All of His Power Lies in The Distaff Rob

ALL OF HIS POWER LIES IN THE
DISTAFF: ROBESPIERRE, WOMEN AND

THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
Downloaded from http://past.oxfordjournals.org/ at The Chinese University of Hong Kong on October 9, 2014
On 29 October 1792 Jean-Baptiste Louvet, a deputy to France’s
National Convention, delivered a speech attacking his fellow
deputy Maximilien Robespierre. Louvet accused Robespierre of
a variety of crimes: of being complicit in the massacres of pris-
oners the previous month, of aiming at a dictatorship, of ‘con-
stantly presenting himself as an object of popular idolatry’, even
of claiming that he was the only virtuous man in France.1
Robespierre had been active in the political life of the French
Revolution since its beginning in the spring of 1789, so facing
criticism was nothing new. The length and scope of the attack
were unusual, however. In 1792 it was surprising to see so
much attention devoted to any one deputy. To be sure,
Robespierre was no longer the obscure deputy from northern
France who had arrived at the Estates-General in 1789, having
since earned a reputation as one of the Revolution’s leading left-
wing spokesmen. He was popular with the people of Paris, had a
strong base of support in Paris’s Jacobin club, and was one of the
leaders of the Montagnards. He was not, however, their sole
leader. Nor were the Montagnards, a loosely organized coalition
of left-wing deputies, the dominant force in the Convention that
they would soon become. The Girondins, a similarly loose-knit
coalition to which Louvet belonged, were powerful rivals with the
allegiance of at least as many of the Convention’s deputies.
Robespierre was taken aback by Louvet’s attack, and asked for a
week to prepare his reply. On 5 November 1792 that week
had passed, and Robespierre’s speech was ready. He was able to
parry most of Louvet’s accusations. ‘Where were my armies?’,
1
Archives parlementaires de 1787 à 1860: recueil complet des débats législatifs et politiques
des chambres françaises. Première série, 1787–1799, ed. J. Mavidal and E. Laurent, 2nd
edn, 94 vols. to date (Paris, 1879– ), lvii, 57. For accounts of Louvet’s attack on
Robespierre, see Peter McPhee, Robespierre: A Revolutionary Life (New Haven,
2012), 137; Ruth Scurr, Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution, 1st edn
(New York, 2006), 235–6; David P. Jordan, The Revolutionary Career of Maximilien
Robespierre (New York, 1985), 123–4.
Past and Present, no. 223 (May 2014) ß The Past and Present Society, Oxford, 2014
doi:10.1093/pastj/gtu001 Advance Access published on 13 March 2014
130 PAST AND PRESENT NUMBER 223
Robespierre asked, dismissing what he saw as exaggerated views

of his own influence; ‘all power was in the hands of my adver-
saries’. As for the rest of Louvet’s claims, ‘in order for the accus-
ation to have even the slightest character of plausibility, it would
first have to be shown that I was completely crazy’.2 Robespierre
was convincing enough that the Convention chose to move on to
other matters. Louvet himself was not allowed to respond, and his
fellow Girondins were not eager to lend their support.3 The phil-
osopher and deputy Condorcet, though an ally of Louvet’s, even
described him as ‘a man who has great spirit and talent, but an
even greater imagination’.4
The day marked at least a de facto victory for Robespierre, and
perhaps something more, as the affair had raised his profile.5
What struck observers at the time, though, was the make-up of
the crowds in the Convention’s galleries that day. The
Englishman John Moore was sitting in the galleries, and noted
that the audience was ‘almost entirely filled with women’.6 One
newspaper described the crowd as ‘a handful of men and several
hundred women’.7 Louvet himself would complain in his mem-
oirs that Robespierre had ‘filled the galleries with all of the
Jacobins and Jacobines he could find’.8 The harshest words
came from Condorcet, though, who wrote that
One wonders sometimes why there are so many women following
Robespierre, at his home, at the podium of the Jacobins, at the
Cordeliers, at the Convention. It is that the French Revolution is a religion
and Robespierre is making it into a cult; he is a priest who has his devotees;
but it is evident that all of his power lies in the distaff.9
2
Maximilien Robespierre, Œuvres complètes, ed. Marc Bouloiseau et al., 10 vols.
(Paris, 1912–67), ix, 80. (There is also a separate eleventh volume: see n. 135.)
3
[Jean-Baptiste Louvet de Couvray], Mémoires de Louvet de Couvrai sur la Révolution
française, ed. F.-A. Aulard, 1st edn, 2 vols. (Paris, 1889), i, 60.
4
Chronique de Paris, no. 317 (6 Nov. 1792), 1254. Historians have supported this
view: see Scurr, Fatal Purity, 236; Jules Michelet, Histoire de la Révolution française,
2 vols. (Paris, 1979), ii, 111.
5
See Jordan, Revolutionary Career of Maximilien Robespierre, 124.
6
Quoted in Scurr, Fatal Purity, 236. See also B. J. B. Buchez and P. C. Roux, Histoire
parlementaire de la Révolution française, 40 vols. (Paris, 1834–8), xxi, 2–5.
7
Quoted in Robespierre, Œuvres complètes, ed. Bouloiseau et al., ix, 78.
8
[Louvet de Couvray], Mémoires sur la Révolution française, i, 60.
9
Chronique de Paris, no. 317 (6 Nov. 1792), 1254. See also Jean Jaurès, Histoire
socialiste de la Révolution française, ed. Albert Soboul, 7 vols. (Paris, 1968–73), iii, 372;
Buchez and Roux, Histoire parlementaire de la Révolution française, xxi, 2. The original
French for the final phrase quoted reads, ‘mais il est évident que toute sa puissance est
en quenouille’. In translating the phrase as ‘all of his power lies in the distaff’, I
am following Hector Fleischmann, Robespierre and the Women He Loved,
(cont. on p. 131)
ALL OF HIS POWER LIES IN THE DISTAFF 131
I
During the Revolution, contemporaries took it for granted that
many Parisian women were active supporters of Robespierre.
Citizens from Paris and its suburbs would complain about
women who acted as his ‘emissaries’ and ‘missionaries’. Radical
women would wear necklaces containing his likeness.10 Market
women prayed for him when he fell ill.11 Women would write him
letters professing their love and offering themselves in marriage,
including one woman who told him that he was an ‘eagle who
hovers in the sky’.12 In September 1791 he even received a letter
of praise from Madame Roland. Though by the time of Louvet’s
speech Robespierre and Madame Roland would find themselves
on the opposite side of the political divide, in her letter she praised
Robespierre as being ‘among the small number of courageous
men, always faithful to their principles’.13 As Louvet and his
allies discovered, when Robespierre gave speeches, women
would cheer him from the galleries; when his opponents re-
sponded, those same women would yell down insults.14 A news-
paper critical of Robespierre wrote in April 1792 that Girondins’
speeches were ‘frequently interrupted by the violent screams from
women who are placed in the galleries and very well trained at
insulting those who do not idolize M. Robespierre’.15 His rivals,
frustrated at the jeers they received, would criticize both the
women who supported Robespierre, and Robespierre for seeking
that support.
(n. 9 cont.)
trans. Angelo S. Rappoport (London, 1913), 168. The English ‘distaff’ and the
French quenouille are close in both literal and figurative meanings: both refer to a
tool used in spinning yarn, but also to the realm of the feminine.
10
Dominique Godineau, The Women of Paris and their French Revolution, trans.
Katherine Streip (Berkeley, 1998), 7, 384, 391; Michelet, Histoire de la Révolution
française, ii, 822.
11
Jean-Clément Martin, La Révolte brisée: femmes dans la Révolution française et
l’Empire (Paris, 2008), 139.
12
Papiers inédits trouvés chez Robespierre, Saint-Just, Payan, etc. supprimés ou omis par
Courtois: précédés du rapport de ce député à la Convention nationale, 3 vols. in 8 (Paris,
1828), i, 171–2; ii, 165. The letter quoted was signed ‘Riquetti’, and came from a
relative of Mirabeau, the former aristocrat who dominated politics in the early years of
the Revolution.
13
Quoted in Charlotte Robespierre, Mémoires (Paris, 2006), 72, 75.
14
Michelet, Histoire de la Révolution française, i, 684; McPhee, Robespierre, 127.
15
Patriote français, cmxcii (28 Apr. 1792), 492–3.
Portrayals of Robespierre as a man ‘surrounded by his de-

