The French Revolution, a period of ten years between 1789 and 1799, is one of the most celebrated and multifaceted historical periods that played a decisive role in shaping the modern political, social and cultural order. It represents a radical break with a long-established and accepted way of life based on a system of rigid and impenetrable hierarchical scales and inherited privileges. Its relatively moderate beginnings were limited mainly to France’s ossified internal order and its confrontation with a severe economic crisis. But it was not long before the revolutionary movement took on international dimensions, undermining Europe’s absolutist monarchical order and established alliances, and even shaking up colonial relations. Then, to add insult to injury, it turned into a frenzy of terror, contrary to the ideals from which it was born. Finally, it opened the door wide for Napoleon to make a grand entrance on the main stage and the return of absolutist and dictatorial tendencies.
All social classes were involved in the French Revolution, and women also played an extremely important role in its key milestones, even if it was long unrecognised. Bourgeois, workers, noblewomen, they were all involved in the whirlwind of revolutionary events. Like men, they found themselves on both the “right” and the “wrong” side of the revolution. Like men, they were its driving force in the initial period and in the uprising of the masses. And like men, they defined and engaged politically – they were royalists, moderate Girondists, radical Jacobins. And many of them paid for their revolutionary zeal with their heads under the guillotine.
But traditional history has dealt very little with the role of women in the French Revolution, and even today it is mainly feminists who write about it. The only exceptions are a few individuals who have gained worldwide fame. These include, of course, the hated queen of Austrian roots, Marie Antoinette, the extravagant campaigner for the rights of women and the oppressed, and the fierce critic of Robespierre himself, Olympe de Gouges, or the young woman disillusioned with the course of the Revolution, Charlotte Corday. The latter was responsible for one of the most famous incidents of the entire revolution – the bathing of Jean-Paul Marat, the leading radical hate-monger and fighter against the supposed enemies of the revolution.
All three were beheaded in 1793 in the infamous Place de la Révolution (today’s Place de la Concorde). Each of them represented a completely different face of the revolutionary period, but all of them were declared mad, hysterical, maladjusted and generally inferior women. As late as 1904, a psychologist presented a “scientific” psychological study of Olympe de Gouges, in which he reduced her political activity to a mental illness for which he coined the term “paranoia reformatoria”. Other lesser-known protagonists of the period were also labelled as such: Théroigne de Méricourt, Manon Roland, Sophie de Condorcet, Pauline Léon, Claire Lacombe.
Although the revolution started promisingly for women, enabling them for the first time in history to participate en masse in the public political arena, hopes for greater equality and a more prominent role for women in society quickly faded. After the initial enthusiasm for their action, as the revolution radicalised, suspicion grew towards women who were becoming more politically aware and confident. Women’s political clubs and associations were therefore soon banned, as were public gatherings of groups of more than five women. The official explanation was in line with the Rousseauian doctrine that women’s nature determined them to take care of home and family, not to engage in public affairs.
The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, the founding document of the Revolution and the preamble of the future French Constitution, adopted by the newly-formed Revolutionary Assembly in August 1789, already applied only to men. This Charter still represents one of the most important turning points in civilisation today, as it established the principle of the universality of human rights and equality before the law. In the spirit of the Enlightenment, it defined the rights of the citizen as inalienable and inviolable, as they derive from human nature. But it defined the citizen, and therefore the human being, as only a man. The motto of the Revolution, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, paradoxically meant unfreedom and inequality for half of French society. No one bothered about this in the midst of all the revolutionary bustle, except for a handful of the first feminists under Olympe de Gouges.
It was not until one hundred and fifty years later, in 1948, that women were granted the same rights as men, at least on paper, by the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In France, they were among the last in the Western world to be granted the vote in 1945.
Pre-revolutionary hope for a more equal political order
The two main reasons that led to the French Revolution were the deep economic and financial crisis and the rigidity of the old regime. France had a huge public debt due to its military involvement in the American Revolution (1775-1783) and the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763), and then a severe famine as a result of harsh winters and disastrous harvests. France had a huge public debt due to its military involvement in the American Revolution (1775-1783) and the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763). People were dying of malnutrition while the court of the incompetent King Louis XVI and the merry Marie Antoinette was bathed in luxury and luxury.
