SOURCE: Favret, Mary A. “Spectatrice as Spectacle: Helen Maria Williams at Home in the Revolution.” Studies in Romanticism 32, no. 2 (summer 1993): 273-95.

[In the following essay, Favret discusses Williams' Paris salon, frequented by an international group of artists and intellectuals in the early days of the French Revolution as a place that blurred the boundary between the domestic and the political realms.]

It was a rendezvous for the most famous orators, the best-known men of letters, the most celebrated painters, the most popular actors and actresses, the most fashionable dancers, the most illustrious foreigners, the lords of the Court, and the ambassadors of Europe; the old France had come there to end, the new had come there to begin.

—Chateaubriand, Mémoires d'Outre Tombe¹

The Paris home of the English writer Helen Maria Williams was just the sort of rendezvous Chateaubriand recalled from the early days of the French Revolution. At Williams' dinners and teas mingled generals and diplomats, poets and philosophers, actresses, journalists, and educators; the intellectuals, artists and politicians of several generations and various countries met in a heady, head-turning society. In Williams' salon the young Peruvian Miranda, recently arrived in Paris, was introduced to Manon Roland and consequently, in whirlwind fashion, made a general in the French army. Mary Wollstonecraft, new in the capital in 1792, immediately made the requisite visit chez Miss Williams; to her regret Wollstonecraft never met Mme Roland, but through Williams she encountered her old acquaintance Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson's friend Joel Barlow, Jacques-Pierre Brissot and other prominent Girondins. She also discovered Gilbert Imlay, the American adventurer who would become her lover. While Imlay and Wollstonecraft wooed each other, Lord Edward Fitzgerald, leader of the rebel United Irishmen, courted his future wife Pamela, protegée of Mme de Genlis and (rumor had it) daughter of the Duc d'Orléans.² But more than romantic intrigue was at work under Williams' roof. “Often,” she recounts, “conversation reached that certain pitch which only a feeling of personal danger could create” (Souvenirs 50). Socializing and political jeopardy went hand in hand. After the Montagnard insurrection of May 31, 1793, she tells us, a desperate Rabaut Saint-Etienne sought asylum in her home; and Bertrand Barère, before betraying his Girondin associates to Robespierre, fell into her armchair and “wept bitterly over the fate of the country.”³ Later that year, when Williams herself was forced from home to prison, the inspector of police conveniently napped on her sofa while, in the next room, she burned “enormous piles” of incriminating documents left in her care.⁴ Locating Helen Maria Williams' place within this intricate network of international hospitality, politics, romance, violence, dangerous manuscripts and comfortable furniture should, therefore, be done with a good deal of circumspection. For Williams' salon was as unusual as the salon described above by Chateaubriand. His was no proper drawing-room by eighteenth-century standards: he was describing the Place de la Bastille, seen in the aftermath of the prison's destruction.⁵

Comparing the social space created by Helen Maria Williams in the heart of Paris with the Place de la Bastille interferes with our sense of public and private structures, of outdoor and indoor rendezvous, parties and prisons. Yet like the Place de la Bastille, her salon was a popular stopping place for foreigners visiting Paris in the years of the Revolution and the Directorate; it provided the setting for sentimental narratives and the site for dangerous alliances.⁶ It was also the meeting-ground of the old and the new: of an eighteenth-century salon society which imagined few barriers between public and private, home and history; and a nineteenth-century romanticism which sought refuge from the public eye in domestic, feminine interiors. Her Parisian salon had not yet conformed to a culture which, as Nancy Armstrong puts it, “represented the existing field of social information as contrasting masculine and feminine spheres.”⁷

In her published writings on the Revolution in France, Williams painted herself as the English outsider/“spectatrice” of revolutionary events and politics, while simultaneously making a public spectacle of herself, her sentimental attachments, and the domestic virtues she espoused. Reporting on events in France to an English audience, she announced: “My love for the French revolution is the natural result of … sympathy and therefore, my political creed is entirely an affair of the heart” (Letters 1.1.66). At the same time that her house shielded Girondins on the run and protected their valuable papers, her own writing broadcast their plight and reproduced their conversation. As a result, the relationship between her work and home was alarmingly double-edged, the notoriety of her writings transforming her house into a prison when she, her sisters and her mother were placed under house arrest during the Terror.⁸ Like the Place de la Bastille with its demolished walls, like her high profile salon, the structure of Williams' Letters From France defies any careful separation of interior and exterior, private and public, sentimental and political.⁹ Although it is impossible to discuss in detail the eight volumes of these letters, I would like give a broad map of their presentation of space: in the main, there is no ideal refuge and no absolute prison in Williams' representation of Revolutionary France. If, in the novels of the Marquis de Sade, “the privé … is almost always figured as a prison” and “privacy is only the theatrical form of solitude,” in the contemporaneous works of Helen Maria Williams, the prison is almost always figured as a social place and interior spaces provide theatrical forms of public feeling.¹⁰

Helen Maria Williams remains remarkably unknown two centuries after that clamorous period when her health was drunk at meetings of the Friends of Liberty, when she was denounced as “a scribbling trollope” and Jacobin “prophetess” with bloody talons, and when her Letters From France made her “perhaps the best-known contemporary author to magazine readers of her generation” and “the overwhelming favorite among writers of popular history and biography.”¹¹ By virtue of her early poems, especially those denouncing tyranny and oppression (Peru, published in 1784 and The Slave Trade, 1788), Williams had settled at the heart of liberal literary circles in London while still a young woman. But in 1790 she determined to “renounce” the soothing enjoyments of “literary conversation, a fine library, charming music and sweet walks” which she found in assorted English country homes. She uprooted herself and her family in order to explore the “sublimer delights of the French Revolution.”¹² Williams returned to England briefly in 1791, but never thereafter. For the next thirty years she lived and worked primarily in Paris, writing thirteen volumes of contemporary history as one of Europe's first foreign correspondents. Among other projects, she translated into English her friend Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's romance, Paul et Virginie (1795), and Alexander de Humboldt's Personal Narrative of Travels (1814) and Researches (1814), all three of which became extremely influential works in England and America. Two popular French poets, Boufflers and Esménard, translated excerpts from Williams' early poetry for an eager French audience, since “renown had placed her … on the first tier of poets in England.”¹³ And her Poems on Various Subjects, including an 1802 ode on the Peace of Amiens that had enraged Napoleon, was published in London in 1823. Of all her publications, however, none was more successful or significant than the eight volumes of Letters From France published between 1791 and 1796, which brought the French Revolution into the libraries, parlors and sitting rooms of a generation of English readers.¹⁴ Resting in their own armchairs and sofas, the English public viewed France through the eyes of this female correspondent. They also watched an exile playing hostess to a world in revolution, a woman at home in the theater of politics.