votees’,16 along with unflattering descriptions of those women,
were commonplace during the Revolution and in its immediate
aftermath. The deputy Dussault, for instance, wrote that
‘women’s gazes were not the least of the attractions of his supreme
power; he liked to attract them; his ambition was mixed with
coquetry’.17 The Swiss journalist Cassat, reflecting on
Robespierre’s life after his death, described the ‘shiver that
would spread among the initiated’ the moment he set foot in
the Jacobin club. ‘Above all it is the women, known in Paris as
the devotees of Robespierre’, whose dedication to Robespierre
could be felt throughout the building as they pointed to him
and said, ‘Yes! It’s him! There he is!’18
Such eyewitness accounts were often intended as criticisms of
Robespierre, meant to belittle him by association. Some, like
Condorcet’s, were bitter; others, like Cassat’s, sarcastic.
Cassat’s was also one of many criticisms of Robespierre to
emerge in the aftermath of his downfall. Many people had been
afraid to criticize him during the Terror; during the Thermidorian
period that followed his death, criticizing Robespierre became
common practice as leading politicians portrayed him as the
sole master of the Terror, spreading exaggerated tales of his
actions and inventing stories of licentious behaviour and abuses
of power.19
The Thermidorians have had a lasting impact on the ways in
which future historians portrayed Robespierre, but accounts of
his female supporters follow a different historiographical trajec-
tory.20 Nineteenth-century historians mostly ignored the tales of
orgies and debaucheries that had spread during Thermidor, but
they endorsed the basic point that Robespierre’s critics had made,
during the Revolution and after, that Robespierre was a favourite
16
Fleischmann, Robespierre and the Women He Loved, 167.
17
[Jean Joseph Dussault], Portraits exécrables du traı̂tre Robespierre et ses complices
tenue [sic] par la Furie, avec leurs crimes et forfaits que l’on découvre tous les jours (Paris,
n.d.), 5–6.
18
[Cassat], ‘Précis de la conspiration de Robespierre par un journaliste suisse,
Cassat ainé, rédigé au lendemain de l’événement’, in Gérard Walter, La Conjuration
du neuf thermidor: 27 juillet 1794 (Paris, 1974), 428.
19
See, for instance, Antoine de Baecque, Glory and Terror: Seven Deaths under the
French Revolution, trans. Charlotte Mandel (New York, 2001), 150–65; McPhee,
Robespierre, 224–6.
20
For the Thermidorians and Robespierre’s legacy, see, among others, McPhee,
Robespierre, 225–8.
of the women of Paris. Michelet, a partisan of the Revolution but a
critic of Robespierre, saw that support as resulting from
Robespierre’s attempt to outflank his rivals. According to
Michelet, Robespierre had no trouble appealing to women; his
only difficulty was finding the ‘exact and precise measure’ of lan-
guage that would ‘win over the women’ without ‘shocking the
men’.21 Thiers, a constitutional monarchist when he wrote his
history of the Revolution, wrote that Robespierre ‘was sur-
rounded by a kind of court, composed . . . chiefly of a great
number of women, who paid him the most refined attentions’.22
Taine, an opponent of the Revolution, wrote that Robespierre’s
‘faithful were always on their knees before him, the women even
more than the men’.23 Even Robespierre’s hagiographical biog-
rapher Hamel, though critical of anything Robespierre’s critics
had claimed, acknowledged that Robespierre exercised a ‘legit-
imate influence’ on women.24
The portrayal of Robespierre as a man surrounded by his
female supporters receded in twentieth-century accounts.
General histories of the Revolution no longer discussed the
issue.25 During the heyday of social history in the twentieth cen-
tury, this shift was aided by larger historiographical trends that
played down the role of individuals, encapsulated in Marc Bloch’s
plea for mercy from Robespierrists and anti-Robespierrists
alike.26 Those authors who still focused on Robespierre were
hard-pressed to ignore women’s support, but rarely emphasized
it. Mathiez, Robespierre’s most fervent academic defender, had
written that his admirers included women from the upper crust,
not just the tricoteuses de la guillotine, that is, the women who would
knit while watching executions. When Mathiez was writing in the
21
See Michelet, Histoire de la Révolution française, i, 685; ii, 822.
22
Adolphe Thiers, Histoire de la Révolution française, 12th edn, 10 vols. (Paris,
1836–44), vi, 109.
23
Hippolyte-Adolphe Taine, Les Origines de la France contemporaine, 12 vols. (Paris,
1911–17), vii, 247. See also Pierre de La Gorce, Histoire religieuse de la Révolution
française, 5 vols. (1912–23; New York, 1969), iii, 481.
24
Ernest Hamel, Histoire de Robespierre: d’après des papiers de famille, les sources
originales et des documents entièrement inédits, 3 vols. (Paris, 1865–7), ii, 523; iii, 114.
25
Among twentieth-century histories of the Revolution, see, for instance, Alfred
Cobban, A History of Modern France, 3 vols. (London, 1957–65), i, esp. 221–2;
François Furet, Revolutionary France, 1770–1880, trans. Antonia Nevill
(Cambridge, Mass., 1998), 143–6; William Doyle, The Oxford History of the French
Revolution, 2nd edn. (Oxford, 2002), 272–3.
26
Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft, trans. Peter Putnam (New York, 1953), 140.
early twentieth century, he still had to respond to the traditional

accounts of Robespierre’s female supporters. Mathiez did not,
however, consider this an important part of Robespierre’s
legacy.27 More recent biographies gave his female support even
less attention, mentioning it in passing or ignoring it altogether.
Those sympathetic to Robespierre were not eager to give too
much credit to the women who supported him, especially as
doing so entailed validating his critics; those more critical of
Robespierre were not eager to parrot the misogyny of a past era.28
To the larger historiographical trends must be added another
factor: there is very little direct testimony from these women.
There are no printed manifestos from Robespierre’s female sup-
porters and few private letters. The relevant available police re-
cords date from Thermidor, when most of his supporters were
trying to erase their past, and when people of all political stripes
were accusing their enemies of having been Robespierrists,
whether they had been or not.29 Robespierre himself rarely men-
tioned his female supporters, or his male supporters, for that
matter. Unlike Jean-Paul Marat, who enjoyed bragging of his
supporters’ dedication and whose newspaper would print letters
of devotion he received, Robespierre tended to portray himself as
isolated and powerless, as he had when he had replied to
Louvet.30 When Robespierre did praise those who supported
him, he tended to phrase it in terms of seemingly generic praise
of the people, as he did in a speech he made in February 1792 in
which he invoked the ‘lively and imposing spectacle of 6,000 spec-
tators’ at the Estates-General in Versailles. Contrasting that
27
See, for instance, Albert Mathiez, ‘Robespierre orateur’, in Albert Mathiez,
Études sur Robespierre, 1758–1794 (Paris, 1973), 57; Albert Mathiez, Girondins et
Montagnards, 7th edn (Paris, 1930), 25.
28
David Jordan’s biography gives Robespierre’s female support one parenthetical
mention: ‘women (for whom he had a peculiar appeal)’: Jordan, Revolutionary Career of
Maximilien Robespierre, 124. The topic is omitted in George Rudé, Robespierre: Portrait
of a Revolutionary Democrat (New York, 1975), and J. M. Thompson, Robespierre (New
York, 1988). See, however, de Baecque, Glory and Terror, 162–3; Hilary Mantel, ‘What
a Man This Is, with his Crowd of Women around Him’, London Review of Books, xxii
(30 Mar. 2000).
29
See, for example, the portraits included in Godineau, Women of Paris and their
French Revolution, appendix 3.
30
For Marat, see Jean-Paul Marat, Œuvres politiques, 1789–1793, 10 vols. (Brussels,
1989–95), i, 559; ii, 1261; iii, 1386; ix, 6215; x, 6543. For Robespierre, his response to
Louvet is a prime example of his self-deprecating rhetoric, but so too is the speech he
gave on 8 Thermidor II: see, particularly, Robespierre, Œuvres complètes, ed.
Bouloiseau et al., x, 558.
crowd to the ‘small space reserved for citizens’ at the ‘impractical
and wretched’ room where the legislature met from November
1789 until May 1793, Robespierre claimed that those people
‘played no small role in inspiring in us the courage and energy
we needed . . . if we are going to give the Constituent Assembly the
glory of having crushed despotism, it must be admitted that it
shared that glory with the galleries’.31
Between the historiographical trends, the lack of direct testi-
mony and Robespierre’s tendency to play down his own influence
on women, historians let his female supporters disappear from
their accounts during much of the twentieth century. It is import-
ant to note, however, that this disappearance did not occur
because anyone brought their existence into question. And if no
one brought their existence into question, the reason is simple:
they existed. Robespierre enjoyed the support of a significant
number of women in Paris, and those women were vocal in
both their support for him and their opposition to his rivals.
This does not mean, of course, that no women opposed
Robespierre. At least one woman attempted to assassinate him,
and there are reports of women dancing in the streets on the day of
his execution. Some of the Revolution’s best-known women
opposed Robespierre and the Montagnards, including Madame
Roland and Olympe de Gouges. Nor is this to claim that only
women supported Robespierre. Men, too, sent him letters of
love and devotion.32 Despite his pleas of isolation and powerless-
ness, he enjoyed the support of the popular classes in Paris, female
and male alike. The men who supported him have remained a
constant in histories of the Revolution, however, while his female
supporters disappeared over the course of the twentieth century
and have not reappeared in twenty-first-century accounts.33
31
Robespierre, Œuvres complètes, ed. Bouloiseau at al., viii, 173; see also ibid., vi,
396–7, and the events of 8 May 1793, discussed above.
32
See Papiers inédits trouvés chez Robespierre, Saint-Just, Payan, etc. supprimées ou
omis par Courtois, i, 169, 261; David Andress, ‘Living the Revolutionary Melodrama:
Robespierre’s Sensibility and the Construction of Political Commitment in the French
Revolution’, Representations, cxiv (Spring 2011).
33
Scurr mentions that Robespierre ‘was loved by’ and ‘had a peculiar appeal for
women’, but does not otherwise discuss the issue: Scurr, Fatal Purity, 113, 237.
McPhee’s recent biography notes that ‘large numbers of Parisian women admired
Robespierre’, and that he received fan mail from women, while also referring to the
‘old obsession with Robespierre’s hold over women’: McPhee, Robespierre, 85, 138,
224. The most recent French biographer, Dingli, devotes several pages to the issue in
an appendix: Laurent Dingli, Robespierre (Paris, 2004). Two potentially relevant
(cont. on p. 136)
The recent silence is puzzling as historiographical trends of the