At the same time, the rule of the absolutist monarchy was being challenged by the French Enlightenment movement of the 18th century, under the intellectual influence of leading thinkers such as Voltaire, Diderot, Montesquieu and Rousseau. The central role of the Church was also under scrutiny by the Enlightenment thinkers, who drew attention to the undeserved privileges of an untaxed clergy.
Louis and his advisers wanted to deal with the debt crisis quickly by raising taxes and excise duties. The Estates-General were made up of elected representatives of all three French social classes – the nobility was the first estate, the clergy the second, and the third estate was the most diverse, comprising 98% of all French people, from the bourgeoisie to peasants and workers. Women took an active part in the drafting of the volumes of complaints to be discussed by the Estates-General.
Already at the first session in May 1789, it became clear that the majority of the first two Estates were not ready to give up their privileges and their life of ease. The Third Estate, joined by some liberal-minded nobles (even a cousin of the King), declared itself the National Assembly and set itself the task of writing a new constitution. This was to introduce a new, much more liberal political order based on freedom and equality.
The economic crisis quickly turned political. In the Third Estate, a number of lawyers, later responsible for radicalising the revolution, quickly took the lead. Among them was the reserved and serious-minded Maximilien de Robespierre. Today, his name is a metaphor for the reign of terror and counter-revolutionary paranoia successfully emulated by the worst dictators of the 20th century.
Although women could not be elected as members of the Estates, they attended all the sessions of the Assembly in large numbers in the galleries, as they were open to the public. They also began to identify themselves politically at an early age, attending meetings of sections or precursors of political parties. The salons of the influential bourgeois women were lively as never before.
Salons were an Enlightenment invention and, alongside coffee houses and the emergence of the mass media, were crucial to the development of public political debate and the emergence of public opinion, which also date back to this period. They were organised at home by influential and wealthy bourgeois women, with an average of around fifty people. People of different classes and backgrounds mixed there, having fun and dancing, but above all discussing current political affairs, literature, philosophy and science. Even before the Revolution, salons were informal centres of intellectualism and progressive thought, and it was women who played a decisive role in them. One of the most influential salons during the Revolution was that of Manon Roland, later herself a tragic victim of the Jacobin terror.
Although there was no organised education for girls, their literacy was increasing and the Age of Reason also raised the issue of women’s education. They were educated mostly by their mothers, but often also by nuns in convents. They were taught mainly “women’s skills”, knitting, sewing, drawing, music, housework.
They were not encouraged to read so as not to develop their own ideas. After all, the legitimacy of their inferior social position compared to men was not questioned. But the question of women’s rights did begin to be raised by some as one of the key conditions for the radical change in society that the revolutionaries had so fervently advocated. Olympe de Gouges wrote bluntly: “Women, what have you gained from the French Revolution? I tell you. Nothing.”
But there was no time to deal with the peripheral issue of women’s rights in general. The Revolution officially began with the massive storming of the Bastille on 14 July 1789. Women were among the people who stormed the semi-derelict Bastille prison, with only seven prisoners, to seize the weapons stored there.
Give us bread and weapons!
When the king asked the adviser if it was a rebellion, the adviser replied, “No, sir, it is a revolution.”
That summer, the National Assembly abolished the feudal system, depriving nobles and priests of their power and position, and adopted the Declaration on the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. Or, as it soon turned out, the rights of man and citizen. Women, slaves, the homeless and criminals were excluded from the category of citizen and man. Few were those who saw in this a contradiction with the very principles of the Revolution. Olympe de Gouges was one of them.
In this early, moderate age of revolution, few people thought of overthrowing the monarchy, even though the King’s authority was already in a fair decline. The transformed political system was to become similar to the English constitutional monarchy, where Parliament had the right to participate in the management of the state and its finances. But Louis XVI was reluctant, almost hostile, to innovations that would limit his power.
