Palm, Etta Aelders (1743–1799)

views updated

Palm, Etta Aelders (1743–1799)

Secret agent of the Dutch, Prussian, and French governments who was also a prominent advocate of women's rights during the French Revolution. Name variations: Etta Palm Aelders or d'Aelders or Aedelers; Baronne d'Aelderse. Pronunciation: ET-tah EL-ders PAHM. Born Etta Lubina Johanna Derista Aelders in Groningen, Netherlands, in April 1743; died of a breast infection in The Hague, March 28, 1799, and was buried in an unmarked grave in a cemetery in Rijswijk; daughter of Johan Aelders van Nieuwenhuys (d. 1749) and his second wife, Agatha Pierteronella de Sitten; well educated at home by her mother; married Christiaan Ferdinand Loderwijk Palm (a humanities student), in 1762 (divorced or separated in 1763); children: Agatha (b. 1763, who died in infancy).

Became an adventurer after her husband's disappearance (1763); moved to Paris and set up a salon (1773); became an agent for France (1778), and possibly for Prussia (1780s); opposed the Patriot movement in the Dutch Republic (1784–87); became an agent for the stadholder (1788); joined the Social Circle during the French Revolution and spoke out on women's rights (1790–91); founded and directed the Patriotic and Charitable Society of the Women Friends of Truth (1791–92); was briefly arrested on suspicion of spying (1791); presented a radical petition on women's rights (1792); went to the Dutch Republic and served as a diplomatic intermediary (1792–93); was imprisoned by the Batavian Republic (1795–98).

The Paris Gazette universelle in its July 25, 1791, issue characterized the recently arrested Etta Palm as "an adventuress, an intriguer, calling herself a baroness although having known no other barons save those who had honored her with their visits." The description was apt but incomplete. For one thing, she was suspected, rightly, of being a spy. For another, she was, with Olympe de Gouges and Anne-Josèph Théroigne de Méricourt , one of the three most prominent advocates of women's rights during the early years of the French Revolution.

Etta Lubina Johanna Derista Aelders was born in Groningen, Netherlands, in April 1743, the child of Johan Aelders van Nieuwenhuys, owner of a papermill and a pawnshop, and his second wife, Agatha Pierteronella de Sitten , daughter of a silk cloth merchant. After Johan's death in 1749, Agatha, a strong, independent woman who had married beneath her social rank, continued to operate the pawnshop in partnership with a Jew. Eventually she went bankrupt because the authorities withdrew her license, alleging irregular operations; possibly anti-Semitism also influenced their decision. From her mother, Etta received a fine education, learning German, French, English, and perhaps a little Italian. Also, her mother indoctrinated her with strongly Orangist (i.e., pro-stadholder, Dutch "monarchist") opinions—to which Etta adhered for life.

Etta was a gadabout teenager, popular with the university students and receiving several marriage proposals, including one from a married man. In 1762, she wed a humanities student, Christiaan Ferdinand Loderwijk Palm, son of Haarlem's prosecutor. Palm's parents opposed the marriage but relented after they eloped. The next year she gave birth to a daughter, Agatha, who soon died. Because she had continued her premarital ways, Etta's husband probably raised questions about the baby's paternity; he divorced her, left for the Dutch East Indies, and disappeared. Despite the divorce—if divorce there actually was—Etta considered herself a widow, and legal documents referred to her as Madame Palm. Moreover, she pretended Christiaan was a baron and henceforth styled herself "Baroness Palm d'Aelders."

Etta became an adventurer, a bourgeois woman "wandering through social stratification with relative ease," writes Judith Vega . In due course she took up with Jan Minniks, a young Groningen lawyer, weak and irresponsible, whose wife had divorced him after he had run through her money. On April 13, 1768, he was, nevertheless, named consul in Messina, Sicily, and Etta accompanied him as his "wife." Some sources say he left her in Provence when she became ill, others that she arrived in Messina with him. He became instantly unhappy with his post and unsuccessfully applied for one at Tripoli. They returned together to Holland, where at Breda she met a 50ish lieutenant general of cavalry named Grovestina who had court connections. He took her to Brussels, where a friend, the Dutch ambassador there, introduced her to diplomatic high society. In 1773, she left Grovestina and moved to Paris bearing letters of introduction to the eminent philosophes Jean d'Alembert and Denis Diderot.

