545. The French Revolution: The First Feminist (Part 2)

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Speaker 1 marianne is the embodiment of the french republic marianne represents the permanent values that found her citizens attachment to the republic liberty equality fraternité

Speaker 1 the earliest representation of a woman wearing a Frisian cap, an allegorical figure of liberty and the République, made their appearance at the time of the French Revolution.

Speaker 1 The origins of the name Marianne are uncertain. Marie-Anne was a very common first name in the 18th century, and she thus came to represent the people.

Speaker 1 The counter-revolutionaries use the name derisively when referring to the Republic.

Speaker 1 So, Tom, that was the website of the Élysée Palace talking about the great symbol of the French Republic, Marianne.

Speaker 1 So this is a symbol that emerges at the point that we've just got to in the great narrative of the French Revolution, the summer and autumn of 1792.

Speaker 1 We heard last time about the terrible September massacres. that took place as the Prussians were advancing on Paris.

Speaker 1 And it's of course at this point that people are singing the Marseillaise, the marching song of the Army of the Rhine that has swept through the capital.

Speaker 1 But it's also at this point that people alight upon a new symbol of France, which is this figure of Marianne.

Speaker 1 Marianne, who is this woman wearing the Phrygian cap, the Liberty cap, long flowing hair, will become the emblem of France itself.

Speaker 1 And I think it's really striking that two of the kind of emblematic embodiments of modern France, so the Marseillaise, its national anthem, and the figure of Marianne, the embodiment of France herself, emerge in precisely these months, the summer going into the autumn of 1792.

Speaker 1 And I guess the previous episode that we did where we looked at the September massacres, I mean, it didn't really portray the revolution in a great light, did it? I mean, if we're absolutely honest.

Speaker 1 Not best fights, no.

Speaker 1 But I think this kind of reminds us that even while people are being dragged out of prisons and hacked to death, there is also an absolutely invigorating and inspiring sense of optimism and hope that is inspiring terrible deeds, yes, but also, you know, it's rallying people to the barricades and it's giving people dreams of a better future.

Speaker 1 Yes. A future in which all of the people of France will have a stake.

Speaker 1 So you mentioned at the end of the last episode, you left us with this absolute cliffhanger that the Prussians are advancing on Paris, but you also talked about how there is this new political settlement, there's this national convention, and elections are being held to it.

Speaker 1 And you said, you know, if the Prussians break into Paris, then maybe the convention will never even meet.

Speaker 1 A spoiler alert, the Prussians don't end up meeting, advancing on Paris for reasons that we'll discuss in the next episode.

Speaker 1 And that the national convention does meet and it meets on the 20th of September and the deputies who are going there they're all going to the Tuileries where the royal family had previously been based until the massacre of their guards and their removal to what ultimately is their prison so this is now at the center of the the convention which is an expression of in a way popular sovereignty

Speaker 1 What is striking about this, and it's not just in the French context, but in the context of the whole of global history, is that this is a near universal suffrage for men there are no distinctions of class there are no distinctions of property people may remember back in the mists of time that we talked about originally there was this idea of active and passive citizens weren't there that active citizens you had to have certain property qualifications you couldn't have certain professions all that has gone all males basically over the age of 21 now have the vote and i think this is a kind of noble and inspiring moment in history no matter what your views on the revolution might be, Dominic, would you disagree with that?

Speaker 1 Or not? I mean, maybe you... Don't you think I would? Yeah, I don't find it inspiring at all.
Well, I don't think everybody should have the vote. So

Speaker 1 that's the difference between me and the French revolutionaries. So who do you think should not have the vote? I probably wouldn't give it to anybody, but I definitely raise the age thing.

Speaker 1 I think probably 30. 35, 40.
And also property. I think you need to be a property.
You need to own property, don't you? Fine. Okay.
The voice of John Bull. For those who've got no stake in the system.

Speaker 1 I think you know that you are just teasing.

Speaker 1 I'm sure you are a Democrat. Tom, that has thrown you so much.
You don't know. I can't.
I don't really know.

Speaker 1 I don't really know how to reply to that.

Speaker 1 Come on.

Speaker 1 This is universal suffrage. This is democracy in action.
It's the closest to the modern ideal of democracy that we have. It's an ideal that Britain now cleaves to.

Speaker 1 So in that sense, you could say that Britain is inspired by this example as well. And Marianne kind of becomes the symbol of it.
And the the reason for that is

Speaker 1 the motion that is brought before the deputies the day after they meet on the 20th of September, on the 21st of September, when they essentially vote to abolish monarchy.

Speaker 1 Royalty shall be abolished in France is the motion.

Speaker 1 And this is where the woman who comes to be called Marianne is introduced because again to quote from the Élysée Palace, Marianne is the embodiment of the French Republic.

Speaker 1 And so how does it come about? How does this woman appear? How does she come to be called Marianne?

Speaker 1 It's actually not until the middle of the 19th century that she's kind of universally called Marianne. But the Elysee Palace thing that I read at the beginning is wrong.

Speaker 1 Am I not right in thinking that we know better than the Elysee Palace? Go on. So the Elyse Palace said, you know, who knows where the name comes from? We know precisely where the name comes from.

Speaker 1 The name comes from this poem that is written in, I think, October, is it? October 1792? To mark the founding of the Republic.

Speaker 1 And interestingly, the poem is not in french i mean that that's what makes it so fascinating yeah so it's by a guy called guillaum levabre who is writing in longedoc and he writes this poem called la guerisson de marianne the healing of marianne in in french and in that poem marianne is is clearly an embodiment of of the new republic that's been proclaimed and this is the first equation of the republic with a woman called marianne but unlike the marseilles it doesn't really spread because it it's not as accessible And it takes a long, long time for that equation to kind of spread.

Speaker 1 As I said, it's not really until the 19th century.

Speaker 1 And so originally, the figure of France as a woman, she's not called Marianne. She is very clearly liberty and specifically Republican liberty.

Speaker 1 And the emergence of an image of France as... a woman who embodies liberty.
As we said, this is emerging at the same time as the Marseillaise is being enshrined as the national anthem.

Speaker 1 And so it's expressive of all the convulsions, all the excitements, all the kind of incredible process of change that these months in 1792 that we've been covering in the previous series and in this series are generating.