He was forced to adopt new decrees abolishing privileges, extortionate taxes, the feudal system and the Declaration by thousands of angry women. In despair at the appalling shortage of bread and the exorbitant prices of food, they set off on a 15-kilometre march from Paris to Versailles in the rainy October weather. The crowd was made up mainly of ordinary working-class women, who have become known throughout history as “fishmongers”, as the vast majority of them were tradeswomen. Armed with kitchen knives, spears, clubs and stones, they demanded an audience with the King, and many stormed the National Assembly, striking fear into the bones of the deputies. They took their seats on the benches, hung their soaked clothes on the benches, loudly demanded food and lower bread prices and generally participated loudly in the debate.
Finally, they were received by Louis XVI, who promised to deliver the grain to Paris immediately. He also agreed to the abolition of feudalism and to the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. Paradoxically, therefore, it was women who achieved the adoption of the Declaration and who were then excluded from it because of their sex.
The people now demanded that the King be moved to Paris, the heart of the civil struggle. Literally out of fear of the uncontrollable crowds, the royal family moved from the opulent Versailles, Europe’s most sophisticated court, to a much more modest palace in the middle of Paris. Officially, the King was supposed to be closer to his people. In reality, however, he became their prisoner.
The famous March on Versailles on 5 and 6 October 1789 marked the first successful mass mobilisation of women, joined by men in their thousands. In addition to the King who was slain, 60 tonnes of grain were delivered to Paris. Today, more and more experts agree that this event was more decisive for the future of the Revolution than the storming of the Bastille. The “fishmongers”, as carriers of a political message, became national heroines and many of them were later sworn Republicans.
From the streets to the political clubs
Women became aware of their influence on the political process and wanted to maintain it. To stay at the heart of the revolutionary process, they, like men, began to set up political clubs. Like a fad, they spread across France like mushrooms after the rain. Most of them were created between 1790 and 1791, but by far the most famous was the Association of Republican Radical Citizens, founded in 1793.
First they were founded by bourgeois women and intellectuals in the spirit of the pre-revolutionary salons of the Enlightenment, then by the wives of local revolutionaries. But there was a fundamental difference – while salons mixed social classes and, above all, brought together people of different ideological persuasions, clubs were the beginnings of political parties, organised according to party affiliation, created with the clear aim of influencing legislative and governmental bodies. In the evenings, the members of the Assembly would meet in the clubs to report on the day’s events and to prepare common positions. Many clubs admitted women, some even as full members, which meant that they could take part in the debates. In others, they sat in the galleries and listened.
But women also set up their own clubs, where, especially in the beginning, they were mainly involved in charitable causes, caring for the elderly, the education of girls and the sick, while also reading newspapers and following political developments. One of the most prominent speakers and advocates of women’s rights was the Dutchwoman Etta Palm d’Aelders, who founded the Patriot Society of Women Friends of Truth. Like the Revolution, these clubs became radicalised from 1792 onwards, as evidenced by their revolutionary names – for example, the Fraternal Society of Patriots of Both Sexes, Defenders of the Constitution. It was there that militant women took their first steps in the revolution. Claire Lacombe and Pauline Léon in particular.
In May 1793, two ardent defenders of the Revolution founded the Society of Republican Radical Citizens to defend the Revolution. This was the women’s version of the Jacobin Club, and they too targeted the moderate Girondists, even though they came from their own ranks. They campaigned for the right to bear arms for women and, among other things, signed a petition for the creation of a Women’s National Guard.
They were not too concerned with women’s rights and equality, their main aim being to preserve the revolution. But even if they did not actively advocate equal rights, they were, in fact, already signalling the possibility of new social relations between men and women by their public action.
In the beginning, women’s involvement was well received because, as an unorganised mass, they were an extension of men and useful as such. As they became more and more connected and organised, and as such competition to men, powerful and capable women fell victim to political opportunism. “We don’t teach you how to love children, so don’t lecture us on how to be a citizen either,” wrote one of the anti-feminist revolutionary newspapers.
After only a few months of operation, the Léon and Lacombe Association banned all women’s clubs. This period also coincided with the beginning of the revolutionary terror. In 1794, they were still allowed to follow the sessions of the Assembly and write petitions, but then, in 1795, they were banned from doing so as well.
