#louise de kéralio

[anotherhumaninthisworld]

I decided to try this but for the girlies instead.

Are you sure want to click on ”keep reading”?

For Pauline Léon marrying Claire Lacombe’s host, see Liberty: the lives of six women in Revolutionary France (2006) by Lucy Moore, page 230

For Pauline Léon throwing a bust of Lafayette through Fréron’s window and being friends with Constance Evrard, see Pauline Léon, une républicaine révolutionnaire (2006) by Claude Guillon.

For Françoise Duplay’s sister visiting Catherine Théot, see Points de vue sur l’affaire Catherine Théot (1969) by Michel Eude, page 627.

For Anne Félicité Colombe publishing the papers of Marat and Fréron, see The women of Paris and their French Revolution (1998) by Dominique Godineau, page 382-383.

For the relationship between Simonne Evrard and Albertine Marat, see this post.

For Albertine Marat dissing Charlotte Robespierre, see F.V Raspail chez Albertine Marat (1911) by Albert Mathiez, page 663.

For Lucile Desmoulins predicting Marie-Antoinette would mount the scaffold, see the former’s diary from 1789.

For Lucile being friends with madame Boyer, Brune, Dubois-Crancé, Robert and Danton, calling madame Ricord’s husband ”brusque, coarse, truly mad, giddy, insane,” visiting ”an old madwoman” with madame Duplay’s son and being hit on by Danton as well as Louise Robert saying she would stab Danton, see Lucile’s diary 1792-1793.

For the relationship between Lucile Desmoulins and Marie Hébert, see this post.

For the relationship between Lucile Desmoulins and Thérèse Jeanne Fréron de la Poype, and the one between Annette Duplessis and Marguerite Philippeaux, see letters cited in Camille Desmoulins and his wife: passages from the history of the dantonists (1876) page 463-464 and 464-469.

For Adèle Duplessis having been engaged to Robespierre, see this letter from Annette Duplessis to Robespierre, seemingly written April 13 1794.

For Claire Panis helping look after Horace Desmoulins, see Panis précepteur d’Horace Desmoulins (1912) by Charles Valley.

For Élisabeth Lebas being slandered by Guffroy, molested by Danton, treated like a daughter by Claire Panis, accusing Ricord of seducing her sister-in-law and being helped out in prison by Éléonore, see Le conventionnel Le Bas : d'après des documents inédits et les mémoires de sa veuve, page 108, 125-126, 139 and 140-142.

For Élisabeth Lebas being given an obscene book by Desmoulins, see this post.

For Charlotte Robespierre dissing Joséphine, Éléonore Duplay, madame Genlis, Roland and Ricord, see Mémoires de Charlotte Robespierre sur ses deux frères (1834), page  76-77,  90-91, 96-97, 109-116 and 128-129.

For Charlotte Robespierre arriving two hours early to Rosalie Jullien’s dinner, see Journal d’une Bourgeoise pendant la Révolution 1791–1793, page 345.

For Charlotte Robespierre and Françoise Duplay’s relationship, see Mémoires de Charlotte Robespierre sur ses deux frères (1834) page 85-92 and Le conventional Le Bas: d’après des documents inédits et les mémoires de sa veuve (1902) page 104-105

For the relationship between Charlotte Robespierre and Victoire and Élisabeth Lebas, see this post.

For Charlotte Robespierre visiting madame Guffroy, moving in with madame Laporte and Victoire Duplay being arrested by one of Charlotte’s friends, see Charlotte Robespierre et ses amis (1961)

For Louise de Kéralio calling Etta Palm a spy, see Appel aux Françoises sur la régénération des mœurs et nécessité de l’influence des femmes dans un gouvernement libre (1791) by the latter.

For the relationship between Manon Roland and Louise de Kéralio Robert, see Mémoires de Madame Roland, volume 2, page 198-207 

For the relationship between Madame Pétion and Manon Roland, see Mémoires de Madame Roland, volume 2, page 158 and 244-245 as well as Lettres de Madame Roland, volume 2, page 510.

For the relationship between Madame Roland and Madame Buzot, see Mémoires de Madame Roland (1793), volume 1, page 372, volume 2, page 167 as well as this letter from Manon to her husband dated September 9 1791. For the affair between Manon and Buzot, see this post.

For Manon Roland praising Condorcet, see Mémoires de Madame Roland, volume 2, page 14-15.

For the relationship between Manon Roland and Félicité Brissot, see Mémoires de Madame Roland, volume 1, page 360.

For the relationship between Helen Maria Williams and Manon Roland, see Memoirs of the Reign of Robespierre (1795), written by the former.

For the relationship between Mary Wollstonecraft and Helena Maria Williams, see Collected letters of Mary Wollstonecraft (1979), page 226.

For Constance Charpentier painting a portrait of Louise Sébastienne Danton, see Constance Charpentier: Peintre (1767-1849), page 74.

For Olympe de Gouges writing a play with fictional versions of the Fernig sisters, see L’Entrée de Dumourier à Bruxelles ou les Vivandiers (1793) page 94-97 and 105-110.

For Olympe de Gouges calling Charlotte Corday ”a monster who has shown an unusual courage,” see a letter from the former dated July 20 1793, cited on page 204 of Marie-Olympe de Gouges: une humaniste à la fin du XVIIIe siècle (2003) by Oliver Blanc.

For Olympe de Gouges adressing her declaration to Marie-Antoinette, see Les droits de la femme: à la reine (1791) written by the former.

For Germaine de Staël defending Marie-Antoinette, see Réflexions sur le procès de la Reine par une femme (1793) by the former.

For the friendship between Madame Royale and Pauline Tourzel, see Souvernirs de quarante ans: 1789-1830: récit d’une dame de Madame la Dauphine (1861) by the latter.

For Félicité Brissot possibly translating Mary Wollstonecraft, see Who translated into French and annotated Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman? (2022) by Isabelle Bour.

For Félicité Brissot working as a maid for Louise Marie Adélaïde de Bourbon, see Mémoires inédites de Madame la comptesse de Genlis: sur le dix-huitième siècle et sur la révolution française, volume 4, page 106.

For Reine Audu, Claire Lacombe and Théroigne de Méricourt being given civic crowns together, see Gazette nationale ou le Moniteur universel, September 3, 1792.

For Reine Audu taking part in the women’s march on Versailles, see Reine Audu: les légendes des journées d’octobre (1917) by Marc de Villiers.

For Marie-Antoinette calling Lamballe ”my dear heart,” see Correspondance inédite de Marie Antoinette, page 197, 209 and 252.

For Marie-Antoinette disliking Madame du Barry, see https://plume-dhistoire.fr/marie-antoinette-contre-la-du-barry/

For Marie-Antoinette disliking Anne de Noailles, see Correspondance inédite de Marie Antoinette, page 30.

For Louise-Élisabeth Tourzel and Lamballe being friends, see Memoirs of the Duchess de Tourzel: Governess to the Children of France during the years 1789, 1790, 1791, 1792, 1793 and 1795 volume 2, page 257-258

For Félicité de Genlis being the mistress of Louise Marie Adélaïde de Bourbon’s husband, see La duchesse d’Orléans et Madame de Genlis (1913).

For Pétion escorting Madame Genlis out of France, see Mémoires inédites de Madame la comptesse de Genlis…, volume 4, page 99.

For the relationship between Félicité de Genlis and Louise de Kéralio Robert, see Mémoires de Madame de Genlis: en un volume, page 352-354

For the relationship between Félicité de Genlis and Germaine de Staël, see Mémoires inédits de Madame la comptesse de Genlis, volume 2, page 316-317

For the relationship between Félicité de Genlis and Théophile Fernig, see Mémoires inédits de Madame la comptesse de Genlis, volume 4, page 300-304

For the relationship between Félicité de Genlis and Félicité Brissot, see Mémoires inédites de Madame la comptesse de Genlis, volume 4, page 106-110, as well as this letter dated June 1783 from Félicité Brissot to Félicité Genlis.

For the relationship between Félicité de Genlis and Théresa Cabarrus, see Mémoires de Madame de Genlis: en un volume (1857) page 391.

For Félicité de Genlis inviting Lucile to dinner, see this letter from Sillery to Desmoulins dated March 3 1791.

For Marinette Bouquey hiding the husbands of madame Buzot, Pétion and Guadet, see Romances of the French Revolution (1909) by G. Lenotre, volume 2, page 304-323

Hey, don’t say I didn’t warn you!

#french revolution #frev #marie antoinette #pauline léon #claire lacombe #théroigne méricourt #reine audu #charlotte robespierre #éléonore duplay #élisabeth duplay #élisabeth lebas #lucile desmoulins #louise de kéralio #félicité de genlis #félicité brissot #mary wollstonecraft #manon roland #madame royale #charlotte corday #albertine marat #simonne evrard #catherine théot #madame élisabeth #sophie condorcet #françoise duplay #cécile renault #gabrielle danton #louise sebastien danton #theresa tallien #theresa cabarrus

[montagnarde1793]

Pas mal ce miniature de François Robert (même s’il ne ressemble pas du tout à son portrait par Laneuville) ! Si seulement on avait un portrait de sa femme, l’écrivaine Louise de Kéralio !

#François Robert #Révolution française #Louise de Kéralio

[idefilarate]

Does anyone have any info/sources on Louise de Kéralio? Ideally English but French is good if they are online . Merci citoyens! @sieclesetcieux @orpheusmori @anotherhumaninthisworld

#frev #french revolution #louisedekeralio #Cordeliers

[empirearchives]

Women writers in Napoleonic France:

“In the archives of the Napoleonic Ministry of the Interior we discover that Félicité de Choiseul-Meuse, was dependent on official patronage for her survival. Remembered today as the author of the infamously pornographic pastiche of Rousseau’s Nouvelle Heloïse, titled, Julie, ou j'ai sauvée ma Rose (1807), among many other works, Choiseul-Meuse clearly found an audience for her literary productions, not only in the market-place, but in the corridors of power as well.”

“There is also considerable evidence of the sustained inclusion and recognition of women of letters by the major literary and scientific academies—for example, Louise de Kéralio (history), Pauline Guizot (moral theory), Fanny de Beauharnais (novels), Charlotte de Bournon, Countess of Malarme (novels), Claudine Guyton de Moreau (natural sciences), Anne Marie de Montgergoult de Coutances, Countess de Beaufort d'Hautpol (poetry), and Sophie Bacquié (poetry). After years of patronage from the Napoleonic regime, in 1815, Mme Dufrénoy became the poet laureate of the Française Académie, its highest literary honor.”

