Six women who endured the Revolution in France

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LIBERTY: THE LIVES AND TIMES OF SIX WOMEN IN REVOLUTIONARY FRANCE

By Lucy Moore

HarperCollins, $27.95, 464 pages

REVIEWED BY CYNTHIA GRENIER

Coinciding with the 214th anniversary of the storming of the Bastille and the onset of the French Revolution, it seems perhaps only fitting to examine a lively new work by a talented young English historian, dedicated to "The Lives and Times of Six Women in Revolutionary France." The six women whose lives Lucy Moore has chosen to study could hardly be more disparate. (The book, incidentally, despite its subject matter is not overly feminist in its orientation.)

The feminine sextet ranges from Germaine de Stael, a rara avis who has earned her own place in history, to Pauline Leon, a political activist who died totally unknown. As for Madame de Stael, she was daughter of Louis XVI's Minister of Finance, Jacques Necker, married at 20 to a Swedish diplomat 17 years her senior. As Ms. Moore puts it succinctly, "Stael married Germaine for her money, and she married him for her freedom."

Every Tuesday evening, she used to hold small dinner parties in her home on rue de Bac on the Left Bank. It was considered the hottest invitation of the day to attend one of Madame de Stael's glittering salons. Everyone who mattered in the realm of arts, literature and politics would be present. America's envoy to France, Gouverneur Morris, jotted down in his journal in 1791, "Go hence to Mme de Stael's, I meet here the world."

The salon was a very special, uniquely French institution dating from the 17th century, always presided over by women. As the Goncourt brothers were to observe a century later, woman was ordained as "the governing principle, the directing reason and voice" of 18th-century high society.

Many reformers of the age viewed the influence exercised by women, particularly by the salonnieres, as evidence of the corruption of the ancien regime. Indeed boudoir politics, as they were so termed, were cited as one of the chief problems plaguing France at that time. In 1788 Thomas Jefferson told George Washington that women's demands "bid defiance to [natural] laws and regulations" and had reduced France to a "desperate state."

In October 1789 at five in the morning, some 2,000 women gathered in front of the Hotel de Ville — city hall — breaking into the building, blocking its doors and refusing entrance to all males on the grounds that men were not strong enough to take vengeance on their enemies and that women would do a better job of it.