Speaker 1 And she appears very precisely in the wake of the abolition of the monarchy when the royal seal, great golden seal of Louis XVI, is melted down and reconfigured.

Speaker 1 And on the new seal of the Republic, this is where Liberty, who will become Marianne, first appears.

Speaker 1 So the figure of Liberty, this is, we've talked so much about the influence of the Romans in particular on the French Revolutionaries.

Speaker 1 So this is a very obviously classical figure, basically a goddess holding the fascists with an axe and a liberty cap. That's right, isn't it?

Speaker 1 So do you feel a little bit of Athena about this figure, maybe? Well, she's, I mean, she's Liberty. She's a classical abstraction given female form.

Speaker 1 And as with so much about the French Revolution, it actually has its roots in the Ancien regime. So the painters,

Speaker 1 illustrators had been showing liberty as this kind of goddess in the years before the revolution breaks out.

Speaker 1 So there was a particularly famous illustration in a book about Henry IV, who was the great hero of France before the revolution. He was seen as the people's king.

Speaker 1 And this illustration shows him being carried up to heaven by liberty,

Speaker 1 by this goddess. You know, this is kind of allegorical illustrations and paintings that really have very little cut through, but it's kind of there on the margins.

Speaker 1 And actually, I think you could say that the very value of liberty is that she is a kind of a bit of an empty cipher. She's a kind of an abstraction onto which you can project things.
So Lynn Hunt.

Speaker 1 the great scholar of the kind of the culture of the French Revolution, particular interest in the role of women in the revolution.

Speaker 1 She wrote about the figure of liberty liberty that she represented the virtues so desired by the new order, the transcendence of localism, superstition, and particularity in the name of a more disciplined and universalistic worship.

Speaker 1 Liberty was an abstract quality based on reason. She belonged to no group, to no particular place, which is another way of saying that the whole point of liberty is that she's quite boring.

Speaker 1 She doesn't bring any baggage. And it's important because, of course, the marketing of liberty is also a marketing of the republic.

Speaker 1 And she's being stamped on the seal at the point where people don't really know what the republic is about.

Speaker 1 What's it going to be? It doesn't have any of the kind of the attributes that a thousand-year-old monarchy has.

Speaker 1 It doesn't bring the kind of the inheritance of symbols that France, particularly royal France, has been absolutely saturated in. And instead, she is

Speaker 1 she's kind of almost Robespierre. She's kind of chilly,

Speaker 1 poised, uptight,

Speaker 1 virtuous. And of course, there are the two obvious contrasts here.
So even though she will come to be called Mary Anne,

Speaker 1 she's not Christian. She's not the virgin.
She is a virgin who is not Christian.

Speaker 1 And I think that's, you know, as we will see in probably our next series, what you do with Notre Dame, Our Lady, the Virgin, will be a pointed issue in due course for the revolution.

Speaker 1 So Liberty, Marianne. is not the Virgin Mary, but of course also she's not an earthly queen.
And more precisely, she is not Marie Antoinette. She is not an aristocratic woman.

Speaker 1 And generally women who are, you know, paintings, images, they're from the aristocracy. The whole point of liberty is she is not.
Right. She's classless, I suppose, isn't she?

Speaker 1 I mean, she's not defined by any, and because she's antique, she doesn't represent any particular group in contemporary France. She's universal.
Exactly.

Speaker 1 And as you said, there are kind of obviously echoes of Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom. So in due course, she comes to be shown wearing a helmet.

Speaker 1 She's shown kind of trampling down various monsters representing counter-revolution and monarchy or whatever.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 so pretty much within a year of her appearance, first appearance on

Speaker 1 the Great Seal of France,

Speaker 1 she's starting to become a bit more proactive.

Speaker 1 And of course, the classic expression of this isn't in this French Revolution, but in a later one in Delacroix's great painting of

Speaker 1 liberty leading the people. I'm sure people will have seen it.
Liberty standing there in her liberty cap, urging the revolutionaries on.

Speaker 1 And I think you get a kind of presentiment of that in the First Revolution as well. But, Dominic, I think there's a kind of interesting question about all this: that

Speaker 1 France,

Speaker 1 liberty, the Republic, the revolution, are all being imaged by this figure of a beautiful, slightly chilly woman. But what does it mean?

Speaker 1 I mean, does it have any resonance at all for the actual women who were living through the revolution?

Speaker 1 So we started the entire cycle of French Revolution series with a woman, with Marie Antoinette, and the extraordinary misogyny of the attacks on her.

Speaker 1 And then, although virility, masculine friendship, martial virtue and all of that, these kind of these masculine ideas have mattered enormously to the ethos of the French Revolution.

Speaker 1 There have been moments, haven't there, when women have taken centre stage. So I think you did an episode about the

Speaker 1 women's march on Versailles, when the market women go and bring back the king and Marie Antoinette. And the symbolism of it being the market women, I think, is really important there, isn't it? Yeah.

Speaker 1 And then, of course, you've got women who are prominent in the sanscoulotte, who are storming the Tuileries, who are shouting slogans in the streets. So it's not just a man's revolution by any means.

Speaker 1 Absolutely. So

Speaker 1 I think we talked before in the previous series about how the idea of the sanculotte, the man who is wearing trousers rather than the breeches that is kind of the traditional markers of wealth and status, how important dress is.

Speaker 1 And there are

Speaker 1 female sanctulotte. You know, they're not wearing trousers, but they're wearing kind of coarse woolen skirts.

Speaker 1 And they're wearing the wooden clogs that are the markers of a sanctulotte. And they wear the camagnole, this kind of um jacket that has ultimately come from kind of revolutionaries in italy

Speaker 1 and because of the role that they played in bringing the king and queen from versailles to paris back in 1789 and as you said because of the role that they also play in um in helping the patriot heroes who stormed the tuilery in the summer of 1792 they are enshrined as a group, as kind of mothers of the nation.

Speaker 1 But I think there is a crucial difference between the way that women are portrayed in revolutionary propaganda and the way that that men are because

Speaker 1 you know we've talked about revolutionary figures whose names continue to reverberate down so everyone has heard of robespierre or marin or uh des moulin these are individuals who kind of stand tall in the pages of history But women, by and large, don't.

