With the adoption of this declaration by the national assembly, all hereditary distinctions, such as nobility and peerage, feudal regime, titles, and orders of chivalry were abolished, also venality or hereditary succession in offices, feudal privileges, religious vows or other engagements which might be at variance with natural rights or the constitution.—
Early in October, 1789, Théroigne de Méricourt also took a leading part in the march of the women to Versailles and it was she who by the violence of her speech won the royalist soldiers over to the revolution and so enforced the return of the royal family to Paris.
Being accused of dangerous conduct and of having been engaged in a plot against the life of the queen Marie Antoinette, the daughter of Empress Maria Theresia of Austria, during a visit to Liége she was seized by warrant of the Austrian Government and for some time interned at the fortress of Kufstein. After her release in January, 1792, she returned to Paris, where she was hailed as a martyr of liberty. Resuming her former role she again became very active in all public affairs. On June 20, 1792, she even commanded in person the 3d Corps of the so-called army of the Faubourges, and marched with them to the palace, where the king, wearing the red cap, met the revolutionists and assured them “that he would do whatever the constitution ordained that he should do.” But as soon afterwards the king’s secret connections with Austria and Prussia became public, the insurrection broke loose again, resulting in the massacre of the national guard on August 10th, in the Place Véndome. It was here, that Théroigne sprang at Suleau, a pamphleteer in royal service, and dragged him among the infuriated mob, where he was instantly killed.—
It was a year before these incidents that Madame Roland opened a salon in Paris, whither her husband had been sent as the deputy from Lyons to the constituent assembly. Her salon had nothing in common with those frequented by people seeking recreation in conversation and belle esprit. Generally there were no women present except the hostess. But her salon was the rendezvous of such fiery spirits as Mirabeau, Brissot, Vergniaud, Robespierre and others, interested in the great movement, which was soon to reach its climax. It was in this salon that Madame Roland impressed her enthusiasm for a republic upon those men who likewise strove for progress and liberty. Here also she conceived the plan of a journal, entitled “The Republican,” which, however, was suppressed after its second issue. Here she penned that famous letter to the king, which, as it remained unanswered, was read aloud by her husband, the king’s appointed Minister of the Interior, in full council and in the king’s presence. Containing many terrible truths as to the royal refusal to sanction the decrees of the national assembly and as to the king’s position in the state, this letter initiated the dethronement of the king and the abolition of royalty.—
It was in these troubled times, also, that another remarkable woman attracted great attention by matching the “Declaration of the rights of man” with a “Declaration des Droits de la Femme,” a declaration of the rights of women. In this document she preached for the first time not only the principle of equality of both sexes but she also demanded the right of women to vote and to hold public offices. This document was published just at the time when the equality of both sexes before the law and the guillotine had become a recognized fact, when not only the head of the king but also that of the queen Marie Antoinette had rolled into the dust. Pointing to these events Olympe de Gouges closed her manifesto with the flaming words: “When women have the right to ascend the scaffold then they must have the right to mount the platform of the orator!”
When Olympe de Gouges wrote these lines, she hardly anticipated her own fate. Provoking in some way the anger of Robespierre, this rabid tyrant did send her also to the guillotine.—
Théroigne de Méricourt likewise fell a victim of the furious hostility, which in 1793 arose between the two leading parties, the Girondists and the Montagnards, the latter party led by those most extreme autocrats as Marat, Danton and Robespierre. When Théroigne, being aware that her own party, the Gironde, was in peril at the hands of these bloodthirsty men, one day urged the mob to moderate their courses, she was seized, stripped naked and flogged in the public garden of the Tuilleries. This infamous affront affected her so that she became a raving maniac, never recovering her reason.—
THE ROLL-CALL FOR THE GUILLOTINE.
After the painting by C. L. Mueller.
For Madame Roland and her husband too the day of darkness was soon to come. They found that they could no longer control those passions which they had helped to call forth. Repulsed by the incredible excesses, which were committed during the progress of the revolution, Mr. Roland sent in his resignation on January 22, 1793, the day after the execution of the king. But all his and his wife’s efforts to regulate and elevate the Revolution failed. Both became more and more the butt of calumny and the object of increasing dislike on the part of the ultra-revolutionists, whose leaders, Marat and Danton, heaped the foulest falsehoods upon them. At the instigation of these men Madame Roland was arrested early on the morning of the last of July, 1793, and thrown into the same prison cell, that had been occupied by Charlotte Corday a short time before. On November the 8th she was conveyed to the guillotine. Before yielding her head to the block, she bowed before the statue of Liberty, erected in the Place de la Revolution, uttering her famous apostrophe: “O Liberty! what crimes are committed in thy name!”—