SAPPHIC SECTS AND THE RITES OF REVOLUTION (1775-1800)

"Saved during your tender youth from the seductions of men, taste the happiness of finding yourself in the bosom of your kind".
—Pidansat de Mairobert, Confession d’une jeune fille (1778)1

"This is what the Nation has had to face in our century: a woman beyond every restraint".
—Restif de la Bretonne, “La duchesse ou la femme-sylphide” (1783)2

In November 1775, the following item appeared in the influential underground journal Correspondance littéraire, philosophique et critique: “There exists, they say, a society known as the Lodge of Lesbos, but whose gatherings are more mysterious than those of the Freemasons have ever been, with initiations into all the secrets that Juvenal described so frankly and openly in his Sixth Satire. . . . One would have to be Juvenal to dare to say more.” The Correspondance identifi es the priestess of this loge as the renowned actress of the Comédie française, Mademoiselle de Raucourt (“our superb Galathea”), and the rites of Lesbos as “the only mysteries our century seems tempted to renew.”3 The passage makes the sapphic at once a closed realm and an open secret, a phenomenon that excludes men but about which men alone are authorized to speak, a modern concern that is also an antiquarian revival. The source of the Lodge’s existence is public rumor; its historical validation, the proper name of a well-known person; and its currency, a pointed reference to eighteenth-century Europe’s most powerful secret society. In a year of revolutionary ferment in North America and a recently crowned young king and queen at home, the Correspondance littéraire announces the relevance of the sapphic for contemporary politics.

Far from an isolated instance, this textual tidbit encapsulates both the constellation of concerns and the discursive practices that will dominate European representations of the sapphic for the last quarter of the eighteenth century, that Dickensian best and worst of times. Well before the upheavals of the French Revolution could have been foreseen, the sapphic begins to stand for a secretive realignment of power. The appeal to gossip as the best source of fact—“Il existe, dit on”—signals the mechanism by which the late ancien régime propels individual women onto the scene of history, rightly or falsely “outing” them in print at a time when the technologies of rumor—newspapers, journals, scandal sheets, secret histories—are among Europe’s most flourishing genres. Most importantly, the 1770s mark an intensification of interest not only in sapphic sex but in sapphic sects that underscores the political agency of same-sex alliances. Turning their focus to all-female groups and gatherings rather than primarily to individuals and couples, the representations I will examine in this chapter take up, often even more directly than the texts I examined in chapter 3, the potential intersections of the sapphic with the state. They configure same-sex alliances on a notion of similitude pulled to its ironic extreme, in a reverse discourse that appropriates the emergent popularity of sexual difference: if men and women are incommensurable by nature, then woman’s place may indeed be with her pareilles, her “kind,” forging alliances toward the potential reconstruction—or destruction—of the status quo. The metamorphic scenario all but disappears from this discourse: its primary preoccupation is at once with the resistance of the sapphic to heterosocial integration and the pliability of the sapphic to horizontalizing aims.

In this way, the sapphic becomes a potent force in the social imaginary of a geopolitically unstable environment, one in which elite women’s public-sphere participation, if nowhere formalized, is on the discursive agenda almost everywhere in Western Europe; when the influence of clubs and societies is growing; and when expanding notions of rights open questions about group identities and their influence. I traced, through the framework of Jacques Rancière, one strategy by which disenfranchised persons might forge a politics. During the late eighteenth century, the possibility emerges more strongly that new polities might become not simply a party but the party, gaining rulership as well as rights.

