French Revolution: Radicals (part 3): A Toxic Bisexual Love Story

Vulgar History Podcast

French Revolution: Rebels (part 3): A Toxic Bisexual Love Story

April 30, 2025

Ann Foster:
Hello and welcome to Vulgar History, a feminist women’s history comedy podcast. My name is Ann Foster, and this is Season Seven; it’s sort of a miniseries in the midst of Season Seven. Technically, we’re talking about various revolutions around the world, but we’re doing several weeks. I think I’d said before seven weeks, it’s going to be more. We’re looking at specifically women who were involved in the French Revolution on the Revolution side of things. Later on this year, we’re going to pivot and we’re going to look at some women who were involved in the French Revolution on the other side. I was going to say the side that was more likely to get their heads chopped off, but frankly, as we learned from the story of Olympe de Gouges and also Théroigne de Méricourt, women on the Revolution side were also not super safe in that way. 

Anyway, today we’re talking about two in one. It’s, I think… We’ve done so many episodes of Vulgar History through the years, and I don’t think we’ve ever done an episode about two people before. The reason I’m combining them is partially because their stories overlap a lot, so it would just be kind of strange to talk about one and then the other one in separate episodes. Secondly, because there’s not that much known about either of them, so when you put it together, it becomes a nice length episode, but separate, it would have been shorter. And thirdly, because I like to think they were lesbians in a relationship with each other. Now, nothing that I’ve read indicates that, but it’s more of a gut feeling I have. Last week, I had Claire Mead on the podcast talking about Théroigne de Méricourt, and she’s the one who put the idea in my head, actually, where she mentioned Claire Lacombe and Pauline Léon and, kind of, these historically very good friends. And that’s a phrase that comes up. There was a podcast I like listening to a bit ago, they’ve ended, but it was a great podcast, what lasted, called Historically Very Good Friends, which is looking at people in the situation in history where it’s just kind of like, “Oh, you know, they were roommates. This person, she left all of her estate to this person who she lived with her whole life,” where it’s like, “Harold, they’re lesbians,” like pretty obviously. 

Claire and Pauline, you know, choose your own adventure here, but I will present to you their story. Again, there’s not enough about either of them for me to comfortably do, like, an hour-long podcast episode, not about their personal lives, but we know they were at this protest on this date, here are some of the words from a speech that one of them gave, like that sort of thing. Their personal lives are personal, and so I will respect that. But in the back of my head, I’m thinking, Harold, they’re lesbians. And I hope they were. I think some French filmmaker could make a fantastic movie about these two women and the high-key drama of their lives. 

So, we’re talking about Claire Lacombe, Pauline Léon. I had to dig around quite a bit to get enough information to make this episode, and I’m excited because special guest appearance, practically the third girl in this story, is my beloved market ladies. We talked about the market ladies in the Olympe de Gouges episode, they came up in the Théroigne de Méricourt episode, and I’ve just gotten only more excited about them and their beating people up with their wooden clogs and stabbing people and just, like… The market ladies are just my people, and I’m excited to get to tell you more about them in this episode, which we’re going to learn a lot. 

So, the resources I used for this episode, an essay about Claire Lacombe by C. David Rice from Women in World History. The Wikipedia entries were with Claire and Pauline. Also, WomenInEuropeanHistory.Wordpress.com about Pauline, an article called “Theophile Leclerc: an anti-Jacobin terrorist” by Morris Slavin. We’ll find out later who Theophile Leclerc is. My main and the most prolific resource, the book I was so delighted to find, is called Liberty: The Lives and Times of Six Women in Revolutionary France by Lucy Moore, which I will be talking about as a resource in three to four other episodes because she talks about six women. And then also, an essay by author Geri Walton about a woman called Reine Audu, who, again, we’re going to talk about her in a bit. 

So, here’s a little back story for you. Picture it: France, 1789. So, the previous year… We’re going to be talking a lot about bread in this episode. It was a real bread crisis. The way that right now there’s kind of an eggs crisis or, you know, in 2020, there was a toilet paper crisis. Bread was the thing that just everybody wanted because it helps make you feel full, it tastes delicious, and also, I think if you’re a poor person, it had been historically a way to get some nutrients, make you feel full for like a less expensive thing. And there’s a bread crisis. What was causing this bread crisis? Grain. The harvest had been destroyed the previous year by late hailstorms, and the winter had been the worst for nearly a century. If you were listening to this podcast a bit ago when we were doing American Revolution stuff, that was around when Thomas Jefferson was living in Paris with Sally Hemmings and he was like, “Let’s leave here,” both because of the revolution that seems to be coming and also because, like, “We don’t like this kind of winter”. So, it was that winter and it just fucked over all the crops. Like this year, I think something happened to strawberries. 

Anyway. So, bread, because it was more scarce, I feel like this is wild because if I had done this episode two years ago, five years ago, I’d just be like, “Oh, this is interesting. Let’s talk about economics.” But it’s like, I feel like we’re all very intimately aware with supply chain issues right now. And so, what had happened is just, the wheat crop was bad, so there was less bread. So, the bread that they were able to make was more expensive. And when bread becomes more expensive, people can’t buy it, like, people who don’t have money. So, people were dying of starvation. Literally, the bread shortage was causing the death of so many people because people in France at this time, the poor people were, like, so poor, and bread was their main thing, and they were dying. This is also affecting, just so you know, to seed this idea, the market ladies, because if they didn’t have bread to sell, then they weren’t able to make money, and then they didn’t have as much money to feed their families. So, it trickled down in a horrible way. The bread was affecting everybody. 

So, at this point in time, just some facts and figures… There were a lot more poor people than there were rich people. And the rich people were incredibly rich. Like, their version of the 1 percent, they’re living lives of luxury. If there had been a Blue Origin spaceship, like, they would have gone up there and been assholes about it too. But it’s also kind of like, the rich people never… they almost had no reason to ever interact with the poor people, so it wasn’t… Today, I don’t know if it’s necessarily that different, but at least with social media and stuff, like people, you might come across somebody from a different type of culture or different class from you, and kind of get to know them and what their issues are. Like, you can just do that from just scrolling through TikTok or whatever. But here, it’s like the poor people were poor and they never interacted with the rich people; the rich people never interacted with the poor people. They might as well have been, like, aliens living on different planets. The only time that the really rich people would interact with the poor people is maybe some of their servants. So, people are dying of bread, but the rich people kind of like, “It doesn’t affect us, whatever.” But there were so many more people in France, so many more not rich people. So, for instance, in Paris, there’s something like 5,000 nobles and the city had like, 550,000 people. Like, most of the people, they wildly outnumbered the nobles. Among these non-nobles are my beloved market ladies. 

So, they spoke poissard, which is the Parisian slang dialect of the markets. Now, I don’t know specifically if this is like cockney rhyming slang, which I also love. But they spoke poissard and sometimes they’re referred to as the poissardes, and that basically means fish seller, fish wife. So, they sold fish, but they also sold bread, they also sold fruit, all the things you need to buy in the market on the street. Also, people in this kind of category would include, like, seamstresses and laundresses. They were respected in a way in this culture that is very, very, very sexist. 

We’re going to get into this a lot in this episode, and as I was researching this, I was just like, “Wow!” You know, I have recorded so many episodes of this podcast about so many cultures and times in world history, and this, to me, unless I’m forgetting something, is one of the most sexist times and places I’ve ever read about. But the market ladies were sort of respected by the revolutionaries, not by the rich people. The revolutionary leaders were men, and the men who were the revolutionary leaders hated most women, but they respected the market ladies because the market ladies had a strong moral fibre, apparently. Also, they’re a bit like the canaries in the coal mine; if the market ladies were like, “Things are not going well,” that meant that things were going to get worse and worse and worse. They were kind of the first line of defence for noticing that something is going wrong in society. These days, what I’ve heard is that women who work in strip clubs, they start noticing, like, “Oh, people are giving less tips, people are coming less often,” and then six months later, it’s like, we’re in a recession. Those are the market— So, this is the people who notice it first. Anyway, so in this lower-class group of people, we meet our first of this episode’s main characters, Pauline Léon, who is from this sort of background. 

So, she’s born September 28, 1768. Her parents are Pierre-Paul Léon and Mathurine Telohan. And what did they do? They had a family business. And what was that business? Chocolate makers. Yes. They were chocolatiers. And so, I didn’t mention chocolatiers as part of the market ladies, and they’re kind of not. That’s because chocolate making was a luxury business, because only rich people could afford to buy chocolate. So, in that sense, I think they were sort of better off than people who were selling things that were bought by less-rich people, because when the economy tanks, rich people are generally unaffected, and they keep buying all their stuff. But the people who are affected are the poor people, and also the people in the middle who maybe just don’t have the money to buy a little treat for themselves or whatever. So, being in the chocolate biz was, like, an okay place to be. And also, also, I just love the idea of just like a French chocolatier, like, a chocolate croissant or like Jacques Torres from Nailed It! Just like, the beautiful chocolate he makes. So, running a chocolate business, I should clearly go have some chocolate right now. 

