No More Corsets

We all​ judge by appearances. Oscar Wilde said that it is ‘only shallow people’ who don’t, but it might be truer to say that they fail to pay attention to the judgments they are making while they dismiss appearances as superficial. Nothing, as Wilde added, is more superficial than thought. For women, who may be assaulted, imprisoned or killed because of what they do or do not wear, clothes may be a matter of life or death. Anne Higonnet’s new book is somewhat belied by its subtitle, which plays to the idea of fashion as accessory to the mainstream of history. ‘Styled’ suggests that her subjects hovered on the edge of the revolution, adding a cockade here and straightening a Phrygian cap there. Her argument is the reverse. She shows that they drove events by the strategic deployment of dress. It is a history, as she modestly points out, that has been ‘hidden in plain sight’, but it was well hidden. It is the bringing together of her own research with sources that have been siloed in different disciplines, as well as a practical knowledge of dressmaking, that allows her to tell the story from 1789 to 1814 and to follow its ramifications across Europe, America and the Caribbean.

The spur for the book was a discovery that was also an example of the problem. A complete set of plates from the Journal des dames et des modes, published in Paris from 1797, was hiding in plain sight in the Morgan Library behind a ‘quirky’ catalogue entry. As is often the case, however, the plates, taken out by dealers to sell as decorative prints, had lost the accompanying text, which had been discarded on the assumption that nothing said about women’s clothes could be of serious interest. Happily, this ‘crucial missing evidence’ survived in the Danish Design Museum and provides the background and setting for Higonnet’s study. She focuses on three women: Marie Josèphe Rose Tascher de La Pagerie, who became Joséphine Bonaparte; Jeanne Françoise Julie Adélaïde Bernard, nicknamed Juliette and later famous as Madame Récamier; and Juana María Ignacia Cabarrus y Galabert, who went by the name of Térézia Tallien and was known popularly as Notre-Dame de Thermidor. The many names and their frequent changes, some self-determined but mostly reflecting the arrival and departure of men, give their own account of the mutability of these lives and their times.

Récamier and Tallien were near contemporaries, born in the 1770s, as was Joséphine, at least for official purposes, after she and Napoleon adjusted their ages on their marriage contract to make them both 28. She was in fact ten years older and of the three most obviously the outsider in pre-revolutionary France. Born in Martinique of French parents, she was designated a Creole when she came to France to be married, at sixteen, to the eldest son of her aunt’s lover, in a bid to boost the family’s status. The marriage was not a success in that or any other way. Her husband, Alexandre, vicomte de Beauharnais, was a very minor noble in a society so stratified and ossified that it required six generations of nobility to be allowed to follow the king’s hunt. A petition to be received at Versailles was turned down on the grounds that a member of the vicomte’s family had been found to have usurped their title in 1667.

Joséphine, too, was rebuffed in her early attempts to restyle herself for life in Paris. The rigidity of the class structure in France was reinforced by sumptuary laws. Since 1268, all trades (métiers) had been in the iron grip of the guilds whose maîtres made clothes to order in prescribed materials. Shopping with her aunt for a trousseau, Joséphine would not have been shown Lyon silk or the elaborate embroidered fabrics which, with their gold and silver thread, were forbidden to a mere vicomtesse under such a flurry of legislation that it seems it was at first difficult to enforce. The essential components of dress were, however, common to all women considered genteel. Daily wear comprised a conical corset or ‘corps’ of linen with whalebone stays, worn over a light chemise. Over this went the three-part gown: first a skirt, with or without panniers at the side depending on the formality of the day’s engagements, then the stiff triangular stomacher, pinned to the corps, and finally the bodice, each piece so precisely constructed as to give the appearance of a single rigid garment. It must have been difficult to breathe, let alone move. The teensy footsteps by which aristocratic women propelled themselves, giving the impression that they were on wheels, were known as the Versailles glide. A woman thus dressed was pinned into her place in society, and her style was also fixed. This was investment dressing; the silk, as much as 25 yards of it, was expensive. It had to last decades and it could never be washed. Perhaps it ‘smelled a bit’, as Higonnet suggests, although the servants did launder the chemise. The dread of spills and stains enforced yet more restraint when it came to table manners.

