Why is madame defarge knitting

They marched on Versailles, demanding bread because they were hungry. That was the spark that started the French Revolution. These courageous women walked the streets of Paris insulting whoever they thought was wealthy and encouraging the revolutionaries to arrest them. They were invited to observe the National Convention, the first assembly to govern France during the Revolution, which formally abolished the monarchy.

My grandmother continued the knitting history lesson. Soon, she said, the revolutionary government felt threatened by these women, by their political role, rising power, and popularity within the Revolution. The market women may have been the spark of the Revolution, but its management was firmly in the hands of men, men who became increasingly authoritarian.

So it was decided that the women could not sit in the gallery during meetings of the National Convention, and eventually they were forbidden to participate in any political assembly. But the women did not give up on being part of this process they had started. They brought chairs from their market stalls and miserable homes and placed them around the guillotine, then sat all day watching their enemies getting their heads severed from their bodies. And they brought their knitting. The revolutionary government was helpless to stop them.

The square was a public place, and people were encouraged to witness the executions, so no one could ask the market women to move. Being accustomed to trade, the women started to sell their seats to people who wanted to watch the executions of specific individuals. They also knit various garments, socks, mittens, and scarfs, which they sold after the executions. Renting the chairs and selling the items they knit proved to be a good business for the market women, even more profitable than their traditional trade.

This was a blessing, because during the Revolution, it was harder for people to make even a meager living. Remarkably, the market women were able to support their families with their knitting. The Liberty cap, I discovered in school, is a copy of an ancient hat, the Phrygian cap, which originated in Anatolia. Dickens wrote that the market women knit as a substitute for eating and drinking, a totally nonsensical conclusion, according to her.

When you are almost starving, as the people of Paris were at the end of the 18th century, nothing can replace a loaf of bread, not even knitting. I must confess that as a child, I found the idea that the tricoteuses knit while watching people die deeply disturbing.

Associating knitting with a violent act was not possible; it did not make any sense. It was my grandmother who explained to me why knitting came to be linked with the beheading of the French aristocrats. The market women knit during meetings of the assembly, she said, and they knit as the heads of the aristocrats rolled into the basket at their feet all for a simple reason: they always knit.

Knitting was a part of their lives, just like breathing and working; it was a required activity. The tricoteuses had to keep busy all the time. Even when they were entertaining themselves with their revenge over the aristocrats, they had to be productive. My grandmother was brought up in a similar fashion, raised to be constantly productive.

She was the first daughter of twelve children. Notify me of new comments via email. Notify me of new posts via email. Website Powered by WordPress. Like this: Like Loading Pingback: Quilters and knitters are mapping climate change Grist. Pingback: Quilters and knitters are mapping climate change newsoz.

Pingback: Waiting - We are Not the Waltons. Interact With Us: Cancel reply Enter your comment here Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:. Email required Address never made public. Name required. Follow Following. Femnista Join 1, other followers. Worse quarters than Defarge's wine-shop, could easily have been found in Paris for a provincial slave of that degree. Saving for a mysterious dread of madame by which he was constantly haunted, his life was very new and agreeable.

But, madame sat all day at her counter, so expressly unconscious of him, and so particularly determined not to perceive that his being there had any connection with anything below the surface, that he shook in his wooden shoes whenever his eye lighted on her.

For, he contended with himself that it was impossible to foresee what that lady might pretend next; and he felt assured that if she should take it into her brightly ornamented head to pretend that she had seen him do a murder and afterwards flay the victim, she would infallibly go through with it until the play was played out. Therefore, when Sunday came, the mender of roads was not enchanted though he said he was to find that madame was to accompany monsieur and himself to Versailles.

It was additionally disconcerting to have madame knitting all the way there, in a public conveyance; it was additionally disconcerting yet, to have madame in the crowd in the afternoon, still with her knitting in her hands as the crowd waited to see the carriage of the King and Queen.

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