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

much in demand in the grand salons of Paris and Versailles. ‘His features were ignoble, his skin pale, his veins of a greenish colour,’ Germaine recalled. ‘He supported the most absurd propositions with a coolness that had the air of conviction.’ From the start, Robespierre saw himself as France’s saviour. ‘ La patrie est en danger ,’ he had written in April 1789. ‘Let us fly to its aid.’ A provincial lawyer from a modest but comfortable background (at the start of the revolution he signed his name using the aristocratic ‘de’), he became a regular speaker at the National Assembly and was already attracting attention for his lofty democratic principles, arguing in favour of freedom of the press and insisting suffrage should be granted to all men, including servants and the poor; he did not mention votes for women.
    Alongside Germaine’s friends Lafayette and the Lameth brothers, Robespierre was a prominent member of a club formed at Versailles in the summer of 1789 by a group of progressive deputies with the purpose of debating issues before they came before the National Assembly. The Society of the Friends of the Constitution would become known as the Jacobin Club because, when the Assembly moved to Paris that October, they hired the hall of a Dominican ( Jacobin , in French slang) monastery on the rue Saint-Honoré, almost opposite the manége where the Assembly met.
    As her opinions of Robespierre and Mirabeau demonstrate, Germaine’s view of politics was intensely personal, coloured by her first-hand observation of people and her sense of being at the centre of events. She called Clermont-Tonnerre ‘my speaker’, meaning speaker on her behalf in the Assembly, and in September 1789 she scribbled an urgent note to Monsieur de Staël in Versailles to find out whether ornot ‘my bill on the veto’ (whether or not the king should have a veto over legislation in the new constitution, and if so how strong a veto) had been won; as she hoped, the ‘Necker–Lafayette’ partial veto had been adopted.
    She had cause to feel possessive. In July, committees were created to compose France’s first constitution, and on them sat many of Germaine’s friends including Talleyrand, Lafayette and the Lameths. In August they produced the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen which established in its first article that all men are born and live free and equal. Torture and arbitrary imprisonment were abolished and innocence was presumed; freedom of the press and of worship was declared; citizens were to bear the weight of taxation according to their abilities; the army was defined as a public force and access to the officers’ ranks opened up to non-nobles.
    Even though the real work of composing a constitution was still to come, these basic liberties were exactly those for which Germaine had been agitating behind the scenes and, looking back on the achievements of this period, she remained certain that politics and society had never been so intimately or valuably connected. ‘As political affairs were still in the hands of the elite, all the vigour of liberty and all the grace of old-fashioned manners were united in the same people,’ she wrote. ‘Men of the Third Estate, distinguished by their enlightened ideas and their talents, joined those gentlemen who were prouder of their own merit than of the privileges of their class; and the highest questions society has ever considered were dealt with by minds the most capable of understanding and debating them.’
    This self-referential, unabashedly elitist idea of ‘communication of superior minds among themselves’ was the spirit of Germaine de Staël’s salon, and, though it was instrumental in bringing the revolution into being, it would have little place in it in the years to come. As Germaine herself said, from the day that the National Assembly moved from Versailles to Paris in the autumn of 1789, ‘its goal was no longer liberty, but