In analyzing the inside/out structure of Williams' correspondence, we see the home “as a social space and mythologised place” that has not yet adopted “the oppositions of inside/outside [that give] order and pattern to the … tensions in urban, industrialised, capitalist life.”¹⁵ And we meet a vision of feminine space whose alignment with national domestic policy (whether English or French) is thwarted because of Williams' manipulations, through which domestic and psychological spaces disintegrate into political prisons and outdoor spectacles. Alan Liu has identified the tendency in most contemporary English accounts to “flinch away from the Revolutionary story” qua story, and to concentrate on establishing “the English subject” in a sort of anti-dramatic, anti-sympathetic response to France. Unlike Liu's examples, who freeze the revolutionary narrative into reiterated scenes of nationalistic classification and stratification (civilized us vs. savage them), the female foreign correspondent, who is never fully an English or French subject, brings the French drama home in a way that resists simple inside/outside placement. As Williams enters into the French mode of representing the revolution, the mode of public spectacle, she domesticates it; as the revolution unveils an Englishwoman's private theatrical, it also becomes her stage.¹⁶

PRIVATE THEATRICALS

While you observe from a distance the great drama which is acting in France, I am a spectator of the representation.—I am placed near enough the scene to discern every look and gesture of the actors, and every passion excited in the minds of the audience.

(Letters 1.3.2; emphasis added)

The language of spectacle and stage fashioned popular response to the French Revolution from its earliest days. Even Edmund Burke initially saw events in France as a performance, and he expressed “astonishment at the wonderful Spectacle”: “What Spectators! and what actors! England gazing with astonishment at a French struggle and not knowing whether to blame or applaud!”¹⁷ As the play unfolded, reaction in England became less ambivalent. Hester Thrale Piozzi, after reading Williams' Letters, bemoaned “this theater of massacres and follies” that has entrapped her friend (Woodward 87). While the English stood back and watched, the French themselves produced their revolution as theater. In the words of Jean Starobinski, the French saw “the history of the year 1789 … [as] a series of spectacular events linked together like the scenes of a tragedy and luridly lit.”¹⁸ It seems appropriate then that the new Republic would commemorate its first dramatic year with a staged pageant, the Fête de la Fédération, and that this Fête would become, in its turn, a revolutionary event. Indeed, the introduction of modern public ceremonial, together with the use of dramatic imagery for wide-spread propaganda, arises with the political culture of the French Revolution.¹⁹ It is worth noting with Burke and Williams, however, the pronounced role of the “spectators” as well as the “actors.” Williams' early Letters register the private, internalized shows performed “in the minds of the audience” that accompany and give weight to the public display.

When Helen Maria Williams begins her Letters From France with an enthusiastic description of the processions and set pieces of the 1790 Fête, she represents for her audience the collaboration of public and private at play in political culture. The first letter opens with a dramatic flourish:

I arrived at Paris by a very rapid journey, the day before the Federation … had the packet which conveyed me from Brighton to Dieppe sailed a few hours later; had the wind been contrary; in short, had I not reached Paris at the moment I did reach it, I should have missed the most sublime spectacle which, perhaps, was ever represented on the theatre of this earth.

(1.1.1-2)

The “most sublime spectacle” is, of course, the Fête de la Fédération, the celebration of the first anniversary of the storming of the Bastille. But the spectator also celebrates her own dramatic entrance: it is her extraordinary experience and elation (paradoxically, as a member of the audience) that gain our attention. Now our assistance is required for her successful performance:

I am well aware how very imperfectly I shall be able to describe the images which press upon my mind. It is much easier to feel what is sublime than to paint it; and I shall be able to give you a faint sketch, to which your own imagination must add colouring and spirit.

(1.1.2)

Playing to the theaters of our imagination, she models for us an emotional response to the scenes she displays: “I have beheld with awful enthusiasm the sun of Liberty spreading its broad blaze,” or “My mind is overwhelmed with its own sensation—the paper is blotted by my tears—and I can hold my pen no longer …” (1.1.135). Williams exploits the familiarity of the letter form to enlist the reader's feelings in her narration and to create a sense of commonly shared emotion: “You will rejoice with me. …” or “You, my dear friend … who understand … can judge the feelings …” (1.1.109, 195). Indeed, the dramatization of personal feeling dissolves the barriers between reader, writer and spectacle so that partisan politics are translated into universal, “human” sympathies. Making a spectacle of her own spectatorship, Williams relies upon her audience's sympathetic response so as to translate French into English experience.²⁰

Both the revolutionary spectacle of the Fête de la Fédération and the structure of Williams' Letters insist that the viewer/reader participate in this translation:

You will not suspect that I was an indifferent witness of such a scene. Oh, no! this was not a time in which the distinctions of country were remembered. It was the triumph of human kind … and it required but the common feelings of humanity, to become in that moment a citizen of the world. … my heart caught with enthusiasm the general sympathy; my eyes were filled with tears; and I shall never forget the sensations of that day, “while memory holds her seat in my bosom.”

(1.1.13-14)

This passage sets several rhetorical gestures in motion, all of which complicate our sense of the author's place in the world of revolution. First we recognize that the literary form she uses, the “letter to a friend,” permits her to speak of political questions in the language of intimacy and familiarity.²¹ She dresses her own propaganda in the terms of friendship and feeling: “What, indeed, but friendship, could have led my attention from the annals of imagination to the records of politics,” she protests elsewhere in her Letters. “That system of politics must be best,” she asserts, “by which those I love are made happy” (1.1.196-97). We also note here the purely representative role performed by her feelings, evident in the fact that she concludes the passage above (characteristically) with a quotation, effectively depersonalizing and generalizing her response. She regards one nation (France) on behalf of another nation (England), her “common feelings” uniting them both.²² Behind the apologetic voice of this “citizen of the world” rumble the broad tones of democracy and universalism: the sentimental experience, like the public spectacle, allows the woman writer to imagine a general, undifferentiated political structure that includes her. Moreover, we hear in Williams' description of the Fête de la Fédération hints that “this was not a time” when “distinctions” between inner and outer self were “remembered” or easily negotiated. To be a citizen of the world was to seize the political “moment” within one's heart. At the same time that tears publicized one's emotional investment, memory and a sense of history began to hoard that investment within the bosom. These conflicted gestures underwrite Williams' Letters, appearing individually or mingling with one another in an affective dramatization of revolutionary France.