Bolstered by references to known women that stoked the fires of credibility, discourse about the sapphic dating from the 1770s already imagines that some women who are not under male control might indeed become that party, the sect that rules. In tandem with fears and fantasies about the potential for conspiracy of clubs in general and the Freemasons in particular, specters of sapphic sects gain new currency, signifying a closed space that those in power, or aspiring to power, were imagined to be unable to penetrate. The sapphic thus also stands for a partiality of interest, for faction in the Rousseauvian sense: parties formed “at the expense of the whole association”—but also parties that could also create a new social blueprint for that larger body politic. While we confront the most dystopic manifestation of this dynamic is the well-known virulence toward Marie-Antoinette and her female favorites, a scholarly emphasis on the queen has tended to obscure more complex and sometimes more sanguine uses of the sapphic particularly in the fifteen years before the fall of the Bastille. I thus read sapphic sects as leveling double agents both of revolution and of the Revolution. In ways that already began to brew by the 1770s, imaginary sapphic sects became imbricated with reformist and counterreformist politics both in and beyond France as newspapers, pamphlets, scurrilous poems, and secret histories grappled with the broader threat of groups and their social powers in a world of political turmoil and potentially radical change. On the one hand, the utopian potential of the sapphic intensifies; on the other, the sapphic fuels fears of female faction that help to justify the configuration of the man as citizen and the citizen as man and to hasten the demise, if not of club culture in general, of female association in particular. In short, a discourse of similitude, attached to intensifying conversations about rights, puts the sapphic at the heart of a politics of class, of concerns about conspiracy, and of hopes for collectivity.

In positing the possibility of sapphic sects, writings of the 1770s and 1780s work out hopes and fears for a different future, but by the1790s these representations turn dystopic through concerns not only for a bourgeois sexuality grounded in difference but for the imagined transparency of a panoptical politics. By the end of the century, explicitly sexual representations will be more or less foreclosed from polite discourse even as romanticized and more sanitized notions of the female couple become the elegaic site of pastoral family ideals, as I will explore in the next chapter. In this chapter, we will see an alteration between 1775 and 1800 of discursive fields as simple and as widely visible as the use of terminology, and especially in changing definitions of the word “tribade” that had ushered the sapphic into modernity two centuries earlier.

ACTS OF NAMING

If late-eighteenth-century writers are more likely to see the sapphic as an ancient practice widely renewed than as a new invention, images of vestal virgins, amazons, secret cults, and esoteric practices link the sapphic with the modern through the mysterious workings of power now attributed to the present-day “tribade.” Thus Mirabeau’s Erotika biblion (1783) reminds the public that in the ancient world tribades had “high privilege” and “limitless power.”4 The 1788 Choix de mémoires secrets claims that “tribaderie” has always been in vogue but “never flaunted as blatantly as today,” when “our most beautiful women give themselves to it, boasting about it, making it a badge of glory!”5 The Almanach des honnêtes femmes (1790) avers that women who prefer one another to men must be particularly happy since their numbers are now so numerous.6

Of course it is these very publications that are effectively creating and promoting the scandal they claim to lament. Rather like the burst of concern about the sapphic and the modern after 1560, this new discursive production is also making the sapphic a more prominent sign of the times. We see a dramatic increase in the explicit use of terms such as “tribade” (mostly in France, the only country routinely to include “tribade” in official dictionaries and in the new Encyclopédie), “sapphic” (mostly in England), and “lesbisch” (emerging in Germany) during this last quarter of the eighteenth century.7 In England, for example, “sapphic” appears in contexts as diverse as a discussion of “Sapphic passion” in the Genuine Memoirs of the Celebrated Miss Maria Brown (1766); the “Sapphic love” claimed by William Dalrymple to be commonplace in Spain and Portugal (1777); the “Sapphick Epistle” meant to discredit the sculptor Anne Damer (1778); the “Sapphic taste” mentioned in the Anecdotes Recorded by the Police of Paris (1794); the “Sapphic affection” “indulged” by the rather masculine women of Aleppo in W. G. Browne’s Travels in Africa, Egypt, and Syria (1799); and even the “Sapphic oppression” allegedly wrought on youthful breasts by stays that ward off the embraces of (male) lovers.8 A cross-national conversation of shifting terms is also a sign of the times: while it is not new that English and German discussions of the sapphic emphasize French connections—and “tribade” has become a French associated term despite its Greek origin—French sapphic texts now also often presume a connection with things English, not only claiming English imprints but setting sapphic scenes on English soil.

