Anne Lister in the French Revolution

The man leading the insurgents against the army of Auguste Marmont, leader of the Garde royale, could have been Cavaignac, Raspail or Blanqui. Yet, above all, the revolt was of the people rising up against the monarchy and for democracy, as illustrated by Eugène Delacroix's famous Liberty Guiding the People – which he painted in the very same apartment that Anne Lister had shared with Mrs Barlow on the 6th floor of 15 Quai Voltaire in 1825.

Lady Stuart de Rothesay had gone ahead to Pau, where Anne was to join her. The ambassador’s wife had been blowing hot and cold with her since the start of their journey, so Anne wondered what her reaction would be: “what will Lady Stuart hear at Pau, will she wish I was with them?”¹  However, Anne’s main concern was her elderly aunt Anne, who she had left in Paris: “My poor aunt will be half frightened to death."²  As to her own feelings, she tried to analyse them in her journal:

Anne was familiar with French history and with the first French Revolution, which was raging at the time of her birth in Halifax, in 1791. She had read Considerations on the French Revolution by Madame de Staël in 1820³ and heard accounts of “La Terreur," during which King Louis XVI, Queen Marie-Antoinette and more than 35,000 “enemies of the Revolution”⁴ were executed – including some close to home. When she visited the Palais de Justice’s archives in Paris, where the statements against those victims were kept, Anne thought “Mr Edwards, the book seller at H-x [Halifax] might know whether his brother was guillotined here or not.”⁵

Hearing the first figures circulating on the number of victims of this new revolution, Anne was incredulous: “Thirty thousand killed! Oh it cannot be true, exaggeration must be allowed for things may be bad but not so bad.” Indeed, the death toll would be much lower: around 1,000 dead and 5,000 injured.⁷  Anne tried to remain calm and hopeful for the French monarchy, who had her support: “The king will prevail, at least for the present." However, Lady Stuart de Rothesay, who knew the royal family personally, started to panic. “I had unluckily told how alarmed my banker seemed and had perhaps increased her fears,” regretted Anne once in Pau. “I wish I had pretended to know nothing about it.”⁸

When Anne read that Laffite had brandished the threat of civil war in the face of Prime Minister Polignac's envoy on 28th July, she thought the paper had mistaken him with Lafayette, the American Revolutionary War's hero, mentioned in the Galignani's Messenger’s report. But it was indeed her Paris banker, also a member of Parliament, who was at the heart of the Revolution – he would soon become President of the Chamber of Deputies. The Journal des débats also reported that the soldiers had fraternised with the insurgents, putting an end to three bloody days.

In a letter to Mrs. Norcliffe a few months later, Anne painted a picture of a much more brave Lady Stuart de Rothesay, determined to stay in France at any cost, to carry on business as usual and thus setting an example for her compatriots as well as safeguarding the Franco-British relations: 

In South France, Anne witnessed the first signs of political change on the ground, such as “the tricoloured flag [of the 1789 French Revolution] waved over even the meanest village." Yet, even if it meant saving her own skin, she would not have mingled with the revolutionary crowd. This was yet another point of contention with her travelling companion:

Thanks to newspapers, letters or some acquaintances, Anne Lister was able to follow the latest Paris news – “nobility was abolished,” on 6 August, “the King has abdicated, and the Dauphin given up his rights” on 7 August. On 12 August, as Lady Stuart de Rothesay and Anne returned from the spa town of Eaux-Chaudes, the Swiss diplomat Jean-Gabriel Eynard brought them the news of the proclamation of the Duke of Orléans as “King of the French” under the name of Louis-Philippe. The news “made us forget to get out and walk up the hill the latter part of the way.”

Instead of putting an end to the French monarchy, the liberal deputies had taken control of the people's revolution and placed the crown on the head of Charles X's cousin, who belonged to a younger branch of the Bourbon dynasty. Coincidentally, this was a scenario Anne had anticipated two years earlier:  “Everybody expects a revolution, a quiet setting aside of the Bourbons for the Orleans branch perhaps.”¹⁹ Only this Revolution had been far from “quiet."