Sumptuary laws were more oppressive in France than in many other European countries. In Britain, most of them were repealed by James I in the early 17th century and the ban on Highland dress, imposed after Culloden, was lifted in 1782. But everywhere the three-piece dress, with its narrow waist and broad skirts, was the norm: this was the silhouette by which a woman of a certain social class could be recognised as decently dressed in public. It was this universality that made its abandonment in France during the revolution a cause of fascination and scandal around the world. By 1789 there were already signs of change. In the arcades of the Palais Royal, which Louis XVI’s cousin the Duc d’Orléans and his ‘ultrafashionable’ duchesse had turned into a complex of shops, boutiques and restaurants, a less elaborate look was emerging, with cotton gowns for women and the black three-piece suit (a British import) for men. The female silhouette, however, remained the same, with everything below the artificially narrowed waist unknowable. In 1788, the bestselling novel in France was Paul et Virginie, a tale of romance and doomed love that ends with the heroine shipwrecked within sight of land but choosing to drown, pulled down by the weight of her petticoats, rather than to strip off and swim in a state of semi-nudity. She is left to her doom ‘like an angel who takes flight to heaven’, or, Higonnet suggests, as ‘the first fashion victim’ in literature. In the same year, the final volume of Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s Tableau de Paris appeared, in which he complained at length about the capital’s obsession with extreme fashion, notably hats so tall they needed built-in springs to be compressed when their wearers were getting into a carriage. The Cabinet des modes, arguably the first fashion magazine, which had begun publication in 1785, was bubbling along with suggestions for such hats and, for the gentlemen, waistcoats in ‘spring yellow’ velvet.

When the Bastille fell, Juliette and Térézia were in Paris, while Joséphine was in Martinique. None of them was in a conventional or comfortable situation. Beauharnais had never found his wife acceptable and after a series of rows had her sent to a convent, a move that backfired because many of the Bernardine nuns she met there came from upper-class families and Joséphine made useful connections. When she left, she was able to secure a separation on decent financial terms before retreating with her daughter to the Caribbean. By this time, Térézia, who later claimed to have been raised by a goat but was actually the daughter of a self-made Basque financier, had in her turn been brought to Paris to be smartened up and married off. She was from childhood a lively girl and her father seems to have considered it prudent to capitalise on his asset before she developed too many ideas of her own. With similar hopes to those of Joséphine’s family of connecting to some branch of the minor aristocracy, he attached her in 1788, when she was fourteen, to the Marquis de Fontenay. A sprig of nobility as low down the social tree as Beauharnais, Fontenay was even less personally appealing. A catastrophic wedding night was marked by what Térézia’s daughter later described cryptically as Fontenay’s ‘revolting acts’ and followed by ‘unfaithful and profound immorality’. It was perhaps Juliette, the only one still unmarried, who was the best placed in the summer of 1789. She, too, had been brought to Paris for a makeover, accompanied by her mother, who was known as Julie, and the three men with whom Julie lived in an apparently contented ménage à quatre. By an arrangement oddly reminiscent of the plot of Mamma Mia!, Julie married one of them, Jean Bernard, and had her daughter with another, Jacques-Rose Récamier, while Juliette grew up regarding them both, along with the third man, Pierre Simonard, as her joint fathers. Thus, at the moment when the revolution began, the three young women were already outside the conventions of bourgeois society and at best insecurely connected to the lower ranks of the aristocracy.

Clothes had played their part in the gathering of revolutionary momentum. Before the (entirely male) Estates General convened in May 1789, there was a heated debate about what they would wear, whether court and clerical dress would distinguish the First and Second Estates or whether they would all wear dark suits. Pamphlets were written and speeches made for and against the distinction between aristocrats, with their ‘magnificent’ fabrics and feathers in their hats, the clergy in their vestments and the deputies of the Third Estate in the dark suits that had by now acquired an association with liberal and democratic ideals. The sans-culottes, as they would become known, having discarded their knee breeches, objected strongly to the First and Second Estates having colourful outfits and big hats with feathers. ‘Distinction in garments’ was, they argued, invidious. Much later, Jacques-Louis David, the artist most identified with the revolution, was asked to come up with an alternative for parliamentarians, a costume that would evoke the dignity of the Greek and Roman republics. The result was a complicated outfit, involving tights, tunics and cloaks. It was not taken up.