Palm furnished an apartment near the Palais-Royal in a "rather coquettish" style, a contemporary reported, her bedroom featuring four large mirrors, one at the foot of the bed. The "baroness" attracted a considerable number of visitors and spent recklessly from profits on shares provided by powerful friends supplying the army with gunpowder and saltpeter. Little precise information exists as to who her visitors were, although it is known that shortly before and during the early years of the Revolution they included the philosopher Condorcet and politicians Pierre Choudieu, Claude Basire, François Buzot, François Chabot, Jean-François de Menou, Théodore de Lameth, Emmanuel Fréteau, Jérôme Pétion, Jean-Louis Carra, and even Maximilien de Robespierre.

Palm's complicated and quite murky career as a secret diplomatic agent—in effect, a spy—began much earlier, in February 1778, when a frequenter of her salon, the Comte de Maurepas, Louis XVI's chief minister, asked her to go to the Netherlands to find out if the Dutch would remain true to their defensive alliance with England if France entered the American Revolutionary War. (While on mission she met up with Minniks, who is said to have become a spy for England.) She returned in March to report that the Dutch were uninterested in supporting England in this war. This mission put her into contact with the Dutch ambassador to France, with whom she henceforth maintained close relations. At some point in the 1780s, she also became a close friend of Count Bernhard von der Goltz, the Prussian envoy to Paris, and as a result (according to a lover, Choudieu) became an informant for Prussia. For how long she was engaged is not known. She is said to have been in direct contact with Princess Wilhelmina of Prussia (1751–1820), sister of the king of Prussia and wife of Stadholder William V (r. 1766–1795). In 1791, however, Palm denounced the charge that she was a Prussian agent as "an odious calumny."

Palm's strong Orangist sympathies put her in the stadholder's camp during the political upheavals in the Dutch Republic in the 1780s that culminated in the Patriots' Revolt (1785–87). Despite her receptiveness to the Enlightenment and the idea of government resting upon the consent of the people, as became evident in her favorable reaction to the French Revolution, she regarded the stadholderate as a guarantor of order and (she hoped) peaceful reform as opposed to the claims of the discordant, proto-democratic Patriot movement, which was resorting to civil war. She may have played some role in thwarting a plot in 1784 against the stadholder's chief adviser, the duke of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel. The claim, however, that she helped persuade the French government not to come to the Patriots' aid in 1787, thus opening the way for Prussia to intervene to crush them, seems at best highly questionable; for France, racked by a major financial and political crisis, intervention simply was not an option.

In 1788, Apollonius Lampsins, sent to France to propagandize in favor of the Orangists, recommended Palm to William's chief minister, Grand Pensionary Laurens van de Spiegel. The latter hired her to send him information not found in the press about the changing leadership in France and to spread in Paris information from The Hague. Until late 1792, she engaged in a lengthy correspondence with van de Spiegel, doing good work and being well paid for it. Perhaps with Lampsins' help, she published in 1788 a 36-page pamphlet, Réflexions sur l'ouvrage intitulé Aux Bataves sur le Stadhoudérat par le Comte de Mirabeau, attacking Mirabeau's pro-Patriot pamphlet. She became an outspoken opponent of the approximately 6,000 Patriot exiles in France and in the press hotly defended the stadholderate against their attacks, sometimes on her own, sometimes at van de Spiegel's request.

Thus, Etta Palm, "la belle hollandaise"—slender, buxom, but said to lack "highly refined" features—was no stranger to political circles when the Revolution began in 1789. In 1791, she admitted that it had taken her a while to become as staunch a supporter of the Revolution as she was by then. And for understandable reasons. She was, after all, in the pay of the stadholder's government and probably also of the Prussians. In conventional terms, she was a monarchist because she supported the stadholder and opposed the Patriot exiles. Yet, as noted, from the start she sympathized with the French revolutionaries, who were opposing Louis XVI's regime and proclaiming the sovereignty of the people in the Declaration of the Rights of Man (August 1789). Hence, Palm has often been portrayed as a political schizophrenic.

