A History of the Wife (26 page)

which championed mutual affection and respect.

Lavoisier looks to his wife not only for love, but also for inspiration. It is her face that will make his pen record the great works of science for which he will be remembered. While she herself was an accomplished painter, she put her art at the service of her husband’s scientific studies and would be remembered as his assistant and muse. This is made explicitly clear in a poem written by Jean François Ducis, one of Lavoisier’s friends.

Epouse et cousine à la fois Wife and cousin at the same time Sûre d’aimer et de plaire Assured of loving and of pleasing Pour Lavoisier soumis With Lavoisier subjected to your laws

à vos lois

Vous remplissez les deux You fill the two roles emplois

Et de muse et Of muse and secretary. de secrétaire.
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Many wives will recognize the role of secretary and muse. After Lavoisier’s untimely death on the guillotine in 1794, his widow contin- ued to be involved in the publication and illustration of his works. The role of wife as helpmeet to the “great man,” if not yet his full intellectual equal, is one that a few privileged women began to play more promi- nently in eighteenth-century Europe.

But however emancipated some wives were at the upper echelons of French society, the sense that women were different from and inferior to men was no less decisive in Revolutionary France than in Revolu- tionary America. The sexist ideology promoted by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his followers, which defined women as domestic crea- tures to be commanded by their husbands and excluded from public life, prevailed in republican politics, in spite of a counter-discourse championing women’s equality that had existed even before the Revo- lution and that intensified between 1789 and 1793. Eighteenth-century Frenchwomen were much more active in clamoring for their rights than American women of this period, and they also had several sympa- thetic men speaking on their behalf, as historian Karen Offen amply documents in
European Feminisms, 1700–1950
.
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The Marquis de Con- dorcet, for example, a celebrated mathematician and
philosophe,
con-

tested the laws that subordinated women in marriage as early as 1787, and spoke out in the National Assembly during the early years of the Revolution for a “a lasting equilibrium between married persons” and even for the citizenship of property-owning women. But women— married, single, or widowed, with or without property—were not meant to be included in “The Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen” proclaimed in 1789. The subversive “Declaration of the Rights of Women and the Female Citizen,” written in 1791 by the playwright and pamphleteer Olympe de Gouges, and other petitions addressed to the National Assembly claiming female rights were contemptuously dismissed by radical republicans. The makers of the constitution of 1791 “effectively wrote women out of the new order of citizenship” and consigned them to their roles as wives and mothers.
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If a wife had influence over her husband’s politics, she was wise to keep it well hid- den from her neighbors.

Such was the case of that remarkable wife, Madame Roland, hailed by many as the “most noble woman” of the Revolution and the only one, alongside Marie Antoinette, to have exerted an undeniable influence on revolutionary politics.
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For two years between 1791 and 1793, when the Revolution was at its height, Marie-Jeanne (Manon) Phlipon Roland was her husband’s right hand in his important government posts. She was always careful to present herself as a conventional nonassertive wife, and not the meddling harpy her husband’s enemies would later vilify. In the memoirs she wrote from her prison cell in 1793, she recalled the political discussions that took place among the deputies from the radical Left who met regularly in the Roland apartment:

I knew what role was appropriate for my sex, and I never abandoned it. The meetings took place in my presence without my taking any part in them. Placed outside the circle near a table, I worked with my hands or wrote letters, while they deliberated. But were I to dispatch ten mis- sives—which sometimes happened—I did not lose a word of what was uttered, and sometimes I had to bite my lips so as not to say a word of my own.
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Even at this stage of the Revolution, when her husband was not yet in the limelight, she carefully hid her passionate interest in politics and her

role in promoting her husband’s career. A year later, when her husband was being considered for the position of minister of the interior, the deputy Brissot turned to her as a mediating influence. In her words: “Brissot came to see me one evening . . . asking if Roland would consent to assume that burden; I responded that . . . his zeal and activity would not be repelled by this nourishment.”
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Sophie Grandchamp, Mme Roland’s closest friend in these years, later claimed that Manon Roland was even more eager to assume political power than her husband.

