Chapter 131: Omake: Do Your Hear the Women Sing?

AN: We all know who wrote this great piece 

Thanks again to @sparkptz

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Excerpted from “Arise, Children of the Fatherland!: The First Coalition War”

The Republican summer campaign of 1791

Lyon transformed the entire complexion of the war. From a position merely three months before that looked like it was steadily proceeding towards a total victory for the Royalist armies, Lyon now rendered Louis’ long-term strategic position in France close to indefensible. The lower Rhône Valley was now vulnerable, forcing Louis to drain other armies of troops and resources to ensure its security, and once the Republicans gained the initiative in the southeast they did not let it go. The war had a long course to run, but the royalists would never again push as far north as they had in February 1791.

The Army of the Rhône was in not much of a fit shape to exploit its success in the immediate aftermath of Lyon, of course, and attempts through July and August 1791 to retake Valence were rebuffed by the reinforced Royalist armies in the area. However, Lyon was never seriously threatened by Royalist forces again, plugging the largest and most dangerous hole in the Republic’s defenses. Condé, having now lost three battles in a row against Murat, lost favor in the royal court and was replaced. However, this did not improve royalist fortunes in the southeast.

The situation for Louis in the southwest was, if anything, even more dangerous for the King. Having pushed the Royalist army under the Comte de Provence away from Bordeaux, Lafayette ordered the Republican army in the area reorganized into a single Army of Aquitaine under the most exceptional officer of the Bordeaux fighting: Jean-Baptiste Jourdan. Unusually amongst the French officer corps of the formal army — especially amongst those not from Paris — Jourdan was an outspoken supporter of the Mountain, which caused more than a few ruffled feathers in the Gironde when word reached the Assembly of Lafayette’s choice. He was, however, manifestly a brilliant commander, and would prove as such over not just the First but Second Coalition Wars.

Jourdan soon put any queries about the appropriateness of his appointment to rest by taking his newly-reorganized army of ten thousand regulars and ten thousand National Guard and conducting a superb summer campaign in the southwest of France. Winning a string of tactically brilliant victories over the course of July and August, he approached the problem of massive casualty rates exposed by Mâcon and Lyon in a completely different, though complementary, way to Murat. Emphasizing surprise and movement, Jourdan would only modestly engage the main body of an enemy force, seeking only to hold it in place. The main thrust of his attack would be against supply trains, routes of retreat and weak points in the enemy line. Rather than killing the enemy outright, or reducing casualty rates using defensive fortifications, Jourdan’s philosophy was to unbalance and disorient the enemy force, winning the battle with as few casualties as possible. “Audacity”, he wrote of his philosophy of battle, “is our protection,”, echoing Danton’s famous invocation of 15 November 1789. By September 1791, Jourdan had pushed the royalists all the way back to Toulouse, and he had retaken the city by early October. By then, however, Louis had been reinforced by yet more mercenaries and levied men, and a planned campaign to push all the way to Montpellier was postponed once spy reports revealed that Jourdan was severely outnumbered and needed to regroup. With Toulouse firmly in Republican hands, both sides took winter quarters, but it was clear who had the upper hand in the southwest.

The royalists fared best in the centre, but this did not mean they fared well. A third attempt to take Clermont-Ferrand failed in June 1791, and it would be the last the royalists would manage. The Republicans were led by a Girondist noble named Charles-François Dumouriez. A capable and popular organizer of troops, Dumouriez was able to put together an army of thirty thousand by July 1791 and commence his own summer campaign. However, Dumouriez did not have either the innovative skill of Murat or the impetuosity of Jourdan, and fighting soon became bogged down in the difficult, mountainous country of the Massif Central. The lines of battle stabilized by November around Saint-Flour, with neither side having the strength or the inclination to renew offensive campaigns in rugged highland terrain with winter setting in.

The women of the National Guard

The victories through the summer of 1791 were much-needed ones for the Gironde, not just militarily but politically too. The political standing of Brissot and the other Girondin leaders had deteriorated badly the previous winter; their bellicosity had been severely discredited by Lafayette’s intervention as well as the disasters of the previous December and January. Down the line, very few would publicly admit that they had ever opposed Robespierre’s now-obvious argument that starting a war with all of Europe when the domestic military situation was in such dire straits was a terrible idea. This was even more true when the war with Europe would actually get underway a year later, and everyone could see first hand just how difficult such a war would become. The Mountain, however, had not forgotten and had made great political hay out of that fact through the first months of 1791.

