Historical Figures

Théroigne de Méricourt, personality of the Revolution

Anne-Josèphe Terwagne, known as Théroigne de Méricourt (1762 – 1817) was a French politician and a personality of the Revolution.

The women's march

Daughter of Elisabeth Lahaye and Pierre Terwagne, laborer, Anne-Josèphe was born on August 13, 1762 in Marcourt in Belgium. At the age of five, following the early death of her mother, Anne-Josèphe was entrusted to aunts and then placed in a convent. At twelve, she returned to her father who had remarried but did not get along with her stepmother and fled the following year. She becomes a cowherd, a servant and then a companion to a society woman.

She tries a career as a singer, knows several adventures and lives in Paris, London and Italy; she is in Naples when she learns of the convocation of the Estates General in France. She then immediately returned to Paris, took the name of Théroigne de Méricourt and took part in the storming of the Bastille. On October 5 and 6, 1789, when thousands of women went to Versailles to fetch the king and present the people's demands to Marie-Antoinette, Théroigne was there but she did not take part in the violence.

The Beautiful Liègeoise

Théroigne de Méricourt, nicknamed "the Red Amazon" (for her Amazonian clothes), "la Belle Liégeoise" or "la furie de la Gironde", held a salon and created the "Club des Amis de la loi", which finally joined the Club des Cordeliers. Informing herself and seeking to inform the people of the work of the Assembly, she became a well-known figure in the public forums, where she did not hesitate to express her opinions. At the end of 1790, in debt and targeted by the press, she returned to Belgium. Suspected of wanting to assassinate Marie-Antoinette, she was arrested on the night of February 15 to 16, 1791 and imprisoned in a fortress in Austria. Nine months later, she was released and returned to Paris.

Interned

In January 1792, she joined the Jacobins and, republican and feminist, asserted herself against the royalists and against the bourgeoisie. In the spring, in view of the war, she wanted to set up a "phalanx of Amazons", participated in the invasion of the Tuileries Palace in August and stirred up the crowd there against the pamphleteer Suleau. In May 1793, at the National Assembly, Jacobin women accused her of supporting the leader of the Girondins, publicly stripped her and spanked her until Marat intervened. Following this episode, Théroigne de Méricourt sank into madness and her brother had her committed to the Salpêtrière hospital. She will stay there for twenty-three years.

She died on June 23, 1817 at the Salpêtrière Hospital. His life inspires Charles Baudelaire, Philippe Séguy and an opera. She would also have inspired Eugène Delacroix for his painting Liberty Leading the People.