Speaker 1 And that is a trend that goes back to the revolution itself. So

Speaker 1 we talked about Marat, who, of course, in due course will have a meeting with a woman who's not very keen on him in his bath. But before that,

Speaker 1 he was very proud of himself as a feminist. He marketed himself not just as the friend of the people, but specifically as the friend of women.

Speaker 1 But when he writes about women, he never names individuals. It's always about the totality of women.

Speaker 1 They are a kind of a mass of humanity who are inspired by a kind of animating energy and an animating emotional power.

Speaker 1 They're spontaneous. This is key to how the march on Versailles is portrayed.
They are not individuals. And in that way, they are kept safe.
They're not intruding on the kind of masculine sphere.

Speaker 1 And this carries on even when they're not kind of marching on Versailles or attacking palaces or whatever, because

Speaker 1 women in Paris in particular, which is the cockpit of revolutionary activity, they are very, very keen spectators.

Speaker 1 So this sense of particularly women from the markets, people, you know, fishwives, as political junkies is very, very strong.

Speaker 1 They're generally not allowed to contribute to the public debate itself, but they are given access to the galleries where spectators gather. They take up public seats at the convention when it meets.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 by and large, male revolutionaries are very appreciative of this.

Speaker 1 So there's one when it turns out that women are not being allowed in to watch a political session because too many people have gathered there.

Speaker 1 And one of the Jacobin deputies kind of posing like a Roman, it's exactly the kind of thing that you could imagine someone in the early pages of Livy or Plutarch saying.

Speaker 1 He orders that more benches be brought in so that they can sit down. These are mothers of families, he tells the other delegates.
They are worthy. of ancient Rome.

Speaker 1 And it may be because Robespierre in particular is so good at playing the Roman that he is a particular favourite of these women who come to cheer and support the various Jacobin deputies. And

Speaker 1 the fact that Robespierre, despite his kind of slight image of chilly asexuality, is an absolute heartthrob. I mean, he has all these groupies.

Speaker 1 It's kind of noted by his enemies and causes them some degree of puzzlement, I think. But is it not because of that image, I would say? The chilliness and the

Speaker 1 I think that is the draw, isn't it? The women think I could be the one who melts the ice-cold, incorruptible heart, all of that.

Speaker 1 But actually, we're just talking about women as spectators here, watching men. But there are, well, we've had one woman in particular.

Speaker 1 So we talked about Marian Antoinette, but on the side of the revolutionaries, we've had one woman in particular that we've mentioned a few times in the more recent episodes who actually is an

Speaker 1 agent. She has genuine political influence, and that is Madame Roland.
So tell me about Madame Roland.

Speaker 1 So she is the wife of a Girondin minister, and

Speaker 1 she essentially is the archetype of the woman who runs a revolutionary salon. So the idea of a salon where

Speaker 1 movers and shakers meet up, discuss philosophy or current politics or whatever. Again, it's something that is inherited from the Ancien regime.

Speaker 1 But Madame Royleau sets up the kind of the classic revolutionary salon.

Speaker 1 But she's not just a hostess. I mean, as you said, she is an actor.
She, in a way, I mean, is much more forceful, much more dynamic, much more proactive than her husband.

Speaker 1 So she is the person who comes up with the idea of recruiting the Fédéré from across France. These are the people who will come singing the Marseilles from the south of France, for instance.

Speaker 1 So that's her idea. And

Speaker 1 in the early months of 1792, as the royal constitution is starting to implode, she is writing letters left, right, and center. So she's writing letters to Brisseau and his colleagues,

Speaker 1 accusing them of being time wasters,

Speaker 1 of supporting the king when his regime is clearly on its uppers. She pushes her husband to support the suspension of the king.
He'd been kind of hesitant about this. So she's very forceful.

Speaker 1 She has very strong opinions.

Speaker 1 And she is able, because of her position in in the salon because she has all these amazing connections to let her opinions be known yeah um they have an impact but again there's this she does not herself

Speaker 1 think

Speaker 1 that women should play a role in kind of public politics so she doesn't invite other women to her salon you know she it's hers and hers alone that's very margaret thatcher isn't it's how margaret thatcher ran her government so madame roland i don't think mrs thatcher would go this far but she says women must inspire political endeavour, yet without seeming to be contributing to it.

Speaker 1 And you mentioned Marie Antoinette. I think it's really striking.
Madame Roland is very, very hostile to Marie Antoinette. And one of the reasons for this is that she condemns Marie Antoinette for

Speaker 1 being

Speaker 1 a malign influence on the king and therefore on politics generally. And so she condemns what she calls the faint rustling of silk behind the royal curtain.

Speaker 1 The idea that when Louis XVI is being attended by his ministers, Marie Antoinette Antoinette is there kind of whispering from behind screens.

Speaker 1 And of course, the irony of that is that these are precisely the terms in which many of her enemies, so Robespierre, Danton, the Montagnard, the people who are opposed to the Girondins and Madame Rolands as Girondin, this is how they condemn her as someone who is kind of hiding behind a curtain, whispering.

Speaker 1 They literally say she is the new Madame de Pompadour. She is the new Madame du Barry.

Speaker 1 She is the over-mighty female favourite who has corrupted and seduced the sort of the slack-minded, gullible men who flock around her.

Speaker 1 I mean, she fits it basically into a standard demonology, doesn't she? She does. And it's to cast her husband as the new Louis XVI,

Speaker 1 kind of venal, pliable,

Speaker 1 emasculated.

Speaker 1 And over the course of that summer, as tensions between the Girondins and those who are kind of further to the left, you might put it like that,

Speaker 1 she becomes a kind of hate figure for many of the sanscoulotte. She's, I guess,

Speaker 1 I mean, what would she be? Kind of polytoinbee, perhaps. Right.
That's the way that which blue-collar Trump voters talked about Hillary Clinton, for example, nagging.

Speaker 1 She's only got where she has because of her husband.

Speaker 1 She's always telling us off and telling us what's good for us. All of that kind of thing.

Speaker 1 And I think that it actually, you know, her role and the things that are said about her and the misogyny that is directed at her, ironically kind of, you know, is drawing on the traditions of misogyny that had earlier condemned Marie Antoinette.

Speaker 1 It helps to polarize the political division between the Montignat and the Girondin.

Speaker 1 And it's kind of striking that it is the Montagnard, those who are furthest left, those who are most committed to perhaps to the ideals of liberty, equality, and of course, fraternity, brotherhood, not sisterhood, who are, I think, the readiest to see female claims to a commanding role in the revolution as actually being counter-revolutionary.

