Arts & International Affairs: Volume 2, Issue 1 | Page 87

secret royalist sympathies, and exhorted them to leave behind the artifice of
make-up and expensive attire. Women who could not perform Republican
femininity successfully might face the guillotine.
As the puritanical political regime that stoked the Reign of Terror came to an
end in the summer of ����, during the Revolutionary month of Thermidor,
women sought to reclaim a voice and assert their power and individuality
in the newly relaxed atmosphere through a new kind of performance.
According to François Gendron, “In reaction to republican austerity and
the suffocating dictatorship of virtue, Paris was shaken by an explosion of
indulgence and frivolity. With the end of the Reign of Terror came roars
of laughter, a riotous race for pleasure, and a lust for life” Gendron (����).
Historians have traditionally described French society post-Thermidor and
under the new government of the Directory (����–����) as hedonistic, in
large part because of the activities of newly assertive young women in the
public view who rejected the previous strictures on their dress and behavior.
Artistic Depiction of ‘Incroyables and Merveilleuses’.
By eigenes Foto (Privatsammlung) [Copyrighted free use], via
Wikimedia Commons
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