as Pauline Léon hoped to, was the former courtesan Théroigne de Méricourt. Although she was mentioned only five times, in contradictory reports, in the nearly four hundred official depositions on the women's march to Versailles in October 1789, Théroigne was described again and again by nineteenth-century historians of the revolution as having been at the vanguard of the mob storming the palace, astride a jet-black charger and dressed in a riding-habit ‘the colour of blood’, with her sabre unsheathed—as the poet Baudelaire later put it, ‘amante de carnage’. For these romantics, she represented all that was most savage and most noble about the revolution: passionate and untamed, and ultimately crushed by the forces she had helped unleash. Michelet called her ‘the fatal beauty of the revolution’, ‘la belle, vaillante, infortunée Liégoise’; and so she was, although he exaggerated most of the facts of her life.

Anne-Josèphe Terwagne (or Théroigne) was born into a family of prosperous peasants in 1762 in Marcourt (or Méricourt) near Liège, in the Ardennes region of the Low Countries, at the time just over the French border in Austria. Anne-Josèphe's childhood was a desperately unhappy one. Her mother died when she was five, and the little girl was initially sent to live with an aunt in Liège, a hundred kilometres from her home, where her two younger brothers remained. The aunt sent her to a convent to learn dressmaking, but soon stopped paying Anne-Josèphe's keep there and took her in as a maid, treating her cruelly. Anne-Josèphe returned home when her father remarried, but her stepmother, busy with children of her own, did not make her welcome; her father's fortunes were also declining rapidly.

At thirteen, Anne-Josèphe sent one of her brothers to one branch of her mother's family and she and her other brother went to live with her mother's parents. Again she found herself unloved, forced to do heavy work, the victim of injustice and neglect. She returned to her aunt's, but received the same ill-treatment as before, and ran away once more.

This time she set out alone, working as a cowherd and then as a nursemaid before finding a post as companion to a woman in Anvers. Mme Colbert was the first person to show the sixteen-year-old Anne-Josèphe any kindness. She taught her to write, encouraged her to read, and arranged for her to study singing and the pianoforte, at first so that she could accompany her daughter and then because she showed talent. In an atmosphere of affection and comfort, Anne-Josèphe blossomed, and dreamed of a glorious musical career.

When she was twenty, a young English army officer seduced her and then reneged on his promise to marry her when he came of age, instead making her his mistress and living with her between London and Paris. He did provide well for her, giving her 10,000 louis which she invested carefully, but, in the language of the day, she was ruined, and could no longer hope for marriage and respectability. For the next few years Anne-Josèphe lived uneasily, as her modern biographer puts it, ‘suspended between literary bohemianism, polite society and moral degradation’. Although she knew she would never change her lover's libertine ways, their liaison continued; she was also kept in some style by the rich, elderly and unpleasant marquis de Persan, whose advances she later insisted she had evaded. She called herself Mlle Campinado, after a branch of her mother's family, and regularly attended the opera alone, ‘covered in diamonds, in a large box’.

Her air of melancholy mystery was not contrived. She gave birth to a daughter, whom her English lover refused to acknowledge and who died in 1788 of smallpox. An affair with an Italian tenor ended badly; then she fell in love with another Italian singer, a celebrated castrato and, somewhat surprisingly, seducer, called Ferdinand-Justin Tenducci, who encouraged her hopes for a musical career. She followed him to Genoa, and although their connection ended in the courts, stayed there alone for a year.

Anne-Josèphe returned to Paris in May 1789, just before the Bastille fell. Although as yet she knew no one involved in the coming revolution and was unfamiliar with the ideas behind it, her unhappiness with her lot in pre-revolutionary France had prepared her to love liberty instantly and instinctively. She was enthralled by the ‘general effervescence’ she sensed around her, recognizing that her chance to change her own life could come at this moment of crisis and opportunity.

While the nineteenth-century poet Lamartine described her ‘descending into the streets’ on 14 July, ‘her beauty like a banner to the multitude’, in fact she said she did not witness the main events of those days. On the evening of the day the Bastille fell, she and her maid went down on to the streets of Paris—her lodgings were a five-minute walk from the Palais Royal—and saw the crowds of men, some armed, some searching for arms. Afraid of attracting their attention, she returned to her rooms, unaware of what had taken place on the other side of the city. The next day she heard the news, and first saw people with green cockades. She immediately began wearing one herself, tucking the green leaves into her hat-band as a mark of support for Desmoulins and then, when leaves were replaced by the tricolour rosette as the sign of reform, she took the tricolour instead.