The charge loses most of its force, however, when one views her in the context of Dutch politics, which were highly unconventional by prevailing European norms. For good, if not altogether justifiable, reasons, she regarded the Patriot exiles as mostly aristocrats masquerading as democrats in order to preserve and extend their old political privileges. At the same time, she, and many others of the Dutch, saw no contradiction between preserving the stadholderate and introducing more democratic structures and practices into the endlessly complicated Dutch regime. Indeed, in December 1789 she is found urging a moderately receptive van de Spiegel to institute reforms giving the common people more influence. And in early 1790, she also was assuring the French government (which was giving subsidies to the Patriots) that the Dutch government, contrary to press reports, was not involved in a counter-revolutionary plot hatched by the Marquis de Maillebois.

Nature has formed us to be your equals, your companions and your friends.
—Etta Palm, 1791

Palm's personal involvement with the Revolution and women's issues included membership in a Fraternal Society of Patriots of One and the Other Sex but centered on the Social Circle (founded in early 1790) and its club (founded on October 13), the Confederation of the Friends of Truth. Meeting at the Palais-Royal, this large and important club became the only one involved seriously in women's issues up to 1793. In 18th-century France, the mass of women were not yet interested in women's rights. Only from 1787 did pamphlets appear in any number, and during the Revolution feminism was never a concern even of a majority of women's clubs, which mostly were auxiliaries of the men's clubs. For her part, Palm did all she could to fight the undertow, becoming the leading female feminist in the Confederation, complemented on the male side by Condorcet.

She made her first public statement on November 26, 1790, when at a Confederation meeting she came to the aid of one Charles-Louis Rousseau, who was being jeered for raising questions about the rights of women. Could it be, she asked, that the "holy Revolution, which gave men their rights, has rendered Frenchmen unjust and dishonest toward women?" Her success brought her an invitation to make a formal speech, which she did on December 30. It was applauded by many, warmly opposed by some, and distributed to provincial societies, where it inspired the Revolution's first recorded discussions of the rights of women. (One society, at Creil-sur-Oise, even awarded her a medal.) Apart from a call for equal education for females, she offered no program of action but instead concentrated on depicting the sad status of women as a "slavery" which mocked the ideals of the Revolution: "Our life, our liberty, our fortune is not ours at all." She celebrated the particular virtues of women and evoked the example of the women of ancient Rome as she had in November. "Justice must be the first virtue of free men," she cried, "and justice demands that the laws be the same for all beings, like the air and the sun." She closed by calling for a "second revolution, in our customs."

Through the winter and spring of 1791, Palm was very active speaking and writing for the women's cause. Evidently she wrote a pamphlet which has not been discovered or was not printed. In July, however, because of accusations against her by a journalist, Louise Robert-Keralio , and others that she was a disloyal, dishonest foreigner, she published a 46-page collection of speeches, letters, and a petition entitled Appel aux françoises sur la régénération des moeurs et nécessité de l'influence des femmes dans un gouvernement libre, Par Etta-Palm, née d'Aelders (Appeal to Frenchwomen on the Regeneration of Customs and Necessity of the Influence of Women in a Free Government). Of special importance was a speech given on March 18 and published in the Bouche de fer (the Social Circle's newspaper) on the 23rd which called for establishment of an all-female society in Paris (following the lead of Bordeaux, Creil, Limoges, Alais, and Tulle), said to be the city's first.

The Patriotic and Charitable Society of the Women Friends of Truth, launched on March 25 with the aid of the Social Circle, was an ambitious project. Palm proposed founding a society in each ward (section) of Paris, with a general directory comprised of the officers of these societies meeting weekly to coordinate them; moreover, similar societies would be started in all 83 departments of France and would correspond with the Paris confederation. (The similarity to the Social Circle and Jacobin networks is obvious.) Following Palm's outline, the tasks of the societies came to include 1) lobbying for women's rights; 2) surveillance of the "enemies of liberty"; 3) inquiries to distinguish dishonest indigents from those deserving public assistance; 4) committees to visit and succor poverty-stricken families; 5) founding of schools and workshops for needy girls aged 7 to 16; and 6) providing shelters and wet-nurse services for poor young women drifting into Paris from the provinces.