More worrying — and necessitating more direct intervention by Lafayette — had been whispers of an armed uprising to overthrow the Girondin ministry and maybe, just maybe, Lafayette himself, had begun to circulate in Paris through January 1791. Brissot had wanted Lafayette to crack down hard on such schemes and make an example of them, but Lafayette had chosen a different — and in hindsight superbly astute — option. When a large mob crowded the square in front of the Hotel de Ville in late January demanding that France be purged of traitors, Lafayette walked out in front of them — showing no small amount of personal courage in doing so — and simply told them that yes, they were right, the enemies of the Revolution and the Republic had to be crushed. What was more, he invited them to personally do so — at the front. A new Army of the Rhône is going to retake Lyon, he told them, go join up and he will take you, no questions asked. Seizing on the opening Lafayette had given them, a pronouncement encouraging all the citizenry of Paris to join the Army of the Rhône was rammed through by the Girondins that same afternoon.

Thousands had done so so. Yet thousands more did so after Mâcon, swelling the ranks of the Army of the Rhône to the large size Murat felt would be needed to take Lyon — correctly so — and, more importantly from Lafayette and the Girondin ministry’s point of view, getting many of the most radical individuals of the Paris sections out of Paris itself. Without anyone really noticing what he had just done, the danger of radical insurrection from the Paris Commune was adroitly defused and was nullified entirely after the victory at Lyon. It would be well over a year before any real danger of an armed insurrection rose once more in the restive districts of Paris.

Those three simple words “no questions asked”, however, created a new and deeper political problem for the Gironde even as it solved their immediate ones, and eventually rise to the first serious split inside the Gironde as the “left-Girondins” began to coalesce. For, as we now know, amongst those who took “no questions asked” literally were several hundred women, the most famous of whom would obviously be Charlotte Corday. They fought alongside their surprised and bewildered male comrades-in-arms at Lyon, serving with distinction and at times extreme bravery — if not quite the same dramatic flair of Corday — and the roll of honor of the Republican fallen in Lyon includes the names of a hundred and forty-six women.

The story of women in the French National Guard, however, could easily have ended there. Whilst those women already in the Army were allowed to stay, at the overwhelming demand of the enlisted National Guard troops, the “no questions asked,” policy was quickly halted, “are you a woman” now being one of the few tests re-instituted to bar entry to the Army of the Rhône. Corday instantly became a hero of the first order to the soldiers of the Army of the Rhône (the irony of a Girondin true believer becoming the hero of the most radical Army in France was not lost on her) and she was quickly elected by her the men of her battalion as high as Captain, becoming the first female officer in the Republic. Before long there would be others to follow in her footsteps, particularly in those battalions where Monatagnardin ideals held the strongest sway.

However, she was still officially Charles Corday on the rolls, and so that was the story officially told by the Assembly and the army through the summer of 1791. It could easily have remained that way too; in the still deeply Catholic nation, many were appalled by even the suggestion that women would find themselves in the muck, blood and gore of a battlefield, and even quite liberal politicians shuddered at the thought of beautiful young ladies like Corday being killed in battle. Rumors as to what had transpired at Lyon, and that “Charles Corday” was in fact a young woman did excite gossip throughout the country, but most gave them little weight. While those in the Society of 1789 did in many cases knew perfectly well who this “Charles” Corday was whose flag was rapidly becoming a symbol of the Republic, having met and argued with Charlotte in Madame Roland’s salon through the previous winter, most were more than happy to continue with this transparent fiction. Corday and the women of the National Guard thus needed a patron to protect them from the traditionalist Assembly and to tell their story. They found one in, of all people, a zealous Montagnardin officer named Louis-Antoine de Saint-Just.

Saint-Just

Louis-Antoine de Saint-Just was born to a retired cavalry officer in central France in 1767. A promising but obviously rebellious child from an early age, his childhood is most known for a famous although the apocryphal story that he had drummed up a students’ rebellion and attempted to burn down his school. Whatever the truth of this event, Saint-Just entered adulthood a wild and transgressive young man, but his focus soon turned to that of virtually all young men: a woman, in this case, named Thérèse Gellé. However, any budding courtship — and from all accounts, both were enthusiastic about the relationship — was cut off when Thèrése was married off by her powerful and influential father to the son of a prominent local family while Saint-Just was out of town. Heartbroken and disgusted by the entire turn of events, he began a fascination with literature, turning as so many did in the 1780s to the Roman classics and the best of Enlightenment thought.

