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THE FRANKENSTEIN OF 1790 AND OTHER LOST CHAPTERS FROM REVOLUTIONARY FRANCE
By JULIA V. DOUTHWAITE
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
Copyright © 2012 The University of Chicago
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-16058-0
Chapter One
From Fish Seller to Suffragist: The Women's March on Versailles
According to the classic historiography of George Rudé, Albert Mathiez, and Munro Price, the march on Versailles that took place on October 5–6, 1789, evolved out of discontent over the shortage of food in working-class neighborhoods in Paris. Such discontent was not a new occurrence; a subsistence riot focusing on bread prices had erupted to spectacular effect in what is now known as the flour war of 1775, and fourteen women were among those arrested. Frustration about the scarcity of flour and the high price of bread had been simmering for weeks in autumn 1789; what finally decided the so-called patriots to act were rumors of the king's imminent departure for (or kidnapping to) the eastern city of Metz, which were inflamed by the display of royalist arrogance at a military banquet at Versailles on October 2. Reports circulated that soldiers of the elite Flanders Regiment, summoned by Louis XVI to cope with disorders in Paris, had enjoyed a lavish evening at court and capped the festivities by trampling the national cockade underfoot while singing a loyalist anthem ("Ô Richard, ô mon roi") and swearing allegiance to His Majesty. The incident splashed across the leading left- wing newspapers; calls for vengeance immediately followed.
It appears that on the morning of October 4 a large group of women gathered at the Palais Royal. Most of them were not poor wretches but rather merchants: poissardes (fish sellers) from the central market of Les Halles, working women of the faubourgs, smartly dressed bourgeois, and wealthy femmes à chapeau (bonnet-wearing ladies). They accused the queen of being the source of their problems and cheered, "Tomorrow things will go better, because we'll be in charge!" On the morning of the fifth, a mob formed together as planned; witnesses say that the crowd swelled to six or seven thousand people and converged first on the Hôtel de Ville looking for hidden stores of flour, arms, and ammunition. The few soldiers guarding the building quickly opened ranks and the women invaded, seizing muskets and bags of money. They carried whatever weapons they could find and belittled the men who refused to join, calling them cowards and bad citizens. Despite the rain, they set out for Versailles in the early afternoon and chanted as they marched: "Allons chercher le boulanger, la boulangère, et le petit mitron!" (Let's go fetch the baker, the baker's wife, and the little bakerboy!). It was supposed that the king, by his presence among his subjects, would ensure a plentiful supply of bread. After making the six-hour trek in a drenching rain, they found the gates of the palace closed. So they took refuge in the National Assembly hall alongside the startled deputies, who listened to their concerns before adjourning for the night. Many set up makeshift beds and slept on the soggy ground. During the night General Lafayette learned of the uprising and brought a contingent of twenty thousand National Guards to Versailles. The next morning a group somehow found an opening in the gate, invaded the chateau, and ran through the corridors, going so far as to ransack the queen's bedchamber while Marie-Antoinette narrowly escaped through a secret passage. Two palace guards were killed and their heads impaled on pikes. Some claim that hooligans vandalized the palace and terrorized the royal family with shouts of "Death to the Austrian." Others allege that the crowd was inflamed after seeing one of their own being killed, another woman wounded, and a third trampled by the horses of the Swiss guards. The crowd was eventually calmed by the appearance of Louis XVI on a balcony, followed by Marie-Antoinette and Lafayette. The king vowed to uphold the revolutionary decrees, including the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, and faced with a crowd shouting, "The king to Paris!" he submitted to popular demand.
The marchers thus forced the royal family to move permanently to Paris on the afternoon of October 6. Louis and his intimates rode in a carriage surrounded by market women and National Guards and entered the capital in early evening before setting up housekeeping in the Tuileries palace. From November 1789, the site of state power would reside in the capital, with the monarchy and the assembly side by side on the right bank of the Seine. More significantly, the king would effectively spend the rest of his days under house arrest, under the watchful eye of the National Assembly, the Paris city government, and le menu peuple (commoners) who so vigilantly brought him back to town.
