The Women's History of the World by Rosalind Miles

Author:Rosalind Miles
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2016-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

She had bared her breasts and was holding them in the palms of her hands, while she deliberately waggled her posterior like a duck. The other women immediately made a rush at her and lifted up her clothing, revealing to the blushing cavalrymen the prettiest figure imaginable, at the same time exclaiming, ‘If you’d like a taste of that, just shout “Death to the king!” first!’.16

This and other similar incidents read like recension of Edmund Burke’s grave reflection on revolution, made in the light of the American experience twenty years before: ‘People crushed by laws have no hope but from power. If laws are their enemies, they will be enemies to laws; and those who have much to hope and nothing to lose will always be dangerous.’17

For this brief, never-to-be-repeated period, revolutionary France abounded in such dangerous women. As a society out of control, it had shed the traditional governing principles and not yet restored or replaced them; riven from top to bottom it was, like a frontier society, wide open to the ambitious, the fearless and the tough. Among the earliest of the women who emerged without a trace and soared to heights previously unimaginable for a female was the complex figure of Théroigne de Méricourt. A gifted singer whose voice had been trained in London and Naples, a successful courtesan who had made a fortune in pre-Revolutionary Paris, she was the woman who led the storming of the Bastille dressed as an Amazon, and later in the same year, the women’s march to Versailles; at the assault on the Tuileries three years later in 1792, she commanded a battalion of Amazons.

Yet de Méricourt was much more than a ‘she-souldier’. An idol of the political clubs, she contributed vociferously to revolutionary discussions, and through her foundation of a number of women’s political clubs, drew the previously disregarded female ‘citizens’ into the debate. Eventually though, she sacrificed her wealth and risked her life for a cause which eventually betrayed her; espousing the moderate faction at the height of the Terror, she lost her popularity and was attacked and severely beaten by the Parisian revolutionary women she had championed. The shock destroyed her reason, and she was confined to a lunatic asylum for the rest of her life.

De Méricourt’s actions even at the height of her importance are not easy to assess. To contemporaries, even by the standards of the time, she often seemed free of all restraint of law, of custom, even of humanity: at the assault of the Tuileries, she used her influence over the mob to have a journalist who had lampooned her lynched before her eyes. Her reputation as a vampire pursued her to the end: ‘one of her last murders was that of a young Fleming, allegedly her first seducer. She . . . struck off his head with her own hand . . . then fell into a kind of maniacal ecstasy, singing a revolutionary ballad while she danced among the pools of blood.’18

De Méricourt

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