“In 1804 Fortunée Briquet, with whom I began, compiled a Dictionnaire historique, littéraire et bibliographique des françaises et des étrangères naturalisées en France. In her dedication of the work to the First Consul, Napoleon Bonaparte, Briquet reflected on the tumultuous fifteen years since the Old Regime had fallen. She exulted that ‘No other century has begun with such a great number of women of letters.’ To prove it, her Dictionnaire offered the literary records of 583 women from the age of Clovis to the present, culled from a very impressive range of bibliographic sources.”

Source: Carla Hesse, The Other Enlightenment: How French Women Became Modern

#Carla Hesse #Hesse #The Other Enlightenment: How French Women Became Modern #book #Napoleon and women #napoleonic era #napoleonic #women’s history #womens history #napoleon bonaparte #napoleon #first french empire #19th century #french empire #france #history

[une-sanz-pluis]

But some years after the Treaty of Troyes a rumor began that Charles VII was not his father’s son, and, increasingly remote from the feud that had dominated the early years of the fifteenth century and guided by stereotypes of feminine fickleness, historians of the following centuries began to condemn [Isabeau of Bavaria] as manipulating the dukes for her own gain. Her reputation deteriorated further when she became associated with the Cour amoureuse, the Court of Love, whose charter was discovered in the early eighteenth century. These different threads were gathered together by champion of the Revolution Louise de Kéralio in her diatribe against the queens of France. Kéralio makes the German-speaking Isabeau into a prototype of Marie-Antoinette—like Antoinette, Isabeau was “greedy, incapable of moderation in her desires, tormented by the desire to rule”—which was then taken up by nineteenth-century historians, many of whom were themselves rabidly anti-German for long-standing political reasons, and woven into narratives of national identity throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth century.

Tracy Adams, "Misogynistic Throwaways: The Case of Isabeau of Bavaria", Queens, Regents, Mistresses: Reflections on Extracting Elite Women’s Stories from Medieval and Early Modern French Narrative Sources (2023)

#isabeau of bavaria #charles vii #historian: tracy adams #historiography #reputation and representation #medieval france

[silver-whistle]

Husband of Louise de Kéralio, the first woman member (corresponding) of the Académie d’Arras – supported and welcomed by the then President, Maximilien Robespierre.

#revolutionary portraiture #Révolution française #miniature portrait #françois robert #maximilien robespierre #louise de kéralio #académie d'arras

[nanshe-of-nina]

Favorite History Books || Christine de Pizan and the Fight for France by Tracy Adams ★★★★☆

The feud between the Orleanists, or Armagnacs, and Burgundians, that “sickness that so tears through the land” brought on by mad King Charles VI’s inability to reign, is a central theme in Christine de Pizan’s corpus. An observer of the strife, Christine laments the conflict’s devastating material effects on her society throughout her career.

And yet her literary engagement with the feud, her use of “literature as a potent social mediator” to influence the course of the conflict, has received little attention. Although scholars acknowledge Christine de Pizan as one of a group of fifteenth-century political writers to treat “immediate reality and, consequently, what one can call contemporary history,” attention to date has focused more on what she said about women, authorship, and authority, and, in the abstract, kingship, peace, and warfare, than on how she sought to influence her immediate political situation. Scholars who have considered her engagement with contemporary politics have relied heavily on superseded histories, creating a confused narrative of her political loyalties and goals. The poet is depicted as politically neutral (“Christine de Pisan hated factions and had no sympathy for partisan politics”) and/or fickle, switching sides from the Orleanists to the Burgundians and back again. No one disputes that by the second decade of the fifteenth century she was an ardent Armagnac, as the Orleanists were called after 1410, fleeing Paris along with fellow Armagnacs fortunate enough to escape the Burgundian massacre of 1418, and celebrating the triumph of the Armagnac leader King Charles VII in the 1429 Ditié de Jehanne d’Arc . But many scholars place her in the Burgundian camp before this, after a still earlier flirtation with the Orleanists. This narrative has her soliciting the patronage of the brother of the mad king, Louis, Duke of Orleans, regent during the king’s episodes of insanity, but, irritated by a slight (Louis is supposed to have refused to find a place for her son in his household) and disillusioned with his profligacy, she abandons him to become a discreet propagandist for the king’s uncle, Philippe of Burgundy. Although some believe that she was less enthusiastic about Philip’s successor, the notion that after Jean sans Peur (the Fearless) succeeded his father as Duke of Burgundy in 1404, Christine remained in her “secure seat in the Burgundian camp” as a “paid Burgundian propagandist” continues to hold force. The most widely read biography of the poet in English reports the presumed shifts of allegiance without comment, slipping in the space of one paragraph from “Christine had enjoyed the patronage of two dukes of Burgundy,” to “her son was now one of the dauphin’s [the future Charles VII’s] secretaries,” to Christine’s “family was fortunate to escape [the Burgundian massacre] with their lives.”

The incoherence results from a narrative of political activity at Charles VI’s court developed by historians influenced by the ideals of the French Revolution, a narrative itself derived from Burgundian propaganda circulated after Jean of Burgundy’s assassination of the Duke of Orleans in 1407. Republicans like Louise de Kéralio uncritically adopted Burgundian images of the king’s brother and the queen as greedy wastrels, and that of the dukes of Burgundy as men of the people. In her 1791 diatribe on the queens of France, Kéralio paints Queen Isabeau as an early Marie Antoinette and Louis as the Count of Artois. This narrative passed into the works of nineteenth century historians: Michelet, Guizot, Martin, Coville, and Thibault reinforced the pair’s negative reputation. True, monarchist historians viewed Louis positively (although they were less favorable toward Isabeau), but they were few in number compared to their Republican counterparts.

The 1838 essay by Raimond Thomassy, an early scholar of Christine’s political thought, manifests these Burgundian biases. Thomassy writes of Louis of Orleans that, “as brother of the king, he claimed to be invested with principal authority to govern during the illness of Charles VI,” as if the duke had no legitimate claim to regency. Moreover, Thomassy asserts that Louis “destroyed the people with exactions, dilapidated without shame the public treasury,” without mentioning that the taxes were for the war with England or that such complaints were routinely leveled for political reasons against anyone possessing the right to tax. By contrast, Thomassy describes Philippe as the “heir in wisdom and determination of Charles V.” As for Isabeau of Bavaria, the odious queen “brought shame and infamy to sit on the throne of France and betrayed at the same time her feminine, maternal, and wifely duties.” Nor is it widely understood that the assumption that the queen suffered from a bad reputation during her lifetime is based on four unflattering comments in the chronicle of Michel Pintoin, the Burgundian-biased monk of Saint Denis, all from the same year in which Jean of Burgundy first tried to seize control of the mad king. And it is rarely acknowledged that evidence for the unpopularity of Louis of Orleans comes primarily from the same source, along with another anti-Orleanist chronicle, that of Pierre Cochon, and the justification of Louis’s assassination pronounced by Jean Petit on behalf of Jean of Burgundy. Even recent Christine scholarship continues to show the influence of the Burgundian narrative, drawing an equivalency between Louis’s regency claim and the attempts of the dukes of Burgundy to seize control of the government, seeing both as the “usurpation of power by the king’s brother, uncles and nephews.” About Christine’s view of the Duke of Orleans, we read that it is “evident that she wanted [him] in particular to take heed” of her writings on prudence. Philippe of Burgundy, by contrast, was “an effective diplomat as well as a sound military adviser,” and, more important, functioned as “a moderating force in the polemical atmosphere of the court.” Isabeau, Charles VI’s “beautiful, sluttish wife,” “encouraged” him “in his taste for pleasure.”  King Charles VI is imagined to have been reduced to rags while his family members pillaged the treasury to support their own luxurious lifestyles; gossip circulated about “the relations between the queen and the duke of Orleans, a liaison that lasted until the duke’s assassination in a Paris street near the queen’s residence in November 1407.”

This study rereads Christine’s major works from a perspective informed by recent historical scholarship on the Armagnac-Burgundian feud. Because the views of Burgundian chroniclers represent just one of several contemporary feud narratives, I widen the set of documents generally relied on to reconstruct Christine’s historico-political context. My argument, laid out in the following chapters, is that when Christine’s works are reread within this broader context— that is, when the Burgundian images of Louis, Isabeau, and Philippe are recognized as propaganda and supplemented with other sources— it becomes clear that the poet’s many narrative voices consistently support the Orleanists. She is of necessity discreet, but she does indeed “challenge the particular interests of the princes,” at least the Burgundian princes. Such a claim requires untangling two frequently confounded perspectives on the poet’s political interactions: first, her beliefs about regency, which follow from her view of kingship, and second, her interactions and personal friendships with noble patrons. Flattery of Philippe of Burgundy has often been assumed to be tantamount to promoting his regency claim. As I hope to show, however, Christine’s conception of regency was motivated by principles that remained steadfast throughout her career.

#historyedit #litedit #christine de pizan #medieval #french history #european history #women's history #history #history books #nanshe's graphics #armagnac burgundian civil war #hundred years' war

[heartofstanding]

The transmission of Isabeau’s black legend to the present is more complex. During her lifetime, except for the couple of attacks we have discussed, chronicles indicate that she was respected, and royal ordinances assigning her positions of real authority during the mad king’s periods of indisposition demonstrate Charles VI’s great trust in her. Even the now infamous Treaty of Troyes, making Henry V the king’s legal heir in place of her own son, was not widely held against her, but was often seen as an attempt to put an end to a conflict between implacable enemies. After the Burgundian attacks, the oldest layer of character assassination is her alleged promiscuity, created shortly before her death by the English to justify Henry VI’s kingship. This was closely followed by her image as a novice interfering in politics, appearing for the first time in some late sixteenth-century treatises on female regency—an image based on the derogatory mentions in Pintoin’s chronicle that we have examined. Increasingly distant from the ideology of feuding that had dominated the fifteenth century and guided by stereotypes of feminine fickleness, some of the treatises condemned the queen as manipulating the dukes for her own gain. The next development of the queen’s bad reputation came when she was associated with the Cour amoureuse, the Court of Love, whose charter was discovered in the early eighteenth century. These different pieces were gathered together by Louise de Kéralio in her diatribe against the queens of France. Kéralio’s Isabeau as a prototype of Marie-Antoinette was then taken up by nineteenth-century historians, prone themselves to anti-German sentiment. This is the Isabeau whom twentieth-century historians, popular and scholarly, have had to extract from the legends in which she was long embedded.

Tracy Adams, “Louis of Orléans, Isabeau of Bavaria, and the Burgundian Propaganda Machine, 1392–1407″ in Character Assassination throughout the Ages, eds. Martijn Icks and Eric Shiraev (Palgrave MacMillan, 2014)

#isabeau of bavaria #charles vi of france #henry vi #henry v #marie antoinette #hundred years war #the isabeau rehabilitation novel

[valheyrie]

Quel est le nom de la première femme à être rédactrice en chef d'un journal ?

https://www.twitch.tv/valheyrie

.....La première femme à êre rédactrice en chef d'un journal se nommait Louise Félicité de Kéralio.

