The National Razor

Hilary Mantel

• The Women of Paris and Their French Revolution by Dominique Godineau, translated by Katherine Sharp
  California, 415 pp, £45.00, January 1998, ISBN 0 520 06718 5

We have seen her at the edge of crowds, dwarfed against public buildings. We have seen her in woodcuts, a naked sabre in her hand, the tricolour cockade pinned to her cap; in drawings, with her wooden clogs and apron, her basket over her arm, her knitting in her hands: click, click, through the debates of the Assembly, in the gallery of the Jacobin Club, and each day at me foot of the scaffold, where the tumbrils bring up their freight of dying flesh. She is the ‘fury of the guillotine’, given to a habit of ‘atrocious vociferation’. She is at once an ultra-revolutionary, bloody and unrestrained, and a destroyer of radical will, priest-ridden and superstitious. For the historian Michelet, she is honest and spontaneous, but credulous, a victim of her own sensibility. For the historian Mathiez, she is stupid. For more recent scholars, she is a very defective sort of feminist, or an armed and violent housewife, less concerned with liberty than with the price of sugar. And though this latter concern is seen as legitimate, it does not fail to detract from her status.