It was​ in fact women who seized the opportunity to revolutionise their wardrobes after 1789. The new government abolished not only sumptuary laws but also guilds, thereby removing all restraints on the clothing market as well as such security as the apprenticeship system had guaranteed to workers. The effect was not immediate. The Cabinet des modes, which apologised to readers for appearing several days late in July 1789, ‘due to events too well known and too unfortunate to require explanation’, suggested tricolour ribbons for the ‘femme patriote en négligée’, while the female equivalent of the dark suit, indicative of revolutionary sympathies, was the ‘redingote’ or short jacket (another British import), sometimes accessorised with a tall hat. The stays, however, remained. The new laws dictated that men and women should wear ‘whatever garment and style’ they chose as long as it was ‘of their sex’. A law specifically forbidding women to wear trousers was passed in 1800 and not formally repealed until 2013. When Marie-Antoinette went to the guillotine, it was part of her degradation to be dressed only in a chemise. She had kept a clean one for the occasion. David drew a vicious sketch of her in the tumbril, emphasising the outline of her breasts and legs under the thin cotton. The depiction of an uncorseted female body was in itself a sexual humiliation.

When the Terror began, Joséphine, who had returned from Martinique, was imprisoned with her estranged husband. The title that was too slight to help them rise in society was weighty enough to sink them now. Beauharnais went to the guillotine in July 1794. At the end he behaved well, leaving a dignified letter for his wife and children. Térézia, similarly compromised by her unhappy marriage, left her husband and withdrew with her son to Bordeaux, where she met for the second time a rising member of the National Convention, Jean-Lambert Tallien. She began an affair with him which allowed her to play a dangerous game, a sort of ‘real-life version of the Scarlet Pimpernel’, as Higonnet puts it. Amid the chaos of arrests, executions and confiscations, she gave whatever she could get, by whatever dubious means, to the would-be refugees who flocked to Bordeaux in the hope of escaping France by sea. Tallien could not protect her indefinitely, however, and in May 1794 Robespierre had her arrested and imprisoned in La Force, one of the most notorious prisons in Paris. Her hair was hacked off and she, too, was reduced to her underwear.

Portrait of Juliette Récamier by François Gérard (1802).

Juliette’s fate was more peculiar. Her unconventional but apparently affectionate family was panic-stricken. Two of the three men had dangerous professional links to the Ancien Régime. Récamier was so certain of his doom that he watched the executions of the king and queen in order to prepare himself for his own. Bernard, Juliette’s official father, was similarly imperilled. In one of the more desperate measures of these desperate times, they decided to secure Juliette’s status as legal heir to Récamier by marriage. In April 1793, 15-year-old Juliette was married to her 42-year-old father, who was still in love with her mother. The assumption seems to have been that his imminent death would leave her free and financially secure. It was a noble act on Récamier’s part, but it became a reverse Sydney Carton, for he was not executed. He survived the Terror and lived until 1830. Juliette was trapped. A divorce process would have revealed the terrible truth, so she and Récamier had to live with their secret for 37 years.

Meanwhile, in La Force, where the prisoners were paraded each morning to be told who would be guillotined that day, Térézia received a message from Robespierre demanding that she denounce Tallien as a counter-revolutionary. She refused. Robespierre retaliated by having a mirror sent to her every day so that she might see what her beauty and dignity had been reduced to. When he ordered her execution, she managed to get a message to Tallien. She wrote that ‘a courageous man’ might be able to save her by toppling Robespierre, but she found herself condemned by Tallien’s ‘unworthy cowardice’. Many people later learned this message off by heart because it had tremendous consequences. It provoked Tallien to make a speech in the National Convention that precipitated the fall of the Committee of Public Safety, the summer coup known as Thermidor and the end of the Terror. Robespierre was guillotined; Térézia was a heroine. Appearing at the theatre – the theatres stayed open throughout the revolution – she was greeted ecstatically as ‘Notre-Dame de Thermidor’. Three months later, at the request of the government, she symbolically locked the doors of the Jacobin Club. ‘This woman could close the gates of Hell,’ William Pitt said. She was still only twenty.

The mood after the Terror was hectic, a combination of relief and post-traumatic shock. All three women were in difficulties. Térézia was famous but broke. Her husband had made off with most of her dowry and Tallien had no money. Joséphine’s dowry and Beauharnais’s estate had been confiscated, and she had two young children. Juliette had a husband and plenty of money but was trapped in her impossible situation. These, and the historic factors in play around them, were the makings, Higonnet writes, of ‘a perfect fashion storm’. Under the Directoire, women had no more legal rights than before. They remained debarred from all professions and institutions. Any hope of agency depended on being attractive to men whom they could influence. Earlier conventions of women’s dress were clinging on, and Paul et Virginie was more popular than ever. In response, Joséphine and Térézia combined their talents and experience, developing a new way of dressing that freed the body and redrew the female figure. Two years later the result emerged, a high-waisted, one-piece dress in a light fabric, worn without petticoats or stays, that allowed for free movement and through which the outline of leg and hip was clearly visible. It was one of the most influential fashion statements ever made, and Higonnet’s analysis of its origins and evolution is a masterpiece of deductive reasoning and empiricism. The most daring thing about it was its conception. It was an adaptation of the punitive prison chemise: Marie-Antoinette’s humiliation in the tumbril was reclaimed and reinvented as a retort to Robespierre from the women who had survived him. The connection was made explicit by Térézia in a portrait she commissioned of herself. She is shown as a prisoner in La Force, her cropped hair now neatly styled, and the coarse linen shift reimagined in fine muslin.