When the Revolution hit in early 1789, Saint-Just was an instant and full-blooded convert and joined the Blérancourt National Guard the next day. A zealous true believer in the cause of liberté, égalité and fraternité and a borderline-ruthless disciplinarian, he steadily ascended the ranks until, by the end of 1790, he had reached the rank of lieutenant-colonel in the National Guard. When Lafayette made his famous “no questions asked” call for all who were willing to join Murat’s army, Saint-Just wasted no time in taking his unit to Mâcon. It was there that he met Charlotte Corday for the first time.

It is unlikely that the pair got off to a good start, despite both admitting later that they were drawn to each other straight away. Saint-Just was an increasingly committed Montagnard, being enamored with the speeches of Robespierre and Danton and the writings of Desmoulins and Marat. Corday was, of course, a paid-up member of the Society of 1789, and truly hated Marat. It is highly unlikely that agreed on anything relating to matters of constitutional governance or the proper course of the Revolution. They did, however, agree on at least one very important thing: the political status of women in Republican France was unacceptable. The two were soon exchanging letters on how to improve this one vital failing of the Revolution (and likely arguing about everything else).

Any lingering doubts about the complete correctness of Corday’s call for total equality without exception between the sexes in Saint-Just’s mind were obliterated by the Battle of Lyon. Whilst he expressed shock that Corday had been the one to personally lead the charge across the bridge at royalist muskets — the two were by now rather close — he was not surprised, and it served to be an object lesson in Corday’s point: the equality of the sexes was not a radical proposition (and a good thing too, for Corday disdained radicalism) but a reasonable one, rooted in liberty, rationality, and objective reality. In this, she had been finally joined by many of the other women of the Army, many of whom had been reluctant to accept political equality as a cause worth fighting for. Most of them had wound up under Saint-Just’s command — although not Corday herself — as many hailed from the Aisne region themselves and he was clearly the most welcoming, least hostile senior officer to their presence in the Army. When the news that the Assembly had effectively erased Corday’s and by extension all of their contributions and sacrifices during the battle, they were outraged, and looked to Saint-Just, their commanding officer, to rectify the situation.

In September they found their opportunity. By then, Murat’s attempts to take Valence had clearly failed, and he decided that with his main strategic objective complete, now was the time to set up early winter quarters in Lyon and allow his soldiers some long-overdue home leave. Corday, Saint-Just, and the women of the National Guard, however, did not go home. Instead, Saint-Just took the battalion to Paris, and there the women of the National Guard dropped a bombshell on the Republic...

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Excerpt from: "The Barricades and the Rostrum: Corday, de Gouges, Méricourt and the beginning of Revolutionary Feminism"

Les Defenseurs de l'Égalité

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By autumn 1791, the first stirrings of the revolutionary feminist movement Corday had tried to whip up a year earlier were evident. A mixture of writers, journalists and playwrights, largely drawn from the ranks of the Jacobin Club and the left flank of the Gironde had begun circulating petitions and pamphlets in the summer of 1791 calling for increased rights for women. Most outspoken amongst them — with Corday out of Paris — were the playwright Olympe de Gouges and the singer Thérogine de Méricourt. Both were members of the Society of 1789 and early examples of the so-called “left-Girondins”, intensely patriotic (Méricourt, in particular, had a deep and personal hatred for the King, having been smeared throughout 1789 by royalist press as a rabble-rousing harlot) but also intensely committed to advancing the cause of women in France.

In July the pair created a private society called “The Defenders of Equality”, likely the first revolutionary feminist club in Europe. Indeed in society’s first pamphlet, they would outline the defining sentence of revolutionary feminism: “no revolution in the name of liberty and equality is complete or just until women have secured both”. Although the Defenders of Equality were careful to keep their membership hidden and would never hold public meetings, they would soon find amongst their membership some surprisingly high-profile figures: Brissot, Condorcet, Danton, and, known only to de Gouges and Méricourt, funded personally by Lafayette. It would be this secretive group of pamphleteers and petitioners that Corday, Saint-Just, and the women of the National Guard would turn to upon their return to Paris in mid-September 1791.

Their plan was simple: Saint-Just would write up the full story of the women of the National Guard, and they would reveal the truth simultaneously to a meeting of the Society of 1789 and to the Jacobin Club. As proof, Méricourt and Corday would unveil the original bloodstained Corday tricolor, which she had been permitted to keep by her superior officers under threat of full-blown mutiny from the entire battalion in which she served. The next day they would present a petition to the National Assembly calling for the removal of all barriers to gender equality, including the reinstated ban on women serving in the National Guard (avoiding mentioning that said ban had never been officially lifted in the first place). They planned their stunt for the 10th of October.