This increase in explicit naming is more than definitional; it accompanies both a proliferation of proper names and a preoccupation with clubs and collectives. In a practice that spans Western Europe but occurs most intensively in France, ephemeral and underground publications mark both individual women and classes of women—especially actresses, artists, and aristocrats—as sapphic. Marie-Antoinette, along with her friends the princesse de Lamballe and the duchesse de Polignac, is of course the best known of those accused in public discourse, but the canvas is far broader; it includes Marie-Antoinette’s sister Carolina, queen of Naples, and Carolina’s English friend Emma Hamilton, Louis XVI’s sister Elisabeth; Marie-Joséphine de Savoie, wife of the comte de Provence and her lady-in-waiting Marguerite de Gourbillon; the English actresses Eliza Ferren, Mary Ann Yates, and Kitty Clive; Madame Joly de Fleury, whose father and (to be divorced) husband were members of the Paris Parlement; the lesser known noblewomen Madame la Prieure and Madame la Vermeille, Madame Nicolet, and Mademoiselle Verneuille; Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire; Cecelia Tron, the Princess of Belmonte; the sculptor Anne Damer, Lady Harrington, and the writer Mary Berry.

No woman is as ubiquitously present as the French actress Raucourt, whom I mentioned in conjunction with the Lodge of Lesbos, and the women with whom she is connected—Sophie Arnauld, Madame Souck, Mademoiselle Contat—who are often mentioned as a group. Within the new ethic of exposure, to take a few examples, the 1778 Sapphick Epistle by “Jack Cavendish” fingers Damer and her putative lovers, especially Kitty Clive, with only the thinnest of typographical veils; the Fureurs utérines de Marie-Antoinette (1791) lists thirty-four persons of both sexes and a range of social classes with whom the French queen has allegedly had liaisons; and lesser-knowns from countesses to market women are named for a range of alleged proclivities in the Almanach des honnetes femmes (1790), which devotes the month of November to “Tribades.” The other “woman” named most frequently is actually a man: “Mademoiselle d’Eon,” the channel-crossing chevalier believed until her/his death in 1810 to be a woman passing as a man, but who was in fact that rarer person, a man passing as a woman. Acts of naming are also accompanied by threats to name; thus an anonymous poem, The Adultress (1773), boasts that “I know a thousand Tommies ’mongst the Sex” and warns that if they don’t “relinquish” their Crime,” the speaker will “give their Names to be the scoff of Time.”9

The late eighteenth century is not, of course, the first time that individuals are being named publicly as sapphic. We can think back two centuries to Brantôme’s suspicions about Laudomia Forteguerri and Margaret of Austria and to murmurs about sixteenth-century women rulers such as Catherine de Médicis and Elizabeth I or the seventeenth-century précieuses.10 And as I discussed in chapter 3, there were more than murmurs in 1708 when England’s Queen Anne appeared to throw over the Sarah Churchill in favor of Abigail Masham. Indeed, the use of sapphic representation for political ends during the English Exclusion Crisis and its Jacobite aftermath may have been a brewing ground for the later eruption, establishing the potency of the sapphic in relation to the state. But during these last decades of the century, as never before, a sizeable number of women are getting identified in print as sapphic, and repeatedly so, whether pruriently, vitriolically, or matter-of-factly, within a network of published gossip and scandal sheets rife with historiettes.11

This new ubiquity of naming individual women as tribades and providing gossipy details of their liaisons does more than compromise the reputations of the women in question; the practice serves equally as authentication, giving credence to the larger claims about sexual—but also more than sexual—behavior.

A wider, looser, and less controllable print culture is doubtless one major reason for this increase in scandalous gossip, but I argue that concerns about female faction are at least as significant. For not only are more women explicitly named as sapphic, they are most often named as members of sapphic groupings, coteries, and secret societies. A 1779 Mémoire secret, for example, lists six “famous tribades” who have collectively “infected the capital” (155); a 1799 British newspaper report identifies Raucourt as a “distinguished Member of the celebrated Vestal Club.”12 Johann Wilhelm von Archenholtz’s travel narrative, as Emma Donoghue records, likewise claims the existence in London of “small societies, known as Anandrinic Societies . . . of which Mrs Y———, formerly a famous London actress, was one of the presidents.”13 It is not implausible to suggest, therefore, that to be seen as a “tribade” in the late eighteenth century is in effect to be seen as a member of a club. Conversely, the idea of all-female clubs often implicated the sapphic; Emma Donoghue notes the sapphic innuendos about specific women in at least two English publications,