last few decades would seem favourable to a revival of interest in
the gendered aspects of Robespierre’s career. The study of
women and of gender has exploded across all historical fields,
and the French Revolution is no exception. Since roughly the
time of the Revolution’s bicentennial, however, an interpretation
of the Revolution has emerged that takes into account how power
can be exercised in gendered ways, but seems not to take into
account the events that actually took place in France during the
first half of the 1790s. Specifically, historians who have studied
the history of gender during the Revolution have focused primar-
ily on the ways in which men excluded women from the public
sphere during the Revolution, until by the later phases of the
Revolution women were ‘relegated to the realm of domesticity’
through laws that ‘put women in their place’.34 Though this
interpretation is based on a relatively small documentary base
of a handful of quotations from minor political actors and one
mostly inconsequential decree from 1793, it has come to have a
life of its own in recent years.35
The image of Revolutionary politics as exclusively male,
though, would have been utterly foreign to those who lived
(n. 33 cont.)
recent articles also lack any discussion of Robespierre’s female support: Andress,
‘Living the Revolutionary Melodrama’; Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall, ‘Robespierre,
Old Regime Feminist? Gender, the Late Eighteenth Century, and the French
Revolution Revisited’, Journal of Modern History, lxxxii (Mar. 2010).
34
Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley, 1992), 122;
Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York, 1988), 47. The classic
formulation of this thesis is in Joan B. Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of
the French Revolution (Ithaca, 1988); see esp. 104–6, 140–51. See also Joan Scott, ‘ ‘‘A
Woman Who Has Only Paradoxes to Offer’’: Olympe de Gouges Claims Rights for
Women’, in Sara Melzer and Leslie Rabine (eds.), Rebel Daughters: Women and the
French Revolution (New York, 1992), 104; Lynn Hunt, ‘The Many Bodies of Marie
Antoinette: Political Pornography and the Problem of the Feminine in the French
Revolution’, in Dena Goodman (ed.), Marie-Antoinette: Writings on the Body of a Queen
(New York, 2003); Hunt, Family Romance of the French Revolution, esp. ch. 4; Olwen H.
Hufton, Women and the Limits of Citizenship in the French Revolution (Toronto, 1992);
Martin, La Révolte brisée, 173; William H. Sewell Jr, ‘Le Citoyen/La Citoyenne:
Activity, Passivity and the Revolutionary Concept of Citizenship’, in Colin Lucas
(ed.), The Political Culture of the French Revolution (Oxford, 1988), 115–20.
35
The thesis can increasingly be found in more general accounts of the Revolution.
See, for instance, Jeremy D. Popkin, A Short History of the French Revolution (Upper
Saddle River, 2002), 88; David Andress, The Terror: The Merciless War for Freedom in
Revolutionary France (New York, 2005), 233–4; The French Revolution: A Document
Collection, ed. Laura Mason and Tracey Rizzo (Boston, 1999), 232–6.
through it. Contemporaries were surprised to see just how active a
role women were playing in the Revolution. Some contemporary
critics felt that those women were exceeding their proper roles.
Many others, though, were content to see them act in the public
sphere, especially when it suited their needs. Robespierre may not
have boasted of his legion of female supporters, but he sought out
their support and reaped the fruits of their activism. During his
rise to power, these women, rather than being excluded from the
political life of the Revolution, helped shape it. Their exclusion
came not from eighteenth-century politicians but from twentieth-
and twenty-first-century historians.
The story of Robespierre and his female supporters does not fit
into the traditional narratives of gender history, and the women
who supported him do not fit any of the roles that, ironically,
feminist and post-feminist historians have expected them to
play. They were not challenging patriarchal codes of behaviour,
and their activism was not on behalf of women’s issues. Yet these
women had a far greater impact on the Revolution than those
women who did attempt to tie the Revolution to the cause of
women’s rights. Robespierre’s female support was a consistent
aspect of his political career that made him stand out from his
rivals and helped him in his rise to the top of the political pile.
Looking at his career and the role that women played in it shows
that, rather than excluding women, the French Revolution
opened new possibilities for women to take part in the political
process. It does so, however, at the cost of a significant break
between the history of women and the history of feminism.
Robespierre’s politics were not supportive of women’s rights, at
least as they are understood today, and the most vocal advocates
of women’s rights were critics of Robespierre. Those critics, how-
ever, were unable to garner the female support that Robespierre
enjoyed during his revolutionary career. The rise to power of
Robespierre and his allies not only came about with the help of
politically active women in Paris, it also came at the expense of the
Revolution’s most prominent advocates for women’s rights.
II
Robespierre arrived at the Estates-General in 1789 as an un-
known deputy with no sign that he was destined for greatness.
Madame de Staël wrote that, during the Revolution’s first years,
‘no one paid any attention to him, and every time he rose to the
podium, those democrats who had any sense were quick to ridi-
cule him’.36 Even in 1791 the Englishman W. A. Miles wrote that
‘the whole National Assembly hold him cheap, consider him in-
significant, and, when I mention[ed] to some of them my suspi-
cions and said he would be the man of sway in a short time, and
govern the million, I was laughed at’.37 Subsequent events,
though, would prove Miles correct. From July 1793 until July
1794 Robespierre was France’s most powerful politician and
chief spokesman for the Committee of Public Safety. Calling
terror ‘nothing but prompt, severe, inflexible justice’ and there-
fore an ‘emanation of virtue’,38 he pursued a politics that was
indeed severe and inflexible, and a far cry from the policies that
the French Revolution had introduced during the liberal revolu-
tion of 1789–90.
Robespierre possessed an ability to remain in the spotlight
throughout the Revolution’s vicissitudes. From the fall of the
Bastille to the Reign of Terror, France would see three different
legislatures: the Constituent Assembly, the Legislative Assembly
and the Convention. The Legislative Assembly, which lasted
from October 1791 until September 1792, was the one legislature
at which Robespierre was not a deputy.39 Those eleven months,
however, were a crucial period in his rise in popularity.40 At the
end of the Constituent Assembly, he was popular among the
people of Paris but still a fringe figure among the deputies.41 By
the start of the Convention, he had become prominent enough to
attract Louvet’s ire, and popular enough to withstand that attack.
Robespierre was able to gain influence even during the
Legislative Assembly by appealing to the wider Parisian public.
During the Revolution, Parisians found ways to participate in
political life. They read newspapers; they knew who the major
36
Germaine de Staël, Considérations sur la Révolution française, ed. Jacques
Godechot (Paris, 1983), 245.
37
Quoted in Robespierre, ed. George Rudé (Englewood Cliffs, 1967), 88.
38
Robespierre, Œuvres complètes, ed. Bouloiseau et al., x, 357.
39
See Barry M. Shapiro, ‘Self-Sacrifice, Self-Interest, or Self-Defense? The
Constituent Assembly and the ‘‘Self-Denying Ordinance’’ of May 1791’, French
Historical Studies, xxv, 4 (2002).
40
See, for instance, the comment from the Committee of Public Safety member
Billaud-Varenne that Robespierre’s ‘popularity only grew during the Legislative
Assembly’: quoted in Robespierre vu par ses contemporains: témoignages recueillis et pré-
sentés par L. Jacob (Paris, 1938), 200.
41
Thompson, Robespierre, 104.
players were; they attended Assembly meetings and joined or at-
tended meetings of political clubs. During the Constituent
Assembly, though his fellow deputies were not paying attention
to him, Robespierre had become a favourite of the crowd. The day
the Constituent Assembly closed, a crowd of Parisians carried
him and Pétion, at the time his friend and ally, through the streets
of the capital.42
Robespierre’s speeches, though unpopular with his fellow
deputies, were popular with the crowds in the Assembly’s gal-
leries. In 1792 the politician Dubois-Crancé noted that, while
Robespierre’s fellow deputies at the Constituent Assembly had
rarely listened to him, he ‘achieved his glory via the newspapers
and the galleries’.43 The Montagnard Merlin de Thionville added
that Robespierre ‘would never have won the attention of the
Assembly if he had not first won that of the gallery’.44
III
During the Legislative Assembly, the podium from which
Robespierre would speak and the galleries he would be addressing
belonged to the Jacobin club, the influential political club whose
membership overlapped with the legislature’s left wing, and
whose ‘mother club’ in Paris had ‘affiliated’ clubs throughout
France.45 Robespierre had been active in the Jacobins since
1789. As Dubois-Crancé pointed out, Robespierre was ‘listened
to and encouraged there . . . advantages he rarely enjoyed at the
[Constituent] Assembly’.46
The Jacobin club limited its membership to men. But, as
Moore observed, the club had ‘a large audience of both sexes’,
and ‘there were an abundance of women in the galleries’.47 For
women in Paris who supported the Revolution and were active in
42
Robespierre, ed. Rudé, 25; Scurr, Fatal Purity, 74.
43
Quoted in Robespierre vu par ses contemporains, ed. Jacob, 83.
44
Quoted in Robespierre, ed. Rudé, 108. See also Patrice Gueniffey, ‘Robespierre’,
in François Furet and Mona Ozouf (eds.), Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution,
trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), 302.
45
See Michael Kennedy, The Jacobin Clubs in the French Revolution: The First Years
(Princeton, 1982); Michael Kennedy, The Jacobin Clubs in the French Revolution: The
Middle Years (Princeton, 1988); Michael Kennedy, The Jacobin Clubs in the French
Revolution, 1793–1795 (New York, 2000).
46
Quoted in Robespierre vu par ses contemporains, ed. Jacob, 83.
47
Quoted in English Witnesses of the French Revolution, ed. J. M. Thompson (Oxford,
1970), 180–1.
politics, attending meetings was part of their political participa-

