Although it ended up suppressing women France’s revolution actually left us testimonies to quick energetic minds

Although it ended up suppressing women, France’s revolution actually left us testimonies to quick, energetic minds. Robespierre made it his personal business to destroy the sensual Th?sia, who seemed able to turn any male weak at the knees. He ordered that she be kept in solitary confinement, unable to change her clothes or wash.The championing of liberty and egality took its toll Moore recounts Manon’s ordeal in prison movingly She faced her death bravely and alone Germaine suffered years in exile. The same autumn the Jacobins crushed the r?blicaines-r?lutionnaires, Marie-Antoinette, Manon and the eccentric writer Olympe de Gouges were dispatched to the guillotine.With the revolution’s emphasis on child-rearing and wifeliness, there’s a sense in which women’s very sexuality posed a threat.

The virtuous Manon was portrayed as an nymphomaniac.The old regime’s boudoir politics was considered the cause of the country’s ills. This led to an equally entrenched form of patriarchy with few patriots prepared to champion women’s rights. For France to be stable and secure, women could exist only as men’s supporters and the mothers of heroes. What had not been foreseen was women’s eloquence, and it became obvious by 1793 that it needed silencing. Regressive measures forbad women from commenting independently on public affairs. Moore writes: “Any woman who did have a voice in 18th-century France, from the queen down, was denounced for immorality.” Newspapers targeted such women, undermining their opinions by attacking them in the crudest sexual terms Th?igne was a whore; Germaine, a hermaphrodite.

The lovely Juliette R?mier – a post-revolution icon – chose not to become Napoleon’s mistress. For the less privileged, independence meant something else entirely.Unmarried and working class, Pauline L? adopted the sans culottes striped pantaloons and joined the Soci? des R?blicaines-R?lutionnaires. These “hideous coquines of Paris” patrolled the streets roughing-up passers-by who showed insufficient love of La Patrie. Anyone who intervened risked being “battered senseless with a wooden clog.” For the “fallen woman” Th?igne de M?court, an early revolutionary pin-up in her blood-red riding habit, the republic provided a different kind of empowerment: the chance to reinvent herself and reject an unhappy past.But independence came at a price. Surrounded by progressive aristocratic and well-connected friends favouring a constitutional monarchy, she was free to take lovers But for her, politics was personal. Despite being fiercely intelligent, she was just another woman judged on her looks and behaviour. In her work, On Literature, she lamented “the injustice of men towards distinguished women.”Almost her equal in egotism but far more extreme, the anti-monarchist Manon Roland supervised her unsparkling husband’s career.