Speaker 1 And of course, these, you know, on the furthest left, the Robespierre, the Marat, so on, these are the men who most identify with the model of antique virtue, with Spartans, with kind of the Romans of the early Republic.

Speaker 1 And we know what the Romans thought about women being involved in politics. They thought it was a terrible thing.

Speaker 1 Yes, because they saw the role, you know, and Spartans paradigmatically saw the role of women to be wives and to be mothers. So, in other words, women who are dedicated to the male citizen.

Speaker 1 Their role is to serve them, to enable them to do their patriotic duty, and then to give them more sons who can continue to serve the Republic.

Speaker 1 And this is very clearly drawing on kind of Spartan and Roman ideals. And it's an ideal that right from the beginning is there in all the kind of the festivals that are staged, in the rhetoric,

Speaker 1 all of that kind of thing. And it leaves open the question, which I think we should maybe try and answer after a break.
Are there actually any women who are pushing for full political rights?

Speaker 1 And if there are, what is the response to them? Well, the good news for people who like the rest is history is that there are such women, because otherwise there would be no second half.

Speaker 1 So return after the break and we will meet two of them. See you then.

Speaker 1 Today's episode is brought to you by A Thousand Blows, the new original series premiering exclusively on Disney Plus.

Speaker 1 A thousand Blows is inspired by the remarkable true life story of the infamous Mary Carr, who led a notorious all-female London gang, the 40 Elephants.

Speaker 1 And as it's International Women's Day this week, we thought we'd talk about not necessarily the most notorious women in history, but some of the most remarkable ones, didn't we, Dominic?

Speaker 1 We did indeed.

Speaker 1 So I don't know who yours is, Tom, but the person who we've talked about in the rest is history that I often think about is a young woman called Sophie Scholl, who grew up in Germany in the late 1930s, early 1940s.

Speaker 1 And she was a young woman of enormous sort of earnestness and kind of moral seriousness.

Speaker 1 And she and her brother Hans joined and were key parts of an organization called the White Rose Group, which distributed pamphlets and leaflets across Germany attacking the crimes of the Third Reich.

Speaker 1 And as you'll remember, Tom, Sophie came to a very sad end that they were, she and Hans were captured and they were interrogated and tried and executed by the Nazis.

Speaker 1 And the story of her in prison, in the Stadelheim prison,

Speaker 1 and the last hours before her death, and she's sort of praying and she's she's completely unapologetic about standing up against the horrors of Nazism.

Speaker 1 I think it's one of the most inspirational stories in all history, not just in 20th century history. Yeah, such a remarkable young woman.

Speaker 1 I've chosen a young woman who didn't die for liberty, but she was an extraordinary footballer or soccer player, if you're watching this in America. She was called Lily Parr.
She was born in St.

Speaker 1 Helens in Lancashire in 1905. She was part of a huge family, lots of boys, and she, as a girl, loved playing rugby and particularly football.

Speaker 1 And when the First World War hit Britain, men's football basically got cancelled. And so everyone started watching women's football instead.
And Lily was an incredible, incredible player.

Speaker 1 So when she was 14, she got recruited to play for this munitions factory called Dick Kerr's.

Speaker 1 And she was only 14 and she scored, I think, something like 100 goals in her first season.

Speaker 1 And she played right the way through the First World War, into the aftermath of the Second World War. She was famous for the brutality of her kicking.

Speaker 1 She's said to have broken the leg of one man when she took a free kick. She broke another man's arm.
And footballs then were really, really heavy. So for her to kick it, I mean, absolutely amazing.

Speaker 1 And what made her sporting ability even more remarkable is that she loved smoking and she was never seen without a woodbine between her teeth and gradually her teeth all rotted and fell out.

Speaker 1 And in due course, the men who controlled football in England got resentful of the fame of the female teams. And so they basically banned them from using the professional football grounds.
Very sad.

Speaker 1 And so Lily retired and she became a nurse, but she was never forgotten. And she's now celebrated as one of England's not just greatest sports women, but but sports people of all time.

Speaker 1 And I think that she was the first woman to be inducted into English football's Hall of Fame. So, you know, I mean, she's not up there with Sophie Scholl, but she was a remarkable, remarkable woman.

Speaker 1 It's brilliant, isn't it, Tom, that women's stories like these are being restored to their proper place in recent history. And that's one reason I'm looking forward to

Speaker 1 this new series so much. So this segment was brought to you by our friends at Disney Plus.
So A Thousand Blows, that is, a new original series and it is streaming right now on Disney Plus globally.

Speaker 1 And if you're watching this in the US, it is on Hulu.

Speaker 1 This episode is brought to you by the American Revolution on PBS. The American Revolution is usually staged like theater.
Washington center stage, red coats marching in step.

Speaker 1 Liberty delivering its lines on queue. In reality, it was messy and uncertain, shaped by arguments over what kind of country America might become.

Speaker 1 Ken Burns' new series shows it in that light, not as polished legend, but as lived experience.

Speaker 1 Rank-and-file soldiers, women, enslaved people, and Native Americans may not have signed the Declaration, but their decisions carried weight in the struggle for independence.

Speaker 1 What makes this story gripping isn't only the speeches or the battles, it's how the questions that gave birth to the United States continue to to shape American life two and a half centuries on.

Speaker 1 The revolution was never frozen in time, it was restless, conflicted, unfinished, which is precisely why it still matters.

Speaker 1 As the United States nears its 250th year, the revolution is not a relic under glass, but a mirror, still reflecting the soul of a country back at itself.

Speaker 1 The American Revolution premieres Sunday, November 16th on PBS and the PBS app.

Speaker 1 Welcome back to The Rest is History. Before the break, Tom promised you he said he'd got binders full of women who were pushing for full political rights.

Speaker 1 And actually, one of them is an old friend of the show. So a tremendous character who was very prominent in the women's march on Versailles cut a very flamboyant figure.

Speaker 1 And that is Teroine de Mericor.

Speaker 1 So she had kind of pistols in her belt. She looked a bit like like a pirate.
She had an adamant. She had a kind of what? Adamant.
Like Adamant, yeah. She looked like a new romantic.
Exactly.

Speaker 1 She had a kind of liberty cap. She had a fancy hat.

