Beauty, chastity and unruly times

It may have taken until the late 1960s for the expression ‘the personal is political’ to condense an important truth, but — as Lucy Moore’s fascinating new book shows — that truth is not a new one. Liberty tells the story of the French Revolution through the lives of the great salonnière Germaine de Staël, the passionate middle-class ideologue Manon Roland, the kind-hearted flibbertigibbet Thérésia de Fontenay, the feisty former courtesan Théroigne de Méricourt and the much younger Juliette Récamier — whose beauty and chastity (a very rare thing, to judge by this book) caused her to become an icon of the Republic. This book takes them, jointly and severally, through exile, intrigue, imprisonment in rat-infested jails, multiple lovers, bloodbaths and reversals, not to mention some fabulous parties.

Naturally, there’s much more material available on the more upper-class sans- chemises than on the sans-culottes — which is why it is so important to the completeness of Moore’s tableau that she includes the story, too, of Pauline Léon, the daughter of a chocolatier, and someone for whom insurrection was more than an intellectual conceit. At 35, Léon co-founded the powerful radical group, the Société des Républicaines-Révolutionnaires — a gang of cross-dressing militant enragées who, when not haranguing the Commune, patrolled the streets like 18th-century Riot Grrls, intimidating moderates and biffing suspected aristocrats.

Her views — in particular, that female citizens should be entitled to bear arms in defence of the Revolution — were further out than most. The background to the Revolution, for intellectuals such as de Staël and Roland, was Rousseau; for the fishwives and sans-culottes, it was, as much as anything, starvation. Rousseau’s conviction that ‘nature’ fitted women only for a supportive domestic role — the great disconnect in the rationalist argument for equality — was swallowed whole not only by the patriarchs of the Revolution, but also by many of its most fervent and intelligent female supporters.