This event has posed a lasting enigma to historians of the French Revolution because the evidence points to wildly different conclusions. Three interpretations dominate present-day historiography: it was either (1) a spontaneous march of thousands of women who, denied formal rights as active citizens, seized power nonetheless as de facto citizens, (2) a march of common people exercising direct democracy, or (3) a calculated and planned assault on the royal family by organized agents of conspiracy who used fish sellers and prostitutes as cover. Literature reflects historiography to some extent, but the most striking imagery and the most riveting plots focus on the first, a predominantly female tale of political action.
The march on Versailles was arguably the first moment when the nation realized the potency of its own people to rewrite the time-honored structure of the French state. By physically confronting the king in Versailles and forcefully displacing the site of authority from royal court to capital and from monarchy to National Assembly and, by extension, to the people through their elected representatives, the participants in the October Days drove a stake through the heart of the Bourbon legacy. French politics and government would never be the same. The consequences unleashed by this event constitute an example of what anthropologist Ernest Becker labeled in 1975 the causa sui project, that is, an oedipal attempt to displace the father in order to invent a new genesis and identity for the self. As Becker writes, this impulse "sums up the basic problem of the child's life: whether he will be a passive object of fate, an appendage of others, a plaything of the world or whether he will be an active center within himself-whether he will control his own destiny with his own powers or not.... it is the flight from passivity, from obliteration, from contingency: the child wants to conquer death by becoming the father of himself." The eschatological undercurrent was noted by earlier commentators too. Alexis de Tocqueville (1856) remarked, "No nation had ever embarked on so resolute an attempt as that of the French in 1789 to break with the past, to make, as it were, a scission in their life line and to create an unbridgeable gulf between all they had hitherto been and all they now aspired to be." Whether couched in psychoanalytic terms of father-child conflict or epic terms of human struggle, one can easily see why commentators interpreted the events of October 1789 as representing a break-if only symbolic-with the existing order.
But the question of intention remains. While some claim that the Versailles marchers sought to usurp the authority of the king-father and even to kill the queen, most interpret the women's actions as a request for succor, seeking a renewal of traditional bonds and sustenance. My evidence supports this second interpretation but reveals how the women's plea was over time, by recurrent representation in the media, made into an icon of radicalism. As the homely fish merchant was increasingly conflated with an armed and dangerous Amazon, she appeared to be out of place, out of line. Criticism of this kind of woman is tucked inside weighty tomes such as Burke's hugely influential Reflections on the Revolution in France (appearing in 1790 in both English and French), where it doubled as a diatribe against the rabble, and the pseudodocumentary travelogue Le Château des Tuileries (1802), where a witty Frenchman and his urbane English friend record little-known anecdotes of Parisian life during the Revolution with a particularly snide rendition of the Versailles march and its leader. By interpreting this moment in revolutionary history as an attempt to pervert natural relations and then pushing the wayward back into the fold, writers kept the causa sui impulse at bay. Later women's actions for political rights fell into a similar trap-their reasoned petitions were recast as wild-eyed militancy—and the weapons of ridicule and burlesque were used against them too.
The marchers did have partisans. Some major newspapers of 1789 embraced the women's cause and inscribed the marchers in a dignified lineage reaching back to Joan of Arc. Mary Wollstonecraft strongly advocated for the marchers and held them up as exactly the kind of women who deserved better education and enfranchisement. In a more humorous vein, one of my most intriguing findings is a mock-heroic novel called Melchior ardent (ca. 1800), where the women warriors and their would-be royal victim are all ridiculed in gendered clichés. The hero staunches the revolt of so-called Féminensiennes with an army of monkey-men and eventually succeeds in remasculinizing the land. Yet he is ultimately hoisted on his own petard when his whole life is explained as an attempt to overcompensate for castration anxieties. Whether Melchior's author was an early and little-known woman satirist or a man pretending to write as a woman remains up in the air. Melchior ardent is a fun read, and its retelling of the October Days as the battle of wimpy Amazons versus strutting monkey-men is surely one of the most preposterous renditions that exist.