When the king came to Paris on 17 July and pinned the tricolour cockade to his hat outside the Hôtel de Ville, demonstrating his surrender to the forces of change, Anne-Josèphe walked in the rapturous crowd ahead of him. She was wearing the costume that was to make her famous, a white riding-habit, or amazone, and round-brimmed hat. This choice of severely masculine dress was deliberate: she wanted ‘to play the role of a man, because I had always been extremely humiliated by the servitude and prejudices, under which the pride of men holds my oppressed sex’.

Anne-Josèphe's resentment was not unusual. Even Germaine de Staël, an only child, an heiress, a member of the most progressive society in the land, as privileged and free as a woman could be in eighteenth-century France, railed against the discrimination that restricted her; many others, like Anne-Josèphe, had more to complain about. In 1788, the teen-aged Lucile Duplessis, before her marriage to the journalist Camille Desmoulins, had expressed her frustrations in her journal: ‘How the months, the days, seem long to me, what a sad fate is woman's and how much do we suffer! Slavery, tyranny, that is our lot…Nothing is fair for us! Ah! That they [men] would worship us less and set us free!’ An unhappily married Mme Morel from Choiseul had ‘set up the tricoloured cockade and preached liberty before her husband's face’ in 1789, explicitly associating public with domestic tyranny. For women, the revolution's rejection of the paternal authority of the ancien régime state carried within it an implicit rejection of the private injustices they endured in their own lives.

For Anne-Josèphe, whose family had not wanted her, whose lovers had abandoned and betrayed her, the impression of being trapped by her sex was doubly strong. She was a fallen woman, living outside society and despised by decent women like the workers who had petitioned the king at the start of 1789. Men had tried only to buy or to use her. Her adored daughter's death and her own struggle, while she was in Genoa, with severe venereal disease, can only have increased her antipathy to her former life.

From the summer of 1789, Anne-Josèphe Terwagne, formerly Mlle Campinado, became simply Théroigne, using her real name as if to express a sense of coming into her true self. She sold some shares she had and pawned her jewels to fund her newly modest existence, proudly recoiled from any suggestion of impropriety—even, according to one report, scorning personal cleanliness, a mark of the ‘professional coquette’, as a political statement—and turned her back on her past. The revolution offered her a new life: ‘the kept woman,’ as Simon Schama phrases it, ‘had become a free person’.

Nearly every day Théroigne walked in the Palais Royal, absorbing the new ideas of liberty and equality that she heard there. ‘What most impressed me was the atmosphere of general benevolence; egoism seemed to have been banished, so that everyone spoke to each other, irrespective of distinctions [of rank],’ she marvelled. ‘During this moment of upheaval, the rich mixed with the poor and did not disdain to speak to them as equals.’ Her private transformation was mirrored on the faces of the people she saw around her. ‘Everyone's countenance seemed to me to have altered; each person had fully developed his character and his natural facilities,’ she wrote. ‘I saw many who, though covered in rags, had a heroic air.’ Heroism seemed possible even for a woman with a past like hers; humiliation had been displaced by equality and opportunity.

So stirred was she by this spectacle that she decided to move to Versailles, where the National Assembly met, to watch their debates on the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen. She was overcome by the beauty and grandeur of the Assembly. Every day, wearing her amazone, Théroigne sat in the same seat in the visitors' gallery, or tribune; every day she was the first to arrive and the last to leave. Although initially she could hardly follow the debates, little by little she began to understand the issues. ‘My devotion to the revolution increased as I grew better informed and became convinced that right and justice were on the people's side.’

Théroigne was in her usual place in the tribune of the National Assembly on the afternoon of 5 October 1789 when the market women entered Versailles. She left before the session ended, perhaps unamused by the sight of the marchers debasing the hall she so revered with their poissard banter; but, wanting to see what was going on, she walked with a friend to her street corner and saw the Flanders regiment, the royal bodyguard and the female marchers with their cannon pass by. On her way home she saw three or four unhappy people who had not eaten for several days; she brought them some bread, and then went back to her lodgings for the night.