tion. Some women would describe themselves as regulars at the
Jacobin club, and men there would acknowledge them as such.48
It was not the only place where women would populate the gal-
leries. Other clubs had public galleries with women attending, as
did government meetings, including the sections, the Parisian
neighbourhood councils — hence the warning in the pamphlet
‘Reply to the Impertinent Question: What is a Sans-Culotte?’
against men who attended section meetings ‘powdered or per-
fumed . . . in the hope of catching the eye of the citizenesses in the
galleries’.49
Robespierre, powdered if not perfumed, succeeded in gaining
women’s attention at the Jacobin club.50 The records of the club’s
meetings include both the deliberations and the reactions from
the audience, and show the extent to which he enjoyed the sup-
port of the galleries, and particularly the women there. Those
records are particularly useful as Robespierre and his fellow
Jacobins did not speak often of their views of the women in the
galleries. His future colleague in the Committee of Public Safety
Collot d’Herbois did once note that many women hoping to
attend that day’s session had been unable to enter, and asked
for more benches to be set aside for them. ‘These are mothers
of families’, he told the club: ‘they are worthy of ancient Rome’.51
And when one member of the Jacobins asked the galleries if they
considered themselves to be united with the Jacobins, though
they could not deliberate, the galleries responded, ‘Yes, yes,
yes!’52 Such explicit statements of praise were rare, but concern
for the practicalities and logistics that allowed women to continue
48
See, for instance, La Société des Jacobins: recueil de documents pour l’histoire du Club
des Jacobins de Paris, ed. F.-A. Aulard, 6 vols. (Paris, 1889–97), iii, 289, 420;
Godineau, Women of Paris and their French Revolution, 209, 380. See also Thomas
Carlyle, The French Revolution: A History (New York, 2002), 586: ‘Patriots, in
Mountain and Galleries, or taking counsel nightly in the Section-House, in Mother-
Society, amid their shrill Tricoteuses . . . to give voice when needful; occasionally very
loud’.
49
‘Reply to the Impertinent Question: What is a Sans-Culotte?’, at 5http://www.
historyguide.org/intellect/sans_culottes.html4 (accessed 2 Dec. 2013). The one not-
able club not to have public galleries was the Feuillants, started by Lafayette and other
former Jacobins in July 1791. The Feuillants never fulfilled expectations, making it the
exception that proved the rule. Doyle, Oxford History of the French Revolution, 175–6.
50
Robespierre was rare among Montagnard politicians in continuing to wear
Old Regime style wigs: see Scurr, Fatal Purity, 11–12.
51
La Société des Jacobins, ed. Aulard, iii, 289.
52
Ibid., iii, 532.
to attend the meetings was a continual theme. Members would
discuss ways to limit the time women waited for the doors to open,
the feasibility of increasing spectator space, and the policies for
who could sit in the galleries.53
IV
Robespierre’s rivalry with the Girondins began at the Jacobin club
during the winter of 1791–2. In that contest, women’s support
would prove crucial not only for Robespierre, but for the direction
of the club itself. The deputy Jacques Pierre Brissot and his fellow
Girondins had been pushing for France to declare war on Austria.
Robespierre was one of the few voices against it.54 His speeches
against the war alienated many of his potential allies. Most mem-
bers of the Jacobin club, like the deputies in the Assembly, sup-
ported the war.55 But he used these speeches to cement his
support of the women and men who filled the club’s galleries. If
Robespierre had to find the ‘exact and precise measure’ of lan-
guage that would appeal to women without shocking the men,
this was one of the periods when he calibrated his pitch. On 18
December he gave his first major speech against the war — a
strident speech, and even, in its own way, a bellicose one. ‘Free
men, or men who want to be free’, Robespierre claimed, ‘will
deploy all of their resources when fighting for their homes, their
fellow citizens, their wives and children’. Foreign wars, however,
were not the same, and provided opportunities for despots,
making them a threat to the Revolution.56 By 2 January 1792
his tone had changed; he talked about the Declaration of the
Rights of Man as ‘the sun’s light that shines on all men at once’,
and France’s Constitution as ‘the daughter of the Declaration of
Rights, does she not look like her mother?’ He also referred to the
53
See, for example, ibid., iii, 197, 231, 289–90, 371, 471, 575; iv, 673–4; v, 153.
54
For the build-up to the war, see Jaurès, Histoire socialiste de la Révolution française,
vol. ii; T. C. W. Blanning, The French Revolutionary Wars, 1787–1802 (London, 1996),
60–2. For the Girondins’ pro-war speeches at the Legislative Assembly, see Archives
parlementaires, ed. Mavidal and Laurent, xxxiv, 309–17; xxxvi, 616–17; xxxvii, 464–
71, 490–4. For the debate over the war in the Jacobin clubs throughout France, see
Kennedy, Jacobin Clubs in the French Revolution: The Middle Years, 123–31.
55
See, for instance, La Société des Jacobins, ed. Aulard, iii, 332, 410. According to
McPhee, Robespierre’s ‘repeated warnings’ about the war made him an ‘object of
scorn’ among Jacobins: McPhee, Robespierre, 116.
56
Robespierre, Œuvres complètes, ed. Bouloiseau et al., viii, 61.
Constitution as ‘this virgin, once a shining celestial beauty’.57

The sentimentality of Robespierre’s language reached its height
on 11 January, when at the end of a long speech he spoke of his
hopes for the next generation, that ‘tender hope of humanity . . .
May the first lessons of maternal love prepare you for the virtues
of free men’.58 Andress has pointed to this speech as an example
of Robespierre’s ‘melodramatic sensibility’,59 but it can also be
seen as the high point of his willingness to use sentimental lan-
guage to ensure his support from women. As his speech ended,
women in the galleries were in tears.60
Robespierre’s speeches were not always so sentimental, and in
his next major speech against the war he returned to the emphasis
on court intrigues and threats to the Revolution.61 If he did not
continue to use the language of maternal love that had won him
the tears of the women in the galleries, however, he did not lose
their support.
Robespierre’s opponents were not happy about having to face
the galleries’ disapproval. One opponent told him that people in
the galleries had ‘their eyes fixed’ on him, trying ‘to read in your
gaze . . . and your smallest gestures, to know if they should
applaud or disapprove’.62 Women would yell down, ‘Courage,
Robespierre!’63 In a debate between Robespierre and Collot
d’Herbois over whether to let prodigal Jacobins return,
Robespierre insisted that the matter be voted on out loud; when
his position won, the galleries ‘stood up as one, and filled the hall
with applause’.64 In April 1792, when Robespierre threatened to
leave the Jacobins, women in the galleries yelled out, ‘We will
follow you’.65
57
Ibid., viii, 82.
58
Ibid., viii, 110. See also Buchez and Roux, Histoire parlementaire de la Révolution
française, xiii, 164; La Société des Jacobins, ed. Aulard, iii, 318.
59
Andress, ‘Living the Revolutionary Melodrama’, 117.
60
Michelet, Histoire de la Révolution française, i, 669; Robespierre, Œuvres complètes,
ed. Bouloiseau et al., viii, 115 n. 21; Thompson, Robespierre, 208.
61
Robespierre, Œuvres complètes, ed. Bouloiseau et al., viii, 141.
62
Charles-Robert Patris, À Camille Desmoulins: la justification de M. Patris, n’ayant
pu être lue en entier à la tribune des Jacobins, il a cru devoir la faire imprimer et distribuer, afin
d’éclairer les bons citoyens que des intrigans ont égarés (Paris, 1792), 7.
63
Robespierre, Œuvres complètes, ed. Bouloiseau et al., viii, 371; La Société des
Jacobins, ed. Aulard, iii, 696.
64
65
Robespierre, Œuvres complètes, ed. Bouloiseau et al., viii, 325; La Société des
Jacobins, ed. Aulard, iii, 544.
Historians have long noted the presence of women in the gal-
leries of the Jacobin club, but few have had positive things to say
about them. The English historian Carlyle wrote of the ‘shrill
Galleries’ where women would ‘bring their seam with them, or
their knitting-needles; and shriek or knit as the case needs’.66
Recent historians are more polite in their assessments, but
remain dismissive of the impact that the women in the galleries
had, while portraying the Jacobin club as part of the ‘public pol-
itical sphere’ from which women were excluded.67
Women’s roles at the Jacobin club were indeed limited. They
were not full members and could not give speeches. Those limi-
tations did not prevent them from having an impact on the evo-
lution of the Jacobin club. Again, during the debates over the war,
though the galleries supported Robespierre, most members of the
club did not. It was Robespierre, however, who would soon
emerge as the dominant voice at the club. Over the first half of
1792 most of the Girondins left the Jacobin club owing to their
dispute with Robespierre and the criticisms they received from
the galleries. That February Louvet complained that the Jacobins
had let too many women in, and should no longer do so, ‘under
any pretext whatsoever’.68 The Girondin Guadet reported being
insulted after leaving the Jacobin club, claiming that Robespierre
and others had misled people about him.69 In April Brissot, who
acknowledged that he did not attend sessions of the club as often
as he used to, accused Robespierre of using the galleries to drive
away his opponents. Brissot did not blame his fellow Jacobins as
‘the majority of them are sane’, but said that Robespierre had a
‘party . . . in the galleries, which he and his followers openly
direct’.70
In the months that followed, the records of the club contain
fewer mentions of prominent Girondins speaking or even attend-
ing. By August 1792 Moore would report that ‘Robespierre’s
partisans’ in the galleries of the Jacobin club ‘raise such a noise
when anyone attempts to utter sentiments opposite to what he is
66
Carlyle, French Revolution, 580, 586.
67
Suzanne Desan, ‘ ‘‘Constitutional Amazons’’: Jacobin Women’s Clubs in the
French Revolution’, in Bryant T. Ragan and Elizabeth A. Williams (eds.), Re-creating
Authority in Revolutionary France (New Brunswick, NJ, 1992), 14. See also Godineau,
Women of Paris and their French Revolution, 121; Martin, La Révolte brisée, 103, 112.
68
69
Ibid., iii, 531.
70
Ibid., iii, 526, 546.
known to maintain, that the voice of the speaker is drowned, and