The society never came close to becoming a Paris-wide, much less nationwide, association, despite Palm's hard work. Nary a school was founded. On April 7, 1792, she publicly complained of the "general indifference" that had plagued her creation, and by the fall of 1792 it had faded away. Why had it failed? The high fee of three livres per month kept all but fairly wealthy women away, nor was inviting Marie Louise d'Orleans (1750–1822), princesse de Bourbon, to be a patron a wise political move. While the society did lobby for a fair divorce law and against Article XIII of the Criminal Code, which gave only men the right to prosecute for adultery and imprison the errant spouse for up to two years, it was Palm's belief that the customs of France were not yet ripe for women to compete with men politically. The society consequently lacked focus, becoming, wrotes Joan Landes , "something between a charitable association of the wealthy for indigent women and a political club on behalf of female rights." Moreover, the need for a women's society in Paris seemed less pressing than in the provinces because the central government was close by and women already could participate in the mixed clubs and sit in the galleries of the National Assembly. And, not least of all, the bourgeois women involved doubtless were put off by Palm's marginal social status, as was also the case with Olympe de Gouges and Anne Théroigne de Méricourt, engaged in similar efforts. Only when Pauline Léon and Claire Lacombe founded the Club of Revolutionary Republican Citizenesses in 1793, with the simple goals of "foiling the projects of the enemies of the Republic" and lowering the price of bread, might any headway be made among the masses of working-class women.

Meanwhile, back in the spring of 1791, the Social Circle and the Confederation were edging leftward toward republicanism when "the flight to Varennes" (June 20–21), the king's attempt to escape abroad to lead a counter-revolutionary offensive, persuaded them to come out for dethronement. A republican demonstration at the Champ de Mars on July 17—in which Palm probably took part—resulted in a "massacre" of 12 demonstrators. In the ensuing crackdown, Palm, who was taking up a collection for victims, was arrested on the night of July 18–19 as a suspicious foreigner, as was a Jewish banker, Ephraïm, thought to be an agent of Prussia. Both were released after three days for lack of evidence. The Social Circle, intimidated, announced the end of the Confederation and on July 28 of the Bouche de fer as well. As noted, however, Palm's society continued for another year.

The society's work and her correspondence with van de Spiegel kept her occupied during 1791–92. Van de Spiegel, concerned about her political activity and radicalism, cautioned her (Sept. 1791) to moderate her zeal. A former lover, François Chabot, introduced her to Claude Basire, a rising young deputy in the new Legislative Assembly (Oct. 1791–Aug. 1792) and in the following Convention (Sept. 1792), with whom she carried on a yearlong affair. He obtained a seat on the powerful Committee of General Security, which made him a likely source of inside information.

Palm's last notable political initiative came on April 1, 1792, when she led a small delegation from her society to the Legislative Assembly and spoke in favor of a petition on women's rights. This petition was a truly radical document for that time. It called for 1) equal civil and political rights for both sexes; 2) admission of women to all civil and military posts (she had long supported the companies of women soldiers, "amazons," sprouting in a few places); 3) a "moral and national" education for all girls; 4) the same age, 21, for majority for men and women; and 5) the right of divorce (a divorce law on the agenda was passed on August 30). The assembly's president thanked her unctuously and sent the petition to a committee, where it expired unread. It did arouse some comment in the press for a few days, but the outbreak of war with Austria (and soon Prussia) on April 20 presently occupied all minds.

