Kate Berridge (18 page)

The guillotine blade bought from the Sanson family

In spite of the difficulties and the mounting tensions in the background, the exhibition remained a precise gauge of the mood of the people. The different acts of the unfolding drama were revealed by just a glance at the silent doormen, who were persuasive enough in their realism to entice people to pay up to see more. In the 1780s they had been dressed in the regalia of royal soldiers; in 1789 they had been reclothed in the simpler uniforms of the National Guard; now they had the distinctive uniform of the sans-culottes: long trousers, such as working men wore, rather than the knee-breeches (culottes) favoured by courtiers and professional men, with the all-important
bonnet rouge
on their heads–the red cap which
according to Marie was ‘much worn at this time as the symbol of liberty, but proved more correctly the symbol of anarchy and was a great favourite with the vulgar'.

Whereas clothing had once followed the fads of fashion, now it had a more serious function as a political statement, with colour, cut and even degree of cleanliness all loaded with significance. It is not surprising that, as the Revolution progressed, the innovative fashion and lifestyle magazines that had appeared in the heady climate of the late 1780s fizzled out completely. Their ethos was not viable in a city that had lost its sparkle, and where dress was suddenly bound up with ideology. What Marie's memoir omits in feelings and opinions, it supplies in detailed description of dress, like a talking pattern book. She witnessed the emergence of clothing as an integral aspect of political allegiance. The absent-minded who forgot to sport a patriotic cockade or to wear the correct republican accessories were putting themselves in real danger. Being out of date, once social death, would soon become a justification for a death sentence. The weight of importance Marie ascribes to clothing makes more sense in the context of her experiences of living at a time when appearances were judged so harshly, and could be used as evidence against you. An incident concerning her maid related by Madame de La Tour du Pin illustrates this:

Wearing trousers was an overt anti-Establishment statement, and as class war intensified it became common practice for aristocrats to adopt an affected version of working-class dress. Marie relates how the Duc d'Orléans, now Philippe Egalité, in order to ally himself to their cause, donned the outfit of the sans-culottes. ‘It consisted of a short jacket, pantaloons and a round hat with a handkerchief worn sailor-fashion loose round the neck, with the ends long and hanging down, the shirt
collar seen above.' Contrived unkemptness was also part of the look. An Englishman in Paris at this time, Dr John Moore, remarked on the ‘great affectation of that plainness in dress and simplicity of expression that are supposed to belong to Republicans'. He relates how a well-connected acquaintance from one of the first families in France drew attention to himself at the theatre by his choice of clothes, ‘in boots, his hair cropped and his whole dress slovenly'. When this was commented on, he defended himself by saying that ‘he was accustoming himself to appear like a Republican.'

As the Revolution progressed, cleanliness was seen as subversive, to the extent that anyone bold enough to appear in a clean shirt was subjected to a barrage of insults. Marie relates how Marat conformed to this dress code, with ‘a dingy neglected appearance, not very clean'. Robespierre, however, did not embrace sartorial slovenliness, and was renowned for his high standards of personal grooming. Marie remembers him as ‘a perfect contrast to Marat, being fond of dress. He usually wore silk clothes and stockings, with buckles in his shoes; his hair powdered, with a short tail; was remarkably clean in his person, very fond of looking in the glass and arranging his neckcloth and frill.' It seems very surprising that the man directing the Revolution and the strict arbiter of Revolutionary protocol should himself appear in such brazenly counter-Revolutionary garb. It was noted by, among others, the Revolutionary idealist Helen Maria Williams, who in a letter wrote, ‘While he called himself the leader of the sans-culottes, he never adopted the costume of this band.'

Named after their style of dress, the sans-culottes were the most important popular movement of the Revolution that surged in power in 1792. As work wear, their clothing defined a set of values and emphasized class difference. A pamphlet from 1793 entitled
What is a Sans-Culotte?
answers the question with a vivid picture and gives a good profile of Marie's audience: ‘He's a man who goes everywhere on his own two feet, who has none of the millions you're all after, no mansions, no lackeys to wait on him, and who lives quite simply with his wife and children, if he has any, on the fifth floor. He is useful because he knows how to plough a field, handle a forge, saw a file, tile a roof, how to make shoes and to shed his blood to the last drop to save the republic.' The sans-culottes were the rank-and-file
workers, the legions who lived cheek by jowl in attics and tenements and whose chief concern in daily life was a full breadbin for the family. They were the artisans and craftsmen who worked in the Revolutionary hot spots of the Rue Saint-Antoine and the Rue Saint-Marcel, with their concentration of small workshops. They were the people who rejoiced the most with each blow to the old regime. They were also regulars at the waxworks, which shed its former associations with the court and, in pace with their rise to prominence, reinvented itself as a favourite sans-culotte entertainment.