It was, to put it mildly, a mixed bag. In the Society of 1789, Corday was immediately howled down and was even accused of stealing the famous Corday tricolor. She did receive support from several of the leaders of the Society — mostly those like Brissot and Condorcet who were in on the plan as members of the Defenders of Equality — as well as the fellow veterans of the Battle of Lyon present who stood to corroborate her story (even if they vehemently disagreed with her petition). One even pulled out a pistol and threatened to shoot any man who so much as laid a hand on her — a duly elected Captain of the National Guard — or the sacred Corday tricolor. Madame Roland, however, was horrified and threatened her with expulsion from the Society of 1789. Dismayed, Corday, Méricourt, and their supporters — mostly fellow veterans of Lyon — left.

They received a better hearing in the Jacobin Club. There, Saint-Just took the lead with a stern, moralizing speech, describing in vivid detail the actions of women at Lyon and railing against the practice of barring women from the electorate and the military as counterrevolutionary. Danton, of course, was already on board, but Robespierre, long sympathetic to gender equality, was highly impressed by both the young man’s stirring oratory and the actual arguments put forth. He was even more impressed when the women in question, having been kicked out of Madame Roland’s salon, arrived and unfurled the Corday tricolor to a rousing rendition of La Marseillaise led by Méricourt. At the conclusion, Robespierre stood and told them “Citizens, today you have won a new convert to your struggle. From this day forth, your cause shall be mine as well.”

Of course, without the support of the Gironde, when their petition was presented the next day it was doomed to crushing defeat. Only the Mountain — and even then, far from all of the Mountain — and a handful of left-Girondists voted in support of even taking up the petition, let alone assenting to its demands. The Assembly, however, did know that merely rejecting a petition would not make the issue go away, so they proposed a compromise that, at least to them, solved the problem: the names and deeds of those women who had fought at Lyon would be officially recognized and the “Charles” Corday fiction dropped, but they would be expelled from the National Guard without pay. The women were, of course, not consulted on the adequacy of this "compromise".

Unfortunately, this was, if anything, even worse than merely having a petition rejected. The women of the National Guard had not fought for glory or recognition — most, unlike Corday, had not fought for revolutionary feminism or to prove a broader political point — but for the same reason their male comrades had fought: to protect their country in an hour of dire need. Being expelled from the National Guard was an outrage; being denied their pay was just a further insult. At meetings of the Jacobin Club, they and their supporters raged, but there was nothing they could do: the National Assembly was the supreme legislative body of France, there was no getting around it.

Except there was, and de Gouges, who had been expecting this outcome all along, was preparing it.

The Declarations of the Rights of Women and the Female Citizen

As is the case today, the official Commander-in-Chief of the National Guard is the President of France. Unlike the modern-day ceremonial role, however, in 1791 this was a quite serious and literal, indeed the most serious, part of Lafayette’s job, and like any other military commander, he could issue orders as to the composition of his Army and they would have to be obeyed — so long as such orders were consistent with the Constitution of 1790. Olympe de Gouges was one of the very few people who knew that Lafayette was the one who was secretly backing the Defenders of Equality, perhaps with this very outcome in mind, so through October 1791 she prepared a work known today as “the Declaration of the Rights of Women and of the Female Citizen”.

Part biting satire, part a political call to arms, but in reality an exhaustively researched legal argument, it methodically went through the Constitution of 1790 and explained in no uncertain terms why it, as already written, barred all legal and political inequalities between men and women, and why the Battle of Lyon proved it to be so. The thrust of the argument can be summed up in its most famous line, drawing attention to the equality of punishment guaranteed by Article X: “Women have the right to mount the scaffold, they must also have the right to mount the barricades and the speaker’s rostrum.”. She published this work on October 28, 1791, a famous day in the history of European revolutionary feminism.

It was an immediate bombshell. The salons of France, already filled with excited chatter about the news that Charles Corday was actually Charlotte Corday, were stirred up even further by de Gouges’ hugely controversial work. For the first time in over a year, the now-established party boundaries broke down completely, as left-Girondins and Montagnards argued in favor of the Declaration and its political goals, beating off attacks from the right by other Girondins (who regarded it as egregiously radical) and from the left by ultra-radicals (who regarded its harsh critique of the Constitution of 1790 as counterrevolutionary). Arguments about it often descended into fist fights as passions grew to uncontrollable heights over the issue, and in Brittany, the National Guard even had to be called out to suppress a riot by devout Catholics who wanted de Gouges (and even Corday) arrested.