#culture #femme #journalistes

[mali-umkin]

Visiting Robespierre's home town, Arras, in the North of France

Maximilien was born in Arras in the old French province of Artois. Early in July 1764, Madame de Robespierre gave birth to a stillborn daughter; she died twelve days later, at the age of 29. Her two daughters were brought up by their paternal aunts, and her two sons were taken in by their maternal grandparents. Already literate at age eight, Maximilien started attending the collège of Arras.

On 15 November 1783, he was elected a member of the literary Academy of Arras. He was then elected president of the Académie royale des Belles Lettres d'Arras. Claiming to share the point of view of the Cartesians on gender equality and anxious to promote gender diversity in scholarly societies, he supported the entry of well-read women, Marie Le Masson Le Golft and Louise de Kéralio in February 1787.

On 26 April 1789, Robespierre was elected as one of 16 deputies for the Pas-de-Calais to the Estates-General.

You will find this plaque quite easily in the city centre - it is easier to find than his birth house.

#Maximilien de Robespierre #Robespierre #Frev #Arras

[anotherhumaninthisworld]

Last Saturday, madame Robert, wife of a man of letters and known patriot, and she herself the author of several works, passing through Quai Théatins, was accosted by three very elegant little men that told her to put down the three color cockade that this lady had tied to her hat. She refuses. These men follow her, repeating their insolent demands. You can take my life, but you cannot force me to put away my cockade, Madame Robert responded. Still followed and insulted, she took out a small knife and threatened her agressors. One of them points a dagger against her breast, she wards off the blow with a gravure roll (rouleau de gravures) that she held in her hand. Another assassin snatches her hat from her. A fourth arrives, and, taking the braves by the arm, tells them: Scatterbrains, don't go and act like Lambesc; you know that’s not for today. And these cutters, worthy game of the lower court of the Tuileries, fled when they saw some people approaching who were going to avenge their outrages. Thermomètre du Jour, number 222, August 9 1792

In vain did madame Robert ask for news of her husband, no one gave her any. She thought he was marching with the faubourg. “Yes,” she said to me, “if he perishes I will not survive him! But this Danton who remains in his bed, he, the rallying point, if my husband perishes I will be the woman to stab him!” Her eyes were rolling. From that moment on I never left her side. What did I know what could happen? To know what she was capable of…  Lucile Desmoulins describing her activities during the night of the Insurrection of August 10 (1792)

OK, now I have a much better appreciation for why Lucile took that threat so seriously…

#louise de kéralio #lucile desmoulins #georges danton #jeez louise #you may take my life but you’ll never take MY COCKADE! #also louise: faints as soon as she hears a canon being fired #frev

[anotherhumaninthisworld]

Really do feel like I’m taking advantage of your generosity lately but I’m writing a novel so that’s my excuse.

Lucile goes on a number of quite feminist rants in her diaries , so I’ve been wondering if we know anything about her official views in that area (and Camille’s, as well.) Would the Desmoulins have known/been friendly with people like Olympe de Gouges and Sophie Condorcet? I’m aware both were Girondins so presumably not to the bitter end, but what about earlier in the revolution? I’ve noticed Lucile actually mentions an Olympe in her diary - is this de Gouges…?

I too reacted on Lucile’s rather modern views — both when it came to gender equality and religious questions — so it’s fun to hear I wasn’t alone there.

If the Olympe she mentions once in the diary is Olympe de Gouges was actually something Philippe Lejeune speculated on when first publishing it in 1995, bringing up how the two at the time actually lived in the same area. He does however underline that there exists no real evidence tying the two together and ends by concluding he thinks it more likely Lucile is talking about a person in her own age and not de Gouges.

Lejeune’s words seem rather well confirmed by other pieces I’ve looked at — I can’t find Camille referring to de Gouges in any of his works, nor does the biography Marie-Olympe de Gouges: une humaniste à la fin du XVIIIe siècle (2003) by Oliver Blanc cite anything hinting at a relationship between her and the couple. The same thing for Condorcet — nowhere could I find Camille talk about him in a way that implies they were/had once been friends (and it goes without saying it was the same thing for his wife). I actually had trouble finding proof of a relationship between Sophie/Olympe and any other prominent revolutionary.

Someone we however do know Lucile was friends with is Louise de Kéralio-Robert, who, judging from the amount of times mentioned in the diary she kept 1792-1793, comes off as one of her closest friends along with madame Danton and madame Brune. De Kéralio has been accepted as the first and even only 18th century woman to found and edit a political journal. In said journal, she, like Camille, showed herself an early and fervent republican. She was however far from a feminist, in 1789 we find the following letter from her:

Mademoiselle de Keralio is very satisfied by what [Monsieur Brissot de Warville] said today about the influence of women. It is very much part of Mlle de Keralio’s principles that women should not make a great spectacle of themselves. […] A love of publicity is bad for modesty, from the loss of that comes a distaste for domestic work, and from idleness, principles are forgotten and from lack of morals arise all of public disorders. We should be forced to seek women inside their homes, their presence should be hard to obtain, and rare, offered as a favour.

And one year later we have this passage from her journal:

I do not believe that women can ever have any active part in government, and I believe that the greatest good that the constitution can do to public morals is to keep them out of it forever. Women reign in despotic states, it is enough to say that they must be null in the administration of a free country. The more the austerity of republican mores will make them attentive inside their homes, the more it will render them incapable of knowing enough public men to direct a choice which must be the fruit of constant observation and consummate experience. I know in them the sagacity necessary to judge the best of things, but not the extent of genius which makes known the means of arriving there or the force of temperament which supports the necessary studies. I repeat it again, the more they will be what nature has made them, the less they will want to undertake something beyond their physical and moral strength. Content to teach their children the decrees of the assembly, they will aspire neither to make nor dictate them.

This in response to a footnote inserted in the pampleth Le franc en vedette (1790) by Armand Joseph Guffroy (who, sidenote, was the man Charlotte Robespierre is proven to have had some interesting political connections to and was helped out by after thermidor. While there’s no way of knowing what Charlotte’s own stance on the topic was, it’s nevertheless interesting that the guy she was arguably closer to politically compared to her brothers also fought more openly for her political rights than they are ever confirmed to have done…)

I had proposed to admit women to the primary assemblies, to deliberate on the choice of municipalities, and I still believe that my two separate ballots and my posted ballots would disturb all the conspiracies. If one is wise, one will come back to it; and I predict that we will never have a public spirit, public morals, if women do not participate in the administration as I have proposed. The National Assembly admitted to swearing the constitution, those who were in the tribune on the 4th of this month. Why would we separate them from the public sake? The queen promised to raise her son in the principles of constitutional liberty; all French mothers must publicly swear this civic oath: without that, I repeat, no morals, no morals, no fatherland. Frenchmen, prove that you are men, by giving back to your wives all their dignity; French women, prove that you are worthy of giving birth to a race of free men.

Now, there’s of course no way to know if de Kéralio influenced Lucile’s own view on the matter (it’s a bit unfortunate that the diary she kept during the revolution doesn’t contain any of the poltical/philosophical reflections the one from 1788 has), but I think it can be concluded that, among the people she is proven to have had any close contact with, those who’s political opinions can be traced were more anti-feminist than the opposite. Sidenote again, but the feminist stuff contained in the diary of 1788 Lucile wrote while simultaneously hanging out with Sylvain Maréchal, a guy who in 1801 would suggest forbidding women from learning how to read.

As for what Camille’s view on the subject was, searching for the term ”femme” in Révolutions de France et de Brabant, I would say he comes off as neither a feminist (in the sense that he wants women to be equal to men) nor a misogynist. The most feminist moment from his side I’ve found so far is when he in number 14 he praises Théroigne de Méricourt and transcribes one of her speeches. The speech does on one hand not have anything to do with women’s right, but after transscribing it Camille nevertheless writes:

On the request of Mademoiselle Theroigne to be admitted to the district with a vote of consent, the assembly followed the conclusions of the president, who gives thanks to this excellent citoyenne for her motion; that a canon of the Council of Mâcon having formally recognized that women have a soul and reason like men, they can not be forbidden to make such good use of them as the preopinante; that he will always make Mademoiselle Théroigne, and all those of her sex, free to propose what they believe to be advantageous to the fatherland.

Edit: Camille speaks in favor of married women’s right to administration of property in 1793.

What’s your novel about, anyway? If you want to tell.

#lucile desmoulins #camille desmoulins #louise de kéralio #olympe de gouges #armand joseph guffroy #a man proposing women should get more political rights and a (politically active) woman opposing it… #that’s not something you get to read about everyday #ask #frev

[anotherhumaninthisworld]

Lucile Desmoulins’ diary

I’ve made a full English translation of the edition of Lucile Desmoulins diary (1788, 1789, 1790 and 1792-1793) given by Philippe Lejeune in 1995.

1788

At Bourg-la-Reine (the location of the Duplessis’ country house Clos Payan)

First part of my diary

Saturday 21 June 1788 — This morning Maman gave me a silk worm.

Sunday 22 — I've been bored all day, it's not… In the evening, around 10 o'clock, Maman and I laughed a lot at Mar (Lejeune thinks this Mar, that shows up multiple times throughout the first part of Lucile’s diary, must be one Sylvian Maréchal (1750-1803) author, atheist and proto-communist who would join Babeuf in the Conspiracy of Equals in 1796) and at Chien Maigre.

Monday 23 — This morning, before 8 o’clock, I went for a walk in the grove. The beautiful chaffinch was on the sumac. Seeing it, I say to myself: "If I can walk around it without it flying away, it's because..." I made a lap and a half, the beautiful chaffinch didn’t fly away! I await the event which must happen before the end of this year... Today I haven't worked on my story. There is a heavy downpour as I write. It's half past nine, I leave my pen and go for a walk while waiting for the day to end. It seems very long to me... I couldn't walk, it rained too much. I started to spin until supper.

Tuesday 24 — Saint John’s Eve. This morning I was arranging silkworms, P(apa) had just come into Maman’s room and I was in the salon. Leaving Maman, he was going to enter the salon, wanting to push open the door to it! P(apa) says I'm scared of him, that I was running away! My sister came to tell me that, and I, very angry, went to pick quarrel with P(apa). After dinner, we went to the park (Parc de Sceaux, according to Lejeune), we saw the water sprout in the fountains, we found M(onsieur) B. D and M(onsieur) G. We came back at 7 o’clock. We couldn't go for a walk after supper, it was raining, and Maman had a sore throat. I sang a little, then we went to bed.