Reign of terror
The pursuit of Louis to Paris was already a grim portent of the violence to come – the bloodthirsty people who accompanied him proudly displayed the severed heads of the King’s National Guard on their spears. The struggle for supremacy between the advocates of a more moderate transition to a new dispensation preserving the monarchy and the more radical republicans was intensifying. In many respects, the King was forging his own destiny – he did not want to believe in the revolution, so he tried to undermine it in every way he could. In 1791, the Assembly proclaimed a constitutional monarchy, thus depriving the King of his absolutist power. To regain power, he began to plot incautiously with aristocrats who had left France in fear of revolution, and with some European countries, notably the dynastic ally Austria.
When he and his family were caught on the border with present-day Belgium in June 1791 during an amateur attempt to flee France, his fate was sealed.
Thus, the republican ideal, initially supported by a few, grew stronger and stronger and the revolutionary movement more and more extreme. France became a republic in September 1792. The political stage was dominated at first by moderate Girondists (most of them from the French province of Gironde), who at first included supporters of maintaining the kingdom with fewer powers. Then came fierce internal political struggles over the future organisation of France, the place of the Church, the King, involvement in war with neighbouring countries, slavery, food prices, taxes. Radicals took power, the most influential of whom were the Jacobins, led by Robespierre, but also the Cordeliers, the Hébertists and others. Today they are generally known as Jacobins, even though they were made up of different parties.
The so-called sans-culottes, or “dancerless” people, also appeared on the scene. This was the organised French proletariat, named after the wearing of long wide trousers as opposed to the aristocratic knee-length tight trousers. The radical bourgeois revolutionaries allied themselves with the kneeless and together got Louis condemned to death. He was one of the first victims of the new “humane” method of execution by guillotine.
While at the beginning of the Revolution, constitutional monarchists and moderate, less moderate and radical republicans were free to express their opinions, times changed after Louis’s death. The most turbulent and at the same time notorious period of the Revolution had begun. At the same time, France was at war with its neighbours, who wanted to overthrow the revolution. Chaos reigned on home soil, allowing the most radical revolutionaries to prevail. The Robespierre purges began.
Anyone who was not 100% with the revolution in his own way was against it. Olympe de Gouges, one of the most remarkable women of the period, felt this first-hand.
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Woman, wake up!
Olympe de Gouges was only taken from the dusty shelves of history and introduced to modernity by feminists in the 1960s. Today, she is regarded not only as the undisputed pioneer of the modern feminist movement, but also as a brilliant, uncompromising and witty humanist and defender of all the oppressed and discriminated against. She campaigned for the abolition of slavery and for the rights of all those who lived at the bottom of society – orphans, manual workers, the poor, the elderly, prostitutes, women’s rights to divorce, to education, the right to vote, and so on. She also boldly stood up to the most bloodthirsty thug of the French Revolution, Maximilien de Robespierre. She knew it would cost her her life.
A beauty of humble roots, Marie Gouze was born to simple parents. Convinced that her biological father was not her mother’s butcher husband, but in fact her lover, the Marquis de Pompignan, she created a veil of secrecy around her true origins, which she carefully nurtured throughout her life. Forced into marriage at the age of 16, a mother and widow by the age of 17, she later fought, among other things, against arranged marriages. Of her marriage, she wrote scornfully: “I was only sixteen when I was married to a man I did not like one bit, who was neither rich nor from a good family. I was sacrificed for no reason, and I felt a simple dislike for this man.”
From the provinces, an ambitious but barely literate widow quickly escaped to cosmopolitan Paris. There, she enjoyed the intellectual atmosphere and, as an autodidact, tried to fulfil her literary ambitions – she surrounded herself with journalists, philosophers, writers and was a regular visitor to the salons. A love affair with a wealthy businessman and arms dealer provided her with a lavish lifestyle. Exposed to new ideas and the philosophy of the Enlightenment, she first critically attacked the institution of slavery by writing theatrical works and even founded the Society of the Friends of the Negro. Her first acclaimed work was entitled Slavery of the Blacks and was even performed on the stage of the famous Comédie française, despite mixed reactions.
