Free Liberty: The Lives and Times of Six Women in Revolutionary France by Lucy Moore

fatherland in danger’.

O NE WOMAN popularly thought to have been willing to shed her own blood on behalf of the fatherland, as Pauline Léon hoped to, was the former courtesan Théroigne de Méricourt. Although she was mentioned only five times, in contradictory reports, in the nearly four hundred official depositions on the women’s march to Versailles in October 1789, Théroigne was described again and again by nineteenth-century historians of the revolution as having been at the vanguard of the mob storming the palace, astride a jet-black charger and dressed in a riding-habit ‘the colour of blood’, with her sabre unsheathed – as the poet Baudelaire later put it, ‘ amante de carnage ’. For these romantics, she represented all that was most savage and most noble about the revolution: passionate and untamed, and ultimately crushed by the forces she had helped unleash. Michelet called her ‘the fatal beauty of the revolution’, ‘ la belle, vaillante, infortunée Liégoise ’; and so she was, although he exaggerated most of the facts of her life.
    Anne-Josèphe Terwagne (or Théroigne) was born into a family of prosperous peasants in 1762 in Marcourt (or Méricourt) near Liège, in the Ardennes region of the Low Countries, at the time just over the French border in Austria. Anne-Josèphe’s childhood was a desperately unhappy one. Her mother died when she was five, and the little girl was initially sent to live with an aunt in Liège, a hundred kilometres from her home, where her two younger brothers remained. The aunt sent her to a convent to learn dressmaking, but soon stopped paying Anne-Josèphe’s keep there and took her in as a maid, treating her cruelly. Anne-Josèphe returned home when her father remarried, but her stepmother, busy with children of her own, did not make her welcome; her father’s fortunes were also declining rapidly.

    At thirteen, Anne-Josèphe sent one of her brothers to one branch of her mother’s family and she and her other brother went to live with her mother’s parents. Again she found herself unloved, forced to do heavy work, the victim of injustice and neglect. She returned to her aunt’s, but received the same ill-treatment as before, and ran away once more.
    This time she set out alone, working as a cowherd and then as a nursemaid before finding a post as companion to a woman in Anvers. Mme Colbert was the first person to show the sixteen-year-old Anne-Josèphe any kindness. She taught her to write, encouraged her to read, and arranged for her to study singing and the pianoforte, at first so that she could accompany her daughter and then because she showed talent. In an atmosphere of affection and comfort, Anne-Josèphe blossomed, and dreamed of a glorious musical career.
    When she was twenty, a young English army officer seduced her and then reneged on his promise to marry her when he came of age, instead making her his mistress and living with her between London and Paris. He did provide well for her, giving her 10,000 louis which she invested carefully, but, in the language of the day, she was ruined, and could no longer hope for marriage and respectability. For the next few years Anne-Josèphe lived uneasily, as her modern biographer puts it, ‘suspended between literary bohemianism, polite society and moral degradation’. Although she knew she would never change her lover’s libertine ways, their liaison continued; she was also kept in some style by the rich, elderly and unpleasant marquis de Persan, whose advances she later insisted she had evaded. She called herself Mlle Campinado, after a branch of her mother’s family, and regularly attended the opera alone, ‘covered in diamonds, in a large box’.
    Her air of melancholy mystery was not contrived. She gave birth to a daughter, whom her English lover refused to acknowledge and who died in 1788 of smallpox. An affair with an Italian tenor ended badly; then she fell in love with another Italian singer, a