Anyway, her father, Pierre-Paul, was also a thoughtful guy. He liked reading philosophy and talking about it with his children. He made sure that his children, including Pauline, could read and write, which was not the norm for a woman in this situation. She hadn’t received much formal education, but her father had sort of talked to her about what was going on in philosophy and stuff. He died when she was 16. So, she stepped up to help her mother run the chocolate biz and also to help raise her five younger siblings. She did this kind of in exchange for room and board, even though it’s her family, because it’s like, everybody’s hustling here. So, she’s just like, this is her life. She didn’t get married at this point yet. When the Revolution breaks out, she is 31 years old, unmarried, basically roommates with her mom running the chocolate biz, raising these siblings. 

The Revolution broke out. And kind of in terms of who are the women revolutionaries? They were women like Pauline and her mom, because people who had young children, mothers of young children, would stay home with the children. So, the women who were, like, taking to the streets in these protests were unmarried, like Pauline, or older women who are widows, like her mom, Mathurine. And the way that because society was so divided between men and women, and it’s… I guess we’ve read about, or we’ve talked about, some cultures like that. The one that comes to mind is like Joseon era, olden days Korea, where it’s just kind of like men and women were kept separate all the time, they just didn’t interact with each other, that’s just what the culture was like. So, even when the French Revolution broke out, there was men’s protests, and there was women’s protests, and the women revolutionaries hung out with each other, and the men hung out with each other. There wasn’t, like, co-ed protests. 

So, she was part of this like, women’s protest situation, and she was psyched, Pauline. When the Revolution kicked off in 1789, she’s just like, “Fuck yes. This bullshit, the society we live in, things have to change. There’s not bread, the market ladies are upset. Let’s go girls,” basically. We’re going to go through— Actually, I should mention on my Patreon page, I have, for free, a bingo card of just kind of names and places and events that are going to come up again and again in these episodes. So, you can get your bingo code there, go to Patreon.com/AnnFosterWriter. You have to sign up to be a member, but that’s free. Get your bingo card and play along because you’re going to cross off the square right now, which is “the Bastille.” 

So, the Bastille was a prison. It was the symbol of the royal family in Paris at this time, because the royal family lived off in Versailles. The Bastille was sort of like a royal-run prison. And so, just kind of like, the Fall of the Bastille, like, the revolutionaries breaking in and freeing the prisoners. There’s only like seven prisoners because the building was condemned; they’re going to stop using it as a prison pretty soon anyway. But symbolically, it meant, like, “We’re attacking the royal family because we’re attacking the Bastille.” So, we don’t know if Pauline was physically there at the Fall of the Bastille when the prison was taken and the prisoners were liberated, but afterwards— Well, actually, I will say many women were there, so that was one of the co-ed riots. And later, she said she “felt the liveliest enthusiasm when the Bastille, symbol of royal despotism, fell.” And after the Bastille fell, it was just kind of like, people just took to the streets. It was not yet a purge scenario, just so you know. They’re not yet running around, like they, Pauline and her mom, but also everybody, it’s not just, like, blood running in the streets, rivers of people being killed. It’s just more of, like, an excited party riot atmosphere. 

So, Pauline and her mom, because I guess the siblings were older now and, well, she’s 31, the siblings are probably in their twenties as well, they don’t need taking after. Pauline and her mom were on the streets from morning till evening, “inciting citizens against the partisans of tyranny, urging them to despise aristocrats, barricading streets and inciting the cowardly to leave their homes to come to the aid of the country in danger.” So, they’re just on the streets, just encouraging everybody else to, like, “Come join this mob. It’s a good time.” And so, when she’s talking about the danger, about France being in danger, she doesn’t mean… There wasn’t a war yet, France was not at war with other countries at the moment. What she meant was the danger of counterrevolutionaries. The danger was like… So, it’s a civil war situation; it’s like revolutionaries versus counterrevolutionaries. And she was the number one hater of a person we’ve talked about on this podcast, the Marquis de Lafayette. 

So, Marquis de Lafayette was one year older than her. He was this French guy who, like, snuck over to America, and he became a hero of the American Revolution, then he came back to France. He was still quite young, like, they’re both in their early thirties. He had been made the commander of the National Guard, and he was overall a popular person, but this was an impossible job for anybody to do. We talked about this a bit in the Marquis de Lafayette episode, but it was hard to be in charge of the National Guard and please both the royalists, the people supporting the royal family, and also the revolutionary-type people. And Pauline just did not trust him. She just thought like, ”He’s on the side of the king and the queen. He’s not on our side. This guy is shifty.” She was, like I said, the number one hater. And she was. It’s like, if Lafayette has no haters, it’s because she’s dead. She hated Lafayette because he was an aristocrat, and aristocrats, to her, could not be trusted. 

So, remember the bread crisis. So, bread. Bread, everybody… There’s not enough bread, people are starving. And the starving poor people who, I want to say… I’m going to extrapolate from my own experience, but when I get very hungry, I get hangry, and I think these were mobs of hangry people. They were hungry and angry. And also, they were living in this really shitty situation and so they connected the fact that they couldn’t get bread to what was going on with the Revolution. Bear in mind, the market ladies are just like, “Where’s our bread? We need bread to sell, we need bread to eat. All we care about,” market ladies, “is bread.” And the people, like Pauline, are like, “The Revolution! Down with the despots!” whatever. And so, the market ladies are like, “Do these things go together?” So, at some point, these things were sort of connected. So, the starving, hangry people started to think like, “Wait, maybe this is connected. Maybe it’s the king’s fault we don’t have bread. Not just the bad crops last year, but maybe it’s the king’s fault.” 

Rumours are spreading, and it’s like, we see now today all the time how easy it is for rumours to spread. But back then, if everyone’s hangry and there’s no bread and you are just kind of trying to make connections to make this make sense how shitty your life is. So, at some point, the market ladies made this connection that, like, the king is withholding bread. The king has a stockpile of bread at Versailles that he’s not giving to us, the poor people, because he’s trying to crush the spirit of revolt. He’s trying to make us hangry so we’ll stop being revolutionaries. He is hiding the bread from us. And then Lafayette, as part of his job with the National Guard, he was responsible for making sure the bread got the way to the market. So, he was held personally responsible as well for this bread crisis. Cannot understate how important this bread crisis is. 

So, at dawn on the morning of October 5th, a young woman began— And this wasn’t just a spontaneous thing that happened. People were planning this before, but this was the day they decided to do it. This is the Women’s March, which we’ve talked about before. The way that it started is a young market woman began beating a drum on the street in central Paris. I don’t know if she was yelling out, just like, “The king has our bread. Let’s go get our bread from the king. Down with the king.” I don’t know what she was saying, maybe she was singing songs. So, this is early morning, you know, the market stuff gets going early. By 7:00 AM, 2,000 women had joined her, and they broke into… They were in this town square, and there’s a building nearby, the Hôtel de Ville, which they broke into, basically trashing it. And they’re just like, “Fuck all this, we’re going to go to Versailles. We’re going to get the king to give us some goddamn bread. We’re going to get bread from the king.” 

And I said that this was not just, like, a random thing that broke out; this was organized. And one of the organizers of this was named Louise-Renée Audu, AKA Reine Audu. And reine is a French word that means ‘queen’ because she was the queen of the market ladies. Just imagine what it would take to be considered the queen of the market ladies. We’re going to get into what they’re like more in this episode. But just know that the market ladies would kill you; they would smash you over the head with their wooden clog if you looked at them funny. The market ladies carry knives with them. The market ladies are not to be fucked with and if you’re the queen of the market ladies, that just means like… I can’t even, like… How terrifying she must have been. Hilariously, one of the sources I was looking at was suggesting that maybe she was voted queen— Well, she wasn’t voted queen of the market ladies, she was just considered queen of the market ladies. But somebody suggested it was because she was so beautiful. Like, I’m sorry. I don’t think it’s a beauty pageant to be queen of the market ladies. I think if anything, it’s like a Hunger Games scenario, like, who among the market ladies is the most deadly, and this is who won, Reine Audu. 

So, her role this day, the day of the Women’s March, was she was out there in the square making speeches, encouraging more women to join them. She was basically like, “We’re going to go to Versailles to ask the king why there isn’t more bread in Paris. We’re all hangry. Let’s go, ladies.” It’s a real Shania, “Let’s go girls,” Shania Twain type moment. Whereas the market ladies’ main grievance was, of course, “Stop hiding the bread. Give us the secret bread you’re hiding,” but they also came up with other demands. They wanted an assurance that bread would be plentiful and cheap; not just, like, give us the stockpile of bread, but like, we want bread on an ongoing basis. And secondly, they wanted Louis XVI and his family in the royal court to reside in Paris instead of in Versailles so that the king would be nearer to the people. 

So, the Women’s March, they just… As they walked, it’s like in the episode of Vulgar History where we talked about Boudica in Great Britain when it was under Roman rule, and she just was walking and people just kept joining her army, it was a similar thing. Women just kept joining the Women’s March. They were not wearing pussy hats; they were carrying pitchforks and broomsticks as well as pikes, swords and muskets. Women were joining the march on purpose because they wanted to, but also, any women who they passed were forced to join the march as well. So, even some, like, clean-faced, well-fed, higher-class women were suddenly just like, “What’s going on? Why am I in a march? Oh my God, that woman’s pointing a dagger at me. I guess I’ll join this march now.” So, the march had grown to like 6,000 women, it’s like, 14 kilometres to walk to Versailles. Do the conversion for that if you’re American, it’s quite a far distance. They left at 7:00 AM, they got there at around 5:00 PM. 