Once he had taken on his new post, Mme Roland played the part of the minister’s wife with relish. Twice a week she entertained, once for her husband’s colleagues and a second time for other notables in the world of business and administration. She was, however, not given to extravagant shows of luxury, for that would have been out of keeping with republican ideals.

Behind the scenes, however, Mme Roland was a much more vigor- ous partner. She was the chief force behind the Office of Public Opin- ion, which her husband ran, and the author of many of its publications. This is how she later described her work as the literary interpreter of Roland’s thoughts:

If it was a question of a circular, of a piece of instruction, of an impor- tant public document, we would confer about it according to the trust we had in one another, and impregnated by his ideas, nourished by my own, I took up the pen which I had more time than he to use. Since we both had the same principles and the same mind, we ended by agreeing on the form, and my husband had nothing to lose by passing [his proj- ects] through my hands.
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Soon, however, rifts between Roland and the King (who was still nominally in power) became apparent, and Roland was forced to resign. Mme Roland tells us that his letter of resignation was a joint venture between husband and wife (“we drafted between the two of us his famous letter to the King”) that they then printed and distributed to all the departments of France.

Yet it was not the monarchy that eventually destroyed the Rolands, but the far Left. After the incarceration of the royal family in August 1792, Roland was once again appointed deputy and minister of the interior, but his (and his wife’s) somewhat more moderate political

views were not acceptable to the likes of Danton, Marat, and Robes- pierre. On September 25, 1792, Danton rose in the National Assembly to question Roland’s reappointment as minister. He said: “If you extend an invitation to him [Roland], extend it also to Mme Roland, because everyone knows that Roland was not alone in his department. I, I was alone in mine.”
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Danton knew exactly how to cast aspersions on his rival: given the eighteenth-century fear of women’s intrusion into the polity, a statesman known to share political power with his wife was an easy target for ridicule. And if we think that such attitudes were restricted to bygone eras, we have only to remember the negative reac- tions to Hillary Clinton’s involvement in health care early in President Clinton’s administration, before she was forced to withdraw from visi- ble policy-making and later became a popular wife, because she “stood by her man” in his most abject hours.

Madame Roland was arrested in connection with Robespierre’s 1793 purges of a large group of deputies, including her husband. While he fled to the provinces, she remained to confront his enemies, not believ- ing they would annihilate someone who was “only a wife.” During her five-month imprisonment, she wrote her memoirs, a work that was to become the most famous eyewitness chronicle of the Revolution. When she was condemned and executed in November 1793, her husband, still in hiding, committed suicide.

Being “only a wife” provided absolutely no protection for women during the Revolution, whether they were the wives of republicans committed to the new nation or aristocrats loyal to the monarchy. The following stories of Elisabeth Le Bas, Marie-Victoire de La Villirouët, and Elisa Fougeret de Ménerville demonstrate how the Revolution forced some married women to assume heroic roles they could never have anticipated in their earlier lives.

Elisabeth Duplay was barely twenty when she met Philippe Le Bas, a deputy to the National Assembly and friend of Maximilien Robespierre, who lodged in her father’s house. She had gone to the Assembly with Robespierre’s sister, Charlotte, to observe the public session, and was quickly smitten by Le Bas. The attraction was mutual, and within a few months, Le Bas declared himself to Elisabeth, but not without testing her republican principles. He wanted to make sure she would be a fit- ting wife, willing to give up frivolous pleasures and eager to nurse her

children. Then Le Bas approached Elisabeth’s family. Since they were strong republicans, he assumed they would be delighted to have him as a son-in-law. Moreover, he was ten years older than Elisabeth, well edu- cated, and well placed. After some hestiation on the part of Elisabeth’s mother—after all, there were older sisters to be married before the youngest daughter—she and her husband gave their consent.