T
HE SUMMER OF
1792 found Paris seething with a menacing rabble as thousands of the extreme patriots known as
fédérés
, who came from Marseilles, poured into the city to celebrate the third anniversary of the fall of the Bastille. Their spirited singing of the Marseillaise stirred up patriotic hearts, and adrenalin and alcohol fuelled fraternal feeling with the sans-culottes. En masse they represented people power as an awesome force. In his memoirs, Chateaubriand wrote of this time, ‘A popular despotism could be scented, no doubt creative and filled with promise, yet far more powerful than the old rotting monarchical despotism; for, as the sovereign People is everywhere, when it becomes a tyrant, he is likewise–the inescapable presence of a universal Tiberius.'

On the night of 10 August 1792 the combined might of a mob of provincial
fédérés
and Parisian sans-culottes finally brought down the Crown when they invaded the Tuileries and the royal family were forced to flee for their lives. For a suffocating sixteen hours they hid in the cramped space of a booth used as a press box by the Legislative Assembly, but their suffering was as nothing compared to what befell the Swiss Guards, gendarmes and other troops garrisoned at the Tuileries. Loyal to the end, they were massacred by the merciless mob. But it was not only the sunburnt hands of the
fédérés
that were bloodied: a small group of women also committed acts of breathtaking barbarity. Their final outrage was to castrate the corpses and then distribute the severed penises from blood-spattered apron pockets, with smiling faces as if they were pressing posies into the hands of passers-by. One eyewitness to these atrocities who never forgot what he saw was Napoleon Bonaparte. At the end of his career he reflected, ‘Never since has any battlefield given me the same
impression of so many corpses as did the sight of the masses of dead Swiss…I saw some very well-dressed ladies committing the worst indecencies on their cadavers.'

The eruption of years of pent-up grievances exploded any constraints of civilized humanity. Mercier gives a vivid account of the carnage witnessed by the rubbernecking voyeurs who sought out the site of the atrocity. They saw a jumble of corpses in a stack like a woodpile. ‘Weep they did not, they seemed petrified, struck mute. Everywhere they stepped back, horrified by stench and sight of oozing corpses, throats cut, entrails hanging out, and anger still screwing up their faces. The more stoical visitors pointed at the massed flies agog for blood drawn by the heat of the open wounds on corpses, the eyes torn from their sockets.' Marie was one of those who walked through the devastation and saw the gobbets of flesh and shards of glass, scenes of horror heightened for being viewed under bright sun (although ominously, as spectators noticed on that dazzling summer day, even the sun was the colour of blood):

An intriguing aspect of Marie's recollection of the aftermath of the massacre is her claim that she was there not as a sightseer, but to look for kinsmen, having ‘three brothers and two uncles who were among the combatants at the palace'. This is the first and only reference she makes to them, and when she exclaims, ‘How few individuals are there who have experienced so dreadful a blow as that of losing in one day, by the hands of assassins, three brothers and two uncles!', one can't help conjecturing that the odds are against her being one of this minority group. This claim was perhaps no more than the
characteristic embroidery of her victim status by means of which she engaged public sympathy later on in her career.

The Tuileries massacre marked the removal of the King and Queen to the Temple prison. Like the rare animals once displayed in the royal menagerie at Versailles, the royal family in captivity became a prize sight in Paris, a pay-per-view attraction. As Marie related, ‘An intense interest existed in the minds of the people respecting them, and in all the houses round the prison, the proprietors were able to let their lodgings at an extremely high rate, numbers of people paying for admission to those rooms from the windows of which they could obtain a view of the King and his family walking in the Temple gardens.' From now on it seemed as if all the mechanisms of restraint had been broken, and the popular uprising marked a turning point to a chill climate of menace and criminality. It is from this period that Marie assumes a starring role in some of the key episodes which defined the Terror of the Revolution. What is not in dispute is the fact that the exhibition remained a leading attraction–it was like the pulse and heart of the public body. But what is worth exploring more carefully is the source of some of the most famous stories and the related exhibits associated with the period of Marie's life when she became Citizen Grosholtz and the shadow of the guillotine fell on the new republic.

