Liberty: The Lives and Times of Six Women in Revolutionary France Read Free

been quietly surrounding Paris during late June and early July as preparation for a show of force that would silence his critics for good. But the democratic germs of patriotism and reform that had infected the French people had penetrated as far as the lower ranks of the army, for so long a bastion of aristocratic privilege and tradition, and their leaders’ response to the crisis was hesitant. The Palais Royal mob, by evening numbering perhaps six thousand, met a cavalry unit of the Royal-Allemands at the Place Vendôme and the Place Louis XV (later, Place de la Révolution, and still later Place de la Concorde) just to the north-west of the Tuileries palace, and, reinforced by the popular Paris-based gardes françaises , forced the German and Swiss soldiers, in the early hours of 13 July, to retreat from the city centre. After a day of chaos and plunder, on the 14th the people’s army reached the Bastille, and the revolution received its baptism in blood.
    The storming of the Bastille was by no means the first act of the revolution. Since 1787, extraordinary developments had been witnessed in government. France was a nation trembling on the brink of change. Its causes were many and varied: ideological, fiscal, constitutional, personal, economic, historical, social, cultural. ‘The Revolution must be attributed to every thing, and to nothing,’ wrote Germaine. ‘Every year of the century led toward it by every path.’ In the summer of 1789the fateful mechanism that would exchange absolute for representative government (and back again) was already in motion. Nor was Necker’s dismissal the sole cause of the Bastille’s fall. But Germaine de Staël can be forgiven for thinking that her adored father–and through him, she herself–was at the heart of events.
    It was no accident that green, the colour Camille Desmoulins chose as the emblem of hope in the Palais Royal, was the colour of Necker’s livery–and typical of the confusion inherent in the revolution itself that it should be replaced soon after with the tricolour because it was also the livery colour of the king’s unpopular brother, the comte d’Artois. The tricolour contained within it a multitude of references: red and blue for Paris, combined with white for the Bourbon dynasty; red and blue were also the colours of the popular duc d’Orléans. Like everything during this period, these colours were laden with symbolism: white for the revolutionaries’ purity, blue for the heavenly ideals they were pursuing, red for the blood which was already seen as the necessary price of France’s liberation. The tricolour was immediately invested with an almost mystical aura. It became a sacrosanct emblem of the new France that the revolution was creating, materially revered in bits of ribbon representing the fatherland.
    Germaine had been dining with her parents in Versailles when Necker received Louis’s notice on 11 July. Saying nothing, but squeezing his daughter’s hand beneath the table, Necker got into his carriage with his wife as if for their regular evening drive; instead of idling round the park in Versailles, they headed straight for the border with the Low Countries. Germaine returned to Paris that night (fourteen kilometres, a carriage journey of about two hours) and found there a letter from her father informing her of his departure and advising her to go to his country house at Saint-Ouen. Ignoring, despite herself, the crowds already gathered in the rue du Bac to hear news of Necker, she rushed to Saint-Ouen with her husband, only to find there another letter summoning them to Brussels, where they arrived on the 13th. There she found her parents, still wearing the same clothes in which they had sat down to dinner two days earlier.
    After a week Necker received a courier from the king recalling him to Versailles. He deliberated for three days and then began the journeyback to Paris with his wife, daughter and son-in-law. Fifteen years later,