In an effort to track the retelling of this story in the years that followed, the coda at the end of this chapter notes how French women during the uprisings of the nineteenth century were inspired by their predecessors in 1789, 1830, and 1848 to plead for women's emancipation in a number of protests. Unfortunately, these women also saw themselves caricatured: as coquettish young warriors, or Vésuviennes, during the Revolution of 1848 or, worse, as the mythical viragoes known as Pétroleuses who allegedly set the fires that destroyed some of the most famous buildings in Paris during the 1871 Commune. Narrating even a brief account of the long and painful battle for women's enfranchisement in France would take us beyond the bounds of this study because the conflicting interests of republicanism, Catholicism, and workers' rights thwarted the cause of female suffrage well into the twentieth century. The French were inspired by their sisters-in-battle across the Atlantic, however, and the correspondence between some French and American suffragists has revealed warm sympathies and relationships during the formative years 1848-1900. So we end on a lighthearted note that is consonant with the somewhat-cartoonish nature of this material by a look at the suffrage writings of American novelist L. Frank Baum (1856–1919).
Beloved by children for the fantastic creatures he brought to life in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), Baum was also and first a newspaperman who created an equally endearing character, especially to suffragists, in the plainspoken columnist he called Our Landlady (1890–91). If Our Landlady, as I contend, represents a latter-day poissarde, her alter-ego Amazon would surely be General Jinjur, leader of the Army of Revolt in The Marvelous Land of Oz (1904). Under Baum's kindly pen both figures do some good cultural work: Our Landlady makes the men listen and General Jinjur makes them work, if only for a while. Taken together they articulate a transitional moment when women's reason was finally gaining ground against the vain froth of misogyny and ridicule.
THE ANXIETY OF AMBIVALENCE: THE JOURNALISM OF OCTOBER 1789
The first reports of the march in the Parisian press reveal the ambivalence that the specter of armed female activism would evoke for generations to come. Sympathetic communion dominates Louis-Marie Prudhomme's account in the leading newspaper of the Left, Les Révolutions de Paris (week of October 3–10): the "women of the people" are said to ensure the "salvation of the fatherland" with their enthusiastic recruitment of marchers on the way to Versailles, and the ultimate success of this crowd of four thousand is chalked up to the efforts of nos brave amazones, ces braves françoises, and ces femmes courageuses. More apprehension marks the rival Chronique de Paris, where we read of a "great multitude of armed women" running through the streets and the ruckus they caused in forcing other women to follow them and in shouting out furious slogans. The editor does not deny the event's historical impact and results, however, and notes in the edition of October 7: "It was a truly new sight [spectacle] to see the numerous troops of women, soldiers, and armed citizens going by without end, carrying ribbons, tree branches, and loaves of bread on their bayonets." By the third day, the threat dissipates into light-hearted merriment, as the article of October 8 notes: "the lighted windows, the cries of joy ... the ribald and warlike songs, everything lent a particular feeling to the festival." The article concludes that "this second revolutionary flare-up [accès de révolution] will doubtless accelerate the work of the National Assembly [and] animate the generous minority, which now knows it is supported by the people's will [toute la force populaire]."
