In Search of Mary (15 page)

“
Non madame
, he cannot touch!”

I pick him up again and try to look at a painting of Olympe des Gouges. Will head-butts me in the chest and shouts. I put him on the ground, and he runs off in a flapping penguin-like way, straight towards the original version of the
Declaration of the Rights of Man
, his fat hands outreached.

Another guard pops out. “
Madame, NON
– he must not touch it!”

“Well, can you stop him?” I bleat, knowing that’s really not good enough.

And so it goes on. A sixteen-month-old child versus the collective might of the French Revolution. Room after room of things I can’t look at properly; room after room of unsmiling guards. Mothers of toddlers will often get the feeling that people are staring disapprovingly, when they’re probably not. But right now they definitely are. My arms are aching and my chest tightens. Finally I give up, and don’t look at any exhibits at all, but merely follow in the random trail of my mini-dictator. “Quite another version of
Footsteps
,” I think bitterly.

We get outside. Will chases a pigeon onto a lawn with signs saying something like “Babies Who Tread upon This Grass Will Be Decapitated”, and I phone up Justin and burst into tears.

“This trip is rubbish! My whole idea is rubbish! You can’t get stuff done with a baby after all!”

“Stick with it, Bee,” he encourages, and I’m too upset to get indignant about his over-kindly tone. “Will was just bringing some authentic mob rule to the Revolutionary showcase. Sounds like he did a great job.”

Chapter Ten

Allons enfants de la matrie, le jour de gloire est arrivé

The next morning we set out with purpose and defiance. Paris, you won’t get the better of us. For starters, the biggest twos-up I can think of is to have breakfast in Starbucks. Ha. It’s reasonably priced. There’s somewhere for Will to sit. And we can fill his baby cup with milk for free, instead of being charged €4 as per everywhere else. This morning is about
droits du bébé
as well as
droits de l’homme
. I smirk at the city as we emerge, caffeine-charged and ready for action. “A dish of coffee” recruits our spirits once again. Today we will get some answers. Answers to questions like: the Revolution, what was that all about?

Hannah Callaway does tours for Context Travel, a tour-guide agency for clever rich people. Today she’s making a charitable exception. Hannah is a New Yorker, researching her Harvard PhD on the French Revolution here in Paris. She’s primarily interested in Tom Paine. I don’t begrudge him. His life story makes even Wollstonecraft’s look pedestrian. How can you resist a carpenter who becomes a global political rockstar – the daddy of not one, but two revolutions – then ends up dying a pauper’s death in New York?

The Norfolk lad turned American founding father isn’t only a key figure here in Paris, but also in Wollstonecraft’s private life. The first time she meets her future love, the philosopher William Godwin, they’ve come to a dinner back in London to hear the celebrated and notorious Paine speak. But he doesn’t get a word in edgeways, because Wollstonecraft won’t shut up. This pricelessly crap first date is later described by Godwin:

Hannah has wayward mid-brown hair, unruly eyebrows and busy eyes. We smile and introduce each other, shaking hands formally. She is warm and keen to help, but she isn’t much of a one for small talk. Within very few seconds she is telling me, as I gulp down the last of my rebellious Starbucks, that “Rousseau’s vision of the formation of government and the way that democratic government should work differs from a more Anglo-American view. That is, Rousseau focused on the general will, and so the idea is that everyone comes together over a consensus that emerges from political discussion. Whereas the Anglo-American tradition emphasizes contention within politics, where dissent is not only allowed but expected, and is
built into the system. So that our system envisions that there will be conflicting views, and it tries to balance them out – and that’s the classic theory of the American Constitution. While the French idea of general will is that politics is essentially consensual. So there is a problem when you have people with dissenting views, because either they must be against the common interest or they must be wrong. There’s no way to envision that they could potentially be correct if they’re the voice of the minority. So. Let’s get started with the Bastille, as we are standing right here”.

I inspect my coffee dregs, wishing for an extra shot. It’s barely nine o’clock and she’s speaking in rapid-fire paragraphs without commas. I decide not to mention coming as a student to see the Bastille, only to find it was no longer here. How cheated I felt that it’s now basically a roundabout. We stand at the brink of the screeching traffic.