The wedding date was set. Elisabeth had twenty days to prepare her trousseau. Her father, the owner of several houses, placed a vacant one at their disposal. But then, national politics intervened: Le Bas was named for a special mission and forced to leave his fiancée the same day. Elisabeth was inconsolable. Despite her friend Robespierre’s sober admonitions, she “did not want to be a patriot any longer.”
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Between the needs of the nation and her need for Philippe, there was no contest. Ultimately she succeeded (through Robespierre) in bringing Philippe home long enough for them to be married. And within a few months, she was pregnant.

This love match between ardent republicans was cut short by politi- cal catastrophe. When Maximilien Robespierre fell in the coup of Ther- midor ( July 27, 1794), Le Bas, too, went to meet his death. Elisabeth later wrote that she became “distraught, almost crazy,” and, despite the presence of her infant son, lay on the floor for two days. Then, because she was Le Bas’s widow and the mother of his child, she was locked up in the Talarue prison with her baby. As she recalled, “I had been a mother for five weeks; I was nursing my son; I was less than twenty- one years old; I had been deprived of almost everything.”

Elisabeth and her nursing baby remained in prison for nine months. Each night she would descend to the water trough in the courtyard to wash his diapers, which she dried between her mattresses. She resisted the advances of her prison warders and government agents, who wanted her to marry another deputy and abandon her “infamous” name. Instead, she clung to her married name, and when she finally emerged from prison, she kept it for the rest of her life. Her memories of her one year of wifehood helped her survive sixty-five years of wid- owhood, during which she never lost faith in her husband, nor in the revolutionary ideals he had died for.

The histories of Mme Roland and Mme Le Bas show the extent to which republican women could be implicated in their husbands’ public lives

and condemned for their husbands’ political activities. The case was even bleaker for aristocratic women, often imprisoned and frequently guillotined for their noble birth. The situation of wives from the aris- tocracy was, however, extremely varied, depending on the region, the relation of a specific family to its community (which might or might not protect them), and numerous other factors, including the presence or absence of a husband. If the husband had emigrated to join the antirev- olutionary armies or simply to save his skin, and the wife was left behind to look after their family and property, her fate was always pre- carious. She might be thrown into prison because of her noble status, or because it was suspected that she was illegally in contact with a hus- band who had escaped abroad.

The case of Marie-Victoire de Lambilly, countess of La Villirouët, illustrates many of these issues. This little Breton woman, twenty-six years old and four feet eight inches tall, was imprisoned in October 1793 on the grounds that she was “an ex-noble, and the wife and sister of male émigrés.”
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At the time of her incarceration, she had been sepa- rated for twenty months from her husband, who had left France to join the counterrevolutionary forces in Germany and the Lowlands. Before leaving, he had given his wife power of attorney to administer his prop- erty. She was also legally in charge of their three small children, one born six weeks after his departure.

Before her imprisonment, Mme de La Villirouët had lived with her children at the home of an aged aunt, but when Robespierre on June 2, 1793, declared all wives, fathers, mothers, children, brothers, and sis- ters of émigrés to be “suspect,” she was arrested and incarcerated.

The difference between Mme de La Villirouët and her coprisoners was that she refused to wait out the Revolution in silence. From her cold, damp, and unheated cell she sent out a volley of missives to local and national representatives, protesting her arrest and the conditions under which the prisoners were forced to live. In October 1794, a year after her incarceration, she wrote a legalistic letter that refuted the words of her denunciation. As for her being an ex-noble: “one does not preside at one’s birth.” As for being the wife of an émigré: “since the month of July, 1792, I have not received news of my husband I

have every reason to believe he no longer exists.”

But what is remarkable in her defense is her assertion that she, a wife, should not be judged by her husband’s actions. She wrote: “But

suppose that he was an émigré—is that a reason for making me respon- sible for his conduct and his acts? Always and everywhere a husband is the head [of the family] in law and deed—thus one cannot indict a wife for her husband’s conduct.” It was unusual for a wife to postulate a sep- arate moral and legal existence from that of her husband and to claim that she could not be blamed for his. Ultimately Mme de Villirouët’s epistolary efforts proved successful; in January 1795, as a result of her flood of letters, she and all her her coprisoners were freed.