On 2 September rumour about the progress of the invading armies sparked panic that turned into drastic retaliatory action against suspected counter-revolutionaries. Danton and Marat have been widely held responsible for inciting the bloodbath that ensued, with the infamous prison massacres that claimed thirteen hundred lives. At La Force prison, one of the most famous victims, who has become the individual embodiment of the horror of a mass slaughter of the innocent, was the Princesse de Lamballe, a loyal and beautiful lady-in-waiting to the Queen, whose official title at Versailles had been Superintendent of the Royal Household. Marie's description of these crimes as being perpetrated by the ‘saturnalia of hell' obscures another dimension to the atrocities against this woman, namely that her murderers were ordinary cobblers and cabinetmakers, jewellers and journeymen. The murder of the Princess is widely documented and, while details differ slightly, all sources concur that
the brutality plummeted new depths of depravity. Count Axel von Fersen, the devoted admirer and erroneously suspected lover of the Queen, wrote, ‘The Princesse de Lamballe was most fearfully tortured for four hours. My pen jibs at giving details, they tore off her breasts with their teeth and then did all possible for two whole hours to force her back to consciousness to make her death the more agonizing.' After death, her brutalized face was turned into an obscene comic mask with a fake moustache of her pubic hair, and this was brandished on a pike outside the Temple prison to taunt the Queen. As Carlyle put it, ‘That fair hindhead is cleft with the axe; the neck is severed. That fair body is cut in fragments; with indignities, and obscene horrors of moustachio
grands-lèvres
, which human nature would fain find incredible.'

This monstrous mutilated relic becomes the first head that Marie claims she was forced to mould. In her memoirs she describes how the head was immediately taken to her, evoking feelings ‘easier conceived than described. The savage murderers stood over her, whilst she shrinking with horror, was compelled to take a cast from the features of the unfortunate princess.' This is recounted as a profoundly traumatic experience: ‘Alas for Madame Tussaud, to have the severed head of one so lovely in her trembling hands was hard indeed to bear.' It was a trauma that would have been exacerbated by Marie knowing the Princess by sight at Versailles, and being aware of her reputation for having an almost saintly good nature. Yet there is something unconvincing about the spirit of her co-operation with the mob. ‘Eager to retain a memento of the hapless princess, Madame Tussaud proceeded to perform her melancholy task, whilst surrounded by the brutal monsters, whose hands were bathed in the blood of the innocent.' As keepsakes go, one feels most people would have settled for a lock of hair. She never showed this gruesome commission in England, though nineteenth-century catalogues record that Marie did display a full-length figure of the Princess, and the press in Liverpool praised ‘the extremely beautiful and highly finished incumbent figure of the Princesse de Lamballe'. However, she did not baulk from recounting details of the murder of the Princess to spice up the catalogue. For example, a version of the catalogue printed in 1819, when the exhibition was on tour in Cambridge, after a graphic
description of the mutilation of the body continued, ‘The murderers carried the bleeding head to Madame Tussaud, and ordered her to take a model of it which dreadful order more dead than alive she dared not refuse to obey.' It would have been shocking enough to read of the unfortunate end that the beautiful woman met, without having to stomach the sight of her mangled mortal remains. Marie's personal involvement in the immediate aftermath of such a famous murder, however, would have strengthened her claims to have been a ‘victim' of the Revolution, and added interest to the other Revolutionary relics on display, reminding the public of her proximity to events.

As Restif de la Bretonne noted, ‘August 10 had renewed the Revolution and brought it to its conclusion; 2, 3, 4 September cast a sombre horror over it.' Indeed, the violence of the September killings caused revulsion among all but the most diehard supporters of the Revolution. As Madame Roland wrote, ‘You know my enthusiasm for the Revolution, well now I'm ashamed of it. It has been dishonoured. I now find it hideous.' As the sans-culottes' vision spiralled into blood-soaked vengeance against aristocrats and royalists, human viscera would become as familiar a sight as butcher's cuts. The mood was already much darker as a life-and-death game of hide-and-seek began. The rigorous house searches for counter-revolutionaries and royalist sympathizers forced suspects to adopt ever more ingenious methods of evading the authorities. A contemporary called Peletier describes this: ‘One man squeezed up behind the wainscot, which had been nailed back on him, seems to form part of the wall; another is suffocated with fear and heat between two mattresses; a third rolled up in a cask loses all sense of his existence by the tension in his sinews.' The embassies closed and, for one of the only times in the Revolution, social life seemed to come to an abrupt halt as people reeled from the impact of the carnival of carnage, of ordinary people stooping to extraordinary acts such as unfurling human entrails like ribbons in public places and forcing people to drink victims' blood.

