Women and the French Revolution (2): Mary Wollstonecraft and Madame de Staël

(There are a number of good biographies of Wollstonecraft that I have consulted for this post. Some can be found here and here. For Madame de Staël, I have used Maria Fairweather's biography and all quotes are from her book.

Mary Wollstonecraft

At about the same time as Olympe de Gouges was arguing for the rights of women, Mary Wollstonecraft took up the same cause. Like de Gouges, she was spurred into action by the events of the French Revolution. By coincidence, they were both in Paris at the same time and mixed in similar circles, but they never seem to have met.

Mary Wollstonecraft, by John Opie
Tate Britain
Public domain

Mary Wollstonecraft was born in London on 27 April 1757, the second child and first daughter of a master silk-weaver, who squandered his inheritance. Her father was tyrannical and her mother submissive. She grew up in a household where girls did not matter. The second great influence on her early life was her sentimental friendship with Fanny Blood, whom she met in 1775. For a while, this friendship was the ruling passion of her life, but too much should not be read into it. Such friendships were common at the time and were not necessarily lesbian.

Wollstonecraft knew she would have to earn her living and that the options were limited. In 1778 she left home to become a paid companion to Sarah Dawson, a widow living in Bath. The post did not suit her rebellious temperament. In 1782, following the death of her mother, she went to live with Fanny Blood and her family.

In 1784, with Fanny Blood and her sister, Eliza, she set up a school in Newington Green, north of London. There she came into contact with the radical clergyman, Dr Richard Price, and the community of ‘Rational Dissent’. Two disasters then struck her: in 1785 Fanny Blood died in childbirth in Portugal, where Mary had gone to nurse her; in 1786 the school failed.

After an unhappy experience as a teacher in Ireland, Wollstonecraft published Thoughts on the Education of Daughters in 1787, a plea for girls' education to be rational rather than ornamental. 

After this, her publisher, the radical, Joseph Johnson, employed her to write on a regular basis for the Analytical Review. In 1788 she published Mary. A Fiction, a semi-autobiographical novel of female friendship.

Wollstonecraft and the Vindication

It was the French Revolution that was to make Wollstonecraft famous. In 1789 the Bastille fell. In 1790 Edmund Burke published his Reflections on the Revolution in France, an attack on the Revolution that infuriated radicals. Wollstonecraft responded immediately with A Vindication of the Rights of Men. She criticised Burke for his reactionary politics and also for sentimentalism.

She followed this up in January 1792 with A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, a ground-breaking work that called for 'a revolution in female manners' so that women 'by reforming themselves' can 'reform the world'.

A wild wish has just flown from my heart to my head. I will not stifle it though it may excite a horse-laugh. —I do earnestly wish to see the distinction of sex confounded in society, unless where love animates the behaviour. For this distinction is, I am firmly persuaded, the foundation of the weakness of character ascribed to woman; is the cause why the understanding is neglected, whilst accomplishments are acquired with sedulous care: and the same cause accounts for their preferring the graceful before the heroic virtues.

How many women thus waste life away the prey of discontent, who might have practised as physicians, regulated a farm, managed a shop, and stood erect, supported by their own industry, instead of hanging their heads surcharged with the dew of sensibility, that consumes the beauty to which it at first gave lustre? How much more respectable is the woman who earns her own bread by fulfilling any duty, than the most accomplished beauty… Yet I sigh to think how few women aim at attaining this respectability by withdrawing from the giddy whirl of pleasure, or the indolent calm that stupefies the good sort of women it sucks in.

In spite of the severe rationalism of the Vindication, Wollstonecraft had been in love for the past three years with the married Swiss painter, Henry Fuseli. She planned to travel to France with him in order to see the Revolution for herself, but when Fuseli's wife threw cold water on the scheme, she decided to travel there alone, and she arrived there in December 1792 - just as preparations were afoot to put the king on trial. 

Women and the French Revolution (1)

The French Revolution represented
as a woman.
But how far did allegory
represent reality?

Gender and the French Revolution

The debate over the Revolution was bound up with issues of gender. It appeared at the end of a century in which women increasingly participated in a widening public sphere. During the Revolution many women became activists, but this was controversial and the revolutionary governments eventually restricted their activities. Later French historians, such as Jules Michelet, approved of this development, as they did not believe that women were suited, either by intellect or temperament, for politics.