What marks Williams' representation of the early years of revolution is her theatrical display of spectators and their “inner state” as itself a display of the state of France. She delivers the revolution to England as a “répétition” produced primarily for emotional effect:

Future generations will celebrate, with grateful commemoration, the fourteenth of July: and strangers, when they visit France, will hasten with impatience to the Champ de Mars [site of the first Fête de la Fédération], filled with that enthusiasm which is awakened by the view of a place where any great scene has been acted. I think I hear them say, “Here the Federation was held! here an assembled nation devoted themselves to freedom!” … I see them eagerly searching for the place where they have heard it recorded, that the national Assembly were seated! I think of these things, and then repeat to myself with transport, “I was a spectator of the Federation!”

(Letters 1.1.107-8)

Williams places the national celebration at two removes: future spectators will relive not the immediate experience of revolution, but the experience of spectators at a commemorative event. Here again we see the blurring of individual with collective response, as well as the enlistment of the audience in the event described. Future generations—perhaps Williams' very readers—repeat her ecstatic response to the scenes she has witnessed and imaginatively recreated. In fact, their response becomes the spectacle to be watched. In other words, the experience of revolution is only realized as the experience of spectators, foreigners, and strangers (see also 1.1.46, 67-68). While on the one hand this seems an exaggerated distancing strategy, on the other hand it allows Williams to bring the spectacle closer to herself, within the stage of her own imagination. As we will see in her Letters, outsiders are written into the revolutionary show by means of this imaginary and emotional “mise en scene.” No one remains outside the experience of revolution.

The force of the early Letters depends, like the revolutionary spectacles themselves, on the ability to reproduce a shared emotional state (or State). By means of this three-way theater of sentiment (between the revolutionary spectacle, the author and the reader), Williams implicates herself in the rhetoric and strategies of the revolutionary government. “The sublimity of [the Fête de la Fédération] … depended much less on its external magnificence,” explains Williams, “than on the effect it produced on the minds of the spectators, ‘The people, sure, the people were the sight!’” (1.1.5). In this concern she is echoed by recent historians of the revolution: “[W]e must try to discover what happens with regard to the receiver … that essential anonymous figure without whom the network [of communication] would be meaningless: the spectator” (Huet 27).²³ The sight was not necessarily a visible, but rather an internal, felt production: “How am I to give you an adequate idea of the behaviour of the spectators? How am I to paint the impetuous feelings of that immense, that exulting multitude?” wonders the letter-writer (1.1.5). The affective state of the individual correspondent, her inner life, must serve “naturally” as the medium for understanding the people, and thus, the State itself: “My love for the French revolution is the natural result of … sympathy and therefore, my political creed is entirely an affair of the heart” (1.1.66).²⁴ Williams can therefore confess her inability to record significant events when overwhelmed by emotion, because the emotion itself records the plain truth of these events.

In the early 1790's in the French Republic, Lynn Hunt explains, “a good public life depended upon transparent private hearts.”²⁵ But this “transparency” has to be carefully and deliberately fashioned, and Williams is a skillful artist, portraying her heart as the unobstructed place where the historical moment is made present. Public, historical value relies upon and is measured by private affect; its force depends upon the vulnerability, the penetrability of the individual (but general) heart. Williams capitalizes on talents she shares with the leaders of the French Revolution, who, she tells us, “have studied to interest in their cause the most powerful passions of human nature,” and whose ceremonies are “perfectly calculated to awaken that general sympathy which is caught from heart to heart with irresistible energy” (Letters 1.1.62). In fact, the Republic's propagandists position the feeling heart as both ground and object of the revolutionary spectacle: audience (or reader) response forms the internal and external limit of their performance. In Williams' case, her own heart guarantees the continued life of the show by continually reproducing a responsive audience for the revolution. She finishes a typical anecdote of ancien régime cold-heartedness by calling on her readers to replay her more “natural” feeling: “Is it possible to hear of every feeling of humanity being thus insulted, without a degree of indignation … ? Is it possible to hear this incident without rejoicing, that a system of government which led to such deprivation of mind is laid in ruins?” (1.2.54). Anna Seward, rereading Williams' Letters From France after reading Edmund Burke's terrifying Reflections on the Revolution in France, finds that Williams' method allows her to participate again in that rejoicing: “These Letters … do not seek to reason, they only paint. … My own enthusiasm, which fear had froze, was relit under the warmth of her sentiments and her imagination.”²⁶ The revolution is rehearsed in the heart. A laudatory note from la Société des Amis de la Constitution à Rouen (1791) acknowledges Williams' effective fabrication of a “pure” inner self and replays her affective response as their own:

The French revolution offers a sublime tableau … but it demands a painter who can present its image to all the peoples of the world. It was left to you, Mademoiselle, to your pure and sensitive heart, to your soul … to express with dignity the noble transports of a great people at the very moment they became free. … If reading your first letters caused us to weep tears of admiration, your last letters have made us cry all the more copiously. What sorrowful tableaux … !

(Woodward 43)

The historical tableau of revolution becomes confused with the sentimental tableau of the sensitive heart. Williams responds to this letter in characteristic fashion, redirecting the experience of a revolutionary people into a display of her own emotional response to the writing of it: “May Virtue no longer be oppressed by those evils the re-telling of which has cost me so many tears!” (Woodward 46). History and domestic genre painting are interchangeable, blurred—or clarified?—by the outpouring of tears from the painter's heart.

Williams' response also maintains that the heart of the sensitive woman best represents and ensures the good of the public: “For to understand the general good, one need not possess the wisdom of a philosopher, one need only the sensitivity [“sensibilité”] of a woman” (Woodward 45-46). In the Letters themselves, she assures her readers that “when a proposition is addressed to my heart … I can decide, in one moment, points upon which philosophers and legislators have differed in all ages” (1.1.196). Oddly enough, her heart and soul understand the French people precisely because she is a woman and a foreigner, and the two positions are never separate for long. This articulation and its affective advocacy is especially pronounced in Volume 2 of the Letters From France, where Williams discovers a curious kinship with the mountebanks and magicians, the comedians and motley characters she views in the town square of Orléans and with the African slaves whose labor supplies Orléans with its main product, refined sugar (1.2.18-58). But the significance of her outsider status is even more explicit in other episodes. When she and her sister first visit the National Assembly, for instance, they are admitted “without tickets” to the best seats in the hall: “We had no claim … except that of being foreigners and women; but these are, of course, the most powerful claims … to French manners” (1.1.42).