What for many citizens were life experiences to live through and forget, Marie's steely constitution turned into shrewd exploitation of a market for the macabre. A climate of opportunism that saw racketeering in everything from saltpetre to sugar and soap also had a
darker side, in which the murkiest business was allegedly carried out by the famous executioner Charles-Henri Sanson, and one of the most interesting rumours suggests that Curtius and Marie may have given him their custom. Profiteering from executed criminals was a perk of Sanson's job, and in the early days, when time permitted, he is said to have sold the fat from corpses as an emollient that was ‘excellent for the rheumatic pains'. The guillotine presented new opportunities, and it is said that, so that they could add realistic replicas to their exhibition, Curtius and Sanson came to an arrangement whereby Sanson would loan them the severed heads of the most interesting public enemies for a fee, before they were interred with the trunks in the cemetery. Certainly some of the waxwork heads of the executed are astonishingly realistic, and so this does seem plausible, although Marie's own explanation of her most famously grizzly guillotined heads was always that each one had been done under extreme duress ‘by orders of the National Assembly'. This casts her in a better light than admitting to a macabre business arrangement with Sanson.

Whatever the truth, we know that all that Marie experienced she profited from, and the chief exhibits with which she later filled her Chamber of Horrors derive from this next, hate-filled phase of the Revolution. Sans-culottes took pleasure in training their pet dogs to growl at the word ‘aristocrat'. In poignant contrast, the innocent young Dauphin in his captivity dubbed his pet squirrel ‘aristocrat' as a term of endearment. This is reported by the Russian traveller Karamzin: ‘It is said when playing with his pet, he [the Dauphin] tweaks its nose and says “You aristocrat! You great aristocrat squirrel!” From continually hearing this word the gentle child has taken to using it.'

In the third week of August a second guillotine was set up, close to the Tuileries in the Place du Carrousel, but the royal family, though so near, were apparently unaware of the execution of the publisher of a newspaper with royalist leanings on the evening of 2 September. Less than three weeks later, on 21 September, the official symbolic death of monarchy was announced and the National Convention started a new rule. The Republic was declared on 22 September. To emphasize the new era, a new calendar transformed 22 September 1792 into Day 1 in the month Vendémiaire in Year 1. But a more dramatic
defining moment between past and present was 21 January 1793, when the oblique blade of the guillotine separated the head from the bloated body of Louis Capet.

The trial of the King had had the air of a theatrical entertainment, with the back of the Assembly hall converted into boxes, and spectators eating ices, and his execution was not to be missed–a one-performance-only production of a tragedy last staged in seventeenth-century England, and never before seen in France. If with the Grand Couvert his subjects had loved to observe the King dining in public, his dying in public was an undreamed-of spectacle. It was symbolically staged in the Place de la Révolution, formerly the Place Louis V (the Place de la Concorde today). This was the site where in 1789 the King's troops had shattered public confidence by firing on civilians, and where in 1791 King-hating had gone up several levels with the mobbing of the captive royal coach after the flight to Varennes. Now, on a cold January morning, the square and the tributary streets on all sides were packed. People had climbed on to the walls of the Tuileries gardens and pressed tightly along the steps. Troops four deep cordoned off spectators. Cannon and armed troops were strategically positioned. Windows en route had been ordered to close their shutters, shops were shut, and, apart from mass drums, there was silence. An unseasonably oppressive fug of humidity seemed to sap the crowds, or perhaps it was just the sheer unreality of what they were awaiting that made them so subdued. In this arena on an elevated scaffold, one man fixed the gaze of twenty thousand people. At 10.20 the blade fell. The executioner's son pulled the head from the basket and held it up by the hair. The sight drew uproarious cries of joy, and shouts of ‘Long live the nation! Long live the French Republic!' Those closest to the scaffold surged forward to dip pieces of paper into the royal blood. Some even dipped their fingers and tasted it, reporting that it was ‘salty', a reference to the lamb grazed on salt marshes that was a privilege of aristocratic diets.