Bookplanet: the French Revolution through the eyes of six women

Daughters of the revolution Lucy Moore's Liberty tells the story of the French Revolution from the perspective of its marginalised women, says David Jays
Review of Liberty: The Lives and Times of Six Women in Revolutionary France by Lucy Moore/The Observer

Despite its fiery title, Liberty is a history of disappointment. Lucy Moore traces the arc of the French Revolution through the lives of six women, each let down by its promises of transformation. The progress from ardent hope through terror to sour quietude is, ultimately, a sombre one. The opening chapters are heady with excitement - 'One lives here 10 years in 24 hours,' writes one of Moore's characters - but are increasingly succeeded by dread and an exhausted cynicism. As Napoleon mops up the last gobbets of hope in the revolution's aftermath, idealism can only look ill at the margins.

The liberty girls cross the social scale - aristocrat to street-fighter, political wife to serial mistress. As Moore reconstructs their stories, she also gives a cogent account of the events they witnessed or participated in: the march on the Bastille, the monarchy's fall, the descent into terror, Robespierre's defeat and Napoleon's triumph. They report events in salons, streets and debating chambers; other notorious women take cameo roles - Marie Antoinette, Marat's assassin, Charlotte Corday, not-tonight Josephine. And Mme Guillotine, baleful icon of the Terror, who emerged in incongruous accessories such as paperweights, toys and earrings.

What kind of revolution was it for women? Although inspired by debates on active citizenship, they never achieved it. Each brave, new constitution stopped short of allowing them votes or representation. Revolutionaries couldn't allow themselves to accept women as independent beings. And even new men readily resorted to old taunts: the snarl of sexual stereotype was always available.

From aristocrats to radicals, women were described as sluts, tramps and unnatural viragos. Moore keeps an eye on the whores in her history, because they provide a depressingly handy simile for a woman entering public life. Independent thought was often dismissed as easy virtue.

Working-class activists, led by chocolate-maker Pauline Leon, swaggered through Paris as 'the new bullies of the streets', but when they denounced Robespierre, he stamped on them. Women's political clubs were banned and their members derided as 'impudent women who want to become men'. Leon appears to have slipped into obscurity.

More privileged women could also be silenced. Germaine de Stael, as an aristocratic intellectual with something of a mouth (and a pen) on her, shuttled in and out of favour, and, thus, in and out of exile. Initially enthralled by Napoleon - she even tried to push into his bathroom, crying: 'Genius has no sex!' - her salon became a focus of opposition to the new leader, who huffed: 'Women should stick to knitting' and packed her off to Switzerland.

Moore is particularly good on fashion. Frocks were weather vanes of ideology; a particular shade of red was even named 'Foulon's blood' after one of Louis XVI's murdered ministers. Loose white muslin, inspired by Rousseau, suggests the rejection of old formality (Moore reports an old corsetiere muttering darkly: 'As soon as they began to introduce bodices instead of whalebone stays, I immediately prophesied the revolution'), while at the height of popular feeling, devotion to dress seemed suspiciously unpatriotic - coarse cloth and hedgerow hair were preferred.

After Robespierre's death, survivors of his terror held extravagantly macabre costume balls; women brandished thin red ribbons around their necks, the guillotine's intended mark. The most startling dresser here is Theroigne de Mericourt. Having briefly been a kept woman, dripping diamonds, she reinvented herself as an androgynous activist, wearing a masculine riding habit and pistols. Theroigne later lost her dreams and wits to the revolution, and she died in an asylum, in filth and fetters.

At their best, Moore's criss-crossing narratives coalesce into superbly tense life, especially with Manon Roland. Married to a politician who lacked her drive and charisma, Roland fostered enemies through her haughty integrity, most catastrophically, Robespierre. She served guests sugar water rather than wine. She became one of the most prominent women targeted by the Terror, oddly proud to be recognised as a political threat.

Having often ghost-written her husband's speeches, in prison, she wrote in her own right, scribbling torrents on pale-green paper. Moore tautens the sense of Roland's imaginative freedom and physical peril in her final days, living on an 'intense plane of impassioned rectitude and nervous energy' until she died crying: 'Oh Liberty, what crimes they commit in your name!'

The figure of Liberty herself encapsulates the narrative's argument. Her iconography passed from inspiration, through domesticity to marginalisation, 'exalted, pursued, manipulated and betrayed by turns'. Initially embodied as freedom's warrior, artists then imagine her as a nurturing, bare-breasted mother, passively suckling the movement. David's image of a colossus, representing the collective might, replaced Liberty on the new republic's seal and, like the women who believed so fervently in her, she was shunted to the sidelines.