Born at Mirecourt, Flanders, 1752; died in Paris, 1817.
The true name of this heroine of the French Revolution was Anne Josephe
Terwagne of Marcourt, a small town in Luxemburg. The daughter of a rich
farmer, Pierre Théroigne or Terwagne, by the kindness of a distant
cousin, who was the Abbess, she was, although not of noble birth,
educated in the Convent of Robermont. At the age of seventeen she left
her home and followed her lover, a young nobleman, to Paris.
Here we find her settled, apparently independently, in 1789. A
contemporary describes her as having “a waist you could span with two
hands and the face of the Venus of Praxiteles.” She adopted violent
revolutionary principles, and never missed attending a meeting of the
Assembly.
She held a kind of _salon_ in her apartment, where she received
the Abbé Siezès and his brother Roussin, Camille Desmoulins, Péthion
and other well-known revolutionists; adopted an extraordinary
semi-masculine military costume, never appearing in public without a
couple of pistols in her girdle, and a sword by her side. She attended
all the principal revolutionary meetings, making violent and incendiary
harangues on every possible occasion; was present at the taking of the
Bastille, and rode in front of the mob which marched on Versailles.
After the arrival of the Royal family in Paris her speeches in Flemish
to the soldiers of the “Regiment de Flandre” assisted greatly in
shaking their loyalty to the King.
In 1790 she returned to her native country, and remained some time at
Liège. She was arrested there by the Austrians and carried off to the
fortress of Kuffstein in the Tyrol, being accused of plotting against
Marie Antoinette.
The Emperor Leopold II. had an interview with Théroigne at Vienna, and
was so much smitten by her charms as not only to order her release, but
to pay the expenses of her journey back to France. When she reached
Paris she found herself the heroine of the hour. Soon after her return
she commanded the 3rd Army Corps in the Faubourg on the occasion of the
riots of June 20, 1792, and when the fight was over, the Federals, as a
compliment to her bravery, decreed her a civic crown.
Suleon, the editor of a newspaper, having insulted Théroigne in a
leading article, she, in company with a band of devoted adherents, laid
in wait for him; and although he was at the time actually one of a
patrol of the National Guard going their rounds, seized him by the coat
collar and dragged him into the middle of the street, where she and her
companions despatched him with their sabres.
She professed opinions similar to those of the Girondins, and when
the fall of this party was imminent, declaimed loudly in their
favour in public places. On one occasion when making a speech in the
gardens of the Tuileries a number of women belonging to the so-called
Société Fraternelle, stripped her naked and flogged her on the spot.
This terrible punishment drove her mad, and she never recovered her
reason. She died at the age of fifty-four in the public madhouse of
La Salpêtrière, where, with one or two brief intervals, she had been
confined for over twenty-four years.