he is obliged to yield the tribune to another orator whose doctrine
is more palatable’.71 That October Brissot and his fellow
Girondins were struck from the membership list.72 By that
time, in the aftermath of the uprising of 10 August, the
September Massacres and the start of the Convention, the polit-
ical dynamic of the Revolution had changed. ‘Jacobin’ became
largely synonymous with ‘Montagnard’, with Robespierre a lead-
ing figure in both groups.
V
In September 1792 the Convention replaced the Legislative
Assembly, and Robespierre was back on the Revolution’s centre
stage. The rivalry between the Montagnards and Girondins
became the Revolution’s defining dynamic and would remain
so until the Girondins’ expulsion from the Convention in June
1793. The events leading up to that expulsion would be more
complex than their exit from the Jacobin club, involving the par-
liamentary manoeuvres of hundreds of deputies. Nor was
Robespierre the only Montagnard to enjoy disproportionate sup-
port from the women of Paris. Marat, in particular, had a signifi-
cant female following, as shown by the crowds of women who
celebrated his acquittal by the revolutionary tribunal in April
1793, or who mourned his death three months later.73
For all the increased complexity of the situation, the dynamics
of the Convention until June 1793 paralleled the earlier dynamics
of the Jacobin club. At the start of the Convention the Girondins
had more support from their fellow deputies.74 The Montagn-
ards’ support from the galleries, particularly the women there,
helped Robespierre and his allies take control of the Convention.
After Robespierre responded to Louvet’s accusations, the
Girondin deputy Birotteau complained that Robespierre and
his allies wanted to pretend that ‘800 women and 400 men,
71
Quoted in English Witnesses of the French Revolution, ed. Thompson, 181.
72
La Société des Jacobins, ed. Aulard, iv, 378.
73
For the reaction to Marat’s acquittal, see ibid., v, 151; Archives parlementaires, ed.
Mavidal and Laurent, lxiii, 217–18; Marat, Œuvres politiques, ix, 6183–98. See also
Martin, La Révolte brisée, 132. For the processions and rituals following Marat’s as-
sassination, see Jacques Guilhaumou, La Mort de Marat (Brussels, 1989), 51–3, 61–4.
74
David Jordan, The King’s Trial: The French Revolution vs. Louis XVI (Berkeley,
1979), 51.
constantly occupying the galleries’, should be taken to represent
the will of all of France, and that ‘when someone wants to show
the truth of the situation, he is booed, threatened, and forced into
silence’.75 On 27 December 1792, during the debates over the
king’s fate, women marched from the Jacobin club to the
Convention in a ‘numerous procession’ to support a speech cri-
ticizing Louis XVI.76 The following day Robespierre called for
the king’s execution and criticized ‘the hypocrisy . . . and shame-
less criminality’ of his opponents, a speech the Patriote français
described as nothing new for ‘those who have familiarized them-
selves with his audience tactics’.77 Another newspaper wrote sar-
castically about Robespierre’s arrival at the Jacobin club the next
day, when the women in the galleries called on him to repeat his
speech. ‘The effect’, that paper wrote, ‘was so touching that the
galleries all broke down in tears . . . and cried out for the head of
Louis XVI’.78
That April, when Robespierre was at the Convention’s podium
complaining of trouble being heard over the interruptions, the
Girondin Isnard replied that ‘never has anyone enjoyed a silence
like the one that reigns in this Convention the moment that
Robespierre speaks’.79 On 8 May Robespierre told the Jacobins
that his enemies ‘want to differentiate the people in the galleries
from the people of Paris, as if it was our fault that we have made all
possible sacrifices to extend the galleries to all the people of
Paris’.80
By this point, tensions were high between the Montagnards and
the Girondins. Women who supported the Montagnards took it
75
Archives parlementaires, ed. Mavidal and Laurent, liii, 191. For a description of
the building where the National Assembly met until 8 May 1793, see Armand Brette,
Histoire des edifices où ont siégé les assemblées parlementaires de la Révolution française et de
la première République (Paris, 1902), 203–8, 216–24, esp. 224, where Brette quotes the
German eyewitness Reichardt: ‘I saw as many women as men, all of the lowest class; in
our gallery, I counted one man for every ten women’. See also Sophia Rosenfeld, ‘On
Being Heard: A Case for Paying Attention to the Historical Ear’, American Historical
Review, cxvi, 2 (Apr. 2011), 331.
76
La Société des Jacobins, ed. Aulard, iv, 623. For the ensuing events at the
Convention, see Archives parlementaires, ed. Mavidal and Laurent, lv, 723. See also
77
Robespierre, Œuvres complètes, ed. Bouloiseau et al., ix, 192, 201. The speech is
available in Archives parlementaires, ed. Mavidal and Laurent, lvi, 16–23.
78
Quoted from Journal français, 49, 3, in Robespierre, Œuvres complètes, ed.
Bouloiseau et al., ix, 206.
79
Quoted in Robespierre, Œuvres complètes, ed. Bouloiseau et al., ix, 437.
80
Ibid., ix, 491.
upon themselves to keep the Girondins’ supporters out of the

Convention’s galleries.81 One deputy from the Gironde wrote
of a crowd of three hundred women inviting their fellow citize-
nesses to join them in crushing the Girondins’ ‘new despotism’.
As for the ‘women of the galleries’, the deputy claimed that they
would ‘leave to eat and drink at the Jacobins’ club’ before ‘return-
ing to their posts’ at the Convention.82 On 18 May the deputy
Lehardy complained that ‘our constituents would be very sur-
prised to learn that those whom they sent here are being . . .
driven away by the Convention’s galleries. And by whom? By
vile beings, the dregs of their sex, bribed by beings even more
vile!’83 The deputy Lanjuinais asked, ‘Will the galleries be on
the payroll of the Jacobins, or not?’84 Later that day Isnard, pre-
siding over the session, claimed that women would soon lead an
insurrection against the Convention because they had believed
the plots of men who were ‘misleading . . . that credulous portion
of the people, more praiseworthy for its virtues than for its
enlightenment, and so easy to seduce’.85 Two days later the
Girondin Buzot said, ‘the galleries belong to all citizens, and
not just to these frenzied women, greedy for murder and for
blood’.86 Marat mocked the ‘panic and terror’ that were caused
by ‘some statements of disapproval, started by the women.
Experience should have cured the Convention of this . . . for
two years now, we have heard your howling, and you still do not
have the slightest scratch to show to your constituents’.87
When the rivalry between the Girondins and the Montagnards
came to a head on 31 May and 2 June 1793, women played a key
role, at one point guarding the doors of the Convention and refus-
ing to let deputies leave.88 At the end of the session on 2 June the
Convention expelled the Girondin deputies. Robespierre and the
81
Elisabeth Roudinesco, Théroigne de Méricourt: A Melancholic Woman during the
French Revolution, trans. Martin Thom (London, 1991), 125; Godineau, Women of
Paris and their French Revolution, 137.
82
Quotations from François Bergoeing, Bergoeing, député de la Gironde et membre de
la Commission des Douze, à ses commettans, et à tous les citoyens de la République, in Buchez
and Roux, Histoire parlementaire de la Révolution française, xxviii, 125–9.
83
Archives parlementaires, ed. Mavidal and Laurent, lxv, 36.
84
Ibid., lxv, 36. See also Robespierre, Œuvres complètes, ed. Bouloiseau et al., ix,
518–19.
85
Archives parlementaires, ed. Mavidal and Laurent, lxv, 43.
86
Ibid., lxv, 121.
87
Ibid., lxv, 120.
88
Ibid., lxv, 703; Michelet, Histoire de la Révolution française, ii, 436, 438.
Montagnards became the dominant force in the Convention, able
to put in place the policies they chose.
Again, the dynamics that led to the expulsion of the Girondins
from the Convention were more complex than those that had led
to their expulsion from the Jacobin club, and the women’s sup-
port was for the Montagnards as a whole, not only Robespierre.
Still, the dynamic of the women of the galleries supporting
Robespierre’s side and opposing his Girondin opponents — the
dynamic that had begun with the debates over the war at the
Jacobin club — had continued into the Convention, and the
Girondins had again come out on the losing side.
It would be too simple to state that it was Robespierre’s female
supporters who caused the Montagnards’ victory. The Girondins
had made poor tactical decisions. Deputies affiliated with neither
side had tired of the rivalry. Crowds of men and women alike
protested against the Girondins. On 2 June thousands of pro-
Montagnard soldiers had surrounded the Convention.89 But
the Girondins’ complaints show that they perceived a situation
in which they faced the opposition of women protesting on behalf
of the Montagnards.
That July, when the Revolutionary Tribunal interrogated the
Girondin supporter Charlotte Corday, she admitted having met
with several of the expelled deputies who had fled to her native
Normandy. When asked what those deputies had said to excuse
their flight, Corday replied, ‘they said that they had been troubled
(vexés) by the galleries’.90
VI
The Revolutionary Tribunal had been interrogating Corday
because on 13 July 1793 the previously unknown young woman
had assassinated Marat. Her act saved Robespierre from
facing the implications of his rivalry with Marat the way he
would have to with other Montagnard rivals.91 That did not
prevent Robespierre from being jealous of Marat (as a fellow
Jacobin pointed out) and opposing Marat’s burial in the
Panthéon.92
89
See Doyle, Oxford History of the French Revolution, 237–8.
90
Actes du Tribunal révolutionnaire, ed. Gérard Walter (Paris, 1968), 56.
91
Ibid., 57.
92
La Société des Jacobins, ed. Aulard, v, 715. See Scurr, Fatal Purity, 274–5.
Marat’s death, like the expulsion of the Girondins, increased