When she returned to the Assembly as usual at about six or half past the following morning and heard that it had been in session throughout the night, she went out into the crowds gathered in front of the palace to hear what they were saying. Dressed in a riding-habit, as usual—she had one in scarlet, one in white, and one in black—she mingled with the market women and soldiers before taking her seat in the tribune again.

In 1791, when she was held prisoner in Austria, Théroigne was cross-examined about those October days. The Austrian government, fearful of upheaval in their own territories and keen to defend Marie-Antoinette, wanted to know whether the duc d'Orléans had paid the women to go to Versailles and cause trouble. Théroigne, surprised at the allegation, replied that although she did not know Orléans she believed him to be a good patriot. They were also curious about stories of men dressed as women, but Théroigne had not seen any. When they asked her what she thought had caused the demonstration, she replied the people's enthusiasm for liberty and their devotion to it. It was clear from her deposition that it was not she who had led the bloodthirsty mob into the palace, bribed the marchers on behalf of Orléans or plotted to assassinate the queen, the crimes of which the Austrians and the French royalists, keen to find a scapegoat, suspected her.

When the National Assembly reopened in Paris later in October of 1789, Théroigne was in the tribune. She was becoming acquainted with the men whose newspaper articles and speeches she admired so fervently: Camille Desmoulins, the progressive journalist Jacques-Pierre Brissot and the handsome lawyer Jérôme Pétion.

Two other men now assumed a particular importance in her political life, neither of whom was likely to cause her to blush angrily, as she was known to do, at whispered insinuations. The Abbé Sieyès was a reserved, uncompromising intellectual much respected in the Assembly who bridged the gap, as did several of Théroigne's friends, between the aristocratic liberals of Germaine de Staël's salon and the more democratic milieu of men like Desmoulins, Pétion and Brissot. A passionate constitutionalist, his 1789 pamphlet What Is the Third Estate?, in which he argued that France's prosperity was derived solely from the people while the nobility and the clergy were just parasites on the nation, sold three hundred thousand copies and became the battle cry of the early radicals. To Théroigne, Sieyès was of all the deputies ‘the most worthy of the recognition and esteem of the public’.

But it was with the sober mathematician Gilbert Romme, whom Théroigne had met in the gallery of the Assembly and who became a quasi-father figure to her, that she founded the short-lived Society of the Friends of the Law in January 1790. The association, which never numbered more than about twenty members, was dedicated to disseminating the Assembly's work to the people and teaching them their rights—exactly what Théroigne had had to learn herself when she began attending the Assembly's debates. It met first in Théroigne's lodgings near the Palais Royal and later in Romme's larger apartment. Théroigne was its only female member and its secretary. While the National Assembly struggled to create a workable constitution from the principles established by the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, Théroigne and the Friends of the Law met to discuss the issues themselves.

From the Assembly's earliest debates, the issue of ‘active’ and ‘passive’ citizenship had been a provocative one. Active citizens had the right to vote for representative assemblies and to sit in them themselves; they had the freedom to make moral choices and to act independently. Passive citizens had to allow other people to think, speak and act for them. In order to sit in the National Assembly, a man had to pay annual taxes of a silver mark, or fifty days' wages for an unskilled worker; those who paid ten days' wages' worth of taxes qualified to sit in local government; those who paid three days' wages in tax were eligible to vote. It was not just the poor who were counted as passive citizens: even if they paid taxes, women, blacks, non-Catholics, domestic servants and actors were all forbidden the vote and considered incapable of participating in public life.

Robespierre was one of the earliest champions of universal male suffrage, arguing against the Abbé Sieyès's contention that property should define civil status. When the question of Jewish citizenship was raised in December 1789, Robespierre spoke out against persecution. ‘We should bear in mind that it can never be politic,’ he said, ‘to condemn to humiliation and oppression a multitude of men who live in our midst.’ In January 1790, after this debate, the Society of the Friends of the Law denounced discrimination against Jews. They called the law of the silver mark unjust and expressed the hope that an alternative way of distinguishing between citizens be found. They backed the complete freedom of the press, also being debated in the Assembly at the time.