Once they got there… So, 15 people, including Reine Audu, were chosen to go and speak with the king to give their demands. And so, allegedly, when they went to speak with him, he was on his best behavior, super nice and charming, and although most of the delegation was satisfied with his promise, he was like, “Yes, I’ll get you bread. Here’s some flour,” or whatever, Reine Audu was not satisfied with what he had to say, and when she went outside, the rest of the marchers were also not won over. I have to say, I can be easily won over by people, by salesmen, people like that. That’s why it’s good to have people in my life who are very cynical and very distrusting, because I feel like the other people in this delegation were like, “Oh wow, he said nice things. That’s good. That’s fine.” That would be me. Reine Audu was just like, “No, no, no, no. This is not enough.” 

So, after they had this talk with the king, she and some others attempted to force their way into the palace, during which time she was wounded. Eventually, everyone ended up sleeping over because it was nighttime and everyone was tired. So, the women marchers were just sleeping on the ground in the stables; Reine Audu allegedly slept on the carriage of a cannon. And then just before dawn, a group of men and women broke into the palace compound. Two soldiers were killed, and their heads were paraded around on pikes. I don’t have “Heads on pikes” on the bingo card, but I feel like this is going to come up every single episode. Lafayette, who was there at Versailles, he woke up and he’s just like, “Oh, what can we do? PR crisis.” What’s her name? “Molly McPherson, what should we do?” And so, he brought Marie Antoinette with him onto this balcony and kissed her hand, and somehow, this calmed everybody down, and they were like, “We have bread! It’s all cool now.” 

So, the royal family agreed to come to Paris. They were escorted by, I want to say, 60,000 people. Like, they were brought back to Paris, and they were going to live at the Palace of Tuileries. “Tuileries,” also on our bingo card. Upon the return, Reine Audu faced a judicial inquiry for her role in this situation that she had helped organize and was the face of. She was charged with having announced her intention of going to Versailles, she was charged with having helped to massacre the king’s bodyguards, and with having taken part in other disorderly scenes. So, she was just kind of like the person blamed, even though there were so many people all doing the same thing. Guess why? Because France hated women! She was found guilty and imprisoned. Her lawyer, Chenau, is his name, he was like, “Okay, she’s clearly going to be found guilty, but at least I can turn her into a legend and icon,” and that’s what he did. At the trial, he gave a speech comparing her to the second coming of Joan of Arc. And so, she remained in prison for the time being. We’ll hear from Reine Audu again later, because, back to the actual main characters of this episode, Pauline. 

So, we don’t know if Pauline was, like, actually part of the Women’s March, but what else would she have been doing unless the chocolate biz was really busy that day? Anyway, she later criticized Lafayette’s behaviour. Him coming out on the balcony with Marie Antoinette confirmed her mistrust of him; she saw him as a traitor, she hated him even more for what he did there. The Women’s March in general gave her and all of the market ladies a new sort of self-confidence, just a realization of the power that they had, like, how many of them there were and how they could actually make things happen. 

So, basically, the Revolution is revolutionizing. People are rioting. There’s a lot of men in rooms having meetings and signing documents with each other. That part all gives me flashbacks to the most boring parts of the Mary, Queen of Scots story, so I’m going to skip over all that as much as possible. 18 months later, a group of widows and single women, probably including Pauline Léon, addressed the popular revolutionary assembly, the Cordeliers Club, to urge, I don’t know, they’re just kind of like making a statement saying like, “Here’s what we want, here’s our demands.” The Cordeliers Club met at the bottom of the street where Pauline and her mother lived, and so she often attended meetings there. So, it was just notable that the widows and single women addressed the club because again, this is a profoundly sexist society. Women making political statements was not common. It’s not usual, that’s how we know that it happened. 

One month after that, Pauline went to the National Assembly, which is kind of like, I don’t know, the House of Commons. It’s kind of the place where the ruling body of France at the time met. It’s just a bunch of man politicians and people could go there and, like, say their piece, basically. So, she went to the National Assembly, presenting a petition with over 300 signatures, and what the people had signed the paper for and what she was speaking about was she was saying, basically, “Let women have weapons.” She was saying “In the event of a foreign war,” like if France went to war with some other country, “the men would go off to fight and the women would be left defenceless at home.” So, women should be allowed to have weapons. She said, here’s a quote from her. “Your predecessors deposited the Constitution as much in our hands as in yours. Oh, how to save it if we have no arms to defend it from the attacks of its enemies.” She demanded “the honour of sharing their men’s exhaustion and glorious labours and of making tyrants see that women also have blood to shed for the service of France in danger.” So, I think that women weren’t allowed to have weapons, even though at the Women’s March they had pikes and whatever, I think it was part of, like, only citizens could have weapons and women were not considered citizens. I think that’s the crux of the issue. 

Feminism corner, just to sort of explain what flavour of feminism we’re talking about in this story. So, in her speeches, and other women of this time who were advocating for more women’s rights, they still were, like, “We want women’s rights but not in a way that would challenge the foundational basis of our sexist society.” So, in her thing that I just read, she was saying, like, “Women should have weapons so that we can defend our beautiful country that we love while our men are off at war.” She’s not saying we should have them for ourselves, but we should have them because of patriotism. The way that France’s gender roles were at this time, as far as I can understand, is that women were thought… They needed to be passive in terms of politics, and that was for the greater good of society. So, Pauline is like, “I’m committed to the revolutionary cause, but don’t mistake that for me being interested in politics. I appreciate that women should never do that. We should all be home breastfeeding our children,” or whatever. So, she was saying that she’s not fighting for rights for herself or for women, but for all French men. 

But in general, political women were mistrusted by the guy who’s the head of the National Assembly, I don’t know if he’s technically the head at this point, but he spiritually is. Another square on your bingo sheet which is Robespierre. Which is like, you can’t see me, this is an audio podcast, but I’m, like, clutching my head like I have a migraine because I’m so angry that I have to read about Robespierre. If you remember, if you listen to the Mary, Queen of Scots season that I did a year or two ago, John Knox was just… Like, I couldn’t, I couldn’t deal with him. I just hated him so much in his incel live podcast recordings, and he was just sort of like, always in the background just fucking shit up. Robespierre gives me that same vibe, except he’s also in charge. He’s not just this sort of like, creepy Rasputin, like telling people what to do, he’s actually in charge, and he’s literally the worst, and I’m so angry I have to read about him. Every time he shows up, just know he’s going to do something really shitty, and some woman who we enjoy is going to end up dead. 

Anyway, political women were mistrusted by almost all of the men leading both sides of the Revolution. And at this point in the Revolution, there’s the two sides. So, there’s the Girondins, who are a bit more centrist, they were like, “We can have the king and the queen, but we should also have an elected assembly, we should be kind of like England. Let’s do that.” And then we have the Jacobins, who were kind of like, “Death to the king, there shouldn’t even be a king, it should just be us. Hell yeah.” And those are the two sides. Almost everybody on both sides didn’t want women involved in any way. This is partially because France had a history of powerful women behind the scenes. So, these are women who we’ve talked about, like Catherine de ’Medici, back in the day. But also, just the thought that there’s like centuries of in France, there were powerful mistresses or wives were kind of telling the king what to do. And so, these guys, like Robespierre, et cetera, were suspicious because powerful wives and mistresses wielding power from behind the scenes was part of kind of like, what they call the ancien régime, the old ways of France, what they wanted to break away from. They wanted to have a new France, and in the ancien régime, women had influence, and they didn’t want women to have any influence because they thought that kept the men from being objective. So, cleansing France of corruption meant stopping all women from playing any kind of public role. 

You know who they pointed to, to explain why they thought this way? Goddamn Rousseau. Fucking Rousseau. He’s the John Knox figure in all of this. He’s the one doing the live podcast recordings. He’s like the Jordan Peterson of his time, Rousseau. Everyone was such a fan of Rousseau and his philosophy. So, as per Rousseau, a society dominated by women was fundamentally tainted. So, any political woman was inherently depraved and unnatural. So, to all of these guys, but also women, because in this situation in France (not unlike today in a lot of way), men hated women, but also women hated women. And the best and quickest and easiest way to discount a political woman was to say that she was a whore, to make up lurid stories about how she’s just, like, this trashy bitch. This is what they did to Olympe de Gouges, this is what they did to Théroigne de Méricourt, this is what they did to Marie Antoinette. This is what we do these days to whoever, you know, like Amber Heard, Blake Lively, Kamala Harris, like just people where it’s like if a woman, if you don’t like them, then it’s just like, “Oh, but she’s a trashy slut. So, let’s just all hate her.” That’s what they were doing then. Saying that a woman was using her sexuality was a way to quickly get everyone to hate them and to kind of discount what they were saying. 