After the Revolution, her work took on an increasingly political tone and she began to denounce the subordinate role of women in society in pamphlets, essays and letters. She often financed the publication of her works herself and wrote her most provocative political statements on the walls of city buildings. She attacked the prevailing mentality, which was rooted in Rousseau’s belief that a woman’s natural place was in the private sphere and a man’s in the public sphere. In this, she followed the Englishwoman Mary Wollstonecraft and her manifesto entitled ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Woman’. She soon became the target of attacks from her opponents and vile rumours and lies began to be spread about her. Among other things, she was said to be illiterate and thus not even the author of her own works, she was also called a courtesan and even had an incestuous relationship with her son. Maria Antoaneta was also accused of this.
But Olympe’s skin was too tough for the criticism to get to her. Her life’s mission was to draw attention to social injustice. But she was increasingly aware that it was very difficult for a woman to get her voice heard in public. “I have presented a hundred worthwhile projects; but as soon as it becomes clear that a woman is behind them, they are ignored.” She did find a loyal audience in pro-women political clubs, such as the Patriot Society of Friends of Truth, led by Etta Palm d’Aelders, also an influential intellectual and feminist. The well-known revolutionary journalist Prudhomme compared her oratorical skills to those of the most eminent speakers of the Legislative Assembly (renamed the National Assembly).
But the work that made history for all time was her most radical – the Declaration on the Rights of Women and Citizens.
A woman is born free and remains equal to a man
These are the words with which the women’s version of the Bill of Rights begins, to draw attention to the fact that the Declaration on the Rights of Man and of the Citizen addressed only men and called for the need for equality of rights between the sexes. In 1791, the latter became part of the French Constitution, thus officially granting universal human rights only to men.
With the Declaration on the Rights of Woman, de Gouges has largely taken the basic text and written it in a way that also refers to the female sex. Thus, the latter would also have the right to liberty, property, security, protection from violence, the right to employment, freedom of expression, and so on. In the resounding Article 10, it highlighted the paradox that women are punished under the law in the same way as men, while being deprived of the same rights. “If a woman is allowed to ascend to the morgue, then she must also have the right to ascend to the podium.”
Finally, there is an appendix entitled “The Social Contract between Man and Woman”, which describes in more detail how the legal relationship between husband and wife should be regulated. For example, both should share equally in property and have equal rights to property and children on separation.
Interestingly, Olympe de Gouges dedicated the Charter to Queen Marie Antoinette, saying, “There will be no revolution until women are free from the tyranny of men.” At the same time, she called on her to help bring back the exiled nobles and strengthen the French crown. She was not alone among the progressive-minded revolutionaries of the early period in supporting a constitutional monarchy, but this was one of the main incriminating pieces of evidence later in her death sentence.
Like its other texts, the Declaration has been largely ignored. However, it is worth highlighting the fact that some “feminist proposals” did find their way into legislation when the Republic was founded. For example, at the end of 1792, a divorce law was passed, women were able to inherit equally, enter into contracts, testify in court and were granted certain other limited civil rights. But they remained economically dependent on men, as they were largely banned from employment. In the years following the Republic, which were marked most notably by the struggle for supremacy between the Jacobins and the Girondists, women became increasingly active in public life. But as Robespierre took the reins firmly into his own hands, he increasingly distanced himself from militant women activists. More and more Girondists ended up under the guillotine.
At the same time, Olympe de Gouges became increasingly critical of the revolution and openly and provocatively attacking Robespierre and his policies. In a period when the slightest disagreement with him led straight to the guillotine, she was one of the few who regularly addressed him in public without a hair on her neck. She claimed that he had desecrated and betrayed the ideals of the revolution. Her lover begged her to stop exposing herself, and indeed she was thinking of moving to the country and had already bought an estate there. But even before that, in the Three Ballot Boxes sub-list, she had proposed a referendum in which the people would choose between three forms of government, a monarchy, a republic or a federation. In the intimidating political climate, this was enough to lead to her immediate arrest.
She was arrested on 20 July 1793. She was thrown in prison for three months and treated extremely badly. A number of texts in which she had inked Robespierre were found in her home. She had to defend herself at her trial, but even there she maintained the calm blood, dignity and even sarcasm that for many years distinguished her personality and public speaking. As an enemy of the Republic with Girondist sympathies, she was sentenced to death for counter-revolutionary activity, undermining the revolution and inciting hatred against the leaders of the revolution.