Wednesday 25 — I read Gessner. I found a poem that made me laugh a lot, ”Le satyre.” I copied it.

Thursday 26 — The three of us went for a walk in the park. In the evening, we found a glowworm. We went to see it in the light and then we brought it back to the grove. We sat there. I sang Le Chien Maigre, which always makes Maman laugh.

Friday 27 — I want to finish my story, I cannot finish it! I take up the pen, I want to write, but nothing comes… I feel like running very hard. How do you do it? It's been raining cats and dogs all morning and the ground is completely soaked… For the moment, I remain in an inaction that no longer allows me to think. It seems to me that I am devastated, I cannot understand how I exist... However, I recover and remember the dream I had last night: I dreamed that I was on the edge of a precipipe, a man came to me, and, taking me in his arms, made every effort he could to throw me into this abyss; at this moment I felt this man hardening, I suddenly saw him turn into a big tree, the arms that were holding me became hard and big branches were already covering me, I was in a terrible stir, believing that I was going to stay that way forever! However, I managed to get rid of it, I started to run at full speed and woke up with a start...

Saturday 28 — I practised playing my piano all morning. The builders are here. At one o’clock, I did a little soaping. I was picking raspberries. After dinner, I finished my distaff. We have gotten ducks, I went to see them. I went to draw. I'm starting to get bored of writing down everything I do like this. In the evening, I went for a walk in the vegetable garden with Maman, I ate gooseberries, and then I was alone in the pavilion, I picked a little hornbeam which I brought to Lolotte, then I I was dreaming in the grove.

Sunday 29 — We went to mass, and laughed a lot at the vicar who almost broke his nose while saluting the high altar. M(onsieur) SR thought we were laughing at him! And on our way back we found M(onsieur) A who was coming to dinner. M(onsieur) Lg came too. We went for a walk in the Park, the S a and l.a were there but I did not see them, it was Maman who told me that. There came a terrible downpour and we had to hide under a yew. Madame and Mademoiselle le b.l also came there and, having recognized Maman, struck up a conversation. After the rain, they went away, we stayed a little longer, finally we returned very quickly. M(onsieu)r Lg left around 8 o’clock. M(onsieur) Lm stayed for supper, a carriage came to take him at 10 o'clock. After he left, P(apa) went for a walk in the salon, he seemed to be impatient that we were not going to bed. Finally he went away and I stayed a little longer to talk with Maman.

Monday 20 (sic) — I got up at 7 o’clock, I wanted to go get some raspberries, but I couldn't find the time. Maman made me arrange mulberry leaves, it took all my time, then I had to do my hair. Maman made her ratafia which I didn't find good. At dinner, while giving me soup, P(apa) told me that I hadn't made much progress in sonata, that I was rather busy with frills, with songs; I didn't answer, because I thought he was right. One is very strong when one is right... After dinner I went for a walk in the grove. I had fun breaking dead wood, then I found a snail. I examined it a little, I broke its shell, but having fallen onto my stomach it made me cry out loud, because this ugly beast was crawling on my stomach! I made a big hole and buried it. In two or three days I will go and see what has become of it. I came back, I filled a reel. Before unwinding it, I asked Maman if she wanted to write something on the paper on which I was going to unwind. Maman wrote, "Time flies like this thread between your fingers," and I added, "Maman, it flies even faster when I'm around you." Maman smiled. After that, I started drawing. The schoolmaster came to teach my sister. I asked him if he had decided not to write me verse, he told me that it wasn’t possible for him, but that he would try nevertheless. I composed a story about a drawing I made.

Wednesday 1 — We have been in les Alpes. (Lejeune was not able to identify this place. Lucile certainly can’t mean the mountain range which is situated 862 km from Bourg-la-Reine). We almost lost Moumoute (a dog) and Mar(échal) who went looking for her. In the evening, at midnight, I copied passages from ”l’Hymne au soleil.”

Thursday 2 — I copied ”La gelée d’avril”

Friday 3 — Maman wanted to read Mar(échal)’s ”L’Âge d’or,” but she couldn't read for long because she was yawning too much. I took it from her and went to read it in the grove. Maman annoyed me all evening by reading me passages from Grandisson, passages of which I did not know the subject.

Saturday 4 — This morning I went to read ”Les Noces patriarchales” in the grove. I found a tale that resembles one I made in ”L’Âge d’or.”

Sunday 5 — I read Grandisson. Monsieur Lamouxxx (same as m(onsieur) lg) came to dessert and brought a print at the bottom of which there were verses addressed to Maman. After dinner, I went upstairs to read a few passages from Grandisson, but I had to go back down to go for a walk with everyone, which annoyed me quite a bit, because I would have liked to read forever. After a while I came back up, expecting to have escaped the glum company again, but after a while they all came back! Finally Monsieur La. left at nightfall and I went to breathe in the grove.

Monday 6 — I didn't go out all morning, I did nothing but read. I read my little tale for Maman. I don't think she found it too pretty, she moved out of the salon.

Tuesday 7 — I haven't been out all morning. We went for a walk in the park. It was raining cats and dogs, we took cover and then… I don't think I need to write it down! I will remember… After half an hour, we got back in the carriage and then we came back. I sent to find the eggs. (j’ai envoyé dénicher les œufs) I got back up and we played badminton with Mar(échal). I spun. Do I need to tell everything? My God, how boring it is… We supped… And then we went back upstairs. I sang, I didn't really want to...

Wednesday 8 — This morning, when I woke up, I found my eye swollen. And my sister too... And Mar(échal) too... but it's charming. It's two o’clock as I write. The dinner bell rings, I must leave...

Mar(échal) went to L. I did not leave my piano. I would like to finish my tale, but I cannot. My God, how stupid I am… In the evening, what detours I had to take! We have come to the end of it. I did not sing.

Thursday 9 — We were, Maman and I, in the woods. What a delicious walk: cloudy weather, both of us melancholy, both with the same subject of sorrows… Oh Maman……

Friday 10 — After dinner we went to the grove. Mar(échal) didn't want us to see the romance he had made, but Maman took it anyways, then she whispered to me...

Saturday 12 — I didn't leave the salon, I wasn't playing my piano. In the evening, around 7 o'clock, we went to the park with P(apa). There came lightning and thunder, we went home.

Sunday 12 — I got up early in the morning to make Maman get up, but she kept me close to her to talk. She told me stories, we just laughed! P(apa) came to scold us, I fled into the salon. After a quarter of an hour the sky darkened, a terrible dust arose, and thunder rumbled. I was on the sofa, I got up, I sat down again, I was tormented, I wanted to read, I couldn't... The hail was falling, the thunder was starting again, I was looking all around to see if I could see it striking... I would be very curious to see it… Finally the storm stopped, and did not prevent La Mg (same as m(onsieur lg) from coming. He is a fearless man! The dinner bell is ringing, I'm going down.

The dinner was as sad as the character. Oh, how boring! We went to the green bench. The conversation was very interesting, indeed: it was about a hair being cut, and then we asked which side of the root it was! (il était question d’un cheveu qu’on coupait, et puis on demandait quel était le côté de la racine) He left at 8 o’clock. After supper, Maman and I talked about… I'm glad Maman agrees with me!

16 — One summer evening, overwhelmed with heat, I found myself in the grove, at home. I couldn't support myself. I would have let myself go if each tree had not served as my support. So I came to my piano. It was dark, absolutely dark. I fumbled around with my keyboard. “Come on, I said to myself, I must play a very cheerful melody.” No matter how quickly I moved my fingers, my piano only made muffled and plaintive sounds. Distant claps of thunder further augmented the mournful sounds I was making with my fingers. From time to time the sky was on fire. Finally, overwhelmed with sleep, I fell asleep, and my fingers were still on the piano. I slept for a long time. I had delicious dreams. I dreamed that I saw a shower of flowers under my feet. I saw a cloud forming, I felt myself being lifted, finally this cloud lifted me very high, but much higher than the imagination can. I felt very happy, lying on a cloud. Oh, what a pleasure! Then I saw the abode of the Lord. There was not what I had been told that one saw, gold, rubies, diamonds. There was nothing of all that man longs for on earth and hopes to find one day in heaven. I saw a mirror — I called it so, because I was not taught the name — I saw a mirror, it was white, of a celestial blue, it represented things that I cannot explain, since they are absolutely foreign to all that we see. But I was happy contemplating what presented itself to my eyes. I approached, I touched this mirror, I felt a sensation that I had never experienced. My soul seemed to exhale, I thought I was going to be separated from it. Oh, delicious moment, full of enjoyment, how short you lasted! I woke up when I was so happy... Instead of the cloud, I find my head on the piano, and the rain and thunder were still going their way...

Friday, Saturday, Sunday — I played the piano almost all night without stop. It’s a great pleasure for me.

Sunday 20 — P(apa) came with Monsieur m h l. and his nephew. La Mg came too. We had no shortage of boredom! He gave me ”la Romance du Saule”, which I had lost. In the evening, the carriage drove Monsieur m h l away. P(apa) did what he could to get La Mg to sit in the carriage, but this man is too tenacious, he didn't want to! He only left at 8 o’clock. A moment later Maman and I were walking down the road. At supper P(apa) talked about how bored he had been all day. Now he wants us to go to the Palais Royal. Great pleasure, we would be fine without it!

Monday 21 — At half past seven, I was at the pavilion. I sat in the grass for a long time. Several people came to the gate. It's very odd that for the past three or four days, I've always been thinking about…, he doesn't get out of my head. However, I don't like him. When I sleep, I dream of him! Since then, everything displeases me. Oh, I would like to see Melkam! (Lejeune suspects ”Melkam” might be some sort of anagram for ”Camille,” who had asked for Lucile’s hand in 1787 but not been given her father’s consent) How curious I would be to hear him speak, how he would teach me things! Always the same thought comes to besiege me, it's a very singular thing... Tell me, are you thinking of me or are you forgetting me? Ever since... every day I don't miss it... is engraved on it... I'll never call it anything else. It is to him that I have consecrated it, he will take my place. Maman made me tremble last night: she came to fetch the inkwell, I was in bed, she opened my drawer to take a pen, I was afraid she would take my notebook...