So, as per Rousseau, women were encouraged to embrace “naturalism,” which meant dressing more plain, dressing more like one might say, Handmaid’s Tale-style. So, if you picture Marie Antoinette and her fancy, embroidered gowns and the big hoop skirts, and the silk fabrics and the stays, which is kind of like what you might think of as a corset, but just kind of like all that stuff, the fancy hairstyles and stuff. So, the big trend in France at this time was naturalism for women. So, if you follow the trickle-down effect of this, if the women in France are like, they were not having their hair styled, they were not getting their blowouts, they were not wearing silk, they were not getting stuff embroidered. The people who are affected by this is the silk industry, people who work in the stays industry, people who work in the hairstyling industry, even the laundry industry, because it became sort of like, for men and women, for everybody in France at this time, it was kind of like “Don’t wash your clothes or yourself.” That’s how you show you’re a patriot. The lace-making industry. All these industries, which were heavily… Most of the people in them were women, so suddenly they were, you know, they’re already hangry, there’s no bread, and now suddenly, people aren’t ordering their silk or their stays. Luckily, people started ordering chocolate, so Pauline is still doing okay, but these are things that are going on. The city of, I think it was Lyon, which was kind of like the silk mecca, it was the place where so much of the silk production happened, because people stopped buying as much fancy silk, they, the whole city, everyone was just suddenly bankrupt and hangry because they weren’t able to sell their products. 

So, of the two sides of the Revolution, the Girondins, who are a bit more like “Let’s have a king but also have politicians,” they were like, “We’ll let women help us towards revolutionary goals. That’s cool.” The Jacobins were like, not even that. “Women, stay home, breastfeed your children, dress in a burlap sack. Thank you so much, that’s what you can do for your country.” And yet, Pauline wanted more than that for women; she wanted to be much more involved in the Revolution itself, and on May 13, 1793, Pauline registered the first ever revolutionary society solely for women. Remember I told you, there’s kind of like men revolutionaries and women revolutionaries? So, there were a lot of clubs for men revolutionaries, and sometimes women like Théroigne de Méricourt or Olympe de Gouges would attend their meetings, but you know, they weren’t really super welcome, and they couldn’t really have a say. So, this is where Pauline was like, “What we need is an all-girl revolutionary society,” and so she did. It was called the Société des Républicaines-Révolutionnaires, and it was formed by Pauline and her new best friend, Claire Lacombe. Let’s talk about her. 

So, Claire Lacombe was a few years younger than Pauline, she was in her mid-late twenties at the time that they started, when they met each other and started this girls’ club. So, Claire was born in poverty in the provincial town of Pamiers in southwestern France, August 4, 1765. If you notice I always like to say dates, that’s because I know a lot of you out there are horoscope girlies, and I feel like that gives you information, knowing these dates. So, we don’t know anything about Claire’s childhood. We know that as a teenager, she became an actress in a repertory company. We’ve talked a bit on previous episodes, we did an episode, if you haven’t heard it, the episode I did a couple years ago about an actress named [phonetic] Rachelle, no last name. It’s spelled like Rachel, R-A-C-H-E-L. Just look up the episode of Vulgar History about Rachel, and you can learn a lot about what it was like to be a French actress. The era just slightly after this one, but a lot of it connects. 

So, she was an actress, Claire Lacombe. She’s AKA Rosa Lacombe, sometimes people call her that. Cute name, I don’t know if that’s her stage name or what. Apparently, to be successful as an actress, you need to have, like, a strong stage presence, you need to be quite striking-looking, and apparently, she was both of those things. As we talked about in the Rachel episode, to be a stage performer at this time meant you were doing these specific plays that had specific hand gestures. So, it was a very, sort of, exaggerated style of acting. And apparently, she did just fine at it. She wasn’t a star, but she was making a career for herself. Like, she’s a working actress and kind of not in Paris, but in other parts of France. So, by her early twenties, she was an accomplished performer; she performed in Lyon, she performed in Marseille, and she was part of an acting company that just moved from town to town, sometimes went to castles and the country houses or aristocrats. So, she would have kind of seen what it was like for the really wealthy people to be living. Meanwhile, she was living in filthy hotels, like, rooms and taverns, and just kind of like, getting by. But as she was travelling around France and spending time in these places, she would have seen the rich people and she’s performing for them, but then she’s spending time in these taverns and whatever, and she would have heard people talking about like, “Oh, you know, there’s Revolution is in the air. Maybe stuff in France is going to change.” 

So, she heard that the playwright, Beaumarchais, had staged The Marriage of Figaro, which was very subversive. I think it’s subversive because something about the story involves, I think, an aristocrat falling in love with a servant, and that was just, like, “Herman, my pills!” like to all of France to see a play where something like that happened. She heard that he’d become the darling of the city for putting on this play. And she was just like, “I need to go to Paris. It sounds like cool things are happening in Paris.” She was like the opposite of Lauren Conrad from The Hills; she’s just like, “I’m going to be the girl who went to Paris.” She saved up her money from acting and made her way to Paris in July 1792, which if… I mean, she arrived in the middle of all of it, she wasn’t just like, “Oh wow, what’s this? The Women’s March?” This is like, two years after the Women’s March, three years after the Women’s March. Things are like, again, I’m not going to say purge-level, but things are pretty chaotic there. So, she arrived to a city at war, in revolution, and in trouble. 

So, this was at this point, three years since the Fall of the Bastille, which was being celebrated on July 14 in widespread street parties. She joined the street parties, she was just like, “Fuck yeah! I’m in Paris, this is amazing.” And while she was there, she saw all the hangry poor people, she saw how people are being oppressed and mistreated. She took a room in a cheap hotel, and she, like Théroigne de Méricourt, who we talked about last week, she just started doing her unofficial bachelor’s degree in political studies by attending all these sessions of meetings of people talking about politics and philosophy and everything. So, she went to sessions of the Legislative Assembly and meanwhile, like she had this cheap room but she had to pay for it, so she made a living as an actor by acting in patriotic tableaus of the time, which I think was just like, street theatre. She knew all the arm gestures of being an actress, so she could just kind of like, step into those roles, which again is very Rachel-coded. She sewed her dress in the colours of the tri-colour red, white and blue flag of the Revolution, which we’re going to talk about a lot. The red, white, and blue flag of the Revolution. People also, when you think about the French Revolution, you know, people, these sort of like fabric boutonnieres, they’re called cockades. It’s sort of like, you take ribbon and it’s like, red and white and blue in kind of a sunburst shape, and you would wear them. When you were wearing one of those buttons, people knew you were like, part of the Revolution. 

Anyway, so Claire, she got her feet under her, she’s just figuring things out to the point where she felt confident enough to address the National Assembly in 1792. This is where she and Pauline might have discovered they were soulmates because she also fucking hated Lafayette. If Lafayette had no haters, it’s because she and Pauline were both dead. They hated Lafayette. So, she went to the National Assembly, demanded the removal of Lafayette from the head of the National Guard, and in her speech, she also explained, like, “I am an unemployed actress, so I don’t have very much money to donate to the cause, but I will pay homage with my person.” This is a quote from her. “Born with the courage of a Roman and with the hatred of tyrants, I would consider myself fortunate to contribute to their destruction.” She’s just like, “I will self-immolate myself if it would kill one aristocrat,” basically. But then also because of the, like, weird, fucked up feminism of it all, she was like, you know, “I’m a single woman, so I can do all this stuff, but all the mothers should stay home and not abandon their children because breastfeeding your children is the most important thing in the world. But I’m a single woman, so I can do it. But other women shouldn’t do the same as me.” It’s such a weird tightrope they have to walk about this. 

Anyway, I don’t know when or where or in what context, but at this time, beginning at this time, Claire Lacombe, Pauline Léon, they were a duo. They were a pair. They were always together. The thing where I’m just trying to explain their whole thing is… OG Taylor Swift fans will remember when she became really close to Karlie Kloss, the actress and model, and they were just, like, never not together. They were always together, they did, like, Vogue editorials together. They were just always besties, they’re always together, and then at some point, they stopped being always together. And people look back on that and think like, “Oh, were they in a romantic relationship that they didn’t disclose? Or was this just a really intense platonic friendship? Like, what was up?” They were together all the time, and then they weren’t anymore. And then you’re looking for Easter eggs and Taylor Swift songs. What does it mean? So, just the same sort of thing with Claire and Pauline. They were just together all the time, and we don’t know what kind of relationship that was. But I do know that they got along really well, and I personally hope they were lesbians. So, they’re just in lockstep. They’re just like, “Oh my god, you’re like me. I’m like you. Let’s be together forever.” 

So, August 10, 1792, there was an assault on the Tuileries Palace. Remember, that’s where the royal family moved to after the Women’s March. Tuileries, also on your bingo card. Claire was among the leaders of this assault along with Théroigne de Méricourt, and guess who? Coming back in this episode, Reine Audu, the queen of the market ladies. Like, if you see those three coming for you, Claire Lacombe, Théroigne de Méricourt, and Reine Audu, like, just run. You will be murdered by them. So, they were among, like, of course, a large crowd, but they were towards the front of the crowd. So, they forced their way past the Swiss guards who were guarding the royal family, killing most of them, and then they pursued the king into the Legislative Assembly. They literally chased him down the hallway. The legislators were in the Legislative Assembly at the time, I guess, and they were just terrified by the mob, and so they voted to suspend the monarchy and place the king under arrest. During this “mêlée,” I would say, purge-like riot, Claire Lacombe was shot through the arm but was fine. This does not stop her. “Shot through the arm” is quite a thing to say. Maybe it grazed her arm? I don’t know. She did not lose a limb. The next day, she was proclaimed the heroine of August 10th and given a civic crown, along with Théroigne de Méricourt. Two days later, she spoke to the Legislative Assembly. Offering her civic crown to the delegates, she praised them for their courage, wisdom, and patriotism. So, that was August 1792. 