“It’s wild,” she says. “I’ll show you: over here we can see in the paving stones the outline of the Bastille. If we cross the street, here you can see it comes all the way across, then over there, look, there’s another one. These are the imprints of the outer turrets, occupying this entire space.”

Hannah sweeps an arm around as we teeter on the edge of the vortex of cars and buses swerving past Will’s buggy. Stepping back from the pavement edge she continues: “If you steal a loaf of bread and you’re convicted and put in jail, you don’t go to the Bastille, you go to a regular prison. People who go to the Bastille are different – they’re imprisoned at the King’s will. Or they could also be imprisoned by a
lettre de cachet
.”

“Elettra de Who?”

“A
lettre de cachet
– it’s a document that any man, any father of a family in France can get issued against a member of his family. So if your son is wasting your fortune with gambling debts, or he won’t marry the right person, you can get the King to throw him in the Bastille.”

“And only fathers could do it?”

“Only fathers, or the King. So the reasoning is that the King is the father of the country, and every family is modelled on the monarchy, because every father is a little king.” She enjoys my horrified look. “They’re all mini-kings, yeah. And what the Bastille symbolizes for the people is the arbitrary power of the absolute monarchy. So it has an extremely strong symbolic power.”

Clever Americans tend to talk faster than clever people from elsewhere. Hannah’s no exception, but she is so absorbed into her subject that it’s contagious. People and traffic flow past us as we wander along, talking quickly, walking slowly. She constructs the living, seething Revolution all around us as we go. Hannah’s face is young, but she has wisps of grey in her hair. This is pretty revolutionary too, given the rigour of Parisian standards of feminine grooming.

“People begin to gather up and they march to the Bastille. The Bastille is now surrounded by people, and the word is spreading. Rumours flow in decentralized ways. Women are key to this. They are important vectors of information: they are out in the streets, they’re in the markets, they are out circulating.”

I can’t help smiling at women being “important vectors of information”. They were the French Revolution’s Facebook.

“In these situations it’s always hard to know exactly who started what, where and how. But suddenly the guards begin firing, the people begin attacking and nearly everyone inside is killed. The governor is brought outside, and his head is cut off. They stick the head on a pike, and they march it around as a sign of victory, as a symbol. The Revolution co-opts a lot of the ritualistic violence of the Ancien Régime. But I want to shift off the narration of this event and give you a larger sense of where other things are fitting in.”

Hannah’s right – the threads are too multiple, too enticing. Plus, she keeps getting faster as the story becomes more blood-soaked. I tell her I’m hoping to learn how it would have been for Wollstonecraft, and how the Revolution did or didn’t help women.

“Wollstonecraft doesn’t really mention women in her writing here, apart from being pretty horrified by the ‘female mobs’…”

“Yes, the women’s movement,” Hannah says. “Inasmuch as there is such a thing. On the general stage we have the popular movement and the elite movement, and it’s the same with the women. Women don’t have one unified point of view, and they don’t have a unified point of action. So on the one hand we see hungry women marching for bread, and on the other these aristocratic women hosting salons. So it’s one of these tricky things where it looks like maybe women are being treated as equal, but…” She pauses.

“In a girly way?”

“Yeah, they’re being valued, they’re doing something important, but what they’re contributing is something distinctly feminine. That’s the idea: they’re feminine characteristics,
so it’s not equal, because they are different. This is a tricky thing.”

“It’s still a tricky thing, equality… and difference…” I stare back along the street. Hannah is looking at me quizzically.

“Do you have kids?” I ask.

“No.”

Screeching gear change as I hastily return us to the Revolution: “So the optimism of the movement, which captivates the Romantics back in England, it goes way beyond getting bread for hungry people, doesn’t it?”