Tuesday 22 - At midnight, we were in front of Mar(échal). Maman told me about her dream on the way, it turned out to be true. After a few steps we found Mar(échal). We asked him for news, he told us that he had spoken to the Swiss, who had told him that he needed permission from the master. I sang after supper. We didn't walk for long. I composed, I don't know how, a romance, I believe it's a prayer to God, I'm going to transcribe it. Beings of beings, indefinite being, you whom the whole earth adores, you my only consolation, mighty God, receive the offering of a heart that loves only you! Enlighten my soul, teach me to know you! Alas, what mortal has this happiness? Teach me to know error, so that I do not fall into the dreadful abyss that surrounds it! O my God, why do you abandon your creatures? Look upon them favorably! Alas, what can I, weak mortal, do you hear my voice in the immensity you occupy, does it penetrate to you?…Pardon this doubt, it is the only one that will come out of my heart… Celestial being, enlighten my spirit...I hate the world...is it evil?...Why do you let it be so wicked?...Can you leave your finest work imperfect?...O my God, when shall I fly into your bosom, when will I be able, while contemplating your glory, to prostrate myself at your feet, to water them with my tears and to ask you for the forgiveness that you will have already given me? Filled with you constantly, I think of you... Are you a spirit?... What is a spirit?... Are you a flame? Ah, let it appear, this flame, and consume me! Come with me, never leave me! See, my mind is wandering. Do I know what I am?... My God, I don't know myself. What spring makes me act? Is it a part of you… oh no, then I would be perfect… Every day I ask who you are… Everyone tells me, and no one knows… What is the sun? It's fire. Alas, I know it well, but what is fire? We don’t know anything. I adore you without understanding you, I pray to you without knowing you, you are in my heart, I feel you and cannot guess you… You are the secret of nature, and it is this secret that we will not be able to discover… To you I can speak, you are above what man calls offence, this word means nothing to you, you cannot be offended. Open the eyes of the universe, my God! We are all blind, let us see this pure day that surrounds you! Make another miracle! Make yourself known! But no, it is in vain that I implore you, I am not worthy of your benefits… We will therefore have to crawl eternally… This happiness that we are looking for, where to find it? The man tries to dazzle himself. So when he forgets himself, he thinks he is happy... No, there is no happiness on earth, in vain we run after it, it is only a chimera! When the world no longer exists... Can it be annihilated... they say there will be nothing... nothing? What a picture! What, nothing?...nothing at all?...I get lost! This sun, will it lose its brightness, will it no longer shine? What will become of it? How will it be nothing? … My God, your power is very great. It's up to you to leave everything. We must therefore revere you and be silent. I leave the pen and go to bed. I'm dying to sleep... I still want to write something... I don't know what I'm saying... I'm leaving...

Wednesday 23 — M(onsieu)r b c wants to introduce Mar(échal) to Madame G, it could be that he… I hope that this will succeed and that this joke will become serious, that would amuse me a lot. Mar(échal) told Maman that I showed him through the window something very finely written that I hadn't wanted to let him read. Maman told him it was a diary I was doing. "Oh, will you show it to me, he said to me, when will you show it to me?" Never! It is for his nose that I write!… After dinner, I copied from Italian. We went for a walk in Cachan, we were very bored there. After supper, we took a walk. It was raining a little, but under the trees this rain was delicious. Maman wanted to catch me, but I was running faster than her. She called me back telling me she was going to tell me something. I came back, but I didn't trust her too much. She said to me, “You see all those trees, well, I saw them alive! They were soldiers. They were all arranged as you see them, when they were transformed into trees. Their leader was an old demon called Prince Tilleul, who had gotten it into his head to kidnap a young girl your age, whose name was also Lucile, she lived somewhere around here, in a muslin castle, but she had a fairy godmother who was always with her because she loved her as if she had been her daughter…” While Maman was telling me this, I saw that she was trying to pass a ribbon around me to tie me to the lime tree, but I took a big leap and she missed her shot! She called me back, but I told her: “On condition that you finish your story!” She told me she wanted to. The fairy, very angry, came to meet the battalion, armed with her wand; she said to him: ”Maroufle…” My God, my God, I don't remember more, I laughed too much! Where did Maman come up with all of this? I've never found her so crazy. The fairy poked her wand in the prince's jaw to find time to speak. She blew up his helmet, he fell down, he took root and was changed into sumac, and the halberds into poplars, and the mines into soldiers! And metamorphoses! It was pouring rain and we didn't feel it. Maman got hoarse from laughting and talking… We went to bed.

Thursday 24 — This morning I worked on my “Princesse d’Espagne”. I wanted to read the beginning, but it's so badly written that I can't get through it. What a time we spent, during and after dinner! How will it all end? How dearly pleasure is purchased! Alas, how should one do to be happy? What a joy to be independent! I am not, I who have no bond... All life is but an eternal slavery... I love only one person on earth, her alone! Yes, Maman alone makes all my happiness, everything else is indifferent to me. She's the only friend I want to have. Friendship with me has no sharing… What darkness, when I think about it. O you whom heaven created for our inversion, how well you fulfill your task! But take care that one day this sky does not punish you for the evils that you avenge us! Men, of what use would my complaints be to you, if you heard them? They would serve you as laughing stock… These reflections that I often make have relieved my heart, it needs it… Alas, what does heaven intend for me in the course of my life? What will become of me? The months, the days, how long they seem to me... How sad a fate is that of the woman... How she has to suffer! Slavery, tyranny, that is her lot. They still want us to love them! I believe that they would tolerate having altars erected for them, and, prostrating before them, censer in hand, ask their pardon for the evils they cause us to suffer! To them, we are celestial beings, nothing is equal to us. Ah! may they deify us less and leave us free! Caution must be our first study, we need it. If ever I form such a terrible bond, prudence, discretion will be my study... Oh, I will study him, whoever possesses me, I will be careful not to let myself be seduced... Always on mistrust! What a cruel thing… I will do what will depend on me to make him happy, but let him do the same, because happiness depends on both. But if he abuses my goodness, if he is ungrateful, if he is ungrateful, if he is unfaithful... ah! Which country is far enough to separate me from him, what seas will I not cross to be able to erase even his memory... What am I saying, where to flee, ah let's rather stay! I am happy in my misfortune. The thorns are still in bloom… If among these flowers, they sting me, let us endure it, and take care, by forming a tang of wishes, to find them deflowered! I don't want anything. The only thing I wish is to never have existed...

Friday 25 — P(apa) has not returned yet. All day I wanted to cry. I couldn't spend long walking with Maman. I withdrew as quickly as I could. I couldn't play the piano, I couldn't spin. I was going, I was coming, without being able to occupy myself. Maman got some side wraps. She came to ask me afterwards if I wanted to go for a walk with her. We went around, she hardly spoke to me, she came back, then I went back to the pavilion, I lay down on the grass.

Saturday 26 — I got up before 8 o’clock, I went to the pavilion. I am like a person whose spirit is absent. I don't understand myself, I don't know why I think or why I speak, I don't know what makes me act, in short I am like a machine. I cannot express what I am. I cannot understand what my being is. Ah, death is preferable to this kind of annihilation. To be, without knowing what one is, the singular thing! Maman is still locked in her room. I spent the morning, as well as the Friday afternoon, without being able to do anything, starting everything and finishing nothing. P(apa) hasn't come back yet. After dinner, I splashed in the stream, still with this absence of spirit, and the moment when I write is still the same. I only act on instinct.

Sunday 27 — Maman told Picard not to let M(onsieur) Lg in, but the order changed with M(onsieur) l f having come. My spirit is still absent. We went for a walk at the Verrieres pavilion, we had fun enough, we toured the chestnut forest. La mg was still walking ahead, he was looking for fern. He told us that in the rod there were the arms of the Empire, and he showed it to us. We got back in the carriage, L f left at 7 o’clock, L m didn't want to leave yet. Oh, what a man, how tenacious he is! We returned through the pavilion. Maman went to sit in the arbor lounge, I was walking near the gate. I didn't know what to do with myself, I was so bored. He finally left. Maman told him as she drove him home that she was going to have dinner in town next Sunday. Maman wanted to go home, but I said to her: "Let's sit on this bench, we have nothing to do." After a quarter of an hour a gentleman rode past. He was quite well dressed. He dismounted his horse and then passed. He went over to the other side of the road. In the meantime he passed an abbot with another gentleman. He says in passing that only one goddess was missing, that would make the three Graces… What is he getting involved in? Afterwards, the gentleman passed by the gate. Maman looked at him a bit, and I didn't pretend to see him. P(apa) entered through the pavilion door. He seemed to be in a very bad mood. "How you are dressed!" he tells us. He walked around and told us he believed he would lose his case. He went down the main driveway, Maman and I took the little one, we found him in the flowerbed, sitting. I asked for light and we went back up. While having supper, he told us that he had met a gentleman who knew him and who had praised him a lot for his house. This gentleman is a knight and a great talker. Talkative knight, probably some adventurer… He asked P(apa) for permission to come and see his house. P(apa) told him that it would please him, so we will receive a visit from the talkative knight. He has a house in Châtillon, but it is not as beautiful as ours. Really, doesn't he want to buy it? If he wants, he can stay at home!

Monday 28 — I got up at 6 o’clock, I went for a walk in the pavilion, I met P(apa), he walked a bit with me, I left him near the raspberry bushes. I went and threw myself on a haystack, I stayed there a long time. I found a few hours of happiness there. I was at my piano. Maman came to pick me up for lunch, we went for a walk for a while. She showed me a maze project that L mg pitched. It's not quite to his liking. I went for a walk in the evening with Maman, she was very melancholy. We sat opposite the gate, she didn't stay long for me, I stayed until 9 o'clock in the evening. This lack of spirit does not leave me. I dare not talk about it because I cannot explain what I feel, not understanding it. They would laugh at me.

Tuesday 29 — P(apa) took medicine. Maman showed me a maze she drew herself: it's charming, there will be an altar in the middle. At table P(apa) left for a moment, in the meantime Maman told me that we would go for a walk on the side of L'Hay. We went for a walk near the Cachan mill. I tell Maman in the evening that my diary was boring me, that I was going to let it go. She laughed it off, and then she told me it was about "looking busy, to say you're doing something you didn't want to show." What a great idea you came up with there, Maman! Go, it's because I won't show you anything more, there's really something to discourage! I will continue, however, but you will not read it!

Wednesday 30 — I found Maman doing paperwork to her secretary. She told me to sit down next to her, and then she told me that she sometimes found affectation in me, that I shouldn't have any in anything, that I shouldn't look for looking like no one, that she loved me better with my faults than with borrowed graces. Maman sometimes has strange ideas! She doesn't even want me to try to imitate her... Yet I often want to. I always have the sound of her voice.

1789

We went for a walk in Sceaux. I said to Maman: 'Why are we bored here, is it because there is no one here? It’s very beautiful though!” "You see," Maman told me, "there are some kinds of beauty that you don't like. We like loneliness. This bores us because it says nothing to our soul. A hut where one enjoys oneself, where one lives without sorrow, is incomparably more beautiful than a palace. There is no true beauty except that which pleases, just as there is no happiness except that…” She did not finish. I said to her: “Well, then finish what you were saying!” She sat down on the ground. I wanted to get her to finish, but she said nothing more and we both sat dreaming for a quarter of an hour. “There is no true beauty except that which pleases,” I said to myself…, “but that which pleases the greatest number must be the most beautiful. But if there is an individual who does not like it, what can be the cause?” I would have liked Maman to explain this to me, but there was no way of getting her to say a word. I don't even know if she saw me.

