Revolutionary Women

Liberty
The Lives and Times of Six Women in Revolutionary France
2006 Harper Press
Hardcover 464 pp
ISBN-13 978-0-00-720601-8
$29.95 US

Quite a lot has been written on or about the French Revolution and the men who had a role in the turbulent decade 1789/1799. Robspierre, Danton, Desmoulins, Necker, Marat and Corday, Antoinette and Louis, but very little aside from the Queen and her ladies has been chronicled, let alone delved into the role that women played in the Revolution.

Author Lucy Moore presents a painstakingly accurate look at the role of women at that time and their struggles to gain acceptance and equality at a period when women had few, if any rights, were virtualy left in many cases, uneducated, or treated as less than equal.

This book chronicles six women of the period and their personal stamp on history. Germaine De Stael, daughter of Finance Minister to Louis XVI, Jaques Necker, and one of the richest women in Europe at the time, whose salon attracted some of the greatest names of the Revoltionary Period; Pauline Leon, a choclatier and woman of the merchant classes who co-founded the first all women's political club in Paris; Theroigne de Mericourt, a former courtesan and fallen woman who was linked to the Girondist party, and spoke at the Cordeliers Club on the rights of women, was imprisoneed by the Austrians, and later committed to a mad house; Manon Roland, a political authoress who championed the cause of the Girondist party and gently guided her views through her salon only to be imprisioned and guilotined after the fall of the Girondists: Theresia Cabaruss Fontenay Tallien, an actress and intimate friend of Rose De Beauharnais, (later Empress Josephine), whose lover Jean-Lambert Tallien led the call to arrest Robespierre during the dramatic events of 9 Thermidor; and Juliette Recamier, a quiet, reserved woman who's beauty made her the toast of Paris and drove men including Napoleon to fall at her feet until her extravagant ways forced her husband into bankruptcy in 1805.

Along the way the reader is also introduced to several other women of distinction like Lucy de la Tour du Pin, a lady in waiting to Marie Antoinette who survived the ordeal of the Great Terror in 1794 and later returned to Paris after exile in America, The Princesse de Lamballe personal friend to Marie Antoinette who met a horrible fate at the hands of a violent mob, Elisabeth Vigee Le Brun, the celebrated woman painter of Versailles and the aristocracy and Helen Williams, an English woman living on the continent at the time who set down in writing her account of the events as they happened and her view of a few of the ladies listed above.

The story itself is broken down into chapters that switch back and forth between each of the women and the years 1789 to 1811, and it brings to the readers imagination, the sense of what life was like at a point where for the first time in history, women sought and fought for a place in poltics and to be treated as equals. Along the way, Moore also paints a vivid picture of Paris that truly makes the reader feel as though they are there watching the events as they unfold.

Six different women from six different aspects of French society and one great read!