Shortly thereafter both papers made the women's attempt on the royalty explicit by printing transcripts of what the women marchers said to the king at Versailles or what their representative would have said to the queen given the chance. The comments range in tone from deferential to slightly threatening. In the Chronique one finds a paragraph-long paean to a beloved king-father, whom the women humbly request to witness the misery of their poverty-stricken neighborhood. In the rival Révolutions, one reads a more sharply worded critique by "an ardent citizen" who reviews France's many bad queens of the past and demands that Marie-Antoinette publicly avow her patriotism—a rhetorical tactic that Olympe de Gouges would take up in her 1791 Déclaration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne. This dual role of the female politico runs through all Versailles literature: the first, of the poor market woman seeking food for her babes, was a traditional ploy of both propagandists and female protesters, notably wielded by authors of the Mazarinades of 1648–54. The second, however, proved more perplexing: the fiery, lowbrow orator stating the serious concerns of a female crowd was a voice that was rarely, if ever, heard in French political history.
Apprehension toward female aggression was perhaps unsurprising, given the widespread imagery which hit the streets of women riding astride cannons: hardly an "innocent" pose (fig. 2). The sight was not necessarily condemned: in 1793 it became an official part of Jacobin lore at the Festival of Unity thanks to its semblance of Greco-Roman heroism. But in the circumstances of 1789, it also reminded people of those controversial public figures who seemed to be usurping male prerogative, that is, the so-called femmes-hommes (female men) such as Olympe de Gouges and Marie-Jeanne Roland (to whom we return in chapter 4) and the prolific novelist and governess to the Orléans family Stéphanie-Félicité de Genlis, whose opportunism and moralistic persona were mocked in a 1790 tract calling her "Mme Brulard, formerly de Sillery, formerly de Genlis, formerly agreeable." This group was clearly less palatable to popular taste than suffering maternity. Most infamous was the striking Théroigne de Méricourt, whose legend as a rabblerousing courtesan would persist well into the nineteenth century thanks to Thomas Carlyle's wrathful pen. Based on his own historico-sexual phantasms more than any actual referent, Carlyle's portrait of Méricourt captures multiple commonplaces of the Amazon motif: "The seized cannon are yoked with seized cart-horses: brown-locked Demoiselle Théroigne, with pipe and helmet, sits there as gunneress, 'with haughty eye and serene fair countenance'; comparable, some think, to the Maid of Orléans, or even recalling 'the idea of Pallas Athene.'" It is hard to imagine that Baum did not have this in mind when sketching his portrait of the raven-haired General Jinjur and her Army of Revolt. Both women are haughty, emasculating, and due for a comeuppance.
This less-sympathetic Amazonian motif conflated the poissarde with radically revolutionary verve: a linkage that was exploited in newspapers as varied as the lowbrow Mère Duchesne and the archroyalist Actes des apôtres. Like its supposed pendant Le Père Duchesne, La Mère Duchesne is liberally peppered with feisty rhetoric; its sansculotte heroine Pétronille Machefer (Petronilla Chomp-Bit) declares in signature bravado: "I offer my services to the nation as a warrior ... at the first roll of the drum, I will take up arms, raise a squadron of Amazons, and lead the way ... cutting a swath through our enemies like a knife slicing through butter." The universal alliance of women touted in La Mère Duchesne was largely fictitious, however, and did not embrace elite society. Madame de Genlis and Madame de Staël circulated in an orbit far removed from Les Halles; as for working women, some eventually joined political clubs in the years 1790–93, but the merchants of Les Halles likely identified more with family, neighborhood, and guild than with the kind of protofeminist solidarity seen here. Of the four femmes-hommes targeted in counterrevolutionary libels, Théroigne de Méricourt had the shadiest past and was reportedly most implicated in the October Days. Les Actes des apôtres fed such fears by publishing an elaborate engraving that represented her as the conductor of a motley orchestra at the "Revolution Club" (L'Ouverture du Club de la Révolution) (fig. 3). Hereafter Théroigne de Méricourt would be canonized as the chief among radical women, to be found wherever unrest was greatest.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from THE FRANKENSTEIN OF 1790 AND OTHER LOST CHAPTERS FROM REVOLUTIONARY FRANCE by JULIA V. DOUTHWAITE Copyright © 2012 by The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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