Palm probably participated, along with Léon and Théroigne de Méricourt, in the "visit to the king" (June 20, 1792), a quasi-insurrection presaging the fall of the throne which came in the rising of August 10. Her role, if any, in the latter event is unclear. By then, most of the leading politicians were those members of the Social Circle who had revived the Jacobin Club in the fall of 1791. They were moderate republicans nicknamed "Girondins" and in effect ran the government until they were overthrown in June 1793 by more radical Jacobins, the "Mountaineers" (Montagnards), who began the Reign of Terror (to July 1794). By then, Palm was long off the scene and living in Holland. Perhaps she had sensed that events were running into more dangerous waters—certainly for her, given her suspicious past and connections. Whatever the case, in October 1792 she informed the French foreign minister, Pierre-Henri Lebrun, that she was on her way to the Dutch Republic (she arrived by November 4 at the latest) and asked if he would pay her for information. Lebrun, who privately called her "an intriguer," accepted (Nov. 26). He hoped, among other things, to use her contacts with Princess Wilhelmina to help detach Prussia from Austria.

The French victory over the Austrians at Jemappes (Nov. 6) led to immediate occupation of the Austrian Netherlands (Belgium) and raised the question of an invasion of Holland. Lebrun, however, told Palm to assure van de Spiegel of France's pacific intentions toward all neutrals. Simon Schama, a leading authority on Dutch affairs in these years, affirms that Palm, "a double agent of consummate craft," tried with some success to resolve the major differences between France and the still-neutral Dutch and British. But France decided (Nov. 27) to open the Scheldt River to free navigation—a violation of the Peace of Westphalia, which gave the Dutch a trade monopoly on this vital Belgian river. Opening the Scheldt, called "that cursed river" by Palm, gravely threatened Dutch shipping and related English interests, and it doomed the peace. The execution of Louis XVI (Jan. 21, 1793) was only the last straw. Palm tried to persuade Lebrun that the French warmongers were either royalists or Montagnards intent on destroying the Girondin leadership, but in vain. France declared war on the Dutch and British on February 1.

It seems unlikely, although it is often asserted, that Palm had returned to France before January 1793, by which time she was in the Netherlands for good. With the war, her role as intermediary and spy disintegrated. Lebrun complained that her information was of little value, and his successor, François Defourges, finally cut her loose on October 5, 1793, without having paid her for many months despite her despairing appeals. Meanwhile, probably the cruelest blow was delivered by van de Spiegel. On May 9, he curtly ended their relations now that the war was on. He enclosed a paltry 20 ducats. Reduced to misery, she appealed to William V on June 30, 1794, to no avail, and a week later to van de Spiegel, suggesting she could be useful in negotiating with the French. He sent no reply except 600 florins for past services.

The French conquest of the Dutch Republic early in 1795 put her between two fires. William fled to England, while the Dutch Patriots, under French control, established the Batavian Republic (1795–1806). Desperate, Palm claimed to be a French citizen and thus entitled to return. The French told her to await the peace treaty. She then tried to contact Orangist elements but failed. On May 18, the inevitable occurred when the Patriot regime, after checking with the French, arrested her for suspected plotting against the Batavian Republic. She was detained at The Castle in The Hague. There she gave her interrogators confused or misleading answers while flatly denying having served either the Dutch or French governments. The Patriots, however, knew her too well from her years as their chief denouncer in Paris. On February 14, 1796, they imprisoned her at a castle in Woerden. Van de Spiegel was there in a comfortable political confinement, but she was put among the common criminals, assigned a one-room cell, and allowed one hour's daily exercise.

Palm was released on December 20, 1798, under a general amnesty for political prisoners, and took shelter with a friend. The French meanwhile, pronouncing her an émigré, had confiscated her papers and property in Paris on June 25, 1794, and sold all but her political correspondence on September 8–9. Penniless, the "Baroness" Palm d'Aelders died of a breast infection on March 28, 1799. She was buried the next day in an unmarked grave in the cemetery at Rijswijk, a suburb of The Hague.

Etta Palm's historical importance rests upon her role as a pioneer feminist during the French Revolution, not as a courtesan or secret agent. Was she a devotee of the Revolution because it served her purpose as an agent? To some degree, no doubt. She took care not to let the Patriot émigrés, patronized by the French government, outflank her. Zeal for the Revolution and France's role as a torchbearer served to keep her persona grata with the changing governments until her association with the Girondin faction finally discredited her in the eyes of the victorious Montagnards.