The following May is when Claire and Pauline founded the Society of Revolutionary Republican Women. And when it started, Pauline was named president and Claire was named the secretary. But this was such a sort of democratic-minded organization, they had a new election every meeting for a new president and new secretary so that no one would get, like, too in charge or something. By this point, like, Tuileries was August 1792; they put in the paperwork to start the club in May 1793. So, this was several, several months. During which time, Claire and Pauline became well-known as orators and revolutionaries. Maybe Claire helped Pauline with some, like, you know, elocution or some actress tips to make your speeches better, and maybe Pauline introduced Claire to, like, chocolate. You know, they were just having a nice time. And they just spoke all over the place; they spoke at huge crowds and assemblies and popular societies. I do want to mention that Pauline’s mom, Mathurine, was also all up in this. Like, her mom was there too. 

I want to mention that specifically because Claire, Pauline, her mom, like Théroigne de Méricout, Olympe de Gouges, like, there were not that many women revolutionaries who were this famous. The reason why I’m doing whatever this is going to end up being, seven or eight weeks, it’s like, that’s how many there were. There’s not more women revolutionaries to discuss. The rest were all men. The revolutionaries were almost all men, the leadership were all men. And it’s kind of like, not unlike now, you know, there are so many radicals on the streets. I was talking about Paris had, like, 500,000 people, and then of those, there’s like, 10 women who were revolutionaries. But in terms of the men who were revolutionaries, it’s a small group of people and the people leading it as an even smaller group of people, led by Robespierre. So, Paris’s radicalization, it’s not just like… Sometimes it’s mistaken as, like, the people of France came together to be like, “Let’s get rid of the king and do this together.” It’s like, no, it’s Robespierre and like two other guys who were just kind of like manipulating the people who were already upset about bread and stuff to kind of side with them. So, it’s like a small group of male activists kind of running everything, but kind of pretending like it’s the voice of the people. 

So, there were some people who didn’t agree with what Robespierre and others were doing, not because they were sexist assholes, but because they were not taking it far enough, and the people who wanted to go even further with it were called the Enragés, which is a French word that basically means “The Angry.” They wanted an even more extreme social change. Pauline and Claire were just like, “Fuck yeah, we’re like the lady Enragés now too.” 

Oh, I also want to mention, at their ladies’ club, during the session, so when they chose a new president— Oh sorry, it’s not every meeting they changed president, it’s every month they changed president. So, during the session, whoever the president was, who was a woman, would wear a red Phrygian cap. So, the Phrygian cap are these red Smurf hats that men wore in the French Revolution, and if you look up the, what was it, 2024 Paris Olympics, the mascot was Phryges, which was a little red animated cartoon Phrygian hat. So, wearing the red Phrygian hat at these ladies’ club meetings was gender shenanigans because these hats were men’s hats; these were masculine hats. The sans-culottes men who— Reminder, the sans-culottes men, I object to their name because I was it always makes me think that they are not wearing… that they are nude from the waist down, which is not the case. What they’re saying is, “We are sans-culottes, we don’t wear culottes, we wear trousers.” They wear these, kind of like, loose-fitting trousers with red and white stripes on them, to be like the patriotic flag. [sighs] But it just sounds like you shouldn’t call yourself sans-culottes, it just sounds like you’re not wearing any pants. You should say, like, “We are trouser wearers,” like, here’s what we are wearing. Like if I had a party and I said, “Hey guys, it’s a party, don’t wear pants,” like what would everyone show up in? It’s like, but if I said, “I have a party, everyone wear a skirt,” then you’d know. 

Anyway, sans-culottes wore these Smurf hats, and so the ladies’ revolutionary society was wearing a Smurf hat, and then that’s kind of like, “Oh my god, what are they up to? Euhhh, they’re threatening gender roles,” et cetera. Even the Revolution had sort of like, a mascot that was this statue of this, like, sexy lady who is Liberty, where it’s like, women are allowed but only in sexy statue forms who don’t talk. But even this woman’s statue wasn’t wearing one of these hats; she had the hat, but it was draped over a pike, not on her head. But Claire and Pauline are just like, “Yeah, we’re going to wear these hats. Fuck you, let’s just break down gender norms. We’re two lesbians and we’re going to run this revolution.” 

So, this is where society turns into what I think of as kind of like French Revolution Karens because the two of them, and the other women from their society, just started walking the streets, just, like, getting it up in other people’s business. They were just looking for counterrevolutionaries. Pauline and Claire, even though women technically weren’t supposed to have weapons, they had daggers and pistols, they wore their cockades, and they just sort of like, walked around just getting up in everyone’s face being like, “Oh, where’s your cockade? Are you with the Revolution or not?” Just kind of like, ladies, calm down. But they, at this point, they kind of overtook the market ladies as the biggest bullies in town, but they saw themselves as agents of liberty, hunting down the nation’s internal enemies. One of these enemies was Théroigne de Méricourt, who we talked about last week. 

So, Théroigne de Méricourt was with the Girondins, which to remind you, in the pantheon of like people in groups in the French Revolution, the Girondins are kind of like the most chill. They were the ones who were like, we can have the king and the queen, but also politicians. The Jacobins, that’s like Robespierre, who’s just kind of like, “There shouldn’t be a king.” And then we have the Enragés who were just like “Fucking burn it all down.” 

Théroigne de Méricourt is with the Girondins. So, a group of the revolutionary Karens were out patrolling the Tuileries gardens on May 15th to make sure that everybody attending meetings today was wearing their cockade and getting up in everyone’s business, and they had been hoping to run into Théroigne for a while just because she was a famous Girondin. Anyway, they found her, they ran into her, and this is where they, like, whipped her famously, we talked about that in the Théroigne episode. They pulled her skirt over her head, like revealing, you know, here’s a sans-coulottes moment. Anyway, it was vicious; Théroigne was permanently injured from this. She was only able to escape when Jean-Paul Marat, who was a Jacobin—he’s the one who was killed by Charlotte Corday, we’ll talk about him next week—he took pity and escorted her away. So, this whole thing that they were doing, Claire and Pauline and their group, like, roving the streets, just whipping people who they thought were against the Revolution, Robespierre was like, he didn’t tell them to do it, but he didn’t mind they were doing it because they were technically helping get rid of his political opponents. 

Then there was a whole thing that happened. So, some radicals were telling the National Convention to expel the Girondins, like, they weren’t extreme enough or whatever. And Claire and Pauline’s group were reporting for duty, “We’re here, we’re wearing our red hats,” probably, and they prevented the Girondins deputies from escaping. Claire and Pauline’s group were armed with poignards, which are apparently lightweight thrusting knives. So, they were sort of like Robespierre’s lady army, making sure the Girondins were kicked out. Afterwards, this group was praised for contributing to this coup. A new constitution was adopted on June 24, 1793, still denying women political rights, but because Claire and Pauline’s group had helped out that day with their thrusting knives, they were allowed to march in the official celebration parade for their part in ousting the Girondins. 

And then Charlotte Corday murdered Marat, which we’ll talk about again in detail next week, probably. But basically, Marat was a Jacobin leader, Charlotte was a Girondin. So, a Girondin killed a Jacobin, and Robespierre was like, “This is great. A lady Girondin killed this beloved figure. This is great. This is great for me, Robespierre, because it means that I can show that women shouldn’t be involved in politics. Look at women be crazy bitches.” And so, he started to work to get Girondins even further removed, but also to remove women… or to make people even more grossed out by the idea of women being involved in politics. 

So, Marat had this big public funeral. Claire and Pauline’s group carried his bathtub. So, Marat, again, we’re talking about this next week, but he was stabbed to death in his bathtub, which is a famous image. So, Claire and Pauline’s group got the honour of carrying the bathtub in the funeral procession, and afterwards they continued to parade it and his bloodstained shirt through the streets. And 10 days later, Robespierre took his place for the first time on the Committee of Public Safety, ushering in a new era, which was no longer about revolution and reform, but about The Terror, AKA the purge era. 

So, market ladies update. Guess what? Bread: still expensive. So, the market ladies, they had been complaining about bread being expensive since 1789. It is now 1793. Three or four? 1793. And the market ladies are like, “Why is bread still expensive? We thought it was maybe to do with this revolution, but maybe it’s not.” They were like, “What did this revolution even achieve?” One of the market ladies said that during the old days, there was one king, but now there’s, like, 30 or 40, things are, in fact, not better. At one point, the market ladies, they were also mad about the price of soap, so they did this whole thing where they just, like, seized a boatload of soap in the Seine and distributed it against themselves. They were mad about bread prices, they’re mad about high prices. And they were starting to realize that the Revolution wasn’t going to solve this problem and that people like Robespierre had been sort of falsely conflating bread prices with the Revolution just to get them on his side. 