Robespierre’s power and influence. As the most respected voice at
the Jacobins and a leading Montagnard deputy, Robespierre was
now one of the most powerful men in France. On 27 July 1793 he
became a member of the Committee of Public Safety. After years
of being on the outside, criticizing the government, he was now its
main spokesman.93 After he became a member of the Committee
of Public Safety, his attitude towards public protest changed. Ever
since the storming of the Bastille in 1789, the Assemblies had
endorsed the role of ‘the people’ in shaping the Revolution,
while simultaneously attempting to stabilize the Revolution by
putting an end to the popular (sometimes violent) protests that
had radicalized the Revolution. Robespierre’s government had
the most success in doing so. Accomplishing this meant ending
the permanence of the sections, which had become organiza-
tional bases for protests. It meant cracking down on the enragés,
a political group led by the former priest Jacques Roux. It also
meant closing down the Society of Revolutionary Republican
Citizenesses, an organization of militant women who had
supported Robespierre and the Montagnards during their
rivalry with the Girondins but who were now pushing for more
radical positions.94
The immediate occasion for the club’s closing was a brawl in
late October between the women of the Society of Revolutionary
Republican Citizenesses and several thousand market women.
The women of the Society had been attempting to enforce a
decree the Convention had passed in September requiring all
women to wear tricolour cockades. This citizen enforcement
would alienate the women of the Society from many other
women in Paris; the conflict with the market women came after
a series of similar (if smaller) disturbances. In the aftermath of the
brawl the Convention not only closed the Society, it decreed that
‘clubs and popular societies of women, whatever name they are
known under, are prohibited’.95
93
See Gueniffey, ‘Robespierre’, 305.
94
See McPhee, Robespierre, 167–8.
95
Archives parlementaires, ed. Mavidal and Laurent, lxxviii, 49. See Women in
Revolutionary Paris, 1789–1795: Selected Documents, ed. Darline Gay Levy, Harriet
Branson Applewhite and Mary Durham Johnson (Urbana, 1977), 197, 215–16; see
also La Société des Jacobins, ed. Aulard, v, 407, for the growing hostility of the women in
the Jacobin club galleries towards the Society’s leaders.
In recent decades, historians have portrayed this decree as the
central event in the history of women during the French
Revolution, and even as proof that the ethos of the French
Revolution was inherently incompatible with female participa-
tion in the political sphere.96 But the decision to close women’s
clubs, and the decree itself, do not deserve this level of attention.
When it happened, the closing of the Society was little noticed in
Paris.97 There was very little discussion of the law, even though
the French revolutionary legislatures were full of men eager to
expound their reasons for agreeing with bills. Lack of debate
indicated not universal agreement but rather lack of interest,
as did the relatively low profiles of the deputies who put the bill
forward. The most important reasons for the closing of women’s
political clubs lay not in the Jacobins’ inherent misogyny but in
their new-found desire to limit popular protests.98 Robespierre
does seem to have endorsed the club’s closing: earlier that month
he had written, ‘close down the RRC’ in his notebook. McPhee
describes Robespierre’s decision as ‘simply a question of pol-
itics’,99 but Robespierre’s politics had always involved seeking
women’s support. Judged by the wishes that women expressed
at the time, closing the Society of Revolutionary Republican
Citizenesses was not a case of the Montagnard government silen-
cing women’s activities, but rather a case of the Montagnard gov-
ernment acceding to women’s requests.
96
See, for instance, Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French
Revolution, 143–5. Outram uses the Convention’s ‘purging of women from the body
politic’ as proof that ‘the apparently universalistic discourse of the general will’
included two ‘distinct political destinies, one male and the other female’: Dorinda
Outram, The Body and the French Revolution: Sex, Class, and Political Culture (New
Haven, 1989), 127. Hunt sees it as proof that the republican ideal of virtue was based
on a notion of fraternity between men, therefore relegating women to the realm of
domesticity: Lynn Hunt, ‘The Many Bodies of Marie Antoinette: Political
Pornography and the Problem of the Feminine in the French Revolution’, in
Goodman (ed.), Marie-Antoinette, 131–3.
97
Hufton, Women and the Limits of Citizenship in the French Revolution, 38. Most
classic histories of the Revolution — Thiers, Jaurès, Quinet, Carlyle — do not mention
it, nor does R. R. Palmer’s Twelve Who Ruled: The Year of the Terror in the French
Revolution (Princeton, 1941). Michelet spent one paragraph on it, describing the con-
frontation between the Society and the market women as a ‘diversion’ and regretting
that ‘this great social question was strangled by the forces of chance’: Michelet, Histoire
de la Révolution française, ii, 607.
98
See Hufton, Women and the Limits of Citizenship in the French Revolution, 37.
99
McPhee, Robespierre, 168.
VII
The impression that Robespierre used women’s support to rise to
power and then turned his back on them once in power is there-
fore only somewhat accurate. If female activism would soon
decline, it was because the months that followed October 1793
were not good ones for political opposition of any stripe. As
Robespierre’s close ally Saint-Just noted, the Revolution was
‘frozen’.100 During the Reign of Terror, not only would the lea-
ders of the Girondins be executed, but many prominent
Montagnards as well. Roux, arrested, would commit suicide.
The Jacobin club remained influential, but as an annexe of the
Montagnard government, not as part of the opposition. But if
Robespierre relied less on popular support, male and female
alike, during the Reign of Terror, it did not stop his supporters
or his opponents from continuing to associate his popularity with
women. Even on the night of 9 Thermidor II, after Robespierre’s
arrest, when the Paris Commune put out a call for insurrection to
Robespierre’s supporters, it reached out to the Jacobins, asking
them to send over reinforcements from the galleries, ‘even the
women who are regulars there’.101
The Commune’s call for insurrection was an ineffective one,
‘only heard by Robespierre’s enemies’, as Quinet put it.102 Still,
the ineffectiveness of the uprising did not stop the Thermidorians
from being concerned about Robespierre’s supporters, including
the women of the Jacobin club. On 11 Thermidor II the Dantonist
Legendre visited the club and announced that the Committee of
Public Safety (now purged of Robespierre and his two closest
allies) had joined the Committee of General Security in sending
a ‘fraternal invitation’ to the Jacobins asking that they rein in their
galleries. As he was leaving, he addressed the women in the gal-
leries directly with what he must have thought were words of
comfort: ‘You were misled’, he told them. ‘That’s all right. The
Convention punishes the crime, and not the error’.103 But the
club had already started its turn against the man who had led
them for so long, declaring that not only was Robespierre gone,
100
Jaurès, Histoire socialiste de la Révolution française, v, 487.
101
La Société des Jacobins, ed. Aulard, vi, 289.
102
Edgar Quinet, La Révolution, 2 vols. (Paris, 1987), ii, 684.
103
La Société des Jacobins, ed. Aulard, vi, 298. The original reads, ‘Vous étiez égar-
ées; allez, la Convention punit le crime, et non l’erreur’.
but gone, too, were ‘his infinite number of backbiters and espe-
cially women backbiters’.104
VIII
While Robespierre and the Montagnards were able to use
women’s support to rise to power and maintain that power,
their reign did not lead to major advances in women’s political
rights, at least as they are understood today. This should not be
surprising. While Robespierre had always had a large number of
female supporters, his politics contained nothing that would lead
anyone to think that he was a supporter of women’s rights. During
the Old Regime, he had made one statement in favour of women’s
participation in the practices of the Enlightenment, but he never
returned to those themes during the Revolution. While the bal-
ance sheet for the French Revolution is equivocal in regard to
women’s rights, those issues where women made gains (divorce
rights, in particular) were not Robespierre’s initiatives.105
The irony is that the Girondins’ politics were much more
favourable to women’s rights. The Girondin movement grew
in part out of the Cercle Social, a political club somewhat analo-
gous to Paris’s Jacobin club but that advocated women’s rights
and allowed women to be full members.106 Among prominent
female revolutionaries who advocated an increased role for
women, the most prominent were allies of the Girondins and
critical of Robespierre. Etta Palm d’Aelders had used the
Cercle Social’s headquarters to launch her attempt to organize
women’s patriotic societies across Paris.107 Olympe de Gouges,
who fought to link the Revolution with the progress of women’s
rights, called the Girondins ‘torches of liberty’ while suggesting
that Robespierre should ‘keep his word’ and take his own life for
the good of the nation.108 Théroigne de Méricourt, who earlier in
the Revolution had tried to organize ‘phalanxes of amazons’ to
104
Ibid., vi, 295–6. The translation is from McPhee, Robespierre, 222. The original
reads, ‘une infinité de clabaudeurs et encore plus de clabaudeuses’. The word clabau-
deur also refers to dogs who bark constantly without cause.
105
Suzanne Desan, The Family on Trial in Revolutionary France (Berkeley, 2004).
106
Gary Kates, The Cercle Social, the Girondins, and the French Revolution
(Princeton, 1985), 119.
107
Ibid., 124; Women in Revolutionary Paris, ed. Levy, Applewhite and Johnson, 62.
108
Olympe de Gouges, Réponse à la justification de Maximilien Robespierre, adressée à
Jérôme Pétion (Paris, 1792), 8, 13; Martin, La Révolte brisée, 97.
fight for Revolution, became a strong supporter of the Girondins,

earning herself the enmity of the women who supported the
Montagnards.109 The Girondins were also unique among major
factions in the Revolution in having a woman, Madame Roland,
play a leading role. Though not an advocate of women’s rights per
se, she played a far more prominent role in politics than any
woman allied with Robespierre. Finally, Condorcet had argued
that women should enjoy full rights of citizenship.110
If female activism during the Revolution had been aimed at
improving women’s political rights, the Girondins would have
been the more likely choice. In the debates between the
Montagnards and the Girondins, however, while individual
prominent women supported the Girondins, the mass of politic-
ally active women in Paris supported the Montagnards. The
attempts by de Gouges, Théroigne de Méricourt, and d’Aelders
to start women’s groups all failed, their attempts supported by
only a small number of women primarily from the wealthier
classes. Robespierre’s support from women, however, cut
across social classes, from the women of the lower classes who
surrounded Robespierre at the closing of the Constituent
Assembly, to the wealthier women who attended meetings at
the Jacobins, to former members of the aristocracy.111
IX
Why, then, did women choose to support the Montagnards over
the Girondins? Why, in particular, did so many women support
Robespierre? Lacking a politics that advocated women’s interests,
or the charisma of a Mirabeau or a Danton, Robespierre was an
unlikely choice. And Mathiez’s explanation for why women were
attracted to him — ‘Women knew instinctively that he would give
himself completely, the day he gave himself. He would only love
once, and his love would be chaste’ — seems at best implausible.112
109
In May 1793 those women surrounded her when she was walking near the
Convention, accused her of supporting the Girondins and whipped her. This was
the end of Théroigne de Méricourt’s political career. Roudinesco, Théroigne de
Méricourt, 92, 137.
110
[Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat, marquis de] Condorcet, ‘Sur l’admis-
sion des femmes au droit de cité’, at 5http://www2.cndp.fr/laicite/pdf/condorcet_
femmes.pdf4(accessed 2 Dec. 2013).
111
See Dingli, Robespierre, 179, 433.
112
Mathiez, Girondins et Montagnards, 25.
Condorcet himself proposed two possible explanations for
Robespierre’s success. When in 1787 he argued that women
should be full citizens with the right to vote, Condorcet wrote,
‘I am afraid women will be angry with me, if they ever read this
piece . . . Ever since Rousseau earned their approval by stating
that women were only made to take care of us and to torment us, I
cannot hope to gain their support’.113
Jean-Jacques Rousseau was, as Condorcet realized, both a
critic of women’s rights and a favourite of many French women
of the era.114 This female adoration, like the support that Robes-
pierre received during the Revolution, can seem strange from a
modern perspective. Rousseau criticized women who partici-
pated in politics, writing that men should be ‘active and strong’,
women ‘passive and weak’.115 Such theories have earned him the
criticism of feminist writers since Mary Wollstonecraft, and scho-
lars arguing that the Revolution excluded women from politics
have seen Rousseau’s inspiration as one of the causes.116 Rous-
seau’s popularity with the women of the eighteenth century has
never been in doubt, though, and it would seem plausible to link
Robespierre’s popularity with women to Rousseau’s. There was
more than a touch of Rousseau in Robespierre’s politics. His
invocation of ‘the lessons of maternal love’ during his speech
against the war, in particular, invoked Rousseau’s views on the
importance of mothers in raising virtuous citizens.117
113
[Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat, marquis de] Condorcet, Œuvres de
Condorcet, ed. A. Condorcet O’Connor and M. F. Arago, 12 vols. (Paris, 1847), ix,
20. See also Mary Seidman Trouille, Sexual Politics in the Enlightenment: Women Writers
Read Rousseau (Albany, 1997), 3.
114
Trouille, Sexual Politics in the Enlightenment, 3.
115
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Émile: or, On Education, ed. and trans. Christopher
Kelly and Allan Bloom (Hanover, NH, 2010), 532.
116
Mary Wollstonecraft, AVindication of the Rights of Woman (London, 1992), 104–
16; Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution, 68–71;
Hunt, Family Romance of the French Revolution, 97–8; Hufton, Women and the Limits of
Citizenship in the French Revolution, 4–5. Carol Blum, Rousseau and the Republic of
Virtue: The Language of Politics in the French Revolution (Ithaca, 1986), highlights the
influence of Rousseau on the revolutionaries’ exclusion of women from politics, as, in
her own way, does Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the
French Enlightenment (Ithaca, 1994).
117
The quotation is discussed above, and in Michelet, Histoire de la Révolution
française, i, 669. For links between Robespierre and Rousseau, see Robespierre,
Œuvres complètes, ed. Bouloiseau et al., viii, 179; McPhee, Robespierre, 25; Michelet,
Histoire de la Révolution française, i, 684; ii, 758; and the comments by Dubois-Crancé
in Robespierre vu par ses contemporains, ed. Jacob, 83. For recent scholarship
on Rousseau, see Helena Rosenblatt, ‘On the ‘‘Misogyny’’ of Jean-Jacques
(cont. on p. 154)
There are problems with giving too much explanatory power to