How upset I am! Everything I see only serves to despair me! Scourge of the earth, you whom heaven made to punish us... How tired I am of living, and I fear to die... Alas, why am I?... What am I useful for on earth? If I didn't exist... I don't know what I'm saying anymore. My mind is absent, I go to bed without thinking about where I am… What am I? Very little…

My piano spoke to me. It said two words that I couldn't understand. What does "sphindre" and "valstes" mean, I don't know. I'm going to bed. Maybe I will have a revelation? I will know what these two words mean… “sphindre” and “valstes”. Why did my piano say... I'm crazy!

They say that troops are coming to Bourg-la-Reine. Necker is not gone, he still reigns. In six months, in a year, what will have happened? What things will I see! What situation will we find ourselves in? We are still in uncertainty… O woman, cruel woman, woman unworthy of the sun that shines on you, what, will not celestial vengeance burst entirely on your head, will you triumph? Go, the day may not be far off when all the evils you cause will fall on you! You will groan then, but it will be too late! We won't complain! Fear the example of queens who, like you, have done evil! See: some perished in misery, others carried their heads on the scaffold. This may be the fate that awaits you...

O you whose delicate and light hand traced these words, these words the balm of my heart, you whose feeling so pure drove away from you the fatal prejudice, O my dear Olympe, it is to you that I send the hymn  ”De l’amitié” with its engraving. Under the features of this chaste goddess you will easily recognize yourself. Yes, my friend, it is Friendship in prayer, it is at the feet of Truth which stretches out its hand to embrace her. I thought I had not had too much pride in painting myself under this figure.

Oh how the boring ones are long in the visits! Naughty xxxx, go, if you come here, I will run far away in order to not see you! The fire rises in my face... stupid Irishman! He pities the queen, he does not want to speak ill of her… What is he getting involved in? Let him go to his country! What is he getting involved in? We really need his help! He struggles to make us believe that he is French! Come on, you're Irish to the core and I'm French and I detest you! The weather is nice today.

The clock strikes midnight. What a silence! Nothing stirs. Is everyone sleeping now? My window is open, there is not a breath of wind, the clouds are not stirring. The moon would look good, but it is too covered. What is going on all over the earth at this hour? Is there only one being who thinks of me? If I heard a clap of thunder, how happy it would make me! On our way to the countryside, we encountered a procession. How ridiculous I find them, these priests, with their psalms! If I had power, I would abolish these foolish customs with their bread. When they sing, they sometimes make a patient die of fear! How low our religion is, it debases... What, men... Oh, what a lot to say! Be quiet, Lucile, let the men do what they want, close your eyes to their actions, you have nothing to do with them… They say that the Emperor is dead, that the Count of Artois is under arrest , that the count is exiled, that the queen weeps. This all sounds like very good news to me. When our enemies groan, we should rejoice.

Cruel moments, which have lasted too long!... The dreadful memory still comes to torment me... Ah, all my life I will remember it! Oh, what temerity! O you, happy inhabitants of these sweet lands, you guided by simple nature, how I envy your fate! Why was I not born among you? I have rage in my heart… Flow my tears, flow, relieve my pain or rather consume me! Perish my memory! May I be reduced to ashes, and may the winds scatter it throughout the earth!

One day, MC (Lejeune thinks ”MC” is yet another abbreviation for ”Camille”) was thinking about his portrait; he says to Maman: ”I would like to have a great reputation, do you know why? It's not for the glory, but to be free to do what I want. Then I wouldn't look ridiculous." "It's true, Maman told him, because one passes a lot of faults onto a great man."

1790

O you who are at the bottom of my heart, you who I dare not to love, or rather who I dare not say that I love, dear C(amille)…, you believe me to be insensitive!… Ah cruel!… Do you judge me according to your heart, and could this heart attach itself to an insensitive being? Well yes, I prefer to suffer, I prefer that you forget me... O God, judge of my courage... Which of us has the most to suffer? I dare not admit it to myself, what I feel for you! I only occupy myself with disguising it... You suffer, you say... Ah, I suffer more! Your image is constantly present in my thoughts, it never leaves me... I look for your faults, I find them, these faults, and love them... Tell me why all these fights... Why would I have to make a mystery even to my mother? I would like her to know it, to guess it, but I would not like to tell her... O sublime thought! To think, yes, it is a blessing from heaven... C(amille), I tremble to form only the first letter of your name... If someone were to find what I write! If you would find it yourself... Love... Ah, C(amille)...shall I be your wife? Will we be united one day? Alas, perhaps as I form these wishes, you forget me... Oh, pain! You, forgetting me... at this cruel thought my tears wet my paper, my eyes are troubled, I barely make out what I'm writing... That a tender soul has to suffer... Yes, don't know that I love you , go, flee, C(amille), go seek happiness near another… I will live far from you, I will learn one day that a link… Ah, would this link make you happy? Should you be so far from me?… I will have no reproach to make of you… it is I who am cruel towards me… You are going to make me cherish solitude even more… Your name that I have engraved in the corner of a tree, your name that only I can see... I call it the tree of mystery... Alas, very often I hold it in my arms, and when the wind shakes it, it seems to me that it’s you who breathe... It's in my garden that I write, sitting on the ground at the foot of my lawn, leaning my elbow, leaning my body, I'm alone... Drops of water fall, a ray of sunshine pierces the foliage… Maman went to Paris, maybe you're with her. But is it really true that you love me? You love me... you love Lucile... well if you love me, run away from me! I am a monster…I have everything xxxx… I can no longer think, I am annihilated……… I fall in spite of myself into daydreams… Oh, what is the human heart? What then am I? Me... you... and everyone... Why do I exist? These clouds that pass over my head, who makes them pass? C(amille), why this stubbornness to hide that I love you? Will you come back again... will I be able to run away from you wishing to be near you?... Will I still see you looking for my thought in my eyes, sometimes thinking I guess it, alarming you with a word that you have misinterpreted, Will I still hear you complaining to Maman about my indifference? What will be the end of all this? What will become of both of us? Alas, maybe separated forever, we will mourn our fate in silence… We will remind each other, and we will say “It is together that we should be happy”. Time will pass like this, death will overtake us, we die……..and in this cruel moment that we… This thought tears me apart! Oh, come, come put a veil on the future! July 16 1790

1792

June

Saturday 23 — Michelet came. How stupid he is! La Poype came. Poa poa!

Sunday 24 — F(réron) is scary. Poor simpleton, you have so little to think about. I'm going to write to Maman.

Monday 25 — Maman came to pick us up, imagining that there was a lot of noise.

Tuesday 26 — I was at Luxembourg with C(amille)

Wednesday — Madame D(anton) came, we played music.

Thursday 27 — Maman came.

Friday the 28th — I went with C(amille) and little Duplay to a an old madwoman’s. Ah! Great God, what carrion!

Saturday July 1 — I went to Lux(embourg), with C(amille)

Sunday 2 —  Painful grief, will you pursue me unceasingly?

Thursday 5 — My head is spinning. I was madame D(anton) after dinner. (sic)

Friday — I gave birth. O God, what a change you have made in me! A second nature has just been born there. I am a mother! My eyes fill with tears, it's so sweet to be a mother.

Saturday 7 — They come to see me. One can't wait to see how I'm doing!

Monday 9 — He's gone! If they would have ripped my soul out, they wouldn't have hurt me any more. What a wound has come to my heart! Dear child, live! O God, live, you will be happy! My tears flow. Weak creature, alas, what will be your fate? You will never leave me. Oh how I love him!

Saturday 28 — It's been 3 weeks since I last wrote. I spent 5 days there (at Clos Payan) without seeing C(amille) He made a speech at the Commune and it made a lot of noise. My little one is doing well. I have great pain in my breast.

Sunday 29 — I have been very ill.

Monday 30 — Maman came. The Marseillais fought.

Thursday, August 9 — What will become of us? I can't anymore. C(amille), oh my poor C(amille), what will become of you? I no longer have the strength to breathe, tonight is the fatal night! My God, if it is true that you exist, then save men who are worthy of you! We want to be free. O God, the cost of it! And to make matters worse, my courage abandons me!