At this point, as well, Claire and Pauline’s organization made a move. They had been sort of like, “We’re Robespierre’s lady soldiers.” And now they’re just kind of like, “Robespierre’s not even extreme enough for us. We were the lady Enragés, and Robespierre is a coward.” So, the men Enragés, the angry, were led by a man called Jacques Roux, AKA the Red Priest. And he had been the guy who… He was a priest, and when Louis XVI was executed—that happened a few months before all of this, we just didn’t get into it in this week’s episode, we’ll talk about it later—Jacques Roux, the Red Priest, had been the one who walked Louis XVI up to the scaffold to the guillotine to have his head cut off. The Enragés’ whole thing was they would not stop revolutionizing until true equality had been established. They were also the only revolutionary group that valued women contributing to political life. So, like, no wonder our lesbian heroes, that’s who they sided with. So, along with Jacques Roux, the Red Priest, another Enragés leader was a 22-year-old man named Théophile Leclerc, who, let’s talk about him because he becomes important to this story. 

His name just really makes me think of, I’m just picturing Timothée Chalamet. His name is Théophile Leclerc, but it might as well be Timothée Chalamet, like, that’s who we’re all picturing, right? Timothée Chalamet was born in 1771 at La Côte near the small town of Montbrison near Lyon. The youngest of five children of a civil engineer named Grégoire and a commoner named Antoinette. So, he’s younger, he’s at least 10 years younger than Claire and Pauline. He was like, 18 when the Revolution broke out, and he tried to join the National Guard, but they’re like, “Babe, you’re Timothée Chalamet. You’re too skinny, you’re too young. You can’t join.” So instead, he went to Martinique in the Caribbean and was a soldier there. He had a short, kind of bananas army career that evolved at age 20. He defended his companions in front of the National Assembly to save their lives. Turns out he’s a good public speaker. And so, he became a popular revolutionary speaker. In fact, he spoke so vehemently against the Girondins that he was kicked out of the Jacobins club. Like, the Jacobins kicked him out for being too extreme is, like, where this little twink is coming from. 

So, he was not from Paris, but he was in Paris now, and he’s like, “Where am I going to stay? I don’t know.” And he started staying with Claire Lacombe. Did he become her lover? A lot of people thought so, and later, she confirmed that he did. But this does not stop my hypothesis of Claire and Pauline being lesbians, because I think Théophile, this might be a throuple situation. Anyway, so after the assassination of Marat, Timothée Chalamet started his own newspaper called The Friend of the People, which was actually the title of Marat’s old newspaper. This newspaper became widely read, and he was saying his really extreme views in it. And this made Robespierre even more mad with him, Timothée Chalamet, and also just with the Enragés in general. So, his little, little Timothée Chalamet energy, his energy just really reinvigorated Pauline and Claire’s Ladies’ Revolutionary Society. 

The anniversary of the storming of the Tuileries was coming up. Everyone was still mad about bread prices, which were getting, guess what? Even higher. This whole time, the market ladies, from the Women’s March till now, bread has only become more expensive, which is, like, relatable. Anyway, so Claire and Pauline’s group decided to send a petition to the Convention demanding that all women should be required to wear the tricolour cockade. And this is like, my girls, why is this… Why is this your focus? Like, forcing everybody to wear the cockade, it’s like, okay, but do you mean you want them to wear the cockade because then they’ll be seen as citizens, and then maybe women will get rights? But I don’t think it is. I think it’s more just kind of like, French Revolution Karen. They just want… It’s like, do you remember that thing where… This is ages ago. It was like, oh, if white women, if you’re like a good person, wear a safety pin and then people know you’re a good person. Or the thing about, like, white women, wear a blue bracelet and that means you didn’t vote for Trump or whatever. It’s like, these gestures of things, why are we focusing on that? I don’t know. You know what? They’re doing the best they could. For some reason, this mattered to them. 

Anyway, meanwhile, while they were just trying to force the market ladies, because that’s who is not wearing a cockade is the market ladies, spoiler, don’t go against the market ladies. Anyway, Robespierre and his pals, the incels, were working to, they’re just like, “We don’t like women having a voice politically. Women should be wives and mothers, that is their highest calling.” So, they launched sort of some sort of PR campaign, being like, “Women of France! What you should be doing is breastfeeding your children who are the future Republicans of France. Being a wife is the most important job of all,” or whatever. Pauline and Claire, who I want to mention, neither of whom has children, were just still all in on this cockades situation, which led to in September 1793, the War of the Cockades. So again, those are these ribbon pins, little wreaths that you wear. 

So, since July 1792, men had been required to wear a cockade. So, it’s not like they’re coming out of nowhere with this. They were just saying like, women should also be required to wear cockades. And this is where they just got into, like, revolutionary Karen vibes. Again, they’re just walking around the city. When they saw a woman who was not wearing a cockade, even though they weren’t required, they would just, like, attack them, they would whip them. And they’d also recently moved their HQ. So, they had moved their headquarters because the Ladies’ Society had started off meeting, I want to say like, in Tuileries, but near where the Jacobins Club was. But when they were like, “Jacobins are not extreme enough for us,” they moved to a different rental space, which was down near the market, which the market ladies were like, “This is our turf. This is market ladies’ area. You’re moving your political club into our area. You’re beating us up to wear cockades. All we want is bread price fixing.” It was on. This was now market ladies versus Claire and Pauline, and the Lady Revolutionaries. It was, this is a rivalry for the ages, truly. 

So, Claire and Pauline were going around like Revolutionary Karens, threatening anyone not wearing a cockade that they would whip them like they had Théroigne de Méricourt. The market women were like, “We will murder you if you keep harassing us and our customers. And besides, how are we going to buy cockades? We don’t have any money because of the bread prices, motherfuckers.” So, things are not going great. 

Meanwhile, Robespierre is still trying to just get the women’s group to, like, chill out and be quiet and like go home and breastfeed babies or whatever. But Claire and Pauline were becoming even more outspoken. So, they’re still calling Robespierre a coward. They were becoming so outspoken that other members of the ladies’ group were like, “You’re going a bit too far.” And at this point, Claire, the other women in the society confronted her. They’re like, “Well, what about your relationship with Timothée Chalamet? What does that mean?” Because remember, France is like obsessed with women having moral, ethical characters and not being sluts. So, it’s like, “Well, Claire, Timothée Chalamet has been staying with you. Isn’t he your lover? And isn’t he sort of aristocratic adjacent? His name is Timothée Chalamet.” And Claire’s like, “No, no, no. We’re not lovers. Totally fine. Ladies, calm down.” And Robespierre and the Jacobins just kept trashing the women’s Republican Revolutionary Society. Like, just trashing them, just saying they were all so shitty. And Claire and her relationship with Timothée Chalamet was really taking the brunt of all of it because you couldn’t say anything against Pauline Léon because she was just this chocolate maker in her early thirties living with her mom, there just wasn’t something they could draw on. If there had been, they would have smeared her as well. 

So, at this point, at one of the meetings, I don’t know, at the Legislative Assembly or whatever it’s called, a guy who was their sometimes an ally called François Chabot, he attacked Claire claiming she had attempted to secure freedom for certain counterrevolutionaries, that she had betrayed her principles. Claire denied the charge, and then her female friends burst into the hall, I guess to defend her. Anyway, there are shouts of “Down with the new Corday.” Some called for her arrest. Like they thought that she was, like, the new Charlotte Corday. It was a real Blake Lively situation of just sort of like this woman who just kind of everyone was just piling on and was like, did she do something shitty? That wasn’t even the issue anymore. It’s just like, people just needed a woman to be really mad about. 

So, Claire at this point was prevented from speaking in her own defence, and she was taken to the Tuileries to be questioned by the Committee of Public Safety. After two hours, she was let out, but when she got home, the commissioners had put, like, seals on her belongings and on the door so she couldn’t even get into her home. The Jacobins voted that the Women’s Society had to expel her. Although everyone kind of had a nice rest, and the next day they’re like, “Okay, you can get in your home. It’s cool. Everything’s fine.” And she was just like, “You will never shut me up.” She spoke to the society, the Women’s Society, and she was just kind of being like, “What the fuck? We’re just the revolutionary ladies. We wear red hats.” This is what she said. “All the ills that are befalling Paris are attributed to us, these monsters who are strong only when they oppress the weak.” And she’s right. 

Like, things were really shitty in Paris, and it was mostly Robespierre’s fault combined with the bad harvest of 1788 and the lack of bread. But Robespierre was like, “Well, no one can blame me because then I’ll get in trouble. So, let’s just blame this woman over here who’s wearing a hat and gender shenanigans,” just to sort of distract people from the fact that he was actually the problem, which again, is not at all like anything we’re seeing in contemporary society, except it’s exactly what we’re seeing in contemporary society. All of the countries like the US and the UK, and places who are just hyperfixated on, like, trans people, and what are the rights of who can play sports. That’s the cockades of it all, really. It’s like, there’s so many more actual problems that are being caused by shitty governments, but the shitty governments are like, “Don’t pay attention to that. Look over there, trans people.” It’s just the same thing over and over again. And I feel for Claire when she’s just like, “Fuck all this noise.” 

But she did not stop, Claire. Within days, she petitioned the convention to demand… So, people who were rich people, who were fleeing France at this point, are called émigrés, and they would, if a rich person left France and went to, like, England or Germany or whatever, they’re considered émigrés. If you fled, then you would be cut off from all your money. So, if you’re thinking like, “Why don’t more of these rich people flee?” We’ll talk about that more in later episodes. But basically, it’s like if you fled, you would have to start over with nothing, and maybe you’re somebody who doesn’t have any skills so it’s better to stay in France where maybe things will get better than to leave where you don’t know what your life is going to be like sort of thing. 