While her political stance appears—inevitably—self-serving to a degree, it also has a convincing ring of sincerity. She, with Théroigne, de Gouges, Lacombe, and Léon, for a long time believed—naïvely, it turned out—that women's rights were in the mainstream of revolutionary thought. To this extent they were "revolutionaries first and women second," writes Candice Proctor . Palm's approach ran counter to the current which in the 19th century would confine women to a separate, special domestic role "defined," in itself, writes Vega, "as a positive contribution to public and social life." Palm believed that the only reason women lacked full rights was because of social custom (moeurs) and male power, not nature. She applied her radical interpretation of the Enlightenment's natural rights theory to marriage and government, private and domestic spheres without differentiation. She refused to accept, notes Vega, "the difference in [current] liberal thought between the citizen and the natural man"; if it were accepted, women inevitably would be confined to women's roles, to domesticity. Interestingly, she, a courtesan, denounced the frivolity and idleness of the lives of most upper-class women. Changing the moeurs of men and women of such a society would be a long, arduous task.

By the time she left France permanently, she had become discouraged by the unreceptiveness of both men and women to any idea of altering traditional female roles in a fundamental way. Indeed, the whole issue of women's rights during the French Revolution remained clouded. And what improvements were enacted—e.g., divorce legislation, 21 as the majority age, equal inheritance rights, a voice in property administration and decisions affecting children—were mostly sponged away a decade later by the Napoleonic Code. Palm's ideas would not make much headway for more than a century after her sad end in an unmarked grave.

sources:

Abray, Jane. "Feminism in the French Revolution," in American Historical Review. Vol. 80, 1975, pp. 43–62.

Cerati, Marie. Le Club des citoyennes républicaines révolutionnaires. Paris: Éditions sociales, 1966.

Decaux, Alain. Histoire des françaises. Vol. 2: La Révolte. Librairie Académique Perrin, 1972.

Dreyfous, Maurice. Les Femmes de la Révolution française (1789–1795). Paris: Société française d'éditions d'art, n.d.

Duhet, Paule-Marie, ed. Les Femmes et la Révolution, 1789–1794. Paris: Julliard, 1971.

Les Femmes dans la Révolution française, Vol. 2. Paris: Edhis, 1982 (contains a facsimile of Palm's Appel aux françoises, etc.) Paris: l'Imprimerie du Cercle Social, 1791.

Hastier, Louis. "Une aventurière batave sous la révolution," in La Revue des deux-mondes. No. 5, 1964, pp. 65–86 (a précis of H. Hardenberg's biography [see below]).

Hufton, Olwen. Women and the Limits of Citizenship in the French Revolution. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992.

Kates, Gary. The Cercle Social, the Girondins, and the French Revolution. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985.

Kennedy, Michael. The Jacobin Clubs in the French Revolution: The First Years. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982.

Landes, Joan B. Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988.

Levy, Darlene, Harriet B. Applewhite, and Mary D. Johnson, eds. Women in Revolutionary Paris, 1789–1795: Selected Documents. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1979.

Proctor, Candice E. Women, Equality, and the French Revolution. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1990.

Rendall, Jane. The Origins of Modern Feminism: Women in Britain, France, and the United States, 1780–1860. NY: Schocken, 1984.

Schama, Simon. Patriots and Liberators: Revolution in the Netherlands 1780–1813. NY: Alfred Knopf, 1977.

Vega, Judith. "Feminist Republicanism: Etta Palm-Aelders on Justice, Virtue and Men," in History of European Ideas. Vol. 10, no. 3, 1989, pp. 333–351.

——. "Luxury, Necessity, or the Morality of Men: The Republican Discourse of Etta Palm-Aelders," in Les Femmes de la Révolution: Actes du colloque international, 12–13–14 avril 1989, Université de Toulouse-La Mirail. Toulouse: Presses universitaires du Mirail, 1989, pp. 363–370.

collections:

Paris: Archives nationales, T. 1601, fol. 8383 (papers of Etta Palm-Aelders); AF III, 426, 2501. Bibliothèque nationale: Lb40 2610. Bouche de fer, 1790–91.

David S. S. , Professor Emeritus of History, Centre College, Danville, Kentucky

Women in World History: A Biographical Encyclopedia