Marquis de Biron;

his sale, Drouot, Paris, M^e Lair-Dubreuil, Paulme et Lasquin fils✨, 14🌼 March 1910, lot 34;

Mme J. Brasseur, Lille;

her sale, Drouot, Pa🍌ris, 20-21 June 1928, lot 293;

Edmond Auguste Courty;

thence by descendance;

Drouot, Paris, 9 December 2002, lot 87;

private European collection

____________________________________________

Collection du Marquis de Biron ;

Sa vent𝓀e, Paris, Drouot, Me Lair-Dubreuil, Paulme et Lasquin fils, 14 mars 1910, lot 34💦 ;

Collection Mme J. Brasseur, Lille ;

Sa vente, Paris, Drouot, 20-21 juin 1928, l𓆉ot 29💃3 ;

Collection 🤪Edmond Auguste Courty, puis par descendance ;

Vente, Paris, Drouot, 9 décembre 2002, lot 87 ;

Collection privée européenne.

1909, Exposition rétrospective de Portraits de Femmes sous les trois Républiques, Paris, Palais 🦩de Bagatelle, cat. 138 (ill., attribué à Joseph-Charles Marin)

A committed revolutionary and a pioneering figure of modern feminism, Anne-Josèphe Terwagne, known as Théroigne de Méricourt, was a major figure in the French Revolution, whose exploits were gradually forgotten and dismissed in the🉐 nineteenth century, but now have a striking resonance.

Born in Marcourt, a village that had become part of the principality of Liège in 1762, Anne-Josèphe had a colourful and turbulent life. She left her family of small farmers at the age of fourteen, and became a servant and cowherd. Later, she was taken under the wing of an English noblewoman who introduced her to a sophisticated life in London, where she tried to become a singer. Shortly after arriving in Paris at the age of twenty-seven, during the first stages of the French Revolution, she became involved in the fight for liberty and followed the work and debates of the Assemblée Constituante on a daily basis, one of the rare women to be admitted. Wearing a man’s riding habit and a feathered hat, Anne-Josèph was nicknamed la Belle Liégeoise by those attending the salon that she held at her home, who included Camille Desmoulins, Saint-Just, l’Abbé Sieyès and Brissot de Warville. In January 1790, she founded the Société des Amis de la Loi with Gilbert Romme, a mathemaꦿtician and future inventor of the Republican calendar. Her interest in the new ideas of the Revolution and in political involvement for women soon made her a target for the royalist press, which branded her lifestyle as depraved and accused her of murder. This tarnished Théroigne’s reputation until the following century.

Female citizens, […] let us arm ourselves; we have the right to do so by nature as well as by law; let us show men that we are not inferior to them as regards either virtue or courage; let us show Europe that Frenchwomen know their rights and are equal to the enlightened figures of the eighteenth century; by showing our contempt for prejudices, which by their very nature are absurd, often immoral, in that they make a crime out of virtues […]. Frenchwomen, […] let us break our chains; at last it is time for Women to emerge from their shameful state of nonentity, where the ignorance, pride and injustice of men has kept them enslaved for so long.

[Citoyennes, […] Armons-nous ; nous en avons le droit par la nature et même par la loi ; montrons aux hommes que nous ne leur sommes inférieures ni en vertus, ni en courage ; montrons à l’Europe que les Françaises connaissent leurs droits, et sont à la hauteur des lumières du dix-huitième siècle ; en méprisant les préjugés, qui par cela seul qu’ils sont préjugés, sont absurdes, souvent immoraux, en ce qu’ils nous font un crime des vertus […]. Françaises, […] brisons nos fers ; il est temps enfin que les Femmes sortent de leur honteuse nullité, où l’ignorance, l’orgueil, et l’injustice des hommes les tiennent asservies depuis si longtemps.]

Speech given to the Société Fraternelle des Minimes, Place Ro🎀yale, on 25 March 1792

Threatened with imprisonment and publicly vilified, she tried to return to the land𒊎 of her birth, where she was seized by exiled aristocrats who handed her over to the Austrian judicial authorities. Finally freed by Emperor Leopold I and covered with glory when she returned to Paris in late 1791, she took the side of the Girondins and planned to raise ‘a battalion of amazons’ to fight against European monarchies and claim civil and political parity for women. She took part in the attack on the Château des Tuileries on 10 August 1792. When the Girondins fell, she was subjected to an episode of humiliating violence when she was stripped naked and publicly whipped by a horde of female Jacobins: some historians see this as the cause of the madness into which she descended from 1793 onwards. She was placed under the guardianship of her brother and spent the last twenty-three years of her life in an asylum: first the Hôtel-Dieu and then the Salpetrière, where she died in 1817.

During the Revolution, various p𝐆ortrait sculptures were made of Théroigne de Méricourt, 🗹including a plaster bust by Marin dated 1792

[2] Récemment acquis par le 🤡musée de la Bove🔜rie de Liège (inv. no. BA.AMC.02e.2020.006164).

[3] ꦓAttribué à C🍎hinard, daté vers 1796, Musée Jacquemart-André (inv. no. MJAP-S 1429).

[4] Coiffure en vogue durant les années 1790, que l’on retrouve, entres autres, dans un portrait de Julie Lebrun en baigneuse datée de 1792 par sa mère Elisabeth Vigéeꦍ-Lebrun, collection particulière.

[5] Notamment grâce à deux profils « physiocrates » gravés par Gilles-Lo✱uis Chrétien en 1790 et 1792.

[6] Mirabeau (1749-1791), 1791, plâtre, Musée des Bea🧸ux-Arts de Rennes (i🍬nv. no. INV 877.32.1).

[7] ♊Maximilien Robespierre (1791), Vizille, Musée de la Révolution française (inv. no. MRF 1986-243) ; Augustin Robespierre (1767-1794), en 1792, frère cadet de Maximilien, également élu à la Convention (Vizille, Musée de la Révolution française, inv. no. MRF D 2020-2).

^[8] Antoinette Gabrielle Danton, 1793 (Troyes, Musée Saint-Loup, inv. no. 897.♚5 ; RE 436)

[9] Disparu

[10] Disparu

RÉFÉRENCES BIBLIOGRAPHIQUES

G. Le Chatelier, Claude-André Deseine, statuaire 1740-1823, Paris, 1903 ;

M. O. Oppenheimer, The French portrait: Revolution to Restoration, 🦋cat. exp. Smith college muse🍸um of Art, septembre - décembre 2005 ;

C. Marciano-Jacob, Théroigne de Méricourt ou la femme écrasée, Le Sémaphore, 2001.

E. Roudinesco, Théroigne de Méricourt : une femme mélancolique sous la Révolution, Paris, 1989 ;

Théroigne de Méricourt, cat. exp. Huy et Liège, 1989 ;

L. Lacour, Trois femmes de la Révolution : Olympe de Gouges, Théroigne de Méricourt, Rose Lacombe, Paris, 1900, p. 95-313.