The Whig Club and Charles Pigott’s The Female Jockey Club (both 1794) along with references to “blue stockings” who refuse submission to “that odious monster man.”14 A 1776 issue of the London Morning Post acknowledges the “neological” term “Tribadarian,” which the writer claims to have read in the Post’s pages, but announces his own preference for “Tribadists,15 a suffix that emphasizes shared identity and a kind of party membership. Designating the tribade as the member of a sect lends a different valence to sapphic representation, turning the emphasis from sexual pairings toward collective interests that dovetail quite firmly with the social and political preoccupations of the period. Even when they sensationalize their subject with obscene words and lewd images, these writings are preoccupied with the ideological investments they attribute to women’s alliances.

It is this banding for purposes of sect rather than only for sex that seems in these texts to be the primary cause of concern. The tribade is not simply a woman who desires a woman; she is a loyal member of an imagined “lodge of Lesbos.” She thus evokes a concern not only about women beyond male control but about a larger phenomenon: the rise, and rise in fear of, exclusive clubs and private societies.

Notes

1. [Pidansat de Mairobert], Confession d’une jeune fille, 209: “échappée dès votre tendre jeunesse aux séductions des hommes, goûtez le bonheur de vous trouver réunie au sein de vos pareilles.”
2. Restif de la Bretonne, “La duchesse ou la femme-sylphide,” in Les contemporaines, 45. “Tel a-été le fénomène que la Nation a-eu sous les yeus dans notre siècle: Une Femme audessus de toutes les entraves.”
3. Correspondance littéraire, philosophique et critique, 11:159: “Il existe, dit-on, une société connue sous le nom de la Loge de Lesbos, mais dont les assemblées sont plus mystérieuses que ne l’ont jamais été celles des Franc-Maçons, ou l’on s’initie dans tous les secrets dont Juvenal fait une description si franche et si naïve dans la sixième satire. . . . Il faudrait être Juvenal pour oser en dire davantage.”
4. Honoré-Gabriel Riquetti, comte de Mirabeau, Erotika Biblion, 120: “prérogatives les plus honorables, crédit immense, pouvoir sans bornes.”
5. Choix de mémoires secrets, 261: “on n’a jamais affiché ces vices avec autant d’éclat & de scandale qu’aujourd’hui”; “nos plus jolies femmes y donnent-elles, s’en font-elles une gloire, un trophée!”
6. Maréchal, Almanach des honnêtes femmes pour l’année 1790, n.p.
7. For a fuller discussion of German definitions of the lesbian, see Steidele, “Als wenn Du mein Geliebter Wärest,” 46–47.
8. Genuine Memoirs of the Celebrated Miss Maria Brown (1766), 115 and 120; Dalrymple, Travels through Spain and Portugal, 152; Jack Cavendish, A Sapphick Epistle (London, 1778); Manuel, Anecdotes Recorded by the Police of Paris (1794), 27; W. G. Browne, Travels in Africa, Egypt, and Syria (1799), 386; Letters to the Ladies, on the Preservation of Health and Beauty, 67.
9. Quoted in Nussbaum, Torrid Zones, 145.
10. On the précieuses, see Wahl, Invisible Relations, ch. 5, and Stanton, “The Fiction of Préciosité.”
11. See the story of Raucourt and Contat, for example, in Choix des mémoires secrets, 2:257–58.
12. Oracle and Daily Advertiser, 21 January 1799, 4.
13. Donoghue, Passions Between Women, 242. “Mrs. Y———” is the actress Mary Ann Yates.
14. Donoghue, “‘Random Shafts of Malice?’” 140–41. See also the much reprinted Female Jockey Club attributed to Charles Pigott, 199 and 203.

By Susan S. Lancer in "The Sexuality of History - Modernity and the Sapphic, 1565–1830", The University of Chicago Press, USA, 2014, excerpts chapter 6, pp. 193-199 & 289-290. Digitized, adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.