Speaker 1 She's on a horse,

Speaker 1 cuts a great figure. But actually, she then gets into a bit of a mess, doesn't she? Terrible scrape.
Yeah, a scrape. Is that what it is? It's a scrape.
So she's captured by Austrian agents.

Speaker 1 Tell us about that. Well, because she's actually Belgian.
So she's from Liège, which is

Speaker 1 under kind of Austrian-ruled Low Countries. And May 1790, she goes there very ill-advisedly, you know, to catch up with all her old friends.
And she gets arrested by Austrian agents, put into prison.

Speaker 1 And the Austrians see this as a great coup because she's notorious as a kind of revolutionary Amazon. And so this is a great prize.
And they transport her all the way to Austria, where she is

Speaker 1 kept in prison for months and months. And she's finally released at the end of 1791 because rather sweetly, her jailer has grown very fond of her.

Speaker 1 She seems to be a very kind of very charismatic person. And the jailer had obviously developed a bit of a shine for her.
And so she then gets released and goes back to Paris.

Speaker 1 And of course, her role in the Women's March has now been supplemented by the fact that she's been imprisoned by Austrian despots.

Speaker 1 I mean, you couldn't have a kind of better calling card, really. And so this gives her...

Speaker 1 a stature among revolutionary men as a hero of the revolution that I think no other woman can rival because she's been there, she's done the hard yards, she's got the notches in her escutcheon to show that she's really served the revolution.

Speaker 1 So, even before her imprisonment,

Speaker 1 she had spoken at the Cordelier Club, which is the most radical of all the clubs.

Speaker 1 And after it, she is allowed to come and give an account of what she's been getting up to in prison and everything at the Jacomin Club itself.

Speaker 1 So, you know, these are very, very distinctive, almost kind of unprecedented markers of her status.

Speaker 1 But I think the very taste of what it would be to be a kind of political player, to be not just a spectator at these clubs, but a participant, makes it all the more frustrating for her that women

Speaker 1 are essentially kept out of that, that they're not allowed to do it.

Speaker 1 And so she pursues a policy of trying to counter that. So she attempts to found women's only clubs, mixed clubs, but it doesn't work.

Speaker 1 And it largely doesn't work because women don't really seem to have wanted to participate in them. And then in 1792, she gives up on the whole

Speaker 1 sitting around and talking because, of course, she's very much a woman for a pistol in a belt.

Speaker 1 And so with Paris being threatened, she agitates for a woman's battalion. to be set up to help in the defense of Paris.
And again, this is turned down.

Speaker 1 When the attack on the Tuilerie happens, the attack that

Speaker 1 results in the massacre of the Swiss guards, she's there. She's all over it.
It's very much her scene, kind of brandishing pistols again. And for this, she receives public honor.

Speaker 1 But I think that she remains an anomaly because she's taught between the traditional dimensions of the masculine and the feminine, the kind of the active and the domestic, the political and the person who stays at home, fostering and looking after

Speaker 1 the people who will engage in politics, namely men. And in due course, as we will see, because we'll continue her story in subsequent episodes, this tension, it ends up destroying her.

Speaker 1 So just before you move on to the other person you want to talk about, there are other people who agree with her, other women who agree with her and say, especially when war is declared, they want to join the war effort.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 there are two sisters called the Fernig sisters who took up arms in the defense of Valenciennes in the east of France.

Speaker 1 The general was so impressed by them, he promised to put them in the line of fire at the first opportunity.

Speaker 1 And then there's a petition put up by an activist called Pauline Leon, which was read out to the Legislative Assembly. So this is summer 1792.

Speaker 1 Our fathers, husbands, and sons may perhaps be the victims of our enemy's fury, could we be forbidden the sweetness of avenging them or dying at their sides? You cannot refuse us.

Speaker 1 Society cannot deny us this right, which is given us by nature, unless it's claimed that the Declaration of Rights does not apply to women. And the Legislative Assembly, do you know what it does?

Speaker 1 It just ignores them because people are embarrassed. And actually, in April 1793, the Convention bans women, officially bans them from going into battle.

Speaker 1 But that issue of the Declaration of Rights brings us to the other great character that you're going to talk about today, who is a great favorite of mine. And her name is Olympe de Gouge.

Speaker 1 So tell us about her.

Speaker 1 I mean, I think you're absolutely right that There are women who, listening to the revolutionary rhetoric, the talk about the rights of men, draw the logical conclusion and say, well, if men have rights, why don't women?

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 as you said, war seems to have been a particular focus for this. The idea that men should defend the country.
If men can defend it, why not women? And there are those who want to do that.

Speaker 1 But equally, the revolutionary authorities regard it as an embarrassment. They don't really want to give any encouragement to it.
And

Speaker 1 that's why nothing really comes of it. There is no revolutionary battalion of Amazons defending the Patri on the barricades.

Speaker 1 And it's left to one woman in particular to hammer home what I think clearly from our perspective seems a monstrous unfairness. And as you said, this is Olympte de Gouge, a woman who

Speaker 1 is becoming, I think, better known pretty much by the year. Would you say? Yeah, better known now than she's ever been, I would say.
And that is because more than anybody else in the revolution, she

Speaker 1 is exposing this key hypocrisy. If there are rights of men, then why not rights of women? And she is, I think, a very attractive figure.
I mean, literally attractive.

Speaker 1 She's very charming, described in 1770 as one of Paris's prettiest women. But she's just also, her personality is very appealing.
She's kind of witty. She's charming.
I mean, she seems fun.

Speaker 1 I think that's probably the best way to describe it.

Speaker 1 And she's born in the Languedoc, but she comes to Paris in 1768 when she is 20 years old. And she does so initially as the mistress of a wealthy industrialist from Lyon.

Speaker 1 There is all kinds of gossip in Paris that she is a courtesan. So there is a paper called La Correspondence, who writes in

Speaker 1 1770, so two years after her appearance in Paris, that she's born with with a pretty face as her only heritage.

Speaker 1 She is known in Paris for some time solely through the favours with which she gratifies her compatriots.

Speaker 1 And one of these compatriots, it was rumored, was Dominic your old friend, the Duke of Orleans, Philippe Egalité. Truly terrible, ma'am.
With whom she was supposed to have had an affair.

Speaker 1 Whether she had an affair with him or not, she was definitely part of his circle.