“You have to realize what they were up against. We are talking about the monarchy, which has become absolute by the time of the Revolution, and a caste system that has been in place, to use their language, since time immemorial. Authority stems from tradition. And this is the fundamental point of the Enlightenment: moving away from the argument of tradition and instead saying no: you know what, we are going to interrogate tradition, and we are going to bring it up against reason. And if it’s not rational, it doesn’t matter if it’s been around for thousands of years – we’re going to get rid of it.”

“Reason!” I light up. “Wollstonecraft bangs on about the importance of Reason all the time. Somehow it never really struck me as all that much to ask.”

“OK, this is
so
important, because that’s the discourse of the Enlightenment that she’s using. Reason is man’s capacity, through rationalism and logic, to determine what is right. It’s saying we can figure out answers for ourselves.
That
is revolutionary. Wollstonecraft is saying: I am a rational being, because I can
use my reason
. Of course I can, because look
at me: I’m doing it – right? And people argued at the time women were not even capable of using reason – that they only had sloppy sentiment. So reason is doubly important for her than for male writers. And this is what’s kind of heart-breaking – you see in the Revolution that women take action: they march for bread, they act as citizens, and they simply behave as equals. But the male revolutionaries who are in power ultimately reject that. And this happens on both levels: both to the elite women and also within popular politics—”

“Why, why did they?” I cut in, upset.

“Why did women behave as citizens?”

“No. Why did the male revolutionaries reject them?”

“Let me explain within the context.” Hannah says. I stifle an impatient sigh: can’t there just be a reason? “There is, of course, a lot of good intention. On the legislative side, the Republic is declared in September 1792, and laws start being passed right away. Divorce is legalized. And there’s huge uptake. There’s also a law on equal inheritance for men and women. But in a few years Napoleon takes over. In 1805 divorce becomes illegal again, and there’s a conservative backlash against the Revolution that’s going to have a huge impact on women. They end up being trapped in that backlash that reasserts very traditional values.”

Divorce is a subject close to Wollstonecraft’s heart. The rule of law could safeguard women’s very lives. These days it’s sometimes an excuse for couples to tear chunks off each other while their lawyers make a fortune. But in her time, a husband quite literally owned his wife – could take her assets
and have her imprisoned at will, take away her kids and abuse her with impunity. Marriage is a nightmare, haunting all of Wollstonecraft’s writings like a crouching dark demon. She is rightly terrified of it.

We’re now walking along the Rue de Rivoli, and I ask if we can sit on the grass in the Tuileries to let Will stretch his small legs. He’s been patiently sitting in his buggy throughout the tempestuous tutorial. Over his unbothered golden head we’ve discussed the Jacobin Club, the bread marchers, the King’s attempt to flee dressed as a servant and war with the crowned heads of Europe. We’re in our own revolutionary bubble on the bustling streets.

“I still don’t understand.” I say, popping Will’s seatbelt open and unleashing him onto the grass. “I get the backlash, but not why the revolutionaries themselves failed to go further at the time – why couldn’t women be considered as equals?”

“OK. Take slavery. There is slavery in the French colonies. And as we see later in America, the question of women’s suffrage and of blacks becoming full citizens comes up at the same time. And this is what happens in the Revolution: the question of freeing slaves and the question of women’s rights are also being posed.”

“What, then it was just too much freedom to handle?”

“You can see that the revolutionaries are trying so hard, but the new world is very much their own vision. The new possibilities are very specific in terms of their own political and economic freedom. Consider the commercial value of the French colonies and sugar islands like Haiti. So when other groups, like slaves, get excited too and say: ‘Hey, OK, freedom –
let’s do it!’ suddenly it goes beyond what they had originally envisaged, and they are afraid.”

We go quiet for a moment. Will runs over and urgently bestows a hedgerow leaf on me, pressing it into my hand before wobbling away. Cheered, I bring the conversation back to my guiding star. Wollstonecraft arrives fairly late on into the Revolutionary action. It’s November 1792, only a few weeks after the founding of the New Republic and these new laws. Other Romantic thrill-seekers like Wordsworth are already leaving in fear. In fact, Wordsworth flees in the very same week that Wollstonecraft arrives (abandoning his pregnant girlfriend on the way – oh, those revolutionary men).