Liberty: The Lives and Times of Six Women in Revolutionary France by Lucy Moore Page A

women, restricted by their gender as well as by their status, these new liberties were all the more potent. What is evident in the accounts of these October days is that the womenrevelled in their own boldness and determination. They were driven to act by desperation, but they seem to have surprised even themselves, and they were proud of what they did.
    Men, who had failed in their duties as administrators and providers, were deliberately barred from the Hôtel de Ville. The only man the women allowed in was a National Guardsman called Stanislas Maillard. At first, because of his black coat (members of the Third Estate wore plain black coats), they thought he was a councillor; but then they recognized him as a vainqueur , one who had participated in the sacking of the Bastille, and opened the doors to him.
    Despite Maillard’s initial efforts to dissuade them, the women insisted they were going to Versailles to present their demands to the king and the National Assembly. Maillard decided to go with them, explaining to a colleague that in this way warning could be sent ahead of the crowd of angry women and control maintained over them. He was also sympathetic to their cause, as were many National Guardsmen who were husbands or sons of those protesting. Lafayette, knowing this, tried to keep the National Guard under his command from joining up with the marchers for as long as possible, fearing violence.
    Another Guardsman, known as Fournier ‘l’Américain’, who defied ‘the sycophant Lafayette’ to assemble troops to follow the women to Versailles, believed, like the women, that royalists were plotting to starve the nation into submission. Writing during the Reign of Terror, he remembered rallying straggling women in Paris with the words, ‘Your children are dying of hunger; if your husbands are perverted and cowardly enough not to want to go look for bread for them, then the only thing left for you to do is to slit their throats.’
    Maillard began beating a drum to call the women to order, but the area in front of the Hôtel de Ville was too small to hold them all and they moved their assembly point first to the Place Louis XV at the end of the Tuileries gardens and then spilled over into the open Place d’Armes on the Champs Élysées. Children blowing bugles and ringing bells went round the market area of Les Halles to assemble the throng. Women converged on the site carrying makeshift weapons like pitchforks and broomsticks as well as pikes, swords and muskets. ‘The town is in alarm,’ reported Gouverneur Morris. ‘All carriages were stopped’,and any passing woman was swept along by the crowd and ‘obliged to join the female mob’. Later, respectable bourgeois women would testify that they had been forced to join the crowd; onlookers were surprised to catch sight of pale-complexioned women in fine clothes alongside the rough market women.
    Numbering by this stage about six thousand, the women set off for Versailles, fourteen kilometres distant, through driving rain. Maillard and six drummers headed the procession alongside two cannon, ridden by women. The cannon were taken for effect; they had no powder, but all the same Maillard persuaded the women to place them at the back of the cavalcade when they reached Versailles so as not to intimidate the townspeople. The marchers wore tricolour cockades and carried leafy branches, just as Camille Desmoulins’s mob had three months earlier when they stormed the Bastille. They sang poissard songs such as the ‘Motion of the Market Women of La Halle’, which just tipped the balance between coarsely amusing and threatening:
If the High-ups still make trouble
Then the Devil confound them,
And since they love gold so much
May it melt in their traps –
That’s the sincere wish
Of the Women Who Sell Fish.
    With cries of ‘ Vive le roi! ’ the women reached Versailles at about five in the afternoon, just as dusk was beginning to fall, marching down the broad