Speaker 1 And she goes to the Palais Real, which people may remember is this kind of great complex of buildings in the centre of Paris, owned by the Duke of Orleans, which in the pre-revolutionary world was a kind of place of free thinking.

Speaker 1 Anything could be published there, anything could be said. And this is the world into which Olympe de Gouge moves, and she becomes a kind of leading contributor to it.
She's fascinated by it.

Speaker 1 She is obsessed by all the ideas and the currents of conversation, the politics there. And what's amazing about this is that

Speaker 1 her background is actually unbelievably poor.

Speaker 1 She'd arrived in Paris barely able to read or write. I mean, much debate among scholars as to whether she could read or write at all.
And on top of that, French wasn't even her first language.

Speaker 1 She spoke Occitan. So she would have liked Marianne.
Yeah, she would. Yeah, exactly.
Her background is absolutely full of kind of the melodrama that you get in novels of this period.

Speaker 1 So the identity of her father is very mysterious. On the birth certificate says that she's the daughter of a butcher, but there's much controversy about this.

Speaker 1 She liked to hint that she was the daughter of a marquee. At times she might even hint that she was the daughter of the king.
So great kind of excitement, a swirl of melodrama there.

Speaker 1 And she had then been forced into marriage at a very young age to a man she absolutely hated and who again in a very melodramatic way drowned in a flood.

Speaker 1 And this is what enabled her then to reject any prospect of future marriage.

Speaker 1 She hated the institution of marriage, condemned it as a form of slavery, and to come to Paris, I mean, clearly as a cat woman, but maybe a courtesan as well. But she is very, very smart.

Speaker 1 And this woman who, when she arrived in Paris, could barely read or write, she very quickly becomes not just a kind of a participant in intellectual debate, but she becomes, first of all, a novelist and then a playwright.

Speaker 1 So she writes her first novel in 1784, then gets very into the theatre.

Speaker 1 She becomes a friend of Sebastian Mercier, who we talked about in the previous episode, that playwright who came up with all the horrific details about the death of the Princess de Lamballe.

Speaker 1 And her most famous play is called Lesclavage des Noir, The Slavery of the Blacks, is a very ripe melodrama about a young girl being reunited with her long-lost father.

Speaker 1 So Olympic Gouche is clearly working issues out there, but it is also very, very vehemently abolitionist.

Speaker 1 So she is hugely opposed to the slave trade. And the impact of this play is such that the slave trade lobby pay hecklers to go to the theater and to shout it down.

Speaker 1 And such is the kind of the uproar that this generates that the play can only be staged for three nights and it has to be withdrawn, which is obviously, you know, on one level, very bad for Olymp DeGouge.

Speaker 1 She wants the message to get out there. She's going to miss out on the money that she would otherwise have earned.
But it does make her famous.

Speaker 1 It makes her a figure of prestige and status in the intellectual world of pre-revolutionary Paris.

Speaker 1 And by and large, I think it's fair to say that anyone who is a committed abolitionist before the revolution, when the revolution comes, is pretty much bound to be in favor of it. Yeah, of course.

Speaker 1 And Olymp DeGouge is...

Speaker 1 She's a big fan of the revolution. But with caveats, right? Yeah, quite a kind of idiosyncratic take on it.
So she always has a very soft spot for Louis XVI.

Speaker 1 um and again it may be this thing she identifies with louis xvi as a a man who's unfortunate in his parents yeah a bit like she was with her father or maybe she's really his daughter after all well i think i think she was meant to be the the daughter of um of uh louis x5th all right so she's his

Speaker 1 what does that make her his

Speaker 1 stepsister yeah stepsister yeah yeah

Speaker 1 half sister oh no it's too complicated i can't work it out but anyway so she feels that Louis XVI has been dealt a very bad hand by his predecessors, by Louis XV and the people who've gone before.

Speaker 1 And so she wrote about him, an unhappier king than his ancestors. Is he to be made responsible for their mistakes?

Speaker 1 So right the way through everything that follows, the fall of the Bastille, right the way up to the flight to Varennes, when Louis XVI and the royal family try to escape Paris and France, she's very, very, you know, always sticking up for him.

Speaker 1 When he makes his flight to Varennes, she's very, very disappointed in him. Yeah, understandably.

Speaker 1 She feels that, you know, he's let her down. He's let France down, but worst of all, he's let himself down.

Speaker 1 But she still feels sorry for him. And I think that's reflective of the fact that, above all,

Speaker 1 she has a big heart, Dominic. She feels the sufferings of others deeply.

Speaker 1 So whether it's the slaves in the Caribbean, whether it's the poor, whether it's the king, whether it's animals, she's a great animal lover.

Speaker 1 She feels compassion for them all. That's lovely.
We love somebody with a big heart.

Speaker 1 So I think that this explains why she comes to feel, as she does about the revolution, just as the king has let her down, so she feels that the revolution is letting her down.

Speaker 1 So people may remember, I can't even remember which episode it was now. We've done so many episodes on the revolution.
But back in 1791,

Speaker 1 France gets its first written constitution. This is the one that Louis XVI had been trying not to sign, and eventually he kind of feels bulldozed into doing it.

Speaker 1 And it passes into law on the 3rd of September, 1791. Louis XVI accepts it 10 days later.
This is now of the constitution that is going to govern France.

Speaker 1 And this is the one that offers a measure of suffrage to men, but not to women. And Olymp de Gouge is appalled by this.
And she says, well, what about women? Why shouldn't women have the vote?

Speaker 1 Why shouldn't women have rights as well? And so 12 days later, on the 15th of September,

Speaker 1 she's written this riposte and she publishes it. And it's called very pointedly, The Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen.

Speaker 1 So it's an obvious parody of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen. And it's a marker of her, again, yeah, idiosyncratic take on politics that she dedicates this to Marie Antoinette.

Speaker 1 It's the last person that you will choose, right? If you were worried about your standing in revolutionary Paris

Speaker 1 and it's simultaneously a kind of parody of revolutionary idealism but also I think its ultimate expression because by echoing the original declaration she's aiming to remind the world what it's missing so woman is born free and is equal to man in her rights.

Speaker 1 And she's deliberately parodying the phrases of the Declaration of the Rights of Man.

Speaker 1 And she is demanding that women share in all these rights, which of course includes suffrage.

