“Madame de Verte-Allure politique !”: A female voice in The Morning Star, Pierre-Edouard Lémontey’s Revolutionary Newspaper »

Résumé 0

The voice of Madame de Verte-Allure (Mrs Fair-Pace) in The Morning Star (1790) is just one among many to be heard in the French Revolutionary press. Purporting to be a former nun, this persona actually conceals Pierre-Edouard Lémontey, who offers a thoughtful and satirical commentary on political events. How can such an illocutionary stance be understood in a period wherein the difference between the sexes was already increasing and would continue to increase into the nineteenth century ? What representations of gender and political discourse are at stake ? Madame de Verte-Allure’s is a distinctive and polyphonic voice, through which Lémontey attempts to combine a ‘female language’ with the emblematically male discourse of the political orator.