At the last session of the month, in a discussion on natural rights, one member of the Society asserted that a man's rights over his wife and children ‘are those of a protector over his protégés’. Despite Romme's progressive views on women's rights, Théroigne was the only member of the group to voice her objections to this statement; like Robespierre, most revolutionaries were too busy defending men's rights to concern themselves with women's. Although she never drafted her views on the matter, as she had intended, she put down in her notebook her thoughts on ‘the liberty of women, who have the same natural rights as men, so that, as a consequence, it is supremely unjust that we have not the same rights in society’. The prejudice and discrimination she had encountered in her own life made her desire for freedom and equality all the more poignant.

One member of the Society of the Friends of the Law was Augustin Bosc d'Antic, a mineralogist and botanist. He had seen Théroigne in the galleries of the National Assembly in Versailles and written to a friend about a beautiful, patriotic stranger who had captured his imagination. A few months later, he joined the Society and may have confessed his feelings to her. If so, the former courtesan Théroigne, who in her new incarnation rejected any amorous advances ‘with Spartan pride’, did not respond.

Because of her regular attendance at the National Assembly, and because of her remarkable appearance which had so fascinated Bosc d'Antic—Théroigne's slight figure and delicate, gentle face contrasted unintentionally picturesquely with the strict cut of her signature ama-zone and plumed hat—she became a celebrity. The people and the deputies respected her, she said proudly, ‘because of my patriotism and my personal conduct’. By the end of 1789, she was popularly known as ‘la belle Liégoise’.

The royalist press had different words for her: trollop, nymph, second-rate courtesan, débauchée, whore. The name Théroigne de Méricourt (which she never acknowledged) was first used in a November 1789 article in the royalist paper the Apostles: ‘One might call her the muse of democracy, or else think of her as Venus giving lessons in public right. Her company is itself a college; her principles are those of the Porch. She would adopt those of the Arcades [the prostitutes' haunt in the Palais Royal], if the need arose.’

Théroigne was also the heroine of a satirical play entitled Théroigne et Populus, ou le triomphe de la démocratie, in which she was linked to a deputy to the National Assembly whose name, Populus, made him a cypher for the average Frenchman. Although the pair did not know one another, their names were often joined by journalists implying that Théroigne sold her favours to the entire French nation. Another royalist newspaper described her in lurid detail giving birth to the ‘National embryo’, with labour brought on by her excitement at Robespierre's eloquence, and suggested Talleyrand, Mirabeau or the young orator Antoine Barnave might be the imaginary infant's father.

It was at this time, too, that the rumours of Théroigne as a bloodthirsty warrior who had stormed the Bastille in July, then Versailles in October, became current. She was depicted in an engraving wearing, inevitably, the amazone in which, sword aloft and pistols smoking, she supposedly ‘bested a brigade of bodyguards [at Versailles]…She was ever to be found where the unrest was greatest.’ While the attacks against Théroigne in the press demonstrate the prominence she had attained—in a 1791 etching she represented French women alongside a generic cleric, nobleman and peasant as witnesses to the birth of France's new constitution—they are also evidence of how threatening emancipated women were to the majority of Frenchmen, from members of the political elite to the man in the street.

Women who were outsiders and did not have reputations to protect were practically the only ones who dared speak out against the social injustices women faced, and to which they were especially vulnerable

—fallen women like Théroigne or Mary Wollstonecraft, living in Paris in the early 1790s with an American merchant to whom she was not married and with whom she had a child; actresses, who were viewed as little more than prostitutes; and foreigners.

It was no accident that Théroigne, although she counted among her male acquaintances friends of both the liberal aristocrat Germaine de Staël and the republican bourgeoise Manon Roland, never met either woman. She would not have been welcome in their worlds. The aristocratic adulteresses Germaine de Staël and Thérésia de Fontenay were, arguably, greater sinners than the newly virtuous Théroigne, who had rejected her degrading past; but while they were embraced by society, she was despised by it.

Their already ambiguous moral roles freed female outsiders to express discontent with the status quo. This was partly because they had less to lose—no families to disown them, no legitimate children to disgrace, no respectability to sacrifice in the name of idealism—and partly because any woman who did have a voice in eighteenth-century France, from the queen down, was denounced for immorality.

