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

on the floor of their carriages.
    Fluttering a fan in a certain way or placing a patch near the eye as opposed to on the cheek revealed a person’s character without them having to speak. The sociologist Richard Sennett observes of this period that it is hard to imagine how people so governed by ‘impersonal and abstract convention [can] be so spontaneous, so free to express themselves…their spontaneity rebukes the notion that you must lay yourself bare in order to be expressive’. Contemporaries were fullyaware of this dichotomy between word and action. ‘A man who placed his hand on the arm of a chair occupied by a lady would have been considered extremely rude,’ wrote the comtesse de Boigne, looking back on the pre-revolutionary period of her youth, and yet language ‘was free to the point of licentiousness’.
    But by the mid-1780s contemporary medical and philosophical views were transforming women’s fashions and habits. In 1772 one doctor described corsets as barbarous, impeding women’s breathing and deforming their chests, and especially dangerous during pregnancy; he was also concerned about the moral effects they produced by displaying the bosom so prominently. His advice was echoed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, prophet of naturalness and sensibility in Émile and La Nouvelle Héloïse , who recommended that children wear loose clothes that would not constrict their growing bodies.
    For the first time, women’s clothes allowed them to breathe and eat freely: the new fashions quite literally liberated their bodies from an armour of stays, panniers and hoops at the same time as the ideological implications of the change in fashion began to liberate their behaviour. In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman written in 1792 Mary Wollstonecraft declared that stiff, uncomfortable clothes, like the ‘fiction’ of beauty itself, were a means by which society kept women submissive and dependent. Shedding these restrictions would empower them. By this definition Germaine, who rose above her plainness (Gouverneur Morris thought she looked like a chambermaid) and paid scant attention to her dress, was already halfway to emancipation.
    Perhaps the most celebrated proponent of these progressive ideas was the queen, Marie-Antoinette, who was painted by Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun in 1783 in a simple white chemise dress tied at the waist with a satin sash. This seemingly innocent act raised eyebrows for a number of reasons. Chemises were muslin shifts, previously worn only in the intimacy of a toilette (or by prostitutes), so to eighteenth-century eyes Vigée-Lebrun had painted the queen in a shocking state of undress. Furthermore, for the queen herself to reject the formality of court custom–she was traditionally portrayed in carapace-like court dress–carried seditious undertones of disrespect to the traditions she represented. Finally, the chemise de la reine (as it came to be called) was a style anyone could afford. As Mary Robinson, the courtesan who popularized the chemise de la reine in England, commented, ‘the duchess, and her femme de chambre , are dressed exactly alike’. Dress, which had once distinguished between people, was becoming dangerously democratic.
    Manners, too, were changing. As with clothing, the fashion for informality initially came from the top down: in the artificial world of the salon, being able to give the impression of naturalness and ease had long been considered the highest of the social arts. ‘Do not people talk in society of a man being a great actor?’ asked the philosopher Denis Diderot. Just as the cut flowers in her headdress were kept fresh with tiny glass vases hidden in her hair, the salonniére achieved the sparkling effect of spontaneity in conversation through study and discipline. Every day, Mme Geoffrin, celebrated pre-revolutionary hostess to the great Enlightenment philosophers, wrote two letters (in those days an art form) to keep her brain sharp.
    Germaine de