In the early volumes of the Letters, the distinction of being female and foreign forms a strange bond between the author and the French crowd; in fact, it erases distinctions. The central episode of Volume 2 involves an ingenious and self-conscious staging by a woman well aware of her symbolic value. From the window of an apartment in the Palais de Bourbon, Williams and her sisters look down upon a festival procession of “between three and four hundred thousand” Parisians. The people in the street perform an impromptu show for their elevated audience: “[they] danced, they sung hymns to liberty, they filled the air with cries of ‘Vive la nation!’” But the spectator does not remain at a safe distance from the volatile mob. The crowd immediately turns upon those who stand above them in the Palais de Bourbon, the edifice of monarchy:

The people do not always reason logically. … they could associate no ideas of patriotism with the Palais de Bourbon, and accused us of aristocracy as they approached.

(1.2.145)

The danger subsides when sympathy intervenes and the women are offered as an alternative spectacle:

They [the people] soon perceived that we were entirely disposed to sympathize in their festivity, and also that part of our company were Englishwomen: while the gentlemen from our windows repeatedly called out in as loud voices as they could, “Vive la nation!” the people answered by crying, “Vivent les Anglaises!”

(1.2.145-46)

The spotlight travels from the noisy crowd in the street to the silent women in the balcony, finally fusing the two as representatives of popular revolution. The response of the individual woman is eclipsed by the demands of trans-national identity. At this moment, we see the story of Williams' letters reduced to a set piece.

Williams not only fills a representative role, she plays director as well, managing both actors and audience from her unique position both outside (politically) and inside (emotionally) the scenes she depicts. She borrows from the contemporary practice of using young, unmarried women as “living allegories” of the nation, but then recasts those figures in a script she controls.²⁷ In doing so, she emphasizes once again the reciprocity between inside and outside, domestic and national theater. In the concluding pages of Volume 1, the author participates in a salon production of a play, “La Fédération, or la Famille Patriotique.” Set within a family celebration (a birthday party), this play recalls and yet replaces the sublime Fête de la Fédération which opened the volume. It also demonstrates how, in the context of home, family and friends, the outsider/woman occupies the central position. Williams, the English-woman, agrees to take a non-speaking part, “le beau rôle de la statue” [the coveted role of the statue]. Silenced (as in the balcony scene), she speaks for all: she plays Liberty, who stands “guarding the consecrated banners of the nation,” while other actors heap decorations, scarves, hats and words upon her and circle her in a dance (1.1.203-4). “Thus do the French,” she slyly remarks, “appoint [female Liberty] not merely to regulate the great movements of government, but to mold the figure of the dance” (1.1.206). And thus Williams herself places the spectacle of domestic pleasure and feminine “sensibilité” at the center of revolutionary France.

VISITES DOMICILIAIRES

Sometimes, [Vergniaud] presented to us, in a language pure and sparkling, a sort of prelude to the admirables speeches he gave to the gallery, at the [hall of the] Jacobins. It seemed to me that he spoke in an irresistible tone … It is one of my regrets not to be able to recall the expressions of this eloquent orator, who spoke at that time with the abandon of a private conversation while discussing the most profound political questions.

(Souvenirs 50-51)

Not only did Helen Maria Williams use the salon as the stage for national performance, the most brilliant orator of the National Assembly used her soirées to rehearse his speeches; there the distinction between the language of private conversation and that of public performance was ignored. Visiting Williams' home, one participated at and in the spectacle of revolutionary politics. Reading Williams' prose, one recognizes the domestic dimensions of the national stage. The most profound political questions of the revolution, were, in fact, questions about the private life: home, family, affective discourse. It is no coincidence that Jacques-Louis David, pageant master of countless outdoor fêtes, set his most significant paintings within the confines of the home: his “Oath of the Horatii,” “Lictors Returning to Brutus the Bodies of his Sons,” and “Death of Marat” all explain public acts of republic virtue as a violation of (feminine) domestic interiors and, in the two former, of familial sentiment. David's work graphically depicts the intrusion of state concerns into the realm of home, family and feeling—the artistic equivalent of the Terror's dreaded “visites domiciliaires.”²⁸ Whereas David, Robespierre and Saint-Just imagined a one-way avenue from the State into the home, Williams' work effects a dual movement: even as statesmen begin to supervise interiors, she imagines interiors opening onto or replacing the public forum. While inviting politicians into the home, the woman writer nevertheless transports the language of domesticity, family and psychological interiority to national issues, often challenging the assumptions that would impede such translation.

To understand the place occupied by Helen Maria Williams and created by her Letters, it helps to see the public sphere in terms of what she would call “domestic affections.” “For,” she explains, “we are so framed that … the tears of tenderness, the throbbings of sympathy, are reserved for that moment when … amidst the loud acclamations of an innumerable multitude, we can distinguish the soothing sounds of domestic felicity” (Letters 1.2.1-2). At the moment we harken to domestic sounds in the midst of multitudes, we understand ourselves as subjects “framed” by domestic settings, in a world that is fundamentally social: men and women of various nations, ages and professions gather in an intimate space and interact—under the aegis of a woman. In this way the home—but more specifically the welcoming salon—offers the model for an egalitarian, universal society. Yet, where Rousseau and later bourgeois ideology would imagine the home as refuge from “le monde” and from history, and would endorse “the solitude of personal existence” found at home, Williams refuses to shut the door on world, history and society (Starobinski 235). For her, “personal existence” is evacuated to make room for shared social experience, “domestic felicity” in the company of multitudes. The language of the salon merges with the language of the street.

This fusion is accelerated under the heat of insurrection and violence, where the principles of politesse fade and “something more than gallantry” overtakes conversation (Souvenirs 19). In her memoirs Williams recounts an evening when she watched social discourse being reconfigured: at dinner with Petion, then mayor of Paris,

The conversation was lively and animated … we hardly engaged in the ordinary chit-chat of society. The women seemed to forget the task of pleasing, and the men thought less about admiring them. … A mutual esteem, a common interest in the great issues of the day, were what manifested themselves most. We spoke of liberty in accents profound and sincere, which approached eloquence. The joy of this patriotic meal was augmented, rather than distracted, by the immense crowd that surrounded the Place de la Ville, and a thousand voices carried up to us the repeated cry, “Petion or death!”

(Souvenirs 19, 24-25)

This slippage between indoor society and the world out of doors, and the concurrent realignment of gender as well as class, winds its way through the narrative structure of the Letters From France.