December 12 — What a gap since August 9! How many things! What a volume I would have filled if I had continued! How do I remember so many things? My memory escapes me… No matter, I will try to trace something. O my child, my dear child, what palpitation I feel when thinking of you! My son! Why then does this word make my tears flow?… On August 8, I returned from the countryside. Already the spirits fermented very strongly, one had wanted to assassinate Robespierre. On the 9th, I had some Marseillais to dinner, we had pretty fun. After dinner, we all went to D(anton’s). Her mother was crying, she was sad, her father looked dazed. D(anton) was resolute. As for me, I was laughing like a madwoman! They feared that the affair would not take place; although I was not at all sure, I told them, as if I knew it well, that it would take place. "But can we laugh too?" mde D(anton) said to me. ”Alas, I said to her, that presages to me that I will perhaps shed a lot of tears this evening! I was not wrong. In the evening we went back to Madame Charpentier (Danton’s mother-in-law). The weather was fine, we made a few turns in the street, there were enough people. We retraced our steps and we all sat down next to the cafe. Several sans-culottes passed by shouting “Vive la Nation!” Then troops on horseback, and then finally a bunch of people! Fear gripped me. I say to Madame Danton: “Let’s go!” She laughed at my fear, but by dint of telling her, she too became scared and we left. I say to her mother: ”Farewell! You will soon hear the toscin sound!” When I arrived at D(anton’s), I found madame R(obert) and many others there. D(anton) was restless. I ran to madame Robert, I said to her “will they ring the tocsin?” "Yes, she told me, but tonight." I listened to everything and did not say a word. Soon I saw everyone arming themselves. C(amille), my C(amille), arrived with a gun!… O God! I sank into the ground, hid myself with both my hands and started to cry. However, not wanting to show so much weakness and say aloud to C(amille) that I did not want him to get involved in all this, I waited for a moment when I could speak to him alone, and I told him all my fears. He reassured me by telling me that he would not leave D(anton). I have since found out that he exposed himself. F(réron) looked like he was determined to perish, "I'm weary of life," he said, "I only want to die." Every patriot who came I thought I was seeing for the last time. I went to the salon, which was without light, so as not to see all these appetizers. No one in the street, everyone had gone home. Our patriots left. I sat down near a bed, overwhelmed, devastated, sometimes dozing off, and when I wanted to talk, I was nonsense. Madame D(anton) and R(obert) reasoned. D(anton) went to bed, he did not seem to be in a hurry. He hardly went out. Midnight was approaching. One came to search for him several times. Finally he left for the Commune. The toscin of the Cordeliers rang, it rang for a long time! Alone, bathed in tears, on my knees by the window, hidden in my handkerchief, I listened to the sound of that fatal bell. In vain they came to console me, this fatal night seemed to me to be the last! D(anton) came back. Madame Robert, who was very worried about her husband, who had gone to the Faubourg Saint-Antoine as a deputy through his section, ran to D(anton), who only gave her a very vague answer. He threw himself on his bed. One came several times to give us good and bad news. I thought I noticed that their plan was to go to the Tuileries, Sobbing, I told them I thought I was going to faint... In vain did madame Robert ask for news of her husband, no one gave her any. She thought he was marching with the faubourg. “Yes,” she said to me, “if he perishes I will not survive him! But this D(anton) who remains in his bed, he, the rallying point, if my husband perishes I am the woman to stab him!” Her eyes were rolling. From that moment on I never left her. What did I know what could happen? To know what she was capable of… We thus passed the night in cruel agitations. C(amille) came back at 1 o’clock, he fell asleep on my shoulder. Mde R(obert) who was next to me seemed to be preparing to learn of her husband's death. “No,” she told me, “I can't stay here any longer! Madame D(anton) is unbearable to me, she seems to be calm, her husband does not want to expose himself!” The big day having come, I suggested that she come and rest at my place.  C(amille) went to bed. I had a sling bed put out in the salon, with a mattress, a blanket. She threw herself on it and took some rest. I went to bed and dozed off to the sound of the toscin which sounded from all sides and which I still heard. We got up. C(amille) left, assuring me that he would not expose himself. Madame Robert, still uncertain if her husband still existed, did not exhale her pain but her heart was so tightly pinched that she turned yellow. We had breakfast. 10 o’clock, 11 o’clock passed without us knowing anything. We took some newspapers from the day before. Sitting on the sofa in the salon, we began to read them. She was reading me an article, it seemed to me during this time that the canon was fired, but, uncertain, I listened several shots without saying anything. They became more frequent. I tell her: “They fire the canon.” She listens to it, hears it, turns pale, lets go and passes out! I undressed her. I myself was ready to fall there, but the need to help her I found myself in gave me strength. She came back to herself. Jeannette (the Desmoulins’ housekeeper) was screaming like a goat, she almost rolled the m r q. who said that it was C(amille) who was the cause of this. We heard shouting and crying in the street, we thought that Paris was going to be all bloody. We made arrangements, and we left to go to D(anton’s). They shouted ”to arms” and everyone ran there. We found the door to the heart of the trade closed. We knocked, shouted, no one came to open the door. We wanted to enter through the baker's, they closed the door in our face! I was furious. Finally we were let in. Madame D(anton) ran up to us to see how we looked, she was soon informed when she saw the silence of one and the tears of the other. We waited long enough without knowing anything. Finally they came to tell us that we were victorious. At 1 o’clock everyone came to tell us what had happened. A few Marseillais had been killed. But the stories were cruel. C(amille) arrived, he told me that the first head he had seen was that of Suleau. Suleau had come the day before and had, so to speak, asked him for asylum. Robert was in town and had before his eyes the dreadful spectacle of the Swiss being massacred. He came after dinner to give us a horrible account of what he had seen, and all day we heard nothing but what had happened. The next day, the 11th, we saw the Marseillais convoy. O God, what a sight! How our hearts were heavy… C(amille) and I went and slept at R(obert’s). I do not know what fear agitated me, it seemed to me that we would not be safe at home. The next day, the 12th, when I returned, I learned that D(anton) was minister. This news gave me great pleasure, especially when C(amille) came to tell me that he was secretary. It took eight days for me to recover from the astonishment of everything that had happened. Maman came. What projects we made! If all this could last... I thought I would have the power to do good to whom I wanted. Vain chimera! I couldn't do anything... After eight days D(anton) went to stay at the Chabcellerie, madame R(obert) and I went there in our turn. I really liked it there, but only one thing bothered me, it was Fréron. Every day I saw new progress and didn't know what to do about it. I consulted Maman, she approved of my plan to banter and joke about it, and that was the wisest thing to do. Because what to do? Forbid him to come? He and C(amille) dealt with each other every day, we would meet. To tell him to be more circumspect was to confess that I knew everything and that I did not disapprove of him; an explanation would have been needed. I therefore thought myself very prudent to receive him with friendship and reserve as usual, and I see now that I have done well. Soon he left to go on a mission. I was very happy with it, I thought it would change him. But many other cares to be taken… I realized that D(anton)… Oh, of that one, I was suspicious! I had to fear the eyes of his wife with whom I did not want to be hurt. I did so well that one did not know that I had noticed it, and the other that it might be. We spent three months like this quite cheerfully. At the end of this time C(amille) was appointed deputy and we returned to our first home. Now I have made new acquaintances, whom I hardly care about and whom at the first moment I will leave there. F(réron) is back, he seems to be still the same but I don't care! Let him go mad if he wants!…My poor C(amille), go, don’t be afraid…

Thursday, December 20 — I had dinner at Robert's. Égalité came to tea.

Friday 21 — Madame Ro(bert) came to fetch me. Tallien, Chabot and Thuriot were there. Thuriot is a bloody pig, his face is so ugly that it stinks. He took great liberties with Mme Ro(bert). She was pushing him back but not too hard, not to say weakly. She tells me, however, that she dislikes him very much. After dinner we went to the Italians, we gave raval. Blue Beard.

Saturday 22 — I went to see Maman. I went to supper with little Brune at mde D(anton’s). How detestable she is!

Monday 24 — We had dinner at mde D(anton's), madame R(obert), B(rune) and B(oyer) were there. After dinner the men asked themselves if they should go to the Jacobins. They said yes. We were asked if we would go. We say no. Madame D(anton) said to me: ”do you want to spend the evening with me?,” I said yes, but soon I did not know what to do. Brune suggested I go to the theater! It was very embarrassing. Madame Brune said aloud: “I have never been to the Jacobins, I would be very happy to go there.” "Well, I'm going with you," I tell her. Finally, here we are, all ready to leave, when I see madame  Brune and Boyer whispering in each other’s ears. I, like a fool, go to ask them what they’re saying to each other. Madame R(obert) told me that she was very embarrassed, that she would like to go with us to the Jacobins. I was very kind, I said a few words to her that meant nothing, then I went into the antechamber. She came there soon and told me to wait for her, that she was going to follow me, she came back near madame D(anton). Brune came and told me “let’s go”. I followed her saying: ”but madame R(obert) who wants to come?” Finally, we are hardly in the middle of the staircase when we hear someone who says “here they are, here they are!”, then we descend with astonishing speed, and when we are in the street we run even harder. We took a fairly long detour. God knows how we laughed! Nothing, too, was more comical. We went to Vaudeville, still laughing. We saw “Arlequin cruel.” They came to have dinner with us. C(amille) told us that madame R(obert) had seemed very stung, and that she would blame me for it. It bothered me all day.

Tuesday 25 — I had dinner at Maman's. Blanc Bec came there and dined with us. I urged him to come. We made mademe R(obert) angry, we cut her hair. After that we came back to my place where I got dressed. Madame Brune came, she was in a bad mood over having to go there. We were preparing to leave immediately if she looked down on us. She almost wanted to. Finally she received us joking very finely. Incidentally, it was very boring. We came back at 10 o’clock. Brune had supper with us.

Wednesday 26 — I had dinner at Brune. Mademoiselle D came there. After dinner we went to a comedy.

Saturday 29 — C(amille) is sick.

Tuesday, January 1 — Brune brought me a box of sugar. The xxxxx has come. Panis and Danton.

2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15 — I was at the Convention.

16, 17 — I was at the Convention, I spent the night there, I got to know Madame Dubois-Crancé.

18 — I went to bed at 8 o'clock in the morning. Nothing is over yet.

19 — After dinner we went to the Convention with Maman. We thought they wanted to beat each other up.

20 — I was at the Convention. Finally we win.

21 — F(réron), La P(oype) came in the evening.

22 — Capet was put to death today. Everything happened with perfect calmness. Roulette (nickname for Madame Brune) dined with us. F(rerón) sent us venison. We spent the evening at Roulette’s.

Tuesday 22 — Ricord came to see me. He is always the same, very brusque and coarse, truly mad, giddy, insane. I went to Robert’s. Danton came there. His jokes are as boorish as he is. Despite this, he is a good devil. Madame Ro(bert) seemed jealous of how he teased me… F(réron) came. That one, he always seems to sigh, but his manners are bearish! Poor devil, what hope do you hold? Extinguish a senseless r (sic) in your heart! What can I do for you? Complain... No, no, my friend, my dear C(amille), this friendship, this love so pure, will never exist for anyone other than you! And those I see will only be dear to me through the friendship they will have for you. My sister went to Rouen.

Wednesday 23 — We went to Madame Boyer's to see the procession. I saw that unfortunate Saint-Fargeau. We all burst into tears when the body passed, we threw a wreath at him. After the ceremony, we returned to my house. Ricord and Forestier had arrived. I was unable to stop my tears for some time. F(réron), La P(oype), Po, R(obert) and others came to dinner. The dinner was quite pretty and cheerful. Afterwards they went to the Jacobins, Maman and I stayed by the fire and, our imaginations struck by what we had seen, we talked about it for a while. She wanted to leave, I felt that I could not be alone and bear the horrible thoughts that were going to besiege me. I ran to D(anton’s). He was moved to see me still pale and defeated. We drank tea, I supped there.

Thursday the 24th — What does this statement mean? Why do I need to be praised so much? What do I care if I please? Do you think I'll be proud of a few attractions? No, no, I know how to appreciate myself, and will never be dazed by praise. To you, you're crazy, and I'll make you feel like you need to be smarter. Madame Robert came.

Saturday 26 — We had dinner at madame R(o)b(ert). She gave me a ring.

Monday 27 — I picked up madame R(obert) to go to the Convention. About her case, there was no question. She took us to Dejan's. There was a stupid aristocrat there.

Tuesday 28 — I saw l. m at madame Robert’s. We only stayed there for a moment. We were going to hear a harp playing at Madame Pouxxx's. She missed xxx xxx leaving that we had. The playing was postponed until the next day.

Wednesday 29 — We went back to hear the harp. My God, that was pitiful. They wanted me to sing, but I, seeing the different faces and grimaces of each individual, right in the middle of my song, I laughed and I didn't continue, thank God! We had dinner at D(anton's), where I just laughed, because I was preventing Brune from eating by saying "poa, poa, poa". D(anton) too couldn't keep himself from laughing.

