The Rights of Women

Among the benefits that thoughtful reactionaries might have claimed for the Ancien Regime--had they not instead been pursuing the retrospective chimeras of Divinely Ordained Subordination and Natural Piety--was that of the Absolute Social and Moral Equality of the Sexes which obtained from the 16th through the 18th centuries (though only among the upper classes, to be sure).  That this fragile bloom of civilization was due only to the total absence of Political Equality, and that it meant social and moral equality both for good and ill, is inarguable; yet the last two centuries of feudalism were, arguably, the last epoch in the Western World during which women consciously felt themselves to be, and were treated like, complete human beings in their own right.  One might have thought that so just, humane, and useful a principle as the equality of one half of mankind with the other would have only to obtain political acknowledgement for it to prevail. When came the Revolution, many...aristocrats...thought the time for that acknowledgement had come:  among them, Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat, marquis de Condorcet, noted libertarian, abolitionist, social scientist, and author of The Rights of Man, who in fact employed his last days in prison under the Terror, before he was sent to the guillotine, drafting a complementary, and utterly charming, Rights of Women.  Alas, it was not to be.

Ask any Frenchman--he will tell you that Louis XVI, and, significantly, his consort, the Austrian born Marie Antoinette, were traitors, who put their dynastic interests above their obligations as rulers  of the French nation.   And so they were.   Louis was thinking only of his patrimony, and Marie Antoinette only of her children--and in the meantime France was surrounded by a Grand Alliance of powers determined to invade it and to throttle the Revolution in its cradle. With War abroad and Terror at home, that vast effusion of French blood known as the Napoleonic Wars had begun.  Under the Terror, from 1793 through Thermidor 1794, The Committee of Public Safety would be filling the prisons with everyone it could lay its hands on, anyone who could by any stretch of the imagination be labelled "Agent of the Foreign Enemy"--and emptying them on the Place de la Guillotine.  But in the years before it was simply the Mob who ruled, "watering" the streets of Paris (where there were hardly any "furrows") with the "impure blood"  of "aristocratic whores."  When news reached Paris in late August 1792 of the fall of Verdun to the Prussian armies, the princesse de Lamballe, former companion to Marie Antoinette, and mistress of her household, was among the 1,200 prisoners (half the number of those then imprisoned in Paris) who were slain "with unspeakable barbarities," according to a British diplomatic envoy who witnessed part of it, in the so-called "September Massacres."  Upon her refusal to take an oath against the Monarchy, the princess was handed over to a band of ruffians armed with swords and pikes who raped, lynched, (the sequence is not clear) and "sexually mutilated" her body, which was then decapitated and the head, "bloody but recognizable," mounted upon a pike and paraded beneath the Queen's windows at the Temple.  To her credit, the Queen fainted.  Then came Robespierre and "Republican Virtue," and nothing more was heard in France, until 1945--after the Allied victory in World War II--of the Rights of Women.