At times, the challenge to interior and exterior structures expresses itself simply in the contrast between individual letters, as when Williams juxtaposes her accounts of a visit to the cathedral with a visit to a friend's home; of a tour of the dungeons of the Bastille with views of outdoor processions; of a walk within the halls of the Palais Royal with a walk past the coffee-houses outside. The contrasts can be quite sharp: Williams prefaces her description of the passages and apartments of Versailles by insisting we see “in the background of that magnificent abode … the gloomy dungeons of the Bastille” (Letters 1.1.83). Both these “résidences privées” and the stories they contain are now opened to the speculations of a curious public.

At times the movement between private and public spheres is subtle, gliding back and forth with smooth elisions. In the fifth letter of the first volume, Williams describes her visit to the maison of Mme de Sillery (Félicité de Genlis), a woman “unrivalled in the arts of pleasing” (1.1.33). She then shifts, in letters six and seven, to the halls of the National Assembly, “whose fame has already extended through every civilized region of the world” (1.1.45). At tea with the pleasant Mme de Sillery, Williams discusses public issues: the question of the “distinction of ranks,” the nature of nobility, and the fall of the Bastille—all “in the spirit of philosophy” (1.1.36). At the National Assembly, by comparison, she attends to the personal “virtue” and wit of the orators. She concludes her study of the Assembly by relaying a sentimental anecdote “warm from my heart,” about an emotional speech given by a young man on behalf of his brothers and dying father. If in the company of women one discusses political philosophy and current events, amidst male politicians one lets familial sentiment and romance claim the floor. The “ability to please” runs round in a circle, uniting politics and feeling, men and women, author and reader: “If … you have fallen in love with this young Frenchman [the speaker],” Williams ventures at the close of this series of letters, “do not imagine your passion is singular, for I am violently in love with him myself” (1.1.60).

Williams is not disavowing politics here: rather, she is claiming the heart—together with the entire realm of affective feelings and relations—as the “natural” terrain of politics. The socializing and unifying force granted to public demonstrations of personal affect allows Williams to intertwine the language of domestic sentiment with the discourse of revolution and liberty. This was the logic of much revolutionary propaganda and political reform: the “interior” life of the citizen provided the terms for understanding the state. “The soul of the republic,” insisted Robespierre, “is virtue.”²⁹ In parallel fashion, a 1793 Lyons Commission for Vigilance decreed that “to be truly Republican, each citizen must bring about in himself a revolution equal to the one that has changed France.”³⁰ The revolutionaries, invoking Rousseau, asked for a “participatory subjection,” “a new subjection,” according to Jean Starobinski, in which individuals “were ruled over by the power of feeling and reason” rather than “bound by” an impersonal social structure defined by birth, title, and status (95).

To be “ruled over by the power of feeling and reason” meant that individual feeling and reason fell under the jurisdiction of political discourse. The spectacle of feeling which accompanied and represented the revolution required a feeling subject which, in turn, could reinforce the idea of a humanizing, “natural” political system. Williams delivers such a spectacle of natural sensibility in her description of Rouen residents the day the King accepted the constitution:

I have on several occasions had the good fortune to witness these scenes of general felicity, in which it requires but common sensibility to partake … the people displayed their joy by crowding the streets with bonfires. … I observed some of the people, who were too poor to contribute a portion of wood, bring for their offerings a part of an old bedstead, a leg of a broken chair, etc. to feed the flame. Strangers stopped and congratulated each other in the streets, which resounded with cries of exultation.

(1.2.2-3)

“General felicity” encourages individuals to carry whatever they have at home out into the street to “feed the flames” of public exultation; as corollary, we learn, “every selfish interest is sacrificed with fond alacrity at the altar of the country” (i.2.5). Robespierre, of course, exploited the mechanism of personal sacrifice in speeches which emphasized the private virtue and morality of good citizens.³¹ Because the line between self and state was not fully articulated, “because politics did not take place in a defined sphere, it tended to invade everyday life,” especially the domestic realm.³² The revolutionary government felt free to legislate domestic arrangements, intrude upon matters of personal virtue, and dictate attitudes toward clothing, eating and sexual practice. Consequently, as Lynn Hunt and others have noted, the “ever-expanding publicity” of the private life in the early years of the republic also promoted society's “romantic withdrawal” into a “more clearly defined feminine space”—the affective realm of family and the home.³³

THROUGH PRISON WALLS

The home, a woman's space, can then serve as political theater, where relationships and feelings perform the lead roles. Given that structure, the Letters From France nevertheless do not represent the home as a convincingly withdrawn or secure place; nor do they imply that domestic pleasures are divorced from public passions and violence. For instance, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre drops by Williams' parlor for a cup of tea and entertains her with his fantasy of domesticity:

I was listening to a description he gave me of a small house which he had lately built in the centre of a beautiful island of the river that flows by Essonne which he was employed in decorating, and where he meant to realize some of the lovely scenes which his fine imagination has pictured in the Mauritius [in his novel, Paul et Virginie].

But Saint-Pierre's dream of seclusion receives little support in Williams' house:

While … listening … I was suddenly called away from this fairy land by the appearance of a friend, who rushed into the room, and with great agitation told us that a decree had just passed in the national convention, ordering all the English in France to be put into arrestation … and their property to be confiscated.

(Letters ii.5.6)

The dream of privacy yields to the nightmare of incarceration.

Like the lively conversation at Petion's (“Petion or death!”), like description of the rooms and passages of Versailles (where Marie-Antoinette hid from angry Poissards), and like the emotional speech in the National Assembly by the young orator, Williams' account of her own imprisonment (volumes 5 and 6) points to the implicit violence that accompanies the interchange of interior and exterior, familiar and political. Williams refuses to let private space remain secure from public discourse. In these later Letters the prison, an enclosed society wrenched apart from revolutionary France, becomes, like the foreign woman, the symbolic center of political and social discourse. As an emblem of the nation, the home is another Bastille—at once a reminder of the ancien régime and of its demolition—and the prison is another home.

This system of reversals becomes most apparent in the later volumes, where Williams' oscillations between private and public cast darker shadows and the specter of violence grows more tangible.³⁴ Robespierre himself spelled out the cost of linking the private life to the politics of the nation when he declared “virtue and its emanation, terror” as the fundamental principles of the new Republic (Blum 26). Williams' later letters explore this realm of emanations—the danger zone of threat, violence and duplicity known as the Terror. In the earlier letters, public spectacle and private theatrical organized her reporting, but in volumes 5-8 these two structures repeatedly fold into that of the prison.