Robespierre’s Rousseauism, however. Though Rousseau’s influ-
ence can help explain women’s motivation to take part in the
political process as much as any text can, it still leaves the question
why it was that Robespierre was the beneficiary of their partici-
pation. Rousseau’s influence cut across many political divides of
the French Revolution, and countless revolutionaries considered
themselves followers of Rousseau. If Robespierre was able to
attract followers of either sex by parroting Rousseau, it raises
the question why other Rousseauist politicians did not have simi-
lar success. Claude Fauchet and Madame Roland, for example,
were both prominent Rousseauists as well as opponents of
Robespierre and victims of Robespierre and the Montagnards.118
Condorcet’s second explanation came in his November 1792
rant against Robespierre (quoted at the start of this article), in
which he wrote that ‘Robespierre is nothing but a priest and will
never be anything but a priest’.119 Another Girondin, Rabaut de
Saint-Étienne, seconded Condorcet’s sentiments, saying, ‘What
a man this Robespierre is, with all his women! He is a priest who
wishes to be God’.120
The claim that Robespierre was priestly was not unusual. Even
today there are aspects of his politics that seem appropriate for a
cleric. The speech on political morality he made in February 1794
brought into the political sphere moral concerns that had long
occupied clerical writers, as seen in his claim that ‘that which is
immoral is impolitic, that which corrupts is counter-revolution-
ary’.121 At the Festival of the Supreme Being, he played such a
(n. 117 cont.)

Rousseau: The Letter to d’Alembert in Historical Context’, French Historical Studies,
xxv, 1 (2002), 91; Jennifer J. Popiel, Rousseau’s Daughters: Domesticity, Education, and
Autonomy in Modern France (Durham, NH, 2008), 3, 46; Trouille, Sexual Politics in
the Enlightenment, 45.
118
See the discussion in Marisa Linton, The Politics of Virtue in Enlightenment France
(Basingstoke, 2001), 211.
119
Chronique de Paris, no. 317 (6 Nov. 1792), 1254.
120
Quoted in Dingli, Robespierre, 431. Unlike Condorcet’s quotation, which ap-
peared in print, there is no direct print record of Rabaut de Saint-Étienne’s quotation,
though it has generally been accepted. See also Vilate, Causes secretes de la journée du 9
au 19 Thermidor an II; suivies des Mystères de la mère de Dieu dévoilés, troisième parie des
causes secrètes de la révolution du 9 au 10 thermidor, par Vilate, ex-juré au tribunal révolu-
tionnaire de Paris, détenu (Paris, 1825), 311; Fleischmann, Robespierre and the Women
He Loved, 167.
121
Robespierre, Œuvres complètes, ed. Bouloiseau et al., x, 354.
prominent role that one deputy complained that ‘it’s not enough
for him to be master, he has to be God’.122 Robespierre railed
against the de-Christianization movement, which he found coun-
terproductive, and against atheism, which he considered ‘aristo-
cratic’.123 He spoke on several occasions of ‘providence’, including
during a speech made in 1792 which he would hear other Jacobins
refer to as a capucinade, a speech worthy of a Capuchin monk.124
The austerity (and in all probability celibacy) of Robespierre’s per-
sonal life also lent itself to comparison with priests.125
It is worth pointing out, though, that many genuine clerics
played key roles in the Revolution. There were true believers,
like Grégoire, Gobel and Fauchet, who had gone on to be bishops
in the Constitutional Church. There were former careerist clerics
with little if any faith, including the abbé Sieyes, who had led the
call for a National Assembly and would later help bring Napoleon
to power; Talleyrand, the Old Regime bishop who would serve
France even after Napoleon had fallen; and Chabot, a Dantonist
and a former Capuchin monk who had fathered a child with his
housekeeper. These were just some of the most prominent clerical
deputies. To have Robespierre singled out as priestly among this
crowd of actual priests is therefore telling, as is the matter-of-fact
way in which Condorcet and Rabaut de Saint-Étienne made the
link between being a priest and having a large number of female
followers. In doing so, they were drawing on concerns about the
power that priests had over female parishioners that pre-dated the
Revolution but which had become particularly salient in the after-
math of the Revolution’s passage of the Civil Constitution of the
Clergy in 1790.126 That law sparked widespread popular oppos-
ition to the French Revolution in which women played key
roles.127 By 1793 that opposition had grown into full-scale civil
war in the Vendée region of western France.
122
Doyle, Oxford History of the French Revolution, 277.
123
Robespierre, Œuvres complètes, ed. Bouloiseau et al., x, 194–201. See also
Robespierre, ed. Rudé, 123.
124
La Société des Jacobins, ed. Aulard, iv, 699–700; Robespierre, Œuvres complètes,
ed. Bouloiseau et al., viii, 233–41.
125
See Robespierre, Mémoires, 68; Dingli, Robespierre, 53.
126
For the Old Regime, see John McManners, Church and Society in Eighteenth-
Century France, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1998), ii, 259–60, 777 n. 84.
127
Jean-Clément Martin, Contre-révolution, révolution et nation en France, 1789–
1799 (Paris, 1998), 86–96; Donald Sutherland, The Chouans: The Social Origins of
Popular Counter-Revolution in Upper Brittany, 1770–1796 (Oxford, 1982), 256–7.
More recent accounts have not questioned women’s partici-