Marie-Antoinette had been married at fourteen to the future Louis XVI, who had a medical condition that made sex almost impossible; their union was unconsummated for seven years. Despite living in a society which considered love affairs completely normal, she might in twenty years of marriage have taken a single lover (Axel von Fersen). Her actual sins were thus completely incommensurate with those of which she was accused by the revolutionary scandal-sheets: of sleeping with her brother-in-law and various ministers, not to mention fleets of footmen, and of lesbian orgies with her ladies-in-waiting during which she committed incest with her prepubescent son. These egregious crimes were salaciously reported alongside her real political ‘crimes’—her influence over the king and her fear of the changes taking place in her world. The association between politics and pornography, which were sold alongside each other in the stalls lining the Seine and the shops of the Palais Royal, was a long-standing one; in 1748 Diderot had attacked Louis XV through the lubricious tale of a king who owned a magic ring that made women's vaginas speak.

Attacking the ancien régime meant, in one sense, attacking the power women were thought to wield from behind the scenes. Politically involved women, who were seen as preventing politics from being disinterested by promoting their favourites, were believed to contaminate both society and the state. For most revolutionaries, cleansing France of corruption could only be accomplished by preventing women from playing any kind of public role. Influenced by Rousseau, they believed that a society dominated by women was fundamentally tainted. In the ideal republic, according to their ‘natural’ roles, men would lead and women would serve. ‘The reign of courtesans brought on the ruin of the nation; the power of queens consummated it,’ wrote the journalist Prudhomme in 1791. Women, who ‘are born for perpetual dependence and are gifted only with private virtues’, should not be allowed to enter into public life.

By this thinking, any politicized woman, regardless of her private behaviour, was depraved and unnatural, and inventing lurid stories about her was a legitimate way of undermining her reputation and public influence. Although Théroigne was a revolutionary, and at this stage women's rights of citizenship were still on the constitutional table, her conduct was every bit as suspect as Marie-Antoinette's because they were both women. Théroigne became such a prominent figure because the idea of a former courtesan becoming a revolutionary campaigner was almost inconceivable at the time—and offered her opponents such irresistable ammunition with which to attack her.

The actress and writer Olympe de Gouges was another woman held in contempt by the press at the start of the revolution. Like Théroigne, she came from a humble background and had washed up as a kept woman in 1780s Paris—just as Lamartine had said of Théroigne, ‘as the whirlwind attracts things of no weight’. Like Théroigne, she saw the revolution as an opportunity to jettison her unhappy past, reinventing herself as a prolific and enthusiastic political pamphlet-writer. As an animal-lover and a believer in reincarnation, her campaigns were occasionally eccentric but always benevolent. Gouges advocated the abolition of slavery, rights for illegitimate children (a cause close to her heart—she claimed to be the bastard daughter of a marquis) and cleaner streets, and proposed setting up maternity hospitals, a national theatre for women and public workshops for the unemployed. But both the republican and the royalist papers reviled her.

Actors and actresses like Olympe de Gouges, inhabiting the same demi-monde as Théroigne in her incarnation as Mlle Campinado, were until 1789 not only automatically excluded from political life but excommunicated from the Church. Because of this treatment, many were immediately sympathetic to the revolutionary cause. The theatre's new star, François-Joseph Talma, used his traditional end-of-season speech in the spring of 1789 to speak out against prejudice and servitude and express the hope that the Estates-General (soon to be the National Assembly) would rid France of the last vestiges of feudalism. Marie-Joseph Chénier, an habitué of Germaine de Staël's salon and a new friend of Théroigne's, wrote Talma's footlights speech as well as the hit play of 1789, Charles IX, in which Talma played the murderous, manipulative, imbecile monarch. Although the play was suppressed after only thirty-three performances, patriotic audiences continued to clamour for the crucial scene in which the king acknowledged his betrayal of his country and his honour.

Talma's politicization was tacit as well as outspoken, evident as much in the way he interpreted roles, the way he moved and dressed, as in the words he spoke. Ancien régime theatre and festivals were seen as tawdry and elitist; revolutionaries, again taking their cue from Rousseau, idealized naturalism, innocence and purity. In popular celebrations, this meant replacing artificial tableaux with pastoral fêtes modelled on village life: country dancing, fresh, simple food, branches of greenery and bunches of flowers instead of tinsel. In the theatre, it meant Talma.

He was the first actor to play his roles in authentic costumes rather than the tights and doublets of traditional theatre-wear. His friend the painter Jacques-Louis David, who often collaborated with Talma in set-design, congratulated him for making his Charles IX look like a Fouquet painting; when Talma played Rousseau's ghost to celebrate the fall of the Bastille, he wore the same clothes in which Rousseau was pictured in his memorial portraits; as Proculus in Vol-taire's Brutus, in November 1790, David designed him a short toga modelled on antique statues, with bare legs, sandalled feet and cropped hair.

