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.


The first salonnière is thought to have been the Italian-born Catherine de Vivonne, marquise de Rambouillet, who, between 1617 and 1665 held a salon in her grand Parisian hôtel. The most celebrated of the eighteenth-century salonnières was Marie-Thérèse Rodet Geoffrin. She held her salon on Mondays and Wednesdays and the most learned men of the day were invited.

Presumed portrait of Madame Geoffrin
Public domain.
You weren't anybody if you
weren't invited to her salon.

The salon had its British imitator in a group called the Bluestockings that assembled in the houses of Elizabeth Montagu, author and wealthy widow, and Elizabeth Vesey, the wife of an Irish MP. The name derives from the informality of their gatherings – one man was invited to attend in his blue (worsted) stockings if he did not have more formal clothes to hand. In 1778 some of the Bluestockings were portrayed in Richard Samuel's The Nine Living Muses of Great Britain.

Madame de Staël: author and political hostess

One of the last of the salons of pre-Revolutionary France was hosted by Suzanne Curchod, the daughter of a Swiss Protestant pastor from a village near Lausanne. She had come to Paris as a poor governess, but in 1764 she married the Genevan financier, Jacques Necker and was able to take her place in Parisian society and preside over her salon.

Her daughter and only child, Anne Louise Germaine, was born on 22 April 1766. From the age of two, she was given a rigorous education that included Greek and Latin, mathematics, geography, science and languages. She read English and spoke it moderately well.

As a wealthy heiress, she was a prize  matrimonial catch, though she was convinced no man could match her father. But on 14 January 1786 she married the 26-year-old Swedish ambassador,  Baron Eric Magnus de Staël Holstein. The contract was witnessed by Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette.

As a married woman, Germaine began to make her mark. She set up her own salon and cultivated a circle of intellectuals and courtiers. Her Letters on the Works and Character of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1788) made her famous. Eclipsed by his wife, De Staël became jealous of her success and the marriage began to founder. 

Madame de Staël and the French Revolution

Germaine was brought into Revolutionary politics through her father, who was made Director General of Finance and Minister of State in 1788. It was on  his recommendation the Estates General was summoned to Versailles to try to find a way to deal with the Crown’s intractable financial problems. She watched the first meeting of the Estates General on 4 May 1789.

The fall of the Bastille on 14 July 1789 was triggered by the king's dismissal of Necker. She was with him on his triumphant return to Paris on 30 July, and her salon in the Swedish embassy was now the most influential in Paris.

In this period she took at least two lovers. The first was Talleyrand, the most skilful intriguer of the age, the second the count of Narbonne-Lara, who was almost certainly the father of her son, Louis Auguste, born in 1790. 

Louis Marie Jacques Amalric,
comte de Narbonne-Lara.
Moderate royalist and lover of
Madame de Staël,
 by Herminie Déhérain
Musée de l'Armée

She continued her salon when her parents left for Switzerland later in the year, surrounding herself with those who wanted constitutional reform rather than revolution. Not realising that she was basically on their side, the royalists attacked her fiercely as an interfering foreigner. 

At the end of 1791 a new constitution was in place, setting up a Legislative Assembly and giving the king the power of veto. Under pressure from Germaine, Narbonne was appointed Minister for War. Marie Antoinette wrote: 

What a triumph for Madame de Staël, and what a pleasure to have all the army at her disposal!  

But his career as a war minister was short-lived. As war with Austria and Prussia approached, he came under fire from both monarchists and republicans and was dismissed in March 1792.  However he and Germaine remained determined to save the king. They devised a plan for the royal family to escape to Normandy, from whence they could sail to England - but it was turned down.

Germaine was in Paris on the violent journée of 10 August 1792 when the monarchy was overthrown. She stayed in Paris to help her friends who were in danger. She hid Narbonne in the chapel of the Swedish embassy and obtained a passport for him so that he could leave for England. She herself was prevented from leaving Paris and was in temporary custody at the time of the September Massacres.

On 3 September she finally left Paris and joined her parents and son at Coppet. At the time of the king’s trial, in January 1793, she made a risky journey to Paris before travelling to England. She arrived at Dover on 20 January. At Richmond, she learned of the execution of the king. In February she rejoined Narbonne at Juniper Hall in Surrey. She was an exile - but safe.

Plaque at Juniper Hall
commemorating its links with
the French émigrés.

The Revolution: a new opportunity for women?

Germaine de Staël tried to exercise power through the men in her life. However, other women sought to exercise power in their own right and some men, like the elderly philosophe, Nicolas de Condorcet, encouraged them to do so. In February 1790 the first Fraternal Society of Patriots of Both Sexes was formed. Germaine de Staël was not a member, though many of her friends were. But some revolutionaries, like Jean-Paul Marat, were suspicious of the idea of women taking a public role.

With the coming of war, women campaigned against grain shortages and inflation.This was a traditional female role but it ran counter to the ideology of the Revolution, where the key player was meant to be the ‘active citizen’, whether defined as a man of property or a revolutionary - but always as a male: a woman’s role was to nurture her husband and family and provide him with legitimate children. Women were to remain in the private sphere and not engage in politics.

The female sans-culotte,
a domestic revolutionary.

Female activists

However, in 1791 the actress and playwright, Olympe de Gouges, published her Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Citizeness, dedicated to Marie Antoinette.

Woman is born free and remains equal to man in rights. Social distinctions may be based only on common utility.… No one should be disturbed for his fundamental opinions; woman has the right to mount the scaffold, so she should have the right equally to mount the rostrum, provided that these manifestations do not trouble public order as established by law.

Apart from her views on gender, Olympe de Gouges was a political moderate. Other women, more radical than she was, became prominent in the revolutionary clubs, such as the Society of Revolutionary Women, formed in May 1793, and according to a visiting Englishman, these clubistes made a noisy contribution to the debates.

One woman in particular, intervened in high politics. This was Manon Roland, the wife of the Minister of the Interior in the Girondin government that was formed in 1792. She dressed with revolutionary simplicity and ran a salon from which women were excluded. She later said, ‘I knew the proper role of my sex and never exceeded it.’ But it was commonly believed that she wrote her husband's speeches.

In the summer of 1793 the Girondins were replaced by the more revolutionary Jacobins. Madame Roland was arrested and imprisoned. She was executed in November. Her last words are said to have been, 'Liberty, what crimes are committed in your name!'

Madame Roland in the Conciergerie prison
Unknown artist
Public domain.

Olympe de Gouges met the same fate. In December 1792 when Louis XVI was facing trial she had offered to be his defence lawyer. The offer was turned down, but her moderate royalist politics was now well-known, and on 8 November 1793 she was guillotined for her counter-revolutionary writings. She was the third public woman to be executed that autumn, the others being Marie Antoinette and Madame Roland. All three were accused of crossing ‘the boundaries of female virtue’.

The end of female activism?

On 15 November 1793 the revolutionary Pierre Gaspard Chaumette warned women of the fate of 

the impudent Olympe de Gouges, who was the first woman to start up women's political clubs, who abandoned the cares of her home, to meddle in the affairs of the Republic, and whose head fell under avenging blade of the law.

His fellow-revolutionary, Jean-Baptiste Amar, said, 

A woman’s honour confines her to the private sphere and precludes her from the struggle with men.

At the end of 1793 the Jacobin government closed down the women's clubs. It turned out that, when it came to gender, the revolutionaries were thoroughly conservative, if not misogynistic.