Speaker 1 And she articulates this in a very famous way and one that looks forward notoriously to what is to happen in 1793.

Speaker 1 When she writes, woman has the right to climb onto the scaffold. She must equally have the right to climb onto the tribunal.

Speaker 1 So in other words, if she can be executed, then she should have the right to govern the laws, to vote. Grimly ironic words.
Very grimly ironic.

Speaker 1 Now, what is the response to this Declaration of the Rights of Woman? There are certainly revolutionaries who accept male revolutionaries who accept its force.

Speaker 1 The most prominent of these is the erstwhile Marquis de Condorcet, who we met again ages ago. He's a philosopher, kind of Enlightenment philosoph, very, very anti-Christian.
He's an economist.

Speaker 1 He's very agitated by polluted polluted rivers,

Speaker 1 and like Olymp de Gouge, he's a very committed abolitionist.

Speaker 1 So all reasons why he would be sympathetic to what she's arguing. And he absolutely supports female suffrage.
And I think it's not just Olymp de Gouge who is kind of influencing him on this.

Speaker 1 It's also his own wife, who is a very, very impressive woman called Sophie de Grouchy, who is sister of a guy who will in due course become one of Napoleon's most celebrated marshals, Emmanuel de Grouchy.

Speaker 1 Now, we've had quite a lot of relationships in this series, and indeed in the rest of history generally, where the man is quite a lot older than the woman.

Speaker 1 So the age gap between Condorcet and Sophie is 20.

Speaker 1 So she marries him when he's 22 and he's 42, but it's a very happy match.

Speaker 1 They're both philosophers. So you can imagine, you know, they have a lovely time sitting around discussing Diderot or Rousseau or whatever.
And she's also a very skilled linguist.

Speaker 1 And Dominique, the tremendous news is that her best second language is English. Oh, good for her.
She translated Adam Smith. Yeah.
Tremendous. And Thomas Payne.
And Thomas Payne.

Speaker 1 And she actually runs her salon. Unlike Madame Roland, she allows other women to come to her salon.
Including Olymp De Gouge. So that's where they would all have met.
Right. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And the Condorcet, they're not kind of card-carrying Girondins, but they're definitely aligned with them.

Speaker 1 And I think it's true to say that the Girondins are much more in favor of female participation in public life than

Speaker 1 the Montaigne. So, even though Madame Roland, she's a Girondin, she's not,

Speaker 1 it is a kind of part of intellectual discussion among Giroin Salon that perhaps women, and particularly at Condorcet Salon, that perhaps there should be female suffrage.

Speaker 1 And so, it's not surprising that Olympe de Gouge is, I mean, she thinks the Girondins are great. She calls them torches of liberty.
Taron de Méricor, she also aligns herself with the Girondins.

Speaker 1 But But in general, it has to be said that the reaction to the Declaration of the Rights of women,

Speaker 1 when people can be bothered so much as to respond to it, is

Speaker 1 either hilarity or just utter contempt.

Speaker 1 And isn't it interesting that the more hardcore Jacobins, the Montagnard, as they're called, Rob Spier and his circle, people like that, they're often among the most contemptuous and the most scornful.

Speaker 1 And you would think, in other respects, I mean, it's a really good example, I guess, of the what some listeners may say is the kind of the patriarchal attitudes, the misogyny, that in other respects, they are so democratic.

Speaker 1 But on this issue, they say, women, are you joking? I mean, ha ha ha, women voting. Wouldn't that be a great, wouldn't that be a thing? Yeah.

Speaker 1 And these are the people who, of course, you know, they're all in favor of Saint-Coulotte wearing the liberty cap, the Bonnet Rouge, and indeed of the female representative of the Republic, Liberty, the future Marianne, wearing the Liberty cap, but not actual women.

Speaker 1 They try and legislate to stop women from wearing it. And their justification for this, it's not just the Spartans, it's not just the Romans.

Speaker 1 There are also more recent influences of whom the main ones are

Speaker 1 the philosophes. So Diderot, but particularly Rousseau.

Speaker 1 I mean, Rousseau has an incredible vein of hostility to any notion of female emancipation, of female suffrage.

Speaker 1 He wrote in his novel, which was a massive bestseller, La Nouvelle Eloise, a brilliant wife is a plague to her husband, her children, her friends, her valet, everyone.

Speaker 1 And Rousseau is such a massive influence on the way that particularly young male revolutionaries think, that he kind of provides them with a sanction for kind of celebrating a very overtly masculine ideal of virtue.

Speaker 1 And of course, you know, as we've said earlier, these are all people who are saturated in Roman literature. So they know that the word virtue itself derives from the Latin for man, vir.

Speaker 1 Virtus is to have masculine qualities.

Speaker 1 And when these young revolutionaries are playing the Roman, we talked about this in an earlier episode, to play the Roman often requires a counterpointing of a kind of a masculine virtue against a female inadequacy.

Speaker 1 So David, the great painter, in 1789, he does a painting of Brutus, the man who who expelled the king, the kind of the founder of the Roman Republic.

Speaker 1 And in this painting, the man is shown stern, unyielding, flinty in the cause of liberty. And meanwhile, in the background, you have women having the vapours.

Speaker 1 They're kind of in hysterics, kind of screaming and generally losing the plot. And it is the role of the man to put the patri first, then the family.
It is the role of...

Speaker 1 the woman to stay within the domestic household and to raise citizens who can then go out and play their part serving the patri.

Speaker 1 I mean, you could translate patri, right, as homeland or as fatherland, couldn't you? You absolutely could. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And so it's for men, radicals, even those on, or maybe especially those on the furthest left, it's this combination, this fusion of the ancient and the cutting edge that serves to justify them in their, well, yeah, I mean, their contempt for everything that Olymp DeGouge is arguing for.

Speaker 1 But I think the thing that's unsettling, perhaps, for

Speaker 1 us today, and certainly for many of the feminist scholars that I read on this, is that it's not just men who are thinking this. A majority of women seem to have thought so too.

Speaker 1 And Condorcet, who's in favor of female suffrage, he's really puzzled by it. And he's one of the people who watches women idolizing Robespierre, who's absolutely against female suffrage.

Speaker 1 And he's kind of really puzzled by it.