This desire to be genuine and uncontrived was revolutionary in itself. The liberal press contrasted Talma's Roman haircut with the powdered ringlets of the court party. Brissot's publication the Patriote Français declared it the only suitable republican hairstyle, praising its economy of money (hair-powder, made of flour, was unpatriotically wasteful) and time (elaborate aristocratic hair-dos took hours to perfect). ‘It is care-free and so assures the independence of a person,’ the paper continued, ‘it bears witness to a mind given to reflection, courageous enough to defy fashion.’ Even liberal society women stopped powdering their hair, letting it fall on to their shoulders in loose curls. Théroigne's iconic riding-habits were demonstrations of this same impulse towards free-thinking, simplicity and classlessness in appearance, with an added frisson of transgression—the idea of a woman in a man's clothes. By wearing such a deliberately masculine outfit, Théroigne imagined that she would be better respected by men: seen as a public woman, not a femme publique. She hoped looking less feminine would compel people to respond not to her appearance but to her words and conduct.

Under the ancien régime, people had been identified by their dress; in the new France, people were still defined by what they wore. Even though the ceremonial costumes of the three governing estates were abolished in October 1789, republican men continued to take pride in the unadorned black coats, breeches and shoes they had been required to wear as members of the Third Estate, in contrast to the glowing colours, velvet and lace of the other two estates. Théroigne urged her fellow-women to give up their luxuries, which were ‘incompatible with liberty’.

Several ironies were concealed behind the cult of naturalism. In the first place, it was often as artfully contrived as any ancien régime salonnière's conversation: the great revolutionary orator Hérault de Séchelles had lessons in declamation from the actress Mlle Clairon, Germaine de Staël's elocution teacher; later Napoléon would be tutored by Talma. Secondly, when republicanism became stylish—Théroigne's amazones soon adorned many society figures—its original intention of being outside fashion was defeated.

The unhappiest side-effect of this craze for simplicity was the destruction of the stay-making, embroidery and silk-making industries, which put thousands of workers, principally women, out of work. Starchers and laundresses saw less business when plain muslin cravats replaced stiffened lace jabots; coiffeurs became redundant when smart ladies no longer wanted model ships to float in their headdresses. Lace-makers rioted in Normandy and Velay in 1793; Lyon, centre of the textile industry, was defiantly anti-revolutionary. After the revolution, the duc d'Orléans's mistress Félicité de Genlis recounted a conversation she overheard between an old stay-maker and an old hoop-maker bemoaning the new fashions. ‘As soon as they began to introduce bodices, instead of whalebone stays,’ concluded the stay-maker darkly, ‘I immediately prophesied the revolution.’

Théroigne's riding-habit had not been intended as a fashion statement, but it soon became one. When she arrived at the newly formed Cordeliers' Club in February 1790, the sight of her crimson amazone and her sword provoked a flattering reaction. Camille Desmoulins greeted her: ‘It is the Queen of Sheba, come to see the Solomon of the sections [the Paris wards].’ Théroigne delivered her speech in her soft Walloon accent, proposing that a temple dedicated to Liberty, a home for the National Assembly and an altar to the fatherland be built on the ruins of the Bastille. It prompted wild applause.

Although a committee was set up to consider her suggestion, the conclusion to Desmoulins's article on her appearance at the Cordeliers' demonstrated her fellow-patriots' true attitude to women involving themselves in politics. With her Society of the Friends of the Law dissolving, Théroigne had requested membership of the Cordeliers' Club, which would allow her a consultative vote in the Assembly. While she was granted the honours of the session for her address, Desmoulins evaded her demand for an official political voice as a member of the Cordeliers':

Mlle Théroigne and those of her sex will always be at liberty to propose whatever they believe to be advantageous to the fatherland, but as regards the question of state, as to whether Mlle Théroigne should be admitted to the district with a consultative vote only, the assembly is not competent to take sides on this question, and this is not the place to settle it.

