Horror spectators: The lady revolutionaries who calmly knit during executions
The ‘tricoteuses’ became symbols of a jaded France
The women were known to hang around the guillotine, waiting for the heads to roll. They got to know the executioners, there were so many death sentences. Between the slices, they knitted. It was automatic — something to keep their hands busy.
Charles Dickens popularized the tricoteuse, the knitting woman, in his classic A Tale of Two Cities. His character Madame Defarge is one of the novel’s chief villains, an extreme defender of the French Revolution and a vengeful hag. She too perches next to the guillotine, knitting into hats and socks the names of aristocrats to be executed.
Before the tricoteuse became rejected thugs, they were respected sisters of the resistance. In the early years of the revolution, on October 5, 1789, working class women marched to the Palace of Versailles in protest of rising food prices. Numbering in the thousands, they got the attention of Louis XVI, who acquiesced to their demands.
Immediately the Women’s March on Versailles was universally praised. No one had heard of common market women making such political headway.
“Government after government of Paris delighted to show them honour,” wrote Henry Morse Stephens in A History of the French Revolution (1891). They received presents and invitations to important events. Eventually they were asked to sit in and observe at the National Convention, the first French republic after the country abandoned the monarchy.
Between political engagements, the tricoteuses became notorious for allegedly prowling the streets harassing suspected aristocrats. In 1862, London magazine The Dark Blue published a likely fictional account of a tricoteuse: “The instinct of the fury of the Revolution detected an aristocrat in the quiet lady who…was walking timidly along the terror-laden streets. The tricoteuse confronted, and stopped abruptly opposite the poor lady, who shrank before the fierce and baleful eyes out of which glared hatred and suspicion…’I promise you that I suspect you. You are no true patriot, I see...’ The nostrils of the woman of the guillotine were dilated as if they scented blood.” She threatened the “aristocrate” and then strode away.
On May 21, 1793, the women were banished from government proceedings. Later that week they were forbidden from forming any political assembly.
Thereafter, the infamous tricoteuses informally gathered in the public Place de la Révolution, in particular around the guillotine. Accounts say they knitted liberty caps — symbols of freedom and the republican government — between decapitations, in morbid silence.
Writer Baroness Orczy depicts the tricoteuses in her 1908 novel, The Scarlet Pimpernel. They “sat beneath the guillotine platform to knit whilst head after head fell beneath the knife, and they themselves got quite bespattered with the blood of those cursed aristos.”
The tricoteuse became synonymous with death, “allying the most delicate tenderness with the most extreme violence,” writes Dominique Godineau in The Women of Paris and Their French Revolution. Her legend was likely exaggerated by the nature of her sex; as a woman her menace was that much more sinister. Even her knitting needles were “weapons without names; tools for labor tinged with bloody tips.”