On 3 November 1793, the guillotine silenced her for good. Before she knelt proudly and peacefully on the scaffold, she spoke her last words: “Children of the Fatherland, you will avenge my death!”
Amazon warrior Théroigne de Méricourt
Her conviction and death were a warning to women who wanted to expose themselves politically. Three days before, the Jacobins had banned women’s political clubs, effectively putting an end to the remarkable participation of women in the drama of the French Revolution. New times were dawning. They were chillingly described as “sans-culotte” by the public prosecutor of the Paris Commune:
“Remember that dragon, that man, that shameless Olympe de Gouges, who founded women’s clubs, abandoned the care of the home, wanted to play politics and committed crimes. /…/ Do you want to emulate her? No, you will realise that you will only deserve respect if you are what nature has set you out to be. We want to respect women, so we force you to respect yourselves.”
Women who sacrificed themselves for God or family were revered, while revolutionaries were branded as madwomen, even monsters. Such was the fate of Théroigne de Méricourt.
Théroigne was born in what is now Belgium into a working-class family and, like Olympe, was drawn to Paris by revolutionary zeal. She took part in both the March on the Bastille and the Women’s March for Bread at Versailles. She then settled there and sat from dawn to dusk in the gallery of the National Assembly, acquiring political literacy.
With her unusual appearance – she dressed like an Amazon warrior – and her sharp tongue, she quickly became indispensable on the political scene. In the evenings, she hosted her own salon and tried to bring the work of the Assembly closer to the people. First she was a member of the Cordeliers Club, a populist workers’ party that welcomed women into its ranks and was close to the Jacobins. In 1791, she was captured in Belgian territory by French aristocratic émigrés, suspected of attempting to murder Marie Antoinette and handed over to the Austrians. After nine months, she returned to France, where she was initially welcomed as a national heroine. She joined the Jacobins and even wanted to form her own “troop of Amazons” during the war with Prussia and Austria.
Like Olympe de Gouges, she campaigned for women’s rights, especially to bear arms and to join the army. And like Olympe de Gouges, she dared to question the integrity of the radical Jacobins, siding with the Girondists in one of their political disputes. She was cruelly avenged by the women themselves, stripped naked in public and beaten on her bare buttocks. This was in May 1793. After this, Théroigne sank into depression, probably even unfitness. Her brother sent her to a mental hospital, where she spent the last twenty-three years of her miserable life. It was probably “madness” that saved her from the guillotine.
But the attacks on her personality refused to end. Public images of her as a child-molesting man-eater and a hysterical, half-naked warrior circulated. She too paid dearly for challenging nature, because she was not prepared to accept the place between the four walls that nature had given her.
Paradoxically, most women themselves supported the prevailing paradigm of a natural division of male and female tasks. Especially women from the upper social classes agreed with Rousseau’s glorification of motherhood. They also did not show solidarity towards other-minded members of the same sex. Madame Roland, who hosted one of the most influential revolutionary salons, wrote: “It angers me to see women striving for the privileges of men. /…/ No matter how talented they are, they should not display their talents in public.”
In the end, it was about revolution, not women’s rights. They had to wait for the 20th century.
A young, unknown woman called Charlotte Corday was also preoccupied with the future of the revolution. It meant more to her than her own life. Like many, she disagreed with the radicalisation of revolutionary ideas, terror and purges, but like few, she was prepared to resort to the most extreme means to achieve her goals.
Martyr of the moderate revolution
Charlotte Corday was not a typical loud revolutionary agitator like, say, Olympe de Gouges, Théroigne de Méricourt or Manon Roland. But she was also a true daughter of the revolution, perhaps the most unusual of them all. It was certainly an unusual act that has made her a part of history. The descendant of the famous 16th-century playwright Pierre Corneille, she was of blue blood but from an impoverished family. She read widely, was inspired by Plutarch and Corneille and, of course, Rousseau and Voltaire, as were other intelligent contemporaries. That is why she too was gripped by the revolutionary fever which, at the beginning, promised so encouragingly a transition to a new, fairer world.