Other clubs were more receptive to women members; indeed, ‘women were the soul of the societies and of the democratic movement’, according to the historian Alphonse Aulard. The first Fraternal Society of Patriots of Both Sexes was formed in February 1790 with the intention of ‘reading and interpreting the decrees of the National Assembly’, and welcomed women from the start. Its female members would include Théroigne, Pauline Léon, Manon Roland and Thérésia de Fontenay; Germaine de Staël did not join, but many of her friends did. Olympe de Gouges was another member, as was Louise Robert, a writer married to a lawyer (from Liège, like Théroigne) and deputy to the Convention. François and Louise Robert were ardent republicans and active members of the Fraternal Society; Louise Robert believed that it and associations like it would bring about the final destruction of despotism. In late 1790 the Roberts founded the Mercure National, one of the hundreds of new journals that appeared between 1789 and 1792, for which their friend Manon Roland would write.

One of the most eloquent of the Fraternal Society's women members was the Dutch baroness Etta Palm d'Aelders. In December 1790 she addressed the Social Circle, another club which welcomed male and female members and met weekly in the Palais Royal. She urged the government to extend full citizenship to women.

Six months earlier Condorcet had written on the same topic:

He who votes against the rights of another, whatever that person's religion, colour or sex may be, has by the same token forsworn his own. Why should creatures subject to pregnancies and to passing indispositions not be able to exercise their rights [a common argument against women participating in public life], when no one has ever contemplated depriving people who have an attack of gout every winter, or who readily catch a cold?

He advised that unmarried women and widows should be granted the vote and called for all women to use their talents to benefit the society in which they lived.

Not every member of the Fraternal Society or the Social Circle shared Condorcet's unusually egalitarian views, but most were progressive thinkers committed to improving women's status in society through legislation, to legalize divorce, to provide protection for battered wives, and to reform inheritance and property laws. A committee was established by Etta Palm d'Aelders's club, the Confederation of the Friends of Truth, to distribute aid to ill and indigent women and children in Paris.

Most men tolerated their wives' and daughters' new-found interest in politics, but the Jacobin Club was wary of women from the start. The Fraternal Society met in 1790 in various rooms of the same former monastery as the Jacobins, and the two clubs shared some members, many of whom also had connections with Théroigne, Germaine de Staël, Thérésia de Fontenay and Manon Roland: Condorcet, Brissot, the Lameth brothers, Mirabeau, Georges Danton and Jean-Lambert Tallien. Despite these links, however, the Jacobins displayed their reluctance to treat the Fraternal Society seriously from the start. In the autumn of 1790, they told the Society that they would only receive a deputation from them if it were composed entirely of men. The journalist Marat used the Fraternal Society to attack the Jacobins that December, snidely saluting ‘the club of women which providence seems to have placed beneath the Jacobins [the Society sometimes met in the monastery's crypt] to repair their faults’.

It was this type of revolutionary misogyny that prompted Théroigne to leave Paris at the end of the summer of 1790. The idealism with which she had greeted the early months of the revolution had been disappointed. It was becoming clear to her that her fellow-revolutionaries were campaigning for the rights of men, not the rights of humanity; her struggle was unimportant to them. In prison in Austria the following year she said it had been her dearest wish to have been able to destroy ‘the tyranny which men exercise over my own sex’, but her efforts had been in vain.

Neither of the progressive associations she had formed had taken off as she had hoped. The Society of the Friends of the Law had disbanded in the spring of 1790. In February Théroigne had watched the deputies of the National Assembly process to Notre Dame to hear a mass celebrating their oaths of citizenship. She recognized some of them, and they asked her to join them; the honour of walking with them and of seeing such a spectacle made her say yes, but when onlookers exclaimed at there being a woman in the deputies' midst she was forced to withdraw, even though many others marching were not deputies either. What the people had found so curious, she said, was the thought that a woman should wish to be a part of the procession.

Théroigne acknowledged that her lack of talent and experience hindered her efforts to play an active political role, but her greatest weakness in the eyes of her fellow-revolutionaries was her sex. She was hassled in the Assembly's tribunes, mocked on the streets and lampooned in the press, but her most bitter disappointment stemmed from the men with whom she hoped to work. ‘The patriots, instead of encouraging me and treating me justly, ridiculed me,’ she said; this was why she became disenchanted with politics, despite her devotion to the cause of reform, and left Paris ‘without too much regret’. For the moment, Théroigne's hopes of being allowed to participate directly in France's new government had been dashed.