pation in the opposition to the Civil Constitution of the
Clergy. Unlike the women who supported Robespierre, coun-
ter-revolutionary women did not disappear from twentieth-
century accounts, though historians have been increasingly
critical of the view that women, or anyone, were ‘malleable clay
in the hands of clergy’.128 These accounts have also been less
dismissive of women’s motives, with Hufton seeing their actions
as ‘an expression of community solidarity’.129 Partisans of
the Revolution, though, saw women’s allegiance to counter-
revolutionary priests as a threat. As one Republican army officer
told his soldiers, ‘lying priests whose dogma is falsehood . . .
whose empire is founded upon the credulity of women. These
are the enemy’.130
For Robespierre’s rivals in Paris, the idea of an ‘empire founded
upon the credulity of women’ would have seemed an apt descrip-
tion of Robespierre’s own tactics.131 There is a parallel, then,
between how Robespierre’s revolutionary opponents understood
his success and the gendered and clerical terms they used to de-
scribe the Counter-Revolution. In both cases, they portrayed
their opposition as a crowd of women ‘misled’ by manipulative
male leaders. This parallel is clearest in the case of Isnard.
Eighteen months before he accused the Montagnards of ‘mislead-
ing . . . that credulous portion of the people . . . so easy to
seduce’,132 he had called for stricter restrictions against any
priest who disturbed the public order, as ‘his ministry furnishes
him the most numerous and the most powerful means to seduce
128
Timothy Tackett, Religion, Revolution, and Regional Culture in Eighteenth-
Century France: The Ecclesiastical Oath of 1791 (Princeton, 1986), 165.
129
Quoted in Hufton, Women and the Limits of Citizenship in the French Revolution,
130. See also Tackett, Religion, Revolution, and Regional Culture in Eighteenth-Century
France, 171, 175. Martin notes that ‘paradoxically . . . counter-revolutionary women
obtained a more durable and effective recognition’ than women who supported the
Revolution: Martin, La Révolte brisée, 107–8, 122–4. See also Jean-Clément Martin,
Blancs et bleus dans la Vendée déchirée (Paris, 1986), 130–3; Jean-Clément Martin,
‘Femmes et guerre civile, l’éxemple de la Vendée, 1793–1796’, Clio: femmes, genre,
histoire, v (1997); Nigel Aston, Religion and Revolution in France, 1780–1804
(Washington, DC, 2000), 235. For more classic accounts, see Michelet, Histoire de
la Révolution française, esp. ii, bk 8, ch. 2; de La Gorce, Histoire religieuse de la Révolution
française, ii, 130, 145, 206.
130
Quoted in Aston, Religion and Revolution in France, 269.
131
See Louvet’s remarks in Archives parlementaires, ed. Mavidal and Laurent,
lvii, 53.
132
Ibid., lxv, 43.
and mislead the people’.133 That Robespierre can still seem
priestly in the twenty-first century, then, does not mean that his
contemporaries meant the same thing that we would when they
called Robespierre a priest.134 For contemporaries, it was not
because Robespierre acted priestly that he had female support;
rather, because he had female support he appeared priestly.
If priestliness was a result of Robespierre’s female supporters
and not a cause, it means that Condorcet has not provided as
much of an explanation for Robespierre’s female support as it
seemed. The lack of direct testimony from Robespierre’s sup-
porters does not help matters. But tracing Robespierre’s own
behaviour can help explain why seeking women’s support made
sense for him. And there the answer might not be that compli-
cated or mysterious: Robespierre appealed to women because he
tried to appeal to women.
One small clue to this approach comes from the statement that
Robespierre had made in 1787 in favour of the admission of
women to the academy of his native Arras. For Robespierre,
women could contribute to the ‘glory of learned societies’ not
only by their intelligence, but ‘above all by their presence . . .
The desire and the hope to excite women’s interest and
133
Ibid., xxv, 66.
134
The view of Robespierre as priestly has enjoyed a surprising degree of unanimity
among historians. Carlyle described Robespierre as the ‘chief priest’ of the Jacobin
club (as well as ‘prophet’ and ‘Pontiff’). Taine used the terms ‘pontiff’, ‘cult leader’
(séctaire) and ‘inquisitor’. Michelet referred to him in many different clerical guises,
including ‘priest’, ‘pontiff’ and ‘inquisitor’. Jaurès was more sympathetic, acknowl-
edging that Robespierre ‘had some priest in him’, including a ‘tyrannical habit of
judging’, but seeing in him also an ‘exceptional moral probity’. By the time Jaurès
wrote, this portrayal of Robespierre as priestly was losing the gendered sense that
Condorcet and Rabaut de Saint-Étienne (himself a Calvinist pastor) gave it.
Carlyle, French Revolution, 451, 728–9; Taine, Les Origines de la France contemporaine,
vii, 237, 238, 266; Michelet, Histoire de la Révolution française, i, 684; ii, 168, 371, 547,
795, 807; Jaurès, Histoire socialiste de la Révolution française, iii, 372. For more recent
accounts, see J. M. Thompson, who, while ignoring Robespierre’s female followers,
referred to Robespierre as a ‘conscientious Inquisitor’, or Furet, who noted
Robespierre’s ‘priestly language’ and ‘doctrinal purity’, adding that ‘the guillotine
was fed by his moral preachings’: Thompson, Robespierre, 588; François Furet,
Interpreting the French Revolution, trans. Elborg Foster (Cambridge, 1981), 59;
Furet, Revolutionary France, 145, 146. McPhee downplays Robespierre’s priestliness,
while noting Robespierre’s view of himself as a martyr and his contemporaries’ view
that he had acted as the pontiff of the Festival of the Supreme Being: McPhee,
Robespierre, 197, 205. Scurr describes Robespierre at that festival as a ‘kind of high
priest’: Scurr, Fatal Purity, 8, 326. Jordan is a rare dissenter, writing that the ‘malicious
view of him as a priest . . . is metaphorically striking but not accurate’: Jordan,
Revolutionary Career of Maximilien Robespierre, 195.
admiration’ would inspire the men in the academy to greater

heights than they would have reached in a male-only academy.
There is, then, an element of continuity in Robespierre’s ap-
proach. He had argued in Arras that men would strive to impress
women in the academy; in Paris he would strive to impress the
women in the audience.135
That was not, however, the most important reason why he tried
to appeal to women, and his silence on the issue after his inter-
vention in 1787 (or before, for that matter) said more about the
importance that women’s issues had for Robespierre than did his
one writing on the topic. It makes more sense to see his popularity
with women as the result of a contingent strategy. In other words,
Robespierre tried to appeal to women because in the early days of
the Revolution, when he had tried to appeal to men, he had failed.
Again, his early speeches at the Estates-General and the Consti-
tuent Assembly were poorly received, and at times openly
mocked. The positions for which he argued lost: he opposed
the division between active and passive citizens and the death
sentence, yet both became law; he argued for priests to be able
to marry and was laughed at.136 His one legislative achievement
during the Constituent Assembly — a law that made all deputies
ineligible for seats in the forthcoming Legislative Assembly —
would come back to hurt him during the debates over the war
when he was not able to address the legislature.137 But like many
revolutionaries, Robespierre was a determined man. As he
became aware of his popularity with the women who listened to
him speak at the legislature or at the Jacobin club, he shifted his
focus and cultivated their support. Given how this tactic evolved,
there was no reason for Robespierre to embrace issues that were
considered women’s issues at the time, let alone issues considered
women’s issues today. He had already gathered women’s support,
and had no need to embrace issues that risked alienating the men
in the audience more than he already had.
135
Sepinwall, ‘Robespierre, Old Regime Feminist?’, 26; Œuvres de Maximilien
Robespierre, ed. Florent Gauthier, xi, Compléments, 1784–1794 (Paris, 2007), 193, 197.
136
Robespierre, Œuvres complètes, ed. Bouloiseau et al., iv, 160–74, 432–7; vi, 387.
137
Shapiro, ‘Self-Sacrifice, Self-Interest, or Self-Defense?’, 655.
X
When Marat died in July 1793, his funeral was a major event. A
large, and largely female, procession followed his coffin through
the streets of Paris, and the bathtub in which he was stabbed was
brought out for people to see.138 Robespierre’s death a year later
would be quite different. Mourning took place in private; the
streets were ruled by those celebrating his death. His supporters
were mostly silent, with nearly a hundred Robespierrists executed
in Paris and countless more fearing the same fate. Some of his sup-
porters had themselves tired of the Terror. Meanwhile, the trad-
ition of popular activism that had radicalized the Revolution so
often since 1789 had been mostly quiet since the Montagnard
government began to rein it in during the autumn of 1793.
Popular activism, including female activism, would for the
most part continue its decline in the coming years. There would
be two revivals during the Thermidorian era, in April and May
1795 (Germinal and Prairial III). In both cases, crowds of women
and men descended on the Convention from the eastern neigh-
bourhoods and suburbs of Paris. During the events of May 1795,
the crowd that entered the Convention went further than any of
the earlier crowds had, killing a deputy in the Convention and
parading his head on a pike. These events, however, did not have
the impact that popular violence had had earlier in the
Revolution. The links between the people and the politicians —
the terrain on which Robespierre excelled — no longer existed.
The earlier leaders were all dead, and no new leaders had risen up
to take their place.139 The Jacobin club had already been closed in
November 1794, and in the aftermath of the riots the Convention
took steps to limit protests further. The Convention would soon
close its galleries to women, and even briefly attempted to impose
limits on women’s gatherings throughout Paris.140 The dynamic
of French politics was changing. Indeed, if there is a time to date
the exclusion of women from politics, it is from Thermidor, al-
though here too it was part of a wider attack on popular politics.
138
Guilhaumou, La Mort de Marat, 51–64.
139
Quinet, La Révolution, ii, bk 20, chs. 2–3; Georges Lefebvre, The French
Revolution from 1793–1799, trans. John Hall Stewart and James Friguglietti
(London, 1964), 145.
140
See the discussion in Godineau, Women of Paris and their French Revolution,
354, 363.
Though Robespierre’s female supporters largely disappeared

from political life in the aftermath of his death, they would con-
tinue to play a major role in accounts of the Revolution for some
time. As discussed above, they were a standard feature of studies
of Robespierre and histories of the Revolution through much of
the nineteenth century. The portraits that emerge of these women
are often disagreeable. From Edmund Burke’s ‘unutterable
abominations of the furies of hell’141 to the Girondin Lehardy’s
‘dregs of their sex’ and Charles Dickens’s Madame Defarge, the
image of the radical women arrived, more often than not,
wrapped in a thick coat of misogyny. Getting past that misogyny
was the first step in any reassessment of the role that gender
played in the unfolding of the French Revolution.
The next step is to understand what role women and questions
of gender played in the French Revolution. Robespierre was a key
part of that story. As his opponents knew well, Robespierre had
a strong base of support among the women of Paris. He had
adjusted his style in order to gain that support, which in turn
gave him an advantage in his battles with political rivals. At key
moments in his career — during the Constituent Assembly when
the other deputies would not pay attention to Robespierre, during
the debates over the war, after Louvet’s accusations, and during
the fighting between the Montagnards and the Girondins —
women were among Robespierre’s most vocal and visible
supporters. His rise to power shows how women took advantage
of new opportunities to take part in the political process during
the French Revolution. These were not women who were
excluded from politics. The failure to take Robespierre’s female
followers into account shows the shortcomings of recent feminist
and post-feminist histories of the Revolution. That these women
were not questioning eighteenth-century gender roles may
disqualify them as heroines or martyrs of a past age. It does not
disqualify them from a place in the histories of Robespierre and
the French Revolution.
Chinese University of Hong Kong Noah C. Shusterman
141
Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. L. G. Mitchell
(Oxford, 1993), 72.

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ALL OF HIS POWER LIES IN THE

DISTAFF: ROBESPIERRE, WOMEN AND

Robespierre asked, dismissing what he saw as exaggerated views

Portrayals of Robespierre as a man ‘surrounded by his de-

early twentieth century, he still had to respond to the traditional

The recent silence is puzzling as historiographical trends of the

politics, attending meetings was part of their political participa-

Constitution as ‘this virgin, once a shining celestial beauty’.57

known to maintain, that the voice of the speaker is drowned, and

upon themselves to keep the Girondins’ supporters out of the

Marat’s death, like the expulsion of the Girondins, increased

fight for Revolution, became a strong supporter of the Girondins,

There are problems with giving too much explanatory power to

(n. 117 cont.)

More recent accounts have not questioned women’s partici-

admiration’ would inspire the men in the academy to greater

Though Robespierre’s female supporters largely disappeared

Chinese University of Hong Kong Noah C. Shusterman

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