Williams focuses on the prison as an alternative salon: it provides the image of a home created by violence, an interior space produced by a totalitarian regime. A biting joke, which hinges on the word “foyer,” articulates Williams' sophisticated sense of this space. A liberal-minded countess, an acquaintance of the author, sends her fine marble hearth to be mended in the capital. An accompanying note declares “that the foyer must be repaired at Paris.” The revolutionary committee, intercepting the countess' mail, reads in these words “the dark designs of aristocracy,” “a daring plot,” “a foyer of counter-revolution, and to be repaired at Paris!” Immediately, the countess, count, and their steward are “conducted to the maison d'arrêt,” despite assertions “that no conspiracy lurked beneath the marble” (ii.5.25-26).

The grim humor suggests that with its “maisons d'arrêt,” the Terror implicitly acknowledged the “hearth” as “the central point of a [political] system.”³⁵ Williams develops and exploits this point by establishing the society of the prison—those excluded from citizenship, from representation, and potentially, from life—as a model for French society. In fact, her treatment of the prisons offers the possibility of a state institution constituted in terms of affective relationships. The contrast between her salon and her prison rooms in the Luxembourg Palace is “unutterable” (ii.5.9) precisely because the two sites fuse into a single social vision, one which threatens Robespierre's: “Our prison was filled with a multitude of persons of different conditions, characters, opinions and countries, and seemed an epitome of the whole world” (ii.5.18-19).³⁶ In some ways, the prison collapses the distinctions between workplace and home: “The mornings were devoted to business and passed in little occupations, of which the prisoners sometimes complained. … Everyone had an appointed task …” (ii.5.19). The prison also provides a self-regulating political system: “every chamber formed a society subject to certain regulations: a new president was chosen every day, or every week, who enforced its laws and maintained good order” (ii.5.19-20). In the prisons of Paris, Williams claims, “the system of equality, whatever opposition it met with in the world, was in its full extent practised”: class distinctions are eased, goods are shared, responsibilities evenly distributed (ii.5.20-21). Nor does prison life neglect social and cultural enrichment: in the public room of the building one found inmates “flirting together … making appointments for card parties or music in their own apartments in the evening, and … relating … in pathetic language all they had suffered” (ii.5.23). Story-telling, poem-writing, and singing punctuate the daily routine; Williams even spends time studying the magnificent tapestries that adorn her chambers and translating French novels into English (ii.5.36-39). Dispossessed and circumscribed by the threat of execution, the prisoners—like Petion's dinner guests—seem to glow with the promise of a utopian society unimagined on St. Pierre's island and unimaginable in Robespierre's Paris (ii.5.54; also ii.6.95-97).

Not surprisingly, these interior spaces permit Williams to give preeminence to women, since these communities emphasize “the fidelity of our [women's] attachments” (ii.5.41). When the author is later transferred to the prison at the Couvent des Anglaises, she explains that women together make the best prisoners/citizens:

[A] true spirit of fraternity … prevailed in our community, consisting of about forty female prisoners, besides the nuns [all Englishwomen]. Into how happy a region would the world be transformed, if that mutual forebearance and amity were to be found in it which had the power to cheer even the gloom of a prison!

(ii.5.185)

The women's ties of mutual suffering and shared nationality are redefined in terms of friendship—“we were born each other's friends”—and exhibited in acts of care and compassion (ii.5.186-93).

As Williams' reports sweep in and out of the prisons of Paris, she takes particular note of those women who refuse to honor the barriers set up between “foyers privés” and “maisons d'arrêt.” “Those prisons from which men shrunk back with terror … women … demanded and sometimes obtained permission to visit, in defiance of all the dangers that surrounded their gloomy walls” (ii.5.41) Women transgress in simple ways: they smuggle letters between cells and salons; they carry food from dining rooms to prison rooms (ii.7.181, 187-90; ii.8.111-17); or, in the case of the English nuns, they maintain the prison as their residence, and walk to the outer gate arrayed in the outlawed signs of their order, the veil and cross. These simple transgressions can be symbolically potent. In one of the more moving episodes in the Letters, Williams recounts the fall of Robespierre from the vantage point of the men and women he had imprisoned. On the night of 9 Thermidor, cut off from the normal channels of communication, the prisoners hear nothing but the foreboding tones of the tocsin bell. The next morning, at last, the prisoners receive the first sign of hope from

women who displayed upon the roofs of houses, which overlooked at a distance the prison walls, the names of Robespierre and his associates, written in such broad characters that the prisoners with the aid of glasses could read them plainly; and after presenting the name, the generous informer shewed by expressive gestures, that the head of him who bore that name had fallen.

(ii.7.179-80)

Women can write the news of the nation upon their houses, communicating to those locked away from the world the possibility of freedom.

For women especially, the distance between home and prison could be slight: “home was but a milder prison,” observes the author, “where we lived in voluntary seclusion, trembling at every knock at the gate … afraid to venture out” (ii.5.206). But the heroines of Williams' Letters do venture out, risking their lives in the process. She tells the stories of various unnamed women who coordinate the worlds of prison and home and consequently reverse the threat of “visites domiciliaries.” But she gives the spotlight to those women who had “fixed on [themselves] the attention of the world”: Jeanne d'Arc (i.1 and 2), Charlotte Corday (ii.5.128-35), Marie-Antoinette (ii.5.153-57), Madame du Barry (ii.6.42-45), and Manon Roland (ii.5.278-91; 6.232-66). In Williams' Letters several of these women display both inner virtues and public effectiveness: Jeanne d'Arc, Corday, and Roland are not only representative figures, they also act with courage and communicate with eloquence.

But the risk of such display outweighs its celebration. We see a culmination of Williams' concerns—spectacle, prison, and women's space—when she recreates the final moments before these women's public executions.³⁷ Williams' adulation of her heroines is defined and reinforced by the prison walls which hold them: in the Letters, the moment of execution serves as both the motive and the result of their brief histories. In this sense, execution repeats the logic of emotional spectacle, the heroine's stoic death replacing the writer's vulnerable heart as guarantee of historical value. Indeed, these women seem most attractive when frozen at the point of death. “Those philosophers who have met death with fortitude” fade before tyranny's female victims, who “have been peculiarly distinguished for their admirable firmness in death” (ii.5.212-20). But death also makes a silent spectacle of them, negates them and turns them into an allegorical figure like Williams' own rendition of Liberty. Watching several young women en route to the guillotine, Fouquier Tainville, the public accuser, nearly smacks his lips in perverse anticipation: “‘How bold these women look!’ cried Fouquier, enraged at their calmness. ‘I must go and see if they show the same effrontery on the scaffold … !’” (ii.6.72). Ironically, these women hold our attention as soon as they stop moving: the prison and the scaffold serve as frames which, in Williams' prose, both elevate and contain heroic women. The movement between interiors and exteriors seems inevitably to lead to this fatal show, making a (disposable) spectacle of these remarkable women.

