The Topeka state journal. [volume] (Topeka, Kansas) 1892-1980, 1895-06-04
THE WOMEN OF FRANCE
Heroines and Martyrs Who Have Exerted q
Powerful Influence.

Heroines and Martyrs Who Have Exerted q
Powerful Influence.
At all times in France women have
exercised potent influence, politically
socially and sentimentally. The coun<
try of Jeanne dare has never lacked
heroines and martyrs. During the
reign Of Catherine de Medici's misera-
bic sons, their Italian mother, by her
absolute. cruel and narrow-minded
policy, plunged the country into the
horrors of st. Bartholomew, which
were only equaled by the excuses of
the reign of terror. During the cor
rupt reigns of Louis XIV. and Louis
XIV, the influence of women at court,
and, therefore all over France, was
paramount and entirely pernicious to
the welfare of the people.
Women in all ages have matched the
men; so as noble aspirations, unselfish-
ness, love of justice and right were at
a discount among the men who crowded
the courts of the Hcentious Bourbons,
where the debauchery and depravity
we're unparalleled since the era of I'll
berius and CommOdus, the throngs of
titled courteSans merrily joined their
royal and aristocratic lovers in spend
ing the revenues exacted from the mis-
cradle peasants with tears of blood,
until similar tears were extorted from
them in turn by the revolution they
originated.
Many generations of bad government
by kings, courtesans and courtiers, the
expressions of the rich clergy and
mobiles who monopolized all that was
worth having in the state, and exacted
their taxes and seigniorial dues from
those who at last had nothing left to
tax, eliminated in the intense misery
of the years Immediately preceding
1855, the first year of deliverance, and
bred in the hearts of the victims
ferocity of hate for their oppressors, a
fierce love for the principles of liberty,
and an overwhelming desire for it's
immediate fruition. In 1889 women of
all classes threw them selves with ardor
into the great revolutionary movement,
and by their burning enthusiasm in
tensified the zeal of the men and urged
them on to heroic deeds of self-sacrifice
and duty to suffering humanity.
Women of noble and unselfsh ideals
such as Nine. Roland, or of stainless
life and character like Charlotte Cor
day, or the fascinating, fearless, I'M
happy Theroigne de Mericourt, the
heroine of the women's march to Yer
sailles, or the women of the people, full
of hate and desire of vengeance, who
crowded round the guillotine in 1898,
uttering ferocious shouts and counting
with exultation the CHASTITY heads as
they fell before the ak of Samson, were
one and all animated by the same pas
siOnate love of liberty, the mother of
all virtues. All were ready to sacrifice
their lives gladly for freedom, con-
scious of the righteousness of their
| cause and of its ultimate triumph.
Many unthinking, superficial people
even now, who have never known
what it is to suffer and be despoiled to
support the luxury and vice of tyrants,
while shuddering 1t the excuses of the
reign Of terror, entirely ignore the
cause of the sanguinary deeds which
stand forth SO luridly. They do not
realize that nothing but a terrible bap-
tism of blood could have regenerated
such a corrupt country, and purged it
from its grossness and selfish indiffer-
ence to wrong-doing. 1t was civil war
in another form. When the day of
vengeance came, how was it that the
women seemed more ferocious than
the men? The answer is very simple
They had suffered more, and great
miseries are always ferocious Bel
| oraVia.