In June, 1791, Beauharnais was elected president of the Constituent Assembly. A few days later, the King and Queen fled to Varennes. As the head of the Assembly, the Viscount was the leader of France for the time. It was he who sat for one hundred and twenty-six and one-half consecutive hours on the bench during the violent session which followed the King’s flight; it was he who questioned the captured King, when he was returned, and directed the distracted proceedings which followed. Indeed, until the dissolution of the body in September, he was one of the most prominent men in France.
Josephine had her share of his glory, and in these months added largely to her circle of acquaintances from the motley crowd which the levelling of things had brought together in French society. She met many of the aristocrats unknown to her until then; but what was vastly more important, she made acquaintances among the “true patriots”, those who had been born in the third estate, and who were already beginning to consider themselves the only part of the population fit to conduct the general regeneration of France. In 1792, war breaking out, Beauharnais went to the front, where he made a respectable record, which he himself reported frequently to the Assembly in glowing letters, filled with good advice to that body. He was steadily advanced until, in May, 1793, he was made general-in-chief of the Army of the North. During all this period Josephine was in Paris or the vicinity, and there were few more active women there than she. Whether advised by her husband or not she had the wit to make the acquaintance of the men of each new party as fast as it came into power. Thus, when the Girondins were at the helm in 1792, she hastened to interview them one by one, to demonstrate to them her devotion to the new civism, to extol the patriotism of her husband, General de Beauharnais. The acquaintance made, she immediately had a favor to ask—this friend was in prison, that one wanted a passport. All through the agitated winter of 1792 and 1793 Josephine was busy getting her friends out of prison and out of France. She seems to have had no fear for herself. As a matter of fact, the men who helped her were so convinced of her simple goodness of heart that they granted her much which would have been denied a more intelligent woman, and they did not question her loyalty. Was she not, too, the wife of General de Beauharnais? That fact did not, however, hold value for many months. Beauharnais’s conduct came into question before the Assembly; he resigned, offering to go into the line. The privilege was denied him, and he was retired from the army. He went at once to his family home near Blois, and threw himself actively into the work of the municipality and of the Jacobins. Josephine, warned of possible danger from her husband’s downfall and fearing the new law against the suspected, decided to leave Paris. She rented, in the winter, a little house at Croissy, not far out of the city, and near many of her friends, and there lived as quietly as she could. One method that she took of showing her devotion to democratic principles was to bind Eugène, who had been in school for several years, as an apprentice to a carpenter; and it is said that Hortense was placed with a dressmaker to learn the trade.
The Viscount escaped arrest until the spring of 1794; then the committee of Public Safety remembered him. There seems to have been no reason for his arrest other than that he was a noble—certainly no man in France had surpassed him in vehement republicanism or had been more fertile in schemes for saving the country. He was taken immediately to Paris, and confined in the prison of les Carmes. A month later, Josephine followed him. Her activity for her friends had continued after the retirement of her husband and the efforts she began at once to make to save him when he was arrested, caused a virtuous patriot to suggest anonymously to the authorities that she too ought to be looked after. She was promptly arrested.
For three months husband and wife lived side by side in that awful prison, the walls of which still bore the red imprints made in the September massacre, and in garden of which blood still oozed, it was believed, from the roots of the tree where murdered men had been stacked up by the score. With them were confined men from every rank of life, princes, merchants, sailors, chimney-sweeps, along with women and children. Almost daily a group was called to die, but their places were quickly filled. The awful tragedy of their lot drew Josephine and her husband no closer together. It is a terrible comment on the times that no one thought it strange that Beauharnais should have paid court here at the gate of death to a beautiful woman, a prisoner like himself, or that Josephine should have been so intimate with General Hoche, also a prisoner, that history has made a record of the fact.
Many efforts were made to save the Viscount and his wife, chiefly under their direction, for they were allowed to see their friends, and also their children. It is quite possible that certain petitions in their favor which have been found in the French archives, bearing the names of Eugène and Hortense, were dictated by the Viscount himself. But every effort was useless, and on July 21 Beauharnais was taken to the Conciergerie: the next day he was tried; the next guillotined. To the end he was brave and self-controlled. In his final words to Josephine, he even charged his death to the plots of the aristocrats, upholding the republic even as it struck him.
None of the Viscount de Beauharnais’s courage was shared by Josephine in her imprisonment. It is true that the majority of the women who suffered death in the French Revolution faced it bravely. Josephine was not of their blood. From the beginning of her imprisonment, she wept continually before everybody, and her favorite occupation was reading her fortune with cards; and yet cowardly as she was, no one was better loved. There was reason enough for this. No one was kinder, no one more willing to do a service, no one had been more active for others than she, when at liberty. All the good will of the prison came out in full when, on August 6, less than a fortnight after her husband’s death, she was set free. There was as general rejoicing as there would have been over the release of a child.
It is not certain through whose influence Josephine obtained her freedom. Mme. Tallien has generally been credited with securing it, but Masson in his delving has found dates which make it improbable that the legend current can be true. According to this, Mme. Tallien (then Mme. de Fontenay) and Josephine were fellow-prisoners, and it was at les Carmes that their friendship began. However, the prison records show that Mme. Tallien was never confined at les Carmes, but at la Petite Force; so that a part at least of the legend is impossible. That she may have interested herself in Josephine’s behalf is quite possible, even probable. She may have known Mme. de Beauharnais before her imprisonment. It is well known that, as soon as she received her own freedom she became an ardent advocate of that clemency which was made possible by the fall of Robespierre on the ninth Thermidor and that she rescued many persons. She may very well have included Josephine among the first of those she sought to save. Her task in this case would not have been difficult, for Josephine was known to most of the members of the Terrorist Government and was probably on terms of intimacy with some of them. At all events, Josephine was set free on August 6, and she immediately went to Croissy to pass the autumn.
The problems which now confronted Josephine were serious enough for the most practical and resourceful of women. The chaos in French business affairs made it very difficult for her to get her hand on money coming to her. Her husband’s property was tied up by his death so that she could realize nothing from it, and the value of what she did secure of her income must have been sadly reduced by the general depreciation which had resulted from the Reign of Terror and from the war, and by the exorbitant prices of even the commonest necessaries of life—bread at this time was over twenty francs a pound. Her situation was still more difficult because the personal property of herself, her children, and husband was all in the hands of the authorities. She had no linen, furniture, silver, clothing, nothing needful in her daily life. To keep house in the simplest way, she had to beg and borrow, and it was many months before she was able to secure her own articles of clothing and her household furniture.
With two children to care for and with a town apartment and a country cottage on her hands, she was in a very difficult position.
That Josephine was able to keep her homes, care for her children, and retain her position in the society of the Directory was due to the friendship and protection of two men, Hoche and Barras. Hoche had been liberated from les Carmes before Josephine, and put in charge of an army, and he at once took Eugène on his staff, thus freeing Josephine’s mind of that care. For a few months she managed by diligent borrowing and mortgaging to keep things going. In all of her efforts to repair her fortune and secure to her children the estate of Beauharnais, she enlisted her friends, especially Mme. Tallien, who just then was at the height of her power. The two became very intimate, and the Viscountess de Beauharnais was soon one of the women oftenest seen at the functions given by the members of the Directory as well as at all the more intimate gatherings of that society. She became as great a favorite among the dissipated and prodigal company as she had been among the aristocratic ladies of the Abbey de Panthemont or in the motley company at les Carmes. It was to be expected that she could not long be an intimate of Mme. Tallien’s salon without finding a protector. She found him in Barras, a member of the Directory, its most influential member in fact, a prince of corruption, but a man of elegance, and ability.