Speaker 1 And so he writes, one wonders sometimes why there are so many women following Rospierre at his home, at the podium of the Jacobin, at the Cordelier, at the convention.

Speaker 1 And he says, which is absolutely right, well, maybe one reason for this is that women are reading Rousseau too. And La Nouvelle-Héloise, his great novel, I mean, that's a massive with women.

Speaker 1 So maybe they're imbibing it.

Speaker 1 So Madame Roland is a big fan of Rousseau.

Speaker 1 Rosalie Julien, who you were quoting in the previous episode.

Speaker 1 I mean, she was a big fan of Rousseau. So, I mean, maybe it's that.

Speaker 1 But I mean, I can't really believe that that's it's not just that there is a so if you think a hundred years hence, when there are going to be huge arguments about uh

Speaker 1 women voting, often among the most vociferous opponents of it are other women, you know, opposing suffrage campaigns, not just in France, in Britain, in the United States, wherever.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 don't historians think that effectively a lot of women had internalized

Speaker 1 the assumptions of the age, that they have come to believe, they come to believe what they're told, that they have their domestic sphere, which is their domain, and that there is the public sphere, which is the domain of men.

Speaker 1 I think it's this language of rights, perhaps, that underpins it, which Olymp DeGouge is drawing on, but it also applies to men.

Speaker 1 So, one of the striking things about this election to the convention, which is it's the first really full male suffrage in any election, I think our perspective today would be

Speaker 1 people denied a right to vote would embrace it. You know, they would feel that a great weight had been lifted off their shoulders, that a great injustice had been righted.

Speaker 1 But what's striking about that election is how few people participate in it. 10%.
I think it's something like one in six. Yeah, but terrible.
Yeah, maybe one in ten.

Speaker 1 That must reflect maybe a bewilderment, a puzzlement, simply an inability to understand what's being offered on the part of men who are being given this right.

Speaker 1 And presumably, then the same would be true of women, that they,

Speaker 1 this is such a kind of novel way of understanding politics and the role of individuals within a polity that people just can't get a handle on it.

Speaker 1 And maybe it's a bit like about slavery, you know, where similar debates are happening. And it's kind of striking that Olympic Gouge is an abolitionist as well as an enthusiast for female suffrage.

Speaker 1 That she is

Speaker 1 arguing for things that today

Speaker 1 we take so for granted that we can't even understand how people could possibly have thought otherwise.

Speaker 1 And yet the fact that she is so scorned and despised and mocked does, I think, remind us of just how revolutionary principles that today we completely accept once were.

Speaker 1 And I think there's a case for saying that, you know, for all her soft spot for Louis XVI, for all the fact that she dedicates her Declaration of the Rights of Women to Marie Antoinette, there is a case for saying that Olympia de Gouge is as radical, if not more radical, than any of the revolutionaries that we've talked about in this series.

Speaker 1 Tom, I could not agree with you more. I think actually, by far, she's the most radical.

Speaker 1 So all that the men are arguing for, the Robespiers, the Maras, whatever, it's within the bounds of the imagination. There have been republics, right? I mean, England executed its king.

Speaker 1 There has been the Dutch Republic. There's the Roman Republic.

Speaker 1 It is perfectly plausible to imagine that, even though you might think it's a bad thing, which a lot of people in France obviously did, but

Speaker 1 you can imagine it.

Speaker 1 It's not making your head hurt to think about it.

Speaker 1 But I think with this, what's clearly the case when she presents that Declaration of the Rights of Women, you know, when she unveils it, the ridicule, the contempt, the disbelief that greets it is

Speaker 1 a sign that a lot of people just simply cannot imagine a world in which women exercise political power.

Speaker 1 Including women. Yeah, including women themselves, exactly.
That they are, as it were, I don't want to say prisoners of the same imagination, because that casts people in the past.

Speaker 1 as somehow lesser than us. We're more enlightened.

Speaker 1 And I don't genuinely like that kind of language, but I think it is fair to say that just as we are trapped by our own preconceptions in ways that we don't even recognize, they are absolutely trapped by theirs.

Speaker 1 But I think it also suggests that we are beneficiaries of

Speaker 1 the events that we're describing in this series

Speaker 1 in ways that we may not appreciate, that we may mistake for

Speaker 1 truths so self-evident that they don't need to be argued for, that that's not what they are at all, that they are in fact kind of radical intellectual ideological innovations

Speaker 1 that

Speaker 1 ultimately succeed because we come to feel yeah they're absolutely right but

Speaker 1 when they are first proposed just seem absolutely kind of mad well tom there are a lot of people in the world right now um when we're recording this who would listen to this episode and would say they are mad i mean there are people right now you know in the people who are currently uh administering afghanistan or or or indeed iran who would say you know a lot of what olymp degouche was arguing was bonkers.

Speaker 1 So maybe we shouldn't be entirely complacent about it, I guess. Yes, well, it's, yes.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 it's nice to hear you finally say something good about the revolution. So Theo will be pleased about that.
Well, I'm not saying something good about the revolution.

Speaker 1 I'm saying about Olympe de Gouge, because as we will discover in a future episode...

Speaker 1 Revolution doesn't treat her well, does it? No, it does not treat her well, which is yet another black mark, I'm afraid. So.

Speaker 1 Jolly good, Tom. That was absolutely fascinating.
And

Speaker 1 kind of overdue, we should have, you know, we've done a lot about men in the revolution. We've done quite a lot about women as well.
Well, we have. We did start with a woman, I guess.

Speaker 1 So next week, we will be getting back to the narrative, won't we? Because I think we left it last time with the Prussians. Cliffhanger.
They were approaching Paris.

Speaker 1 They're 120 miles away, and they've just turned to finish off the last French army at Valmy. And listeners will be excited to hear that there is going to be a thrilling twist to the story.

Speaker 1 We love a thrilling twist on the rest of this. Can't wait.
So, Tom, what could people do if they wanted to hear that episode now, Literally now,

Speaker 1 they could sign up to the Rest is History Club, and not only will they be able to hear both the two episodes yet to come, but they will get a slew, Dominic, a slew of additional benefits.

Speaker 1 And just to be very clear, we are a mixed club. And Tom, do we treat our male and female members equally? Yeah, we're all about egalité.
We treat them equally badly.

Speaker 1 And on that bombshell, we will see you next time for the most exciting twist in European history. Goodbye.
Bye-bye.