Despite living through this period of uncertainty, Anne continued on with Lady Stuart de Rothesay towards Marseille, Toulon, and Hières. Along the way she spent some time in the Spanish Pyrénées, where she was finally on her own – “What of all my journey pleased me far the most”.²⁰

As the trial was set to begin on 15 December, Anne was pessimistic: “Things look very black for them – I think there is hardly a hope for Polignac and Peyronnet [Home Minister].” But she dreaded a new outbreak of violence “if the exministers are not condamnés à mort [sentenced to death].”²⁴  In the end, the ministers were “only” sentenced to life imprisonment and secretly taken back to Vincennes before the verdict was announced to protect them from the rioters, who soon returned home. “We had no fear during the trial of the ex ministers – 100,000 men under arms – sense enough,”²⁵ Anne wrote afterwards to Mrs. Priestley. Many of Anne’s compatriots were not as brave and, instead, fled: “Very few English in Paris,”²⁶ she reported to Vere Hobart, Lord Stuart's niece. The position of the British ambassador itself was precarious as a new French government was appointed. At first, Anne refused to come to terms with the idea:

Eventually, at the beginning of December, came the “miserable news:”²⁷ Lord Stuart de Rothesay was replaced by Lord Granville. “I certainly regret the change for public as well as private reasons,”²⁸ Anne told Mariana. She tried to comfort an extremely worried Lady Stuart—the ambassador’s mother and her friend—by calling her son “the cleverest diplomatist we have” and assuring her that “the French themselves are by no means glad of the change.”²⁹ To back up her claims, Anne even quoted an article from the Courrier Français: 

She admitted to Old Lady Stuart to being “rather in a fright.” Dreading the “fearfully unsettled state of Europe” and the risk of another dissolution, she discussed going back to Shibden with her aunt: “there is so much excitement here, who knows how it will end.”³¹

As a businesswoman, Anne Lister deplored that after the events there was “no commerce here – everything in a dreadful state.”³⁶  Perhaps she still had in mind an article from the British Review, which she quoted ten years earlier in her journal, about the state of the commerce in France stating it was “much worse since the revolution, in fact that it has been in a great measure ruined by it.”³⁷  The Trois Glorieuses also caused bankruptcies, including Laffite's: “out of all his millions little more than a thousand a year left.”³⁸ 

As a legitimist, Anne was concerned about the fate of the royal family, soon to be exiled to England. Along with Lady Stuart de Rothesay, who had been close to the Duchess de Berry, Anne hoped that the Duchess’s son (Henri) would one day return to the throne of France. This, however, never happened.

As a “staunch blue," Anne did not approve the French Revolution’s demands, particularly with regards to the right to vote. She could only be at odds with the French “exceedingly for”³⁹ the English reform bill she openly opposed. This bill would allow some small landowners, tenant farmers, and shopkeepers to vote in Parliamentary elections – but would formally exclude women. The French already had themselves a censal suffrage system and the new King Louis-Philippe further extended it in 1830. They “would revolutionize us, and put us in the same predicament as themselves if they could,”⁴⁰ warned Anne. 

As an insatiable traveller, Anne also knew the instability in Europe could jeopardize her plans. “All Europe seems on the eve of revolution – God grant that we may do things quietly!”⁴¹ she wrote to Mariana as unrest started in Belgium in August and in Poland in November. 

Most of all, she dreaded the return of hostilities in Europe. She hoped England would “keep out of war”⁴² to be able to go on with “all my Italian schemes.”⁴³  “It would grieve me not to have seen Rome before the continent is once more shut against us," she wrote to her Durham friend Mrs Dalton.⁴⁴

Throughout Anne's childhood and youth, from 1803 to 1815, the Napoleonic Wars were raging across Europe. The British Empire was targeted by the Continental Blockade, a large-scale embargo ordered by the French Emperor. All this came in the way of the plans she had drawn up to study, travel, or settle abroad with her young lover Eliza Raine:

This time a new European war was avoided and Anne resumed her travels to the continent from 1834, with Ann Walker. However, the revolutionary fever persisted in France. In the city of Lyon, they witnessed the damage done during the Canut revolt,⁴⁵ a workers' uprising that had claimed several hundred lives in April. 

As for Lady Stuart, she apparently kept a vivid memory of these agitated “Trois Glorieuses” she spent with Anne.  Years later, on 29 July 1836, she wrote to Anne marking, ironically, “the anniversary of this glorious day we spent together.”⁴⁶