Friday 31 — Ricord, Sy and two Marseillais and Blanc Bec came to dinner. Madame Saint-Ange came to see me in the morning to promise me to go to the opera. We have been there.

Saturday, February 1 — C(amille) took medicine. Sy came. He took his cap. Mademoiselle D has returned.

Sunday 2 — We had dinner at Madame Delinière's.

Monday 3 — I went to see madame D(anton). Sick. La petite Brune gave me her ring. She had dinner with me.

Tuesday 4 — We had dinner at Dillon's. Sy gave me a ring. Mademoiselle D is gone. Have a nice trip!

Wednesday — I went to dinner with Santerre's brother-in-law. C(amille) voted against Dillon. He wasn't happy to be there. He was afraid... It was made up of a few aristocrats.

Thursday 6 — I had dinner with Maman. I went to see madame Da(nton)… She is very ill.

Friday the 7th — I had dinner at Madame Saint-Ange's. From there to the opera.

Saturday — C(amille's) brother came. We had dinner at Madame Brune's.

Sunday 9 — We had dinner at m(onsieu)r xxxxx. Madame Danton is ill. She has given birth to a girl.

Monday 10 — I had dinner with Maman. Madame Danton is dead.

Tuesday 11 — We dined at Roulette’s. Maman came there.

Wednesday 12 — We were, Roulette and I, on the boulevards. From there, to madame Charpentier to where madame Robert came. Roulette dined with us.

Thursday 13 — I had dinner with Maman.

#lucile desmoulins #desmoulins #camille desmoulins #frev #french revolution #annette duplessis #danton #george danton #fréron #stanislas fréron #long post #gabrielle danton #louise de kéralio

[montagnarde1793]

Ribbons of Scarlet: A predictably terrible novel on the French Revolution (part 1)

Parts 2, 3, 4 and 5.

Q: Why is this post in English? Isn’t this blog usually in French?

 A: Yes, but I can’t bypass the chance, however small, that someone in the book’s target audience might see and benefit from what I’m about to say.

 Q: Why did you even read this book? Don’t you usually avoid bad French Revolution media?

 A: My aunt left the book with me when she came for my defense last November. I could already tell it would be pretty awful and might not have read it except that I needed something that didn’t require too much concentration at the height of the Covid haze and I — like most people who insisted on finishing their doctorate despite the abysmal academic job market — have a problem with the sunk cost fallacy, so once I got started I figured I might as well find out just how bad it got.

 Q: Don’t you have papers to grade?

 A: … Next question.

 Q: Aren’t you stepping out of your lane as an historian by reviewing historical fiction? You understand that it wasn’t intended for you, right?

 A: First of all, this is my blog, such as it is, and I do what I want. Even to the point of self-indulgence. Why else have a blog? Also, I did receive encouragement. XD;

 Second, while a lot of historians I respect consider that anything goes as long as it’s fiction and some even seem to think it’s beneath their dignity to acknowledge its existence, given the influence fiction has on people’s worldview I think they’re mistaken. Besides, this is the internet and no one here has any dignity to lose.

 Finally, this is not so much a review in the classic sense as a case study and a critical analysis of what went wrong here that a specialist is uniquely qualified to make, not because historians are the target audience, but because the target audience might get the impression that it’s not very good without being able to articulate why. To quote an old Lindsay Ellis video, “It’s not bad because it’s wrong, it’s bad because it sucks. But it sucks because it’s wrong.” Or, if you prefer, relying on lazy clichés and adopting or embellishing every lurid anecdote you come across is bound to come across as artificial, amateurish and unconvincing.

 This is especially offensive when you make grandiose claims about your novel’s feminist message and the “time and care” you supposedly put into your research.

 I also admit to having something of a morbid fascination with liberals creating reactionary media without realizing it, which this is also a textbook example of (if someone were to write a textbook on the subject, which they probably should).

 With that out of the way, what even is this book?

 The Basics

 It’s a collaboration between six historical novelists attempting to recount the French Revolution from the point of view of seven of its female participants. One of these novelists is in fact an historian herself, which is a little bit distressing, given that like her co-authors, she seems to consider people like G. Lenotre reliable sources. But then, she’s an Americanist and I’ve seen Americanists publish all kinds of laughable things about the French Revolution in actual serious works of non-fiction without getting called out because their work is only ever reviewed by other Americanists. So.

 Anyway, if you’re familiar with Marge Piercy’s (far superior, though not without its flaws) City of Darkness, City of Light, you might think, “ok, so it’s that with more women.” And you might think that that’s not so bad of an idea; Marge Piercy maybe didn’t go all the way with her feminist concept by making half the point of view characters men (though I’d argue that the way she frames how they view women was part of the point). It’s even conceivable that if Piercy had wanted to make all the protagonists women her publisher would have said no on the grounds of there not being a general audience for that. It was the 1990s, after all.

 Except the conceit this time is they’re all by different authors, we have some counterrevolutionaries in the mix, and instead of the POV chapters interweaving, each character gets her own chunk of the novel, generally about 70-80 pages worth, although there are a couple of notable exceptions. We’ll get to those.

 It’s accordingly divided as follows:

·      Part I. The Philosopher, by Stephanie Dray, from the point of view of salonnière, translator, miniaturist and wife of Condorcet, Sophie de Grouchy, “Spring 1786” to “Spring 1789”; Sophie de Grouchy also gets an epilogue, set in 1804

·      Part II. The Revolutionary, by Heather Webb, from the point of view of Reine Audu, Parisian fruit seller who participated in the march on Versailles and the storming of the Tuileries, 27 June-5 October 1789

·      Part III. The Princess, by Sophie Perinot, from the point of view of Louis XVI’s sister Élisabeth, May 1791-20 June 1792

·      Part IV. The Politician, by Kate Quinn, from the point of view of Manon Roland, wife of the Brissotin Minister of the Interior known for writing her husband’s speeches and for her own memoirs, August 1792-(Fall 1793 — no date is given, but it ends with her still in prison)

·      Part V. The Assassin, by E. Knight, which is split between the POV of Charlotte Corday, the eponymous assassin of Marat, and that of Pauline Léon, chocolate seller and leader of the Société des Républicaines révolutionnaires, 7 July-8 November 1793

·      Part VI. The Beauty, by Laura Kamoie, from the point of view of Émilie de Sainte-Amaranthe, a young aristocrat who ran a gambling den and who got mixed up in the “red shirt” affair and was executed in Prarial Year II, “March 1794”-“17 June 1794”

An *Interesting* Choice of Characters…

 Now, there are some obvious red flags in the line-up. I’m not sure, if you were to ask me to come up with a list of women of the French Revolution I would come up with one where 4/7 of the characters are nobles/royals — a highly underrepresented POV, as I’m sure you’re all aware — but fine. Sophie de Grouchy is an interesting perspective to include and Mme Élisabeth at least makes a change from Antoinette? And though the execution is among the worst (no pun intended) Charlotte Corday’s inclusion makes sense as she is famous for doing one of the only things a lay audience has unfortunately heard of in association with the Revolution.

 Reine Audu is actually an excellent choice, both pertinent and original. Credit where credit is due. Manon Roland and Pauline Léon are not bad choices either in theory, but given the overlap with Marge Piercy’s book, if you’re going to do a worse job, why bother? The inclusion of Sophie de Grouchy, while, again, not a bad choice, also kind of makes this comparison inevitable, as another of Piercy’s POV characters was Condorcet.

 But Émilie de Sainte-Amaranthe? I’m not saying you couldn’t write an historically grounded and plausible text from her point of view, but her inclusion was an early tip-off that this was going to be a book that makes lurid and probably apocryphal anecdotes its bread and butter.

 The absolute worst choice was to make Pauline Léon only exist — at best — as a foil to Charlotte Corday. (It turns out to be worse than that, actually. She’s less of a foil than a faire-valoir.)

Still, why does no one write a novel about Simone and Catherine Évrard (poor Simone is reduced to “Marat’s mistress” here, not just by Charlotte Corday, which is understandable, but also by Pauline Léon) or Louise Kéralio or the Fernig sisters or Nanine Vallain or Rosalie Jullien or Jeanne Odo or hell, why not one of the dozens of less famous women who voted on the constitution of 1793 or joined the army or petitioned the Convention or taught in the new public schools. Many of them aren’t as well-documented, but isn’t that what fiction is for?

Let’s try to be nice for a minute

There are things that work about this book and while the result is pretty bad, I think the authors’ intentions were good. Like, who could object to the dedication, in the abstract?

This novel is dedicated to the women who fight, to the women who stand on principle. It is an homage to the women who refuse to back down even in the face of repression, slander, and death. History is replete with you, even if we are not taught that, and the present moment is full of you—brave, determined, and laudable.

It’s how they go about trying to illustrate it that’s the problem, and we’ll get to that.

For now, let me reiterate that while I’m not a fan of the “all perspectives are equally valid” school of history or fiction — or its variant, “all *women*’s perspectives are equally valid” — and there are other characters I would have chosen first, it absolutely would have been possible to write something good with this cast of characters (minus making Charlotte Corday and Pauline Léon share a section).

The parts where the characters deal with their interpersonal relationships and grapple with misogyny are mostly fine — I say mostly, because as we’ll see, the political slant given to that misogyny is not without its problems. These are the parts that are obviously based on the authors’ personal experience and as such they ring true, if not always to an 18th century mentality, at least to that lived experience.

Finally, there are occasionally notes that are hit just fine from an historical perspective as well. The author of the section on Mme Élisabeth doesn’t shy away from making her a persistent advocate of violently repressing the Revolution. Manon Roland corresponds pretty well to the picture that emerges from her memoirs even if the author of her section does seem to agree with her that she was the voice of reason to the point of giving her “reasonable” opinions she didn’t actually hold.

I should also note that while the literary quality is not great, it’s not trying to be great literature and in any case, on that point at least, I’m not sure I could do better.

Ok, that’s enough being nice. Tune in next time for all the things that don’t work.

#en anglais #French Revolution #Révolution française

[montagnarde1793]

silver-whistle a dit :                                                                                                                            Je crois qu'il ressemble un peu à Phil. Le Bas!                            

silver-whistle a dit :                                                                                                                            J'espère qu'on la trouvera! C'est possible que Louise est ‘portrait d'une inconnue’ dans une collection des portraits.                            

Désolée de n'avoir pas répondu plus tôt ! Oui, c’est vrai, François Robert ressemble un peu à Philippe Le Bas sur ce portrait. Quant à Louise de Kéralio, c’est ce que je me disais moi aussi. Il y a tant de portraits d’anonymes dans nos musées...