Ultimately, though, none of this sound and fury actually mattered, because the Declaration had been explicitly addressed to one and only one person: the Commander-in-Chief of the National Guard and the President of France, the Marquis de Lafayette. In one of the most hotly debated Constitutional decisions in French history, Lafayette considered the document for two weeks, and on December 9th, he made his pronouncement:

“As President of the French Republic and Commander of the National Guard, it is my solemn duty to ensure that the rules and regulations of the National Guard are consistent with the highest constitutional principles espoused in the decrees of March 1790, as established by the National Assembly of France.

On the 26th of October 1791, I received a legal petition from Mme. de Gouges requesting an explanation as to the restrictions on membership of the National Guard and their consistency with the Constitution of 1790. Having carefully considered this petition and the arguments it contained, I have decided that:

1. The legal distinction between men and women with regards to their ability to defend France with force of arms is not founded in Nature, as demonstrated by the actions of Capt. Charlotte Corday and other women of the National Guard at Lyon through April and May 1791. Laws creating such distinctions are thus inconsistent with Article I of the Constitution of 1790.

2. The actions of Capt. Corday and the women of the National Guard were manifestly consistent with the good of the Republic and its citizens. Decrees that would have prevented those actions are thus inconsistent with Articles IV and V of the Constitution of 1790.

3. The above being established, the decree of the Assembly of October 11 preventing the proper dispensation of pay to duly enlisted soldiers and duly elected officers of the National Guard is inconsistent with Article XVII of the Constitution of 1790.

As Commander of the National Guard, I, therefore, order that all regulations and decrees of the National Guard restricting enlistment, election and payment on the basis of sex are annulled, and the women represented by the petition of Mme. de Gouges be reinstated to the National Guard with full rank and back pay.”

This was a sensation and had it come from any other than Lafayette, it would have been enormously destabilizing. However, Lafayette’s political status was such that, begrudgingly, the nation largely accepted this new reality — although only with regards to the National Guard. The rest of the Declaration of the Rights of Women, that relating to political equality, was dutifully ignored by most, even as enlistment in the National Guard was open to women.

For most of the women of the National Guard, this was victory declared: they had merely wanted the chance to continue to serve France as they had already done (as well as their pay). They returned to Murat’s army at Lyon and rejoined their National Guard units, and soon more women enlisted to fight alongside them. However, Lafayette’s legal argument did not go completely unnoticed by all, and soon the question was asked by more than merely radical Montagnards as to why Article I, which now forbade distinctions based on gender in the National Guard, did not do so everywhere else too. If women like Corday could lead hundreds, or maybe even thousands, of men under fire, why could she not participate more actively in the political process?

For this reason, Corday, Méricourt, and de Gouges did not regard it as a total victory. For Corday, political equality had been the goal all along; the right to die in battle but not the right to vote was not much of a right at all. For her partner Saint-Just, the fact that no fewer than four articles of the Constitution had been violated simply proved how irrational and unjust the current situation truly was. Corday, however, would not have the opportunity to continue the fight then and there as she was, of course, a duly elected officer of the National Guard and had to return to her battalion in Lyon. She would serve with great distinction as a company and then battalion commander through late 1791 and early 1792, as Royalists made concerted attempts to retake Lyon, but she was not done with her work in Paris. Not by a longshot.

Ever since 1791, a debate has raged on as to why Lafayette made the decision he did. Some grumbled that he was indeed a secret radical, and had only been attacking the Montagnards to maintain the fiction of distance. Many of these grumblers eventually renounced their previous support of the Republic and quietly left for Marseille. Others claimed that Lafayette, always known for his idealism, had been genuinely convinced by Corday, de Gouges, and the arguments they had made, and this is the generally accepted argument today. A small minority of historians, however, have since suggested a more prosaic, cynical reason. The Republican summer offensives of both 1790 and 1791 had stalled out because of serious manpower shortages, and those were more acute than ever by the end of 1791. Under the cover of political enlightenment, Lafayette had just doubled the number of recruits available to the National Guard without yet having to resort to the even more controversial and destabilizing option of forced conscription.

And as 1792 dawned, France would soon need every single recruit, man or woman, that it could get...

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