So anyway, people who had left, the émigrés, some of the men left, but their wives were still in France. And so, Claire petitioned to have those wives arrested. She also, and this is a very interesting part of Claire’s whole vibe, she wanted to work towards the rehabilitation of sex workers. This was always something that was important to her. Like, the stuff I read and just other things I read and my personal feelings are like that actresses and sex workers were so overlaid with each other at this time. A lot of actresses were also courtesans, and a lot of courtesans also did acting. Like, it was kind of one big community, and she was like, “Let’s help the sex workers.” And she wasn’t like, let’s legitimize, let’s legalize sex work. She was because the whole country is just like women have to be so moral and breastfeeding the next generation. So, she’s like, let’s rehabilitate them, which is more than anyone else is doing for them. 

Anyway, she did in fact convince the convention to pass a law requiring women to wear the cockade. The market women were like, “Fuck this.” Because they didn’t give a shit about politics. They were just like, “We just want to make money, buy bread, not die of starvation.” And again, it’s a lot like today, where there’s people who are like, “Well, I didn’t vote in the election because those things don’t really affect me.” Like, people were so busy just going paycheque to paycheque, just trying to survive. It’s like, yeah, I can see why who’s the political leader does not feel like it matters to that person, where it’s just kind of like everyone is always crushing you down. Anyway, so the cockade rule was passed, but Claire and Pauline were still like, you know what, because the whole thing with the Enragés is to just, like, never stop. And they’re like, “Great, the cockade is now legal. Now let’s force women to wear the red Smurf hat too!” Like, Claire… Claire! My sweet little baby, adorable little lesbian, like, this is not going to go well. So, everybody freaked out about this, the red hat. People were panicked about the like— Because remember the red Smurf hat was a man’s hat. So, then it’s, like, “Gender shenanigans!” This is going to lead to more street violence, which it would because Claire and Pauline were probably going around whipping people and not wearing a hat, I guess. And the market ladies were just like, “We don’t want to wear a cockade. We don’t want to wear a hat. Don’t tell us what to wear. We just want bread.” 

So, you know how the meeting place of the Women’s Revolutionary Society was, like, in the market ladies’ area? So, at the end of October, at one of the meetings, some market ladies stormed a meeting of the Ladies Society. They were yelling, “Down with red bonnets! Down with Jacobins women! Down with Jacobins women in cockades. They’re all scoundrels who have brought misfortune upon France!” and the market ladies beat everybody up. Like, people are left unconscious. There was a man there for some reason, and he tried to intervene, like, a market lady was beating someone to death with her wooden clog, and this man was like, “Hey! Ladies, calm down,” and then the market ladies stabbed him. Like it was, and then the fight went on the streets, and then it’s just kind of like… To be fair, a lot of people were being stabbed on the streets at this time. So, it was just like, what’s one more? But anyway, it just kind of shows like, if only there had been a way that Claire and Pauline could have been on the market ladies’ sides. Like, if you could harness the market ladies for your cause, like the Women’s March, everyone had kind of teamed up together, that went well, all told. But this is just, like, women versus women, and it’s just Robespierre turning women against women. And it just makes me sad. 

So, Robespierre, of course, he was just like, “Ha-ha! The women are fighting. This is an excuse to disempower this group for good.” So, the market ladies went to the National Convention to be like, “Let us wear what we want. Don’t make us wear hats. Don’t make us wear cockades.” Several other speakers in the Convention denounced the women’s society, and then the women’s club was banned. Not only that, but all women’s clubs and all women’s popular societies were all banned. Women were no longer permitted to organize in clubs. They could be tolerated as spectators, “silent and modest in the patriotic societies,” but they could no longer go searching for news outside of their homes. “There they will wait and receive it from the mouths of their fathers or their children or from their brothers or husbands.” So, women were just cut off from political life entirely. Claire and Pauline tried to challenge this law, but I mean, no. Robespierre had been wanting to do this for a while, and why would he change his mind? 

November 17th, the revolutionary women made their last stand. They appeared in front of the General Council of Paris in their red caps. And then this part kind of mystifies me and reminds me of those kind of, like, fake stories on Reddit where people explain a thing they did and they’re like, “And then everyone applauded.” It’s kind of that. But I’ll tell you what apparently happened, which is that the president of the council, not the ladies’ group, the male president of the General Council of Paris, gave a moving speech telling them to go, like, “Be natural, breastfeed your children. Women should be at home and not into politics.” And maybe the fact that all of society really deeply believed that somehow is why, somehow, this guy’s speech, I don’t know his name, I don’t care, made all the women in the society remove their red hats and then put on normal hats. Did they have normal hats with them also? Why? I don’t know. And the women were just kind of like, “Okay, we’ll go off and be wives and mothers, I guess.” Seems like a pretty insane thing to happen, but that is apparently what happened. I can’t picture Claire doing that. 

Anyway, the society was disbanded, and then there was also a fight where, I don’t know if it was that day, but like around this time as well, where Pauline, in front of the rest of the Revolutionary Society, was challenging Claire. She was like, “Claire, have you been fucking Timothée Chalamet?” And Claire was like, “Okay, yes. Fine. I have been, yes.” So, that was sort of a fracture in their relationship. Now, some people might say, was this a fracture because Pauline had feelings for Timothée Chalamet or was this a fracture because Pauline had feelings for Claire and realized that Claire had been sleeping with Timothée Chalamet? Had they been a throuple at all? You tell me. Write some fan fiction. All I can tell you is that two days after the society disbanded, when the ladies took off their hats, Timothée Chalamet got married to… Pauline Léon… Blake did not see that coming. And then Claire decided to leave Paris and resume her career as an actress. She’s just like, “There’s nothing here for me. The Revolution is just a bunch of incels. My best friend/lesbian partner just married this twink, Timothée Chalamet.” Like, of course, she left. Claire’s not even from there. But before she could leave, she was caught by surprise and arrested on April 2, 1794, as were Pauline and Timothée Chalamet. 

While they were imprisoned, Pauline Léon wrote a statement, which has survived. In the statement, she highlighted her personal involvement in the Revolution and how she recruited many others to the revolutionary cause. She mentioned in this, of course, just how much she hated Lafayette, and she confirmed a rumour that she once broke into a man’s home to throw a bust of Lafayette out the window, which is like, again, number one hater. She wrote highly of the sans-culottes movement and how she appreciated them. Her statement concluded with her just saying that she and her husband, Timothée Chalamet, were innocent and did nothing to merit an arrest. The reason why they had been arrested, the two of them, is that Timothée Chalamet had been writing that newspaper, remember? There was like Robespierre sucks, I think that’s why, and Pauline had been helping with that. Anyway, they were released after three months, mostly because on August 21st, Robespierre died and like so many shitty, incel, political, shitty, tyrannical government movements, it takes the death of the person in charge for it all to collapse because it was all just a cult of personality anyway. We’ll talk in later episodes about the death of Robespierre. Good riddance, this fucking guy. Anyway, he died. And then it’s like the people he had sent to jail were kind of all freed because they’re like, “You’re only in jail because he kind of didn’t like you. He’s dead. So, be free!” But Claire was not released at this time. 

After her release from prison, Pauline really removed herself from the political scene, focusing her efforts on her household and her occupation as a schoolteacher. I’m not sure how she went from chocolate business to school teaching, but I guess one of her siblings maybe took over the chocolate business. Anyway, she and Timothée Chalamet, they stopped publishing the newspaper and just kind of settled down to just be a little couple just living their lives, not being constantly threatened with murder. Good. Kind of like the ending of The Hunger Games vibes. Claire still in jail, though. 

So, Robespierre was killed, and then his followers, the Robespierrists were overthrown in August 1794 as well. Claire, still in jail at that time. She wrote from prison to the victors, speaking to her services of the nation, I guess hoping that they would congratulate her or maybe free her. But they did not. They, in fact, ignored her letter. Finally, in the autumn of 1795, after 16 months in prison, Claire was freed, and no one knows what happened to her next. She just walked out and off of the pages of history. Did she keep acting? Did she…? I don’t know. Did she travel? Like, we do not know what happened to Claire. 

What happened to everybody else? Just so you know, at around that same time when Robespierre was killed so Reine Audu, the queen of the market ladies, she was, like, in and out of prison for a while. Ultimately, she went insane, and she died in a hospital for lunatics in 1794 as well. Timothée Chalamet lived until 1820. 18 years after that, Pauline died, age 70, at home in Bourbon-Vendée. She died on October 5, 1838. And that is the saga; Claire Lacombe, Pauline Léon in, kind of, the next phase of the French Revolution and the women of the French Revolution. 

So, I told their story as one episode, and so I’m going to score them jointly as one person. So, there are some other categories we haven’t looked at in a while. Like, there’s the Lady Jane Seymour Memorial Award for Outstanding Supporting Performance, and that’s for someone in a story who’s just, like, helpful, and… I don’t think there’s anyone. Like, Claire and Pauline were kind of this for each other, but where they’re both the heroines, I can’t really give them the award. The Jewelled Tortoise Award is for legendary friend behaviour for someone who really was there for somebody, and maybe they were for each other as well. But no one else really was, like, Timothée Chalamet, wasn’t. 

