Read Liberty: The Lives and Times of Six Women in Revolutionary France for Free Online

and church pews. ‘All Frenchmen shall wear from henceforth the same ensigns,’ he declared, ‘those of Liberty.’ Like Germaine he looked on Rousseau as a hero, petitioning for him to be honoured by the French nation in 1791.
    As well as Frenchmen who had served in America, Germaine knew several Americans in Paris, including Thomas Jefferson (who advised Lafayette on his drafts of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen before leaving Paris in September 1789) and Tom Paine. One of her most regular American guests was Gouverneur Morris, who admitted he felt very stupid in the rue du Bac. His pursuit of Talleyrand’s mistress did not stop him making eyes at the wild, enchanting Aimée de Coigny. ‘We have some little compliments together, Mme de Coigny and I,’ he confided to his diary after a dinnerin 1791 at Lady Sutherland’s,–the British ambassadress was another member of Germaine’s set, – ‘and I think it possible we may be pretty well together, but this depends on the Chapter of Accidents for she must be at the Trouble of bringing it about. Stay late here.’
    Morris was not entirely in agreement with the politics of Germaine’s salon. Soon after his arrival in Paris in early 1789 he described Germaine’s friend and Lafayette’s cousin Mme de Tessé, a member of the queen’s household, as a republican ‘of the first feather’; a week later he was told her friends saw him as an ‘aristocrat’, with ideas ‘too moderate for that company’. This was partly true. Morris thought the French too depraved for liberty–but perhaps he was simply intoxicated by the pleasures of the ancien régime and did not want them replaced by republican austerity before he had drunk his fill.
    The most radical aristocrat of Staël’s group was the marquis de Condorcet, a mathematician and philosopher. Reserved and painfully timid, Condorcet lacked social polish – he was said always to have hair-powder in his ears–but his passion for modernity illuminated his views. The first stirrings of reform confirmed all his faith in the perfectibility of mankind. ‘Everyone tells us that we are bordering the period of one of the greatest revolutions of the human race,’ he wrote optimistically. ‘The present state of enlightenment guarantees that it will be happy.’
    Condorcet, married to a celebrated intellectual (and another celebrated salonniére) twenty-one years his junior, Sophie de Grouchy, known as la Vénus lycéenne , was one of the rare feminists of the age. In his political writings of the late 1780s he called repeatedly for the franchise, when it came, to be extended to women as well as men. ‘Either no individual in humankind has genuine rights,’ he declared in On the Admission of Women to Civil Rights in July 1790, ‘or all have the same ones.’ Excluding women from political life, he argued, violated the entire principle of natural rights on which the first revolutionaries were basing their calls for reform. The right to participate in the government of their country is a right men hold by virtue of their reason, not their gender; thus women, who also possess reason, cannot be deprived of those rights. Furthermore, he insisted, women’s active contribution to society could only be of benefit to it.

    According to the historian Madelyn Gutwirth, Condorcet was so concerned to avoid the ‘posture of bogus rococo gallantry’ that marked so much eighteenth-century writing about women that he lamented his lack of it. ‘Sighing philosophically, he observes that in robbing women of their myth by speaking of their “rights rather than their reign”, he may fail to earn their approval, for he saw all about him the stampede among women to Rousseauist views’, which granted them dominion over men’s hearts but no political rights.
    Although the constitution of the newly formed United States had not granted rights to women, its democratic example was an inspiration to Condorcet. ‘Men whom the