Of course Helen Maria Williams is as much a heroine and a victim as the women she writes about. She too crosses the lines between intimacy and publicity, between private associations and public concerns. She smuggles messages into and out of prisons, reprinting the prison memoirs of Manon Roland, General Sernan, and Brissot (see Appendices to Volumes 6 and 7). And she sends correspondence past enemy lines, insisting on communication between two countries at war. She places herself and her “sympathies” on stage, sacrificing them “with fond alacrity” to public consumption and to the political demands of transparent, universal feeling. And she pays the price: having made a spectacle of herself in the 1790's, she is silenced by history. “What is she now?” writes a critic, William Below, in 1817. “If she lives, (and whether she does or not, few know, and nobody cares), she is a wanderer—an exile, unnoticed and unknown.” Until a society that erases the walls between a woman's place and the public forum is realized, rather than imagined, the work of women like Helen Maria Williams may remain spectacular—and virtually unknown.

Notes

1. François-René Vicomte de Chateaubriand, Mémoires d'Outre Tombe, ed. with intro. Georges Moulinier, vol. 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1951) 168-69; my translation.

2. Helen Maria Williams, Souvenirs de la Révolution Française, trans. C. Coquerel (Paris: 1827) 97. Williams' Souvenirs were translated into French and published posthumously by her nephews. See also the biography of Williams by Lionel-D. Woodward, Une Anglaise Amie de la Révolution Française (Paris: Librairie Ancienne Honoré Champion, 1930) 77-78 and 82-86. All translations from the French are my own. Regarding Wollstonecraft's friendship with Williams, see The Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Ralph Wardle (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1979) and William Godwin, Memoirs of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. W. Clark Durant (London, 1798; London: Constable & Co., 1968).

3. Helen Maria Williams, Letters From France, ed. with intro. Janet M. Todd, from the 5th ed. of Letters Written in France and 1st ed. of Letters Containing a Sketch of the Politics of France, 2 vols. (1795 and 1796; Delmar, N.Y.: Scholars' Facsimiles and Reprints, 1975) 11.5.171-73; and Souvenirs 52-56. For the 2-volume Letters From France, which includes the eight volumes published by Williams, I use a roman numeral to indicate the volume of the reprint and Arabic numerals to indicate the number of the original volume and the original page number.

4. She understood the inspector's ploy and rushed into a neighboring room in order to destroy “enormous piles of papers, the discovery of which would have been disastrous for us: Mme de Roland's notes, Lasource's letters, and the correspondence of other conspirators” (Souvenirs 81). Amongst the papers were also the notebooks of Mme de Genlis, who later complained that Williams was harboring them in order to publish them herself (Woodward 85-86).

5. For background on the eighteenth-century French salon and the powerful role it assigned to women, I rely on Carolyn Lougee, Le Paradis des Femmes: Women, Salons and Social Stratification in Seventeenth Century France (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1976) and Joan B. Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1988) 17-65.

6. A full list of the distinguished and curious visitors to Williams' salon in the 1790's and in the first decades of the nineteenth century would overwhelm a single footnote. I offer only a sampling: l'Abbé Gregoire, M and Mme Roland, Benjamin Constant, Joseph Priestley, Charles Fox, William Godwin, Fuseli, Mrs. Siddons, Frances Burney d'Arblay, William Wordsworth, Percy and Mary Shelley. Williams was romantically linked with a number of eminent men, notably General Miranda, Barère, and the Polish General Kosciusko, but she seems to have remained attached to John Hurford Stone throughout these years, though they never married. For details, see Woodward, especially chs. 2, 3, 6 and 8.

7. Nancy Armstrong, Desire in Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (New York: Oxford UP, 1987) 9. On salon society, see Landes 50-63.

8. Williams, her sister and her mother, with whom she lived, were imprisoned repeatedly in the years between 1793 and 1802. At first they were sent to the prison du Luxembourg in the general arrest of all English citizens in Paris in 1793. From the Luxembourg they were transferred to the Couvent des Anglaises. They spent about three months in prison at this time. Later, due to the decree of 27 germinal, Williams was forced to move outside of Paris and report daily to the local magistrates. In June of 1794, she fled to Switzerland to avoid a “special proscription” against her, caused by her sympathetic accounts of Robespierre's enemies. At several points during Napoleon's reign, Williams' writings offended the emperor, and he placed her under house arrests for days at a time. For detailed accounts, see Woodward, chs. 4, 6, 8, 9.

9. In Women and the Public Sphere, Joan Landes argues that the public sphere which was produced by a growing print culture and which organized social and political transformations during the revolution, contended with “le monde” of salon society as “a mode of cultural production” and “organ of public opinion” (22-23; 39-40). According to this model, print culture was hostile to the idea of the stylish, spectacular, and politically effective woman of the salon (31-38). Print culture fostered the idea of a “bourgeois interior” which substituted the familial foyer for the sociable salon (61-62). Williams' distinction, I argue, rests on her disregard of this conflict: she is a salonnière who belongs to the world of print. Her published Letters open the salon onto the larger, less select stage of the reading public while at the same time exploiting the ideological force of domesticity, transparency and femininity.

10. Roland Barthes' remark from Sade, Fourier, Loyola is quoted in Lynn Hunt, “The Unstable Boundaries of the French Revolution,” in From the Fires of Revolution to the Great War, ed. Michelle Perrot, vol. 4 of A History of the Private Life, gen. ed. Philippe Aries and Georges Duby, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1990) 41.

11. For contemporary responses to Williams' writing, see Janet Todd's Introduction to the Letters From France; on the Letters' popularity, see Robert D. Mayo, The English Novel in the Magazines, 1740-1815 (Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1962) 259.

12. Letter to Col. Barry, 25 June 1790, quoted in Woodward 32. Williams' “family” at this time included her mother and her two sisters, Persis and Cecile. Cecile subsequently married Athanase Coquerel and when she died in 1796, Helen adopted her sons Athanase and Charles.