So, when we’re scoring Claire and Pauline jointly, the first category is the Scandaliciousness, which is how scandalous were they seen by people at the time? And I feel like any woman who wasn’t at home breastfeeding her babies was seen as pretty scandalous by Robespierre. But these two were even seen as scandalous by, like, the market ladies. Like, there were not a lot of women revolutionaries. They started a revolutionary society. I think they were seen as extremely scandalous, and Robespierre tried to make up all the stuff about, like, the sex scandals and whatever, to try and make people hate them. But like what people found scandalous was just they were women speaking their mind and also kind of being an asshole, like with the whole Revolution Karen cockade quest. I’m going to give these gals… I’m going to give them a 9 for Scandaliciousness. 

The next category is Schemieness, which is just, like, coming up with plans. I don’t know how much they were doing that. They were coming up with speeches, proposals that they took to various governing bodies. They weren’t really coming… Like, the market ladies, if I was going to market ladies, they score high for Schemieness because they will just, like, beat you with a shoe. But also, the market ladies organize a Women’s March and all these things. I think Claire and Pauline were like… They weren’t not coming up with plans, they started their whole women’s political organization. But I think that’s a huge number for them. I’m going to give them a 5 for Scheminess. 

Their Significance. I will say that the reason why I’m covering both of them is because just in reading about Olympe de Gouges, Théroigne de Méricourt, Pauline and Claire’s names just kept coming up. It’s kind of like Olympe, Théroigne de Méricourt, Claire, Pauline and one other person we’re going to talk about in a couple of weeks. It’s like, those are the gals. Those were the women of the Revolution. So, it’s notable for that. I think it’s notable the significance of, like, making the women’s political club, doing everything they could. There’s just a lot of people doing a lot of things. I don’t know about their significance, although I will say that there is a movie called One Nation, One King that I haven’t watched since 2018. It’s a movie about the French Revolution, and Pauline Léon is in it. So, she is significant enough to be in it. So, I’m going to say… I’m just going to say a 5 for Significance as well. They were certainly significant because there’s so few women revolutionaries at the time. But there’s so much chaos going on, I don’t know how much their actions contributed to history. 

The final category is the Sexism Bonus, which is just like, how much could these people have accomplished without the patriarchy getting in their way? And I don’t have to think very hard because that’s a 10 because the society they were living in was bullshit. Like, how much more could they have accomplished if they didn’t have to spend all their time fighting for just, like, the most basic things? If France in this time wasn’t a place that hated women, where women hated women, where everyone hated women, like, if they didn’t have to spend their time defending themselves, if they had been accepted by the other revolutionaries. I mean, it’s a straight-up 10. 

So, let’s see. So that’s a 29. And I feel like that’s exactly where the other revolutionary women are too. I am right, yeah. So, 29 is… Olympe de Gouges, 29. Théroigne de Méricourt, 29. Claire Lacombe and Pauline Léon, 29. That’s just… I like that they’re all hanging out there together. Although I will say that during the French Revolution, they were not hanging out with each other. There’s different, different— Especially, like, Théroigne de Méricourt was with the Girondins. Like, they weren’t hanging out with each other. Anyway, that is the scoring. 

Next week, as I’ve said several times, I’m going to be talking about Charlotte Corday. So, just to kind of fill in that whole side of things, because she is, I think, maybe the most famous woman from the French Revolution, and her story is interesting, and it’ll help flesh out a lot of the other stuff that we’ve been talking about. So, stay tuned next week for that. 

In the meantime, I want to say this was mentioned to me by a listener. I’ve talked a lot recently on the podcast about the Canadian election. And I do want to mention that there is an Australian election that is coming up. It is on May 3rd. So, I’m not sure what day this is when you’re listening to this, Australia, because I know Australia is a day ahead of me in Canada. But like so many other elections that are going on right now, there are some shitty Robespierre-like, shitty incel, shitty men who are running on fascist reasons, and it’s really important for people who are not into that to vote for literally anybody else. So, if you’re in Australia, I hope this election goes okay. I hope that you’re all able to vote. I think Australia, from what I was told, is that they have a preferential ballot where you put, like, this is my first choice, second choice, third choice, fourth choice. So, I think it might be harder for the shitty incel, Robespierre-types to manipulate those numbers. But my fingers are crossed for you, Australia. Voting is so important, and I wish that this season of Vulgar History wasn’t so tragically pertinent to contemporary political life. 

So, you can keep up with me and this podcast. I have a mailing list! So, if you want to get just one email every month of, like, what’s happening with the podcast? What’s happening with my book, Rebel of the Regency? Is Ann doing any more live events? What books does she recommend? Like, that stuff is all happening on my mailing list, which you can sign up for at VulgarHistory.com/News. You can sign up for the mailing list. The next one of those, actually, I’m trying to think… I’m looking at my calendar. I think the next one of those is coming out in a bit. So anyway, that’s where you can sign up for that. You can also follow my writing at Substack, where I’m VulgarHistory.Substack.com. I post an essay every two weeks there about women from history. 

You can also get, I mentioned a few times, the bingo sheet for this season of Vulgar History is available to all free members, all members, but including free members of my Patreon, which is Patreon.com/AnnFosterWriter. So, you can go on there, become a member, get the bingo sheet, hang out. Some of the posts there are for everybody, and then some of the other posts are for people at $1 or more a month. And what people who pledge $1 or more a month get is they get early, ad-free access to all episodes of this podcast. So, you can listen to this podcast without the ad break in the middle and also get it a few days earlier than everybody else. If you pledge $6 or more a month, you get access to bonus episodes of this podcast. There’s a whole back catalogue of Vulgarpiece Theatre where I talk about costume dramas with Allison Epstein and Lana Wood Johnson, hopefully, we’ll be getting back into that soon. I think this movie, One Nation, One King, would be good to watch. Well, I’m excited to watch it because so many people have been reading about it, right? There’s also episodes there, So This Asshole, you can listen to those if you join at the $6 or more per month on my Patreon. And like, know there’s going to be a So This Asshole: Rousseau and a So This Asshole: Robespierre coming soon, because I started that side podcast when I just get so mad about a man I have to read about when I’m reading some woman’s story. And these guys keep interrupting everybody’s story, and I hate them so much. And also, if you join my Patreon at $6 or more a month, you can join the Discord, which is just a big group chat where we recently were talking about the similarities, the kind of interesting freaky similarities between the Jacobins and the Girondins and the French Revolution and some of the current alliances on the season of Survivor. Just so you know.

I will also mention our brand partner Common Era Jewelry, which is a small, woman-owned business that makes beautiful heirloom pieces using recycled gold, as well as they make their pieces in more affordable gold vermeil. The pieces are made in New York City. Everyone involved has healthcare, good wages. The packaging is made by a lovely little family-owned business in Chicago. And they’ve actually recently just changed their logo to kind of celebrate that it’s been a few more years in business, it looks beautiful. You should check it out. They make beautiful designs inspired by women from history, as well as women from classical mythology and also just images from classical ancient Rome, ancient Greece, ancient Egypt, as well as they have the new zo— I was going to say “Zodiacale.” I was just thinking about the J. Lo movie with the Zodiacale Council. Zodiac. Zodiac jewelry inspired by 17th-century alchemical manuscripts. You can get these talismans, all of what I love about the pieces of jewelry from Common Era is the owner/designer, Torie, always really thinks about kind of the facets of the person who she’s putting on it or the design and kind of what energy or what power that could give somebody who’s wearing it. Vulgar History listeners can always get 15 percent off your order from Common Era by going to CommonEra.com/Vulgar or using code ‘VULGAR’ at checkout. 

I’ve got new merch coming so soon. I think by next week we should have beautiful new Tits Out Brigade design, much, much requested. I can’t believe I’ve never actually done a design that says “Tits Out Brigade” on it before. Hopefully next week, I’ll have more to talk to you about that then. I’m not going to make you wear it. I’m not going to make you wear a Smurf hat or a cockade. But if you want to get some Vulgar History merchandise or actually, we do have pins. None of them are cockades though, stickers or whatever, travel mugs. If you’re in America, I recommend going to VulgarHistory.com/Store, which takes you to our Dashery store, which has good shipping in America. If you’re outside the US, I recommend VulgarHistory.Redbubble.com, which has better shipping for all other places. 

If you want to get in touch with me, you can go to VulgarHistory.com, and there’s a little “Contact me” button there. Or my DMs are open on Instagram, where I am @VulgarHistoryPod. I also post on Bluesky and on Threads. And I mean, what I usually say at the end of my episodes or what I have for a long time is: pants on, tits out. And I think it’s funny that this season we have the sans-culottes. It’s like culottes off, pants on, cockades, if you want to, red hats. You do you. 

Vulgar History is hosted, written, and researched by Ann Foster, that’s me! The editor is Cristina Lumague. Theme music is by the Severn Duo. The Vulgar History show image is by Deborah Wong. Transcripts are written by Aveline Malek. Find transcripts of recent episodes at VulgarHistory.com.

References:

Wikipedia (Claire)

Wikipedia (Pauline)

https://womenineuropeanhistory.wordpress.com/2017/01/31/pauline-leon/

Theophile Leclerc: an anti-Jacobin terrorist by Morris Slavin

Liberty: the life and times of six women in revolutionary France by Lucy Moore 

https://www.geriwalton.com/reine-audu-heroine-heroine-of-the-french-revolution/

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