On 26 August 1789 the National Assembly issued the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen. It set out the doctrine of the inalienable rights of man, and did so, using well-established female iconography. So were women included in these rights - or were they not?

The Declaration of the Rights of Man
surmounted by two female figures
representing Liberty and Victory

The Bread March of the Women to Versailles on 5 October 1789 was a demonstration of working women that turned violent. The result was the removal of the royal family from Versailles to the Tuileries Palace in Paris, making it one of the most significant events in the Revolution. 

But were the women to be praised or condemned? Two British polemicists disagreed over this. To Edmund Burke, they were 'the vilest of women', comparable to 'the furies of hell'. But Mary Wollstonecraft defended them as women trying to earn an honest living by selling vegetables or fish and engaging in a justifiable protest. Either way, they were controversial - as was the whole issue of women's engagement in politics.

Prelude: a widening public sphere?

By the time of the French Revolution, some women had found a new source of power through the print culture. The growth of literacy and the expansion of education generated a wider reading public, and authors and readers were drawn from a wider social spectrum than ever before. Women as well as men read magazines, newspapers and books. In Britain the circulating library made books available for readers of comparatively modest income. From the mid-seventeenth century, women were becoming not merely readers but also successful writers. These included the novelist Madeleine de Scudéry and the playwright (and government spy), Aphra Behn.

At the same time, elite women continued to exercise power through the salon, a model going back to the Renaissance courts of Isabella d’Este at Mantua and Elisabetta Gonzaga at Urbino. The salon was a meeting place for cultivated people at the house of a woman of rank for the purpose of conducting witty and well-informed conversation, and it flourished in particular in late-seventeenth and eighteenth-century France.

Catherine the Great

Catherine, b J. B. Lampi, 1780s
Kunsthistorisches Museum
Public domain

The century of the empresses

Russia in the eighteenth century saw four reigning empresses. This was made possible because of a degree of Peter the Great in February 1722 in which he overturned the traditional laws of succession and decreed that the tsar would have absolute right to choose his successor. The crown thus became a piece of personal property that the tsar could dispose of at will. 

Catherine I: In 1724 Peter signed a decree bequeathing the crown to his second wife, Catherine, a Lithuanian of very obscure origins, who was then crowned in the Dormition Cathedral in Moscow. But later in the year Peter learned of her affair with the court chamberlain. He was executed and Peter tore up the succession decree. He died in January 1725, without naming his successor. Catherine was then proclaimed empress. She died in 1727 and was succeeded by Peter’s grandson, Peter II, who died without naming a successor in 1730. 

Anna: The Supreme Privy Council offered the throne to Peter the Great’s niece, Anna Ivanovna, a childless widow, who became the first female sovereign to rule in fact as well as in name. She died in 1740.

Elizabeth: After a complicated transition period, in which the unfortunate  child tsar Ivan VI was overthrown and then imprisoned for life, Peter the Great’s daughter, Elizabeth seized power in November 1741. 

A year later she named as her heir her nephew, Peter the Great’s grandson, Duke Peter of Holstein. She brought him to Russia, made him convert from Lutheranism to Orthodoxy and began to search for a bride for him. Her choice fell on his second cousin, a German princess Sophie Auguste Fredericke, Princess of Anhalt-Zerbst. 

Grand Duke Peter,
later Tsar Peter III

Catherine in Russia

Sophie was born in Stettin (now Szczecin, Poland) in Pomerania in 1729, the daughter of the reigning prince, Christian August of Anhalt-Zerbst, who was in the service of Frederick II. Her mother, Joanna, was the sister of the prince-bishop of Lübeck. The marriage to Peter was promoted by Frederick, who wished to cement his relationship with Russia and to prevent an alliance between Russia and Austria.

Sophie and her mother arrived in St Petersburg in February 1744. She learned Russian quickly and was received into the Orthodox Church in June 1744 where she was given her Russian name Ekaterina Alekseyevna in honour of the Empress Catherine I. On 21 August she and Peter were married. By this time Peter had already been ill twice – first with measles and then with smallpox.

 Grand Duchess Ekaterina Alekseyevna
around the time of her wedding,
 by George Christoph Grooth, 1745
Hermitage Museum
Public domain

The court at St Petersburg was presided over by Elizabeth and her lover, Alexei Razumovsky, whom diplomats privately called ‘the night emperor’. She then took a lover eighteen years her junior, Nikita Beketov, who founded Moscow University, a newspaper and the Academy of Arts. He gradually became the real power in Russia.