13. Advertising Notice; quoted in Woodward 202.

14. The eight volumes were published serially between 1790 and 1796. The first two volumes, entitled Letters Written in France in the Summer of 1790, to a Friend in England, were published together after Williams' initial visit to France. The second two, Letters From France, containing many new Anecdotes relative to the French Revolution and The Present State of French Manners, appeared in 1792. Four more volumes were published together in 1795-96 as Letters containing a Sketch of the Politics of France. Together, the collected Letters From France cover Williams' experience of the Revolution from the Fête de la Fédération on 14 July 1790 to the fall of Robespierre on 28 July 1794. For a history of their publication and reception, see Woodward 207-11 and Todd 4-7.

15. Laura Mulvey, “Melodrama Inside and Outside the Home,” in Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1989) 64. Mulvey maintains that nineteenth-century culture “flourished on oppositions. … Problems of class difference and sexual difference [were] translated into mythology through a series of spatial metaphors: interior/exterior, inside/outside, included/excluded” that gave “an order to the contradictions that haunted the cities of industrialised society” (69).

16. Alan Liu, Wordsworth: The Sense of History (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1989) 142. In Liu's account (which is based on writings by men and which, by his own admission, relies on a masculine paradigm of narrative desire), the English refused to discern a narrative and refused to confront change in events in France. Instead “their sole task was to define a zone of cultural exclusion with which to contrast—through a ‘normative’ instinct concealed within ‘formal’ analysis—the English subject as … epochally different” from a reciprocally established French ‘nature’ (141). The French, on the other hand, adopted for themselves a discourse best understood as “theatricality” (139).

17. Edmund Burke, The Correspondence of Edmund Burke, ed. Thomas Copeland et al., vol. 6 (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1967) 10.

18. Jean Starobinski, 1789: The Emblems of Reason, trans. Barbara Bray (Charlottesville, VA: U of Virginia P, 1982) 8-9. See also Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley: U of California P, 1984) 34-38. Alan Liu discusses the “totalitarian poetics” of the state's self-dramatization as a tragic poetics. The Republic learned to “convert … a French ‘standard vocabulary of massacre’ … into a discursive form designed to constitute government solely as collective tragedy” (154-63).

19. For an elaboration of this point, see Starobinski 101-2; Hunt, Politics, Culture and Class, ch. 2; Ronald Paulson, Representations of Revolution (1789-1820) (New Haven: Yale UP, 1983) 4-28. For more detailed argument, see Marie-Helene Huet, Rehearsing the Revolution: The Staging of Marat's Death, 1793-1797, trans. Robert Hurley (Berkeley: U of California P, 1982) and Mona Ozouf, La Fête Révolutionnaire, 1789-1799 (Paris: Gallimard, 1976). I take the term “political culture” directly from Hunt.

20. In contrast to Williams, the standard English response, according to Liu, insisted that events unfolding in France could in no way translate to English experience; they were both silenced and rendered “unspeakable” (Liu 142-48).

21. I consider this point at greater length in my Romantic Correspondence: Women, Politics and the Fiction of Letters (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993), ch. 3.

22. At one point in her travels, Williams spots a sign over a shop, and reports, self-ironically (in French) to her English audience: “‘Robelin, écrivain—Mémoires & Lettres écrites à juste prix, à la nation.’ [‘Robelin, writer—Memoirs & letters written for a just price, for (to?) the nation.’] I am told that Mons Robelin is in very flourishing business; and perhaps I might have had recourse to him for assistance in my correspondence with you” (Letters i.1.94-95).

23. Huet is more interested in public deaths and quotes Foucault's Discipline and Punish: “In the ceremonies of public execution, the main character was the people, whose real and immediate presence was required for the performance” (27).

24. See also Letters i.1.60: “If you are not affected by this circumstance, you have read it with very different feelings from those with which I have written it.”

25. Lynn Hunt, “The Unstable Boundaries of the French Revolution” 16.

26. The Letters of Anna Seward Written Between the Years 1784-1807, vol. 3 (Edinburgh: A. C. Constable, 1811) 75.

27. Young women were frequently used in place of statues in the secular ceremonies and spectacles of the new republic. Moreover, these live, allegorical figures, especially female Liberty, replaced the figures of Catholic saints and French monarchs which had hitherto functioned as symbols of community and nation. See Lynn Hunt, “Engraving the Nation: Prints and Propaganda in the French Revolution,” History Today 30 (1980): 11-17 and her Politics, Culture and Class 64-65; and Maurice Agulhon, Marianne Into Battle: Republican Imagery and Symbolism in France (New York: Cambridge UP, 1981) 11-37.

28. In my characterization of these paintings I depart from the Landes' argument that sees the masculine ethos depicted unambiguously within the domestic interior (Landes 154-65). Paulson (29-30) and Robert Rosenblum, Transformations in Late Eighteenth-Century Art (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1974) 67-68, are more sensitive to the ambiguity of the domestic setting, acknowledging that the rhetoric of public activity may be violently inconsistent with and nevertheless endorsed by the rhetoric of home and family.

29. Quoted in Carol Blum, Rousseau and the Republic of Virtue (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1989) 27.

30. Quoted in Hunt, “The Unstable Boundaries” 15.

31. On the rhetoric of sacrifice and the “show of law” during the Terror, see Liu 144-49.

32. Hunt, Politics, Culture and Class 56.

33. Hunt, Politics, Culture and Class 13; see also Blum, ch. 2 and Armstrong 3-27.

34. See the opening pages of Volume 5: “Those scenes [of the Terror], connected in my mind with all the detail of domestic sorrow, with the feelings of private sympathy, with the tears of mourning friendship, are impressed upon my memory in characters that are indelible” (ii.5.23).

35. Williams' own footnote to this tale defines foyer in just these terms.

36. Compare this characterization of the salon/prison with Montesquieu's treatment of the seraglio/salon in The Persian Letters. Rica, a Persian noble, complains that the Parisian salon “is like a state within the state, and a man who watches the actions of ministers, officials or prelates at court, in Paris or in the country, without knowing the women who rule them, is like a man who can see a machine in action but does not know what makes it work” (Letter 107). The correlation between salon and seraglio is made clear in the course of Montesquieu's letters (quoted in Landes 31-35).

37. Volumes 6 and 7 are devoted almost entirely to accounts of executions, but more specifically, accounts of the condemned's behavior before death and the public's response to the various executions. Typically, Williams correlates the victim's demeanor inside the prison with the reaction of the crowd assembled outside around the guillotine. And typically, she attends more often to female victims than male. See for example Corday's execution (ii.5.133-35).