At the start of the revolution, she was delighted. She followed all the events, read the newspapers, the pamphlets, the speeches of the revolutionaries. To be closer to political activities, she moved to Caen in 1791. Charlotte was a supporter of the more moderate Girondists who dominated the political scene before the start of the Terror. But when they fell out of favour with the radical Jacobins, many of them left Paris in fear of the guillotine. They settled in Normandy and Caen became the meeting place of the escaped Girondists, from where they tried to organise a coup d’état.
Charlotte was increasingly convinced that all the ills of France were the fault of the radicals. Having read a lot, she was well acquainted with the newspaper The Friend of the People, published by the demagogic weirdo Jean-Paul Marat. Marat, together with Danton and Robespierre, represented the leading troika of the Terror. Before the Revolution, he was a distinguished scientist and doctor who even corresponded with Benjamin Franklin. Privately unhappy, suffering from a severe skin disease and probably also a nervous one – his facial muscles twitched constantly – he found in the Revolution both an escape from pain and an opportunity for fame. In his own hard-hitting revolutionary newspaper, he constantly incited the people to violence, spread lies about imaginary enemies of the revolution, and aroused general suspicion and hatred.
His image inspired both shame and awe. Filthy, with tattered clothes and a vinegar-soaked handkerchief on his head, he was one of Paris’s more recognisable personalities. His illness had progressed since 1793 and he spent almost all his time at home, in a bath tub filled with medicinal bath water. He had a writing desk installed above it, and he wrote hateful articles even more obsessively.
Charlotte Corday despised the editor of the People’s Friend outright. She believed that he was one of the main people responsible for the bloody anarchy in which France was sinking. In order to save her country, she decided to murder him. As she wrote in a letter to the French, which was found strapped to a corset when she was arrested:
“Oh, my country! Your misfortune tears my heart out. All I can give you is my life.”
It has carefully prepared for its mission. She paid off her debts, wrote to her father and set off on her journey on 9 July 1793, carefully prepared. In Paris, she bought a kitchen knife, hid it in her closet and calmly made her way to the Marat residence. She had to insist on being allowed to see him, and his interest was aroused by the pretext that the young lady had important information about the names of the traitors to the Revolution, the Girondists, who were hiding in Normandy. They talked for a while and when he promised that all the traitors she had reported to him would end up under the guillotine, she took a knife and, in one fell swoop, plunged it between his ribs. He bled to death within minutes.
In prison, she was completely calm and wrote a lot, including her memoirs. She wrote a simple, heartbreaking farewell letter to her father: “Forgive me, Daddy, for sacrificing my life like this without your permission. But in doing so, I have avenged many innocent lives and prevented many other disasters.” She also asked to be portrayed and her calm, determined look shows that she believed unconditionally in the rightness of her action. Of Marat, she wrote: “He was a raging monster who devoured France with the fire of civil war. Now peace can live!”
It was clear that she would be sentenced to death by guillotine. The crowd that witnessed her beheading was huge. Word of the beautiful, cold-blooded young woman spread throughout France. Marat’s murder sparked widespread outrage at Charlotte Corday’s action and, at least temporarily, France was in the grip of even greater terror. Marat became a national hero, revered and celebrated as a bastion of the Revolution. One of the most famous works of art from the French Revolution, the painting The Death of Marat, was created by Jacques-Louis David. A remarkable artist, but himself a Jacobin, the painting depicts Marat in a glorified form, without a trace of skin disease.
Like other women who exposed themselves in one way or another during the Revolution, Charlotte Corday has been etched in the collective memory as unbalanced and depraved.
Hope dies last
Sooner or later, however, Robespierre and his most radical followers were also called out. He ended up like nearly twenty thousand Frenchmen before him – under the guillotine. France slowly calmed down under the moderate Directory and the violence ended. In 1799, with the beginning of the Napoleonic era, the Revolution was over. At the same time, the hope of improving the position of women in society, which the Revolution had nevertheless brought about in some respects, was over.
In many ways, the way out of the chaos and confusion also meant a return to the established habits and beliefs of the old regime. This was certainly true of the perception of the role of women, who were successfully banished from the public sphere once again. Napoleon’s Civil Code had legitimised their legal inferiority and women had become, as it were, the property of men. Gender equality was not enshrined in the French Constitution until 1946.