Joséphine and Térézia’s friendship has been discussed chiefly in terms of their connections to the men who led the revolution. If, however, their association is considered ‘from their perspective’, much becomes clear. As Higonnet says, it only takes ‘common sense and a little empathy’ to see the bigger picture, but those qualities have often been lacking in historical writing about women. Her analysis follows the stages by which the new line was worked out, its apparent simplicity the sum of interconnecting influences. One was Joséphine’s familiarity with the gole, a straight dress worn by light-skinned mixed-race women in Martinique to get round the local sumptuary laws. Another inspiration was the exquisitely embroidered muslins being imported to France from India and, more obliquely, Indian men’s dress. The jama, a fitted top with sleeves and sashed skirt in fine light fabric, had created a sensation in Paris in 1788 when Tipu Sultan sent a legation. Politics and taste under the Directoire dictated that the end result of Joséphine and Térézia’s efforts must be capable of being seen as neoclassical, but authentic Roman women’s dress was neither flattering nor practical. It consisted of two oblongs of fabric front and back attached at the shoulders and belted. It was, however, a useful precedent for the absence of underwear. Gradually, from the three-part dress to the one piece with a sash over the seam between bodice and skirt, a new soft waistline was formed which rose gradually until it came to rest under the bust, creating a long, columnar silhouette with nothing beneath it but a straight shift. The totality could pass for neoclassical but is better described, Higonnet suggests, as ‘colony classical’. Its origins in ethnic dress, some of it male, would certainly have seen it banned if it had been properly understood. Beyond aesthetics and rhetorical revenge for earlier humiliations, the high waist and loose skirts gave women one more obvious advantage that has been overlooked. Higonnet seems to be the first person to do the maths and ‘multiply nine times the six babies born between 1794 and 1804’ to Térézia, establishing that of the 125 months she spent at the height of fashionable society, she was pregnant for 54 of them. The new dresses not only made pregnancy more comfortable, they did away with the corseted woman’s obligation to retreat into ‘confinement’ in its later stages. Women could be more active for more of their lives.

Joséphine, too, posed for portraits. In one she appears standing ‘confidently and dynamically’ in contrapposto, a position physically impossible for a woman in a corset. The outline of her legs and one bent knee is visible through the light fabric. Portraits were important for promoting the new look. They were often advertised in the press and could be viewed in the painter’s studio, while those shown at the annual salons were seen by up to half a million visitors. Perhaps only in the fervid mood of post-Terror Paris could such a radical redesign of female social identity have succeeded, but it took off like a rocket. David himself approved and, albeit via various ‘messier fashion adoptions’, it became an international style. The Cabinet des modes had been snuffed out during the Terror, but when its successor, the Journal des dames et des modes, began publication in 1797, it illustrated all the latest variations on the theme, such as the ‘priestess style chemise’, while the dress itself was only the centrepiece of a vast array of accessories: shawls, shoes and – another liberating invention – the handbag completed the look.

