This facet of the French revolution always fascinated me, thank you in advance for your replies.
The average Parisian would not be aware of tricoteuses knitting next to the guillotine because it is a myth. French historian Dominique Godineau has retraced the origin of the expression and it goes as follows.
Under the Ancien Régime, tricoteuse was sometimes (the evidence exists but is scarce) used as a gendered slur, possibly because the job was a low-paying one done by poor women employed to knit in hospitals and "dépôts de mendicité" (a mix of prison and hospital for vagrants, beggars and prostitutes).
The term in its current acception appears only in 1795, and it was used as an insult (perhaps due to the negative connotation mentioned above) against Parisian women who sat in the stands to follow and participate in public debates, and particularly those of the radical Club des Jacobins. In addition to "tricoteuses", they were called many names by the enemies of the Jacobins, including "tricoteuses de Robespierre", "Furies de guillotines", "female harpies", "female barkers", "shrews" and other insults. In the image of tricoteuses drawn by Jean-Baptiste Lesueur, the text says that they were paid "40 sols per day to sit in the Jacobin stands and applaud the revolutionaries". Note that while women may have spent time knitting during the sessions, the only records available talk of women who were sewing. In any case, there is no mention, during the revolutionary period, of women knitting at the foot of the guillotine. A Revolutionary-era tricoteuse was a female political activist who participated, sometimes vocally, in public debates. Of course these women may have gone to watch executions to whoop and cheer, so we have indeed tricoteuses next to the guillotine, but they were not knitting.
There is a mention of "tricoteuses dancing round the scaffold" in the journal La Clef du cabinet des souverains, published in 1801. However, in the same paragraph we also find "singing freemasons in charge of the world's destiny" and a mention of Dr Franz Messmer, so it's not exactly descriptive. The first direct association of the tricoteuses with the guillotine appears in Chateaubriand's Mémoires d'Outre-Tombe, published in 1848. He first mentions the "naive tricoteuses who arrived from the spectacle of the guillotine" and later writes this:
From her exposed thighs foul reptiles emerged that danced, instantly, with the tricoteuses knitting round the scaffold, to the sound of the blade, ascending and descending over and over, to the refrain of a devil’s jig.
Since then, mentions of tricoteuses have always included guillotine and violence and its certainly Dickens in the Tale of Two Cities (1859) who, through the character of Thérèse Defarge, introduced the most vivid image of the tricoteuses knitting in front of the guillotine. It is this image that took hold in the public imagination, but it is not supported by the historical record.
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