Liberty: The Lives and Times of Six Women in Revolutionary France by Moore Lucy

Author:Moore, Lucy [Moore, Lucy]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780061881947
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Lacombe’s brave defence of a victim of injustice was enough to incriminate her in Chabot’s ‘cockroach eyes’ (as she described them). ‘I told him that we didn’t get rid of the tyrant [Louis XVI] in order to replace him with others,’ Lacombe reported. She accused Chabot himself of being an enemy of the revolution and insisted that she had not insulted Robespierre, but merely tried to warn him against his evil associates.

Chabot’s distrust of Lacombe in particular was aggravated by a more general misogyny. ‘It’s because I like women that I don’t want them to be forming a body apart and calumniating even virtue,’ he protested to the Jacobins. He had taunted Lacombe by insisting he could never refuse anything to a woman; she retorted that she pitied her ‘country because the counterrevolutionaries also had women, and it wouldn’t be difficult for them to obtain pardons by sending [their] women to him’.

‘It is these counter-revolutionary sluts who cause all the riotous outbreaks, above all over bread,’ stormed Chabot. ‘They made a revolution over coffee and sugar, and they will make others if we do not watch out.’ Others confirmed that Lacombe meddled everywhere and encouraged her followers to speak scornfully about ‘Monsieur Robespierre’. Her liaison with Leclerc was raised, of note as much because of Leclerc’s supposedly aristocratic background as for any depravity implicit in their living together: ‘Citoyenne Lacombe, or Madame Lacombe, who likes nobles so much, is sheltering a noble in her house.’

Just as the Club turned its attention to the case of Leclerc–who had declared in his newspaper that ‘if they wanted to arrest him, he would stab both the person who issued the arrest warrant and the person who executed it’–Lacombe stood up and demanded the chance to speak. Cries of ‘À bas la nouvelle Corday!’ greeted her request; the women in the galleries nearby hissed, ‘Intriguer!’ and ‘Get out, miserable woman, or we will tear you to pieces!’ Lacombe stood her ground, loudly protesting that she would speak or perish. ‘The first one of you who dares to come forward, I am going to show you what a free woman can do!’

‘The tumult and disorder became so great that the president donned his hat [to call for order],’ recorded the minute-taker. ‘It was only at the end of a considerable period that calm returned.’ The president pointed out to Lacombe that causing turmoil in a group of people trying calmly to debate a point concerning the interests of the people was counterrevolutionary in and of itself.

At the Jacobins’ orders, Lacombe was prevented from speaking in her own defence and seized by guards, who took her to the Tuileries to be questioned by the Committee of Public Safety. After two hours waiting in the Committee’s antechamber, one of her guards took pity on her and escorted her back to her lodgings near the Palais Royal. When they got there they found the commissaires of the local sectional committee had placed seals on all her belongings and on the doors, so she could not enter.

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