The most influential figures of the Directoire came to the two women’s salons, which acquired a reputation for intellectual brilliance as well as style. Each had its speciality. Térézia’s was mainly political and financial. It attracted diplomats and bankers, as well as artists including Jean-Baptiste Isabey, and Germaine de Staël, taking a break from her own ‘more intellectual’ gatherings. Joséphine was a regular attendee and seems to have met Napoleon there, when she was a star and he was so down on his luck that Térézia gave him a note to a clothier to get some decent breeches made. Térézia enthusiastically attended other people’s salons during the day. After dinner there would be the theatre or a ball, where she might generate more scandalised admiration by wearing flesh-coloured stockings and gold rings round her legs – all duly reported in the press. Even her sandals were considered risqué, a woman’s feet having been previously part of the unknowable zone below the waist. It was assumed by many people at the time, and some historians since, that she and Joséphine got what they wanted from powerful men just by sleeping with them. It was a useful slur, and Térézia, who having toppled Robespierre and shut down the Jacobin Club was not particularly afraid of gossip, was sometimes provocative. Once, at a party, she made a bet that her whole outfit – including the sandals – weighed less than two livres, and won the bet by taking everything off and having it weighed. When Joséphine became empress, Gillray’s cartoon Ci-devant occupations – or – Madame Talian and the Empress Josephine Dancing Naked before Barrass in the Winter of 1797 – A Fact! repeated a well-established slander. Napoleon is shown peeping through the bed curtains as the women cavort for Paul Barras, leader of the Directoire and a regular at Térézia’s salon. She and Tallien had eventually managed to marry but the relationship foundered. He was not a success politically and his complicity in the massacre of royalists in Brittany left his wife ‘disgusted’ with this man who had ‘too much blood’ on his hands. As his star declined, Barras’s rose. A soldier, and an astute politician who spotted Napoleon early, by 1795 he and Térézia were a couple.

Juliette Récamier​ had a symmetrically opposite problem from the other two. For her any sexual relationship would involve either adultery or incest. She might have been expected to avoid the new look, with its associations of sexual and physical liberation, but she realised that if carefully deployed it could work for her too, turning ‘virginity into a spectacular style’. She became friends with Térézia and adapted her designs. She wore the column dress, but always in white: muslin by day, satin in the evening. She wore pearls, which glow, not diamonds, which glitter. Everything about her was soft and pure, and the chastely elegant look was copied from London to Peru. Her salons were frequented by Chateaubriand, who described her as an embodiment of recent French history, a serene light shining over a storm. The chaise longue, on which she posed for many artists, is sometimes still known as a Récamier. David’s portrait of her, however, remained unfinished and Higonnet makes interesting suggestions about the reasons David might have found himself uncomfortable under the steady gaze of the celebrity virgin. She does her subjects justice without special pleading, weighing the evidence with a transparency that reassures the reader and making generous acknowledgment of her sources. She points out that all three women were described in their lifetimes and retrospectively by the peculiarly French adjective bonne, a combination of moral and personal qualities to which the English ‘good-natured’ only partly equates. They were all generous. Many of Térézia and Joséphine’s more questionable acts were undertaken to protect their children, who all seem to have returned their mother’s affection. Higonnet frees them from the cliché of the grande horizontale but admits that the truth, if more complicated, is not always more pleasant. On the question of where Joséphine got the money to buy her château at Malmaison, she cites recent evidence that rather than merely sleeping with men who gave her money, as was lazily assumed, she took advantage of the collapse of the official currency of assignats, which gave anyone offering hard cash an advantage. Her mother sent gold from Martinique, where the legal abolition of slavery had been disregarded, and the plantations remained profitable. If the purchase of Malmaison was tainted, it was not by commercialised adultery but by the profits of enslaved labour.

As the Directoire became the Consulate and then the Empire, revolutionary ideals waned. A kleptocracy emerged among those who had positioned themselves well. As empress, Joséphine acquired a wardrobe more extensive than Marie-Antoinette’s, as well as a fine collection of cameos accumulated during Napoleon’s campaigns – donated, so it was said, by a ‘grateful Italy’. Radical style retreated and, as dress grew more elaborate again, it was often slightly gothicised. Napoleon became noticeably less enthusiastic about intellectual women, and it was rumoured that he retained the legal right to divorce only so that he would be free to separate from Joséphine. When he did, in 1809, she dressed for her repudiation in a fabulously understated revenge dress of pure white. She never lost her interest in clothes and fashion. She died in ribbons and pink satin six weeks after Napoleon’s abdication in April 1814, having asked to be ‘very nicely’ dressed. Térézia had read the signs and made a sensible marriage to the Belgian Comte de Caraman, who was undeterred – though his family was horrified – by the fact that she had six children with three fathers. Banned from court by Napoleon, who mistrusted her influence on Joséphine, she retreated to her husband’s château and had four more children. Juliette’s father-husband was deliberately bankrupted by Napoleon’s manipulation of the banking system and so the days of her grand salons came to an end. She lived on quietly through the restored monarchy into the Second Republic, ‘a white ghost’ of the revolution by the time she died in 1849. Térézia stayed on good terms with Tallien. At their daughter’s wedding, he reprimanded her for her interest in fashion, which he said was responsible for all her difficulties.