Etta Palm d'Aelders

Etta Lubina Johanna Aelders[1] was the daughter of Jacob Aelders van Nieuwenhuys, a merchant, and Agatha Petronella de Sitter. She was born in Groningen and received a good education, which was remarkable for a girl in her age in a non-aristocratic family. She married Christiaan Ferdinand Lodewijk Palm, the son of an attorney, in 1762. The marriage was not happy and Christiaan disappeared to the East Indies.[2]

In 1768 she traveled with Jan Munniks, a young attorney, brother of the celebrated professor of botany Wynoldus Munniks, who had been appointed consul at Messina for the Dutch Republic to France, where she stayed behind because of illness. On the way she met Douwe Sirtema van Grovestins, a former equerry to the widow of Stadtholder William IV, Prince of Orange, who became her lover, and introduced her in higher circles. She left him in 1773 and moved to Paris, where she settled in the Palais Royal area, and became a courtesan for the better classes, taking a number of lovers. In these circumstances she was recruited for the French secret service, possibly by Jean-Frédéric Phélypeaux, comte de Maurepas himself. He sent her to The Hague in 1778 for a short mission, where she again met Jan Munniks, who himself now was a spy in British service.

The financial revenues of this mission enabled her to move to a grander house at the Rue Favard in Paris, where she set up a salon, where many "political" people met. From this time dates her affectation of the title of "baroness." Among these people were Dutchmen like Gerard Brantsen, who negotiated the peace between the Republic and Austria in Paris in 1784, and Apollonius Jan Cornelis Lampsins, a prominent Patriot, who sought refuge in France in 1787. Around this time she apparently started working for the Dutch Grand Pensionary Laurens Pieter van de Spiegel,[3] to whom she became especially valuable after the events of 14 July 1789, when her salon was frequented by prominent revolutionaries like Jean-Paul Marat, François Chabot and Claude Basire.[4]

Etta now became involved in revolutionary politics, and she was especially active in feminist circles, like the Société fraternelle de l'un et l'autre sexe, Société Patriotique des Amis de la Vérité , and Société Patriotique et de Bienfaisance des Amies de la Vérité ..

She set up shop in The Hague where she now spied on French émigrés like Beaumarchais and Dumouriez. However, events in France forced her to change sides again and she imposed on the Stadtholder himself, referring to her old services. Then in early 1795 the French revolutionary armies invaded the Netherlands. The Batavian Republic was proclaimed and Etta became suspect, because she tried to persuade the French representatives at the negotiations for the Treaty of The Hague (1795) to use the right of conquest to the detriment of the new Republic. These machinations, in cohorts with her old acquaintance Jan Munniks, brought her to the attention of the Hague Comité van Waakzaamheid (the Dutch equivalent of the French Comité de surveillance révolutionnaire). Munniks was sentenced to banishment, and Etta was put under arrest in the fortress of Woerden together with her old spymaster Van de Spiegel. She was released at the end of 1798, but her health had suffered so much, that she died the following March.[5]

• Sur l´injustice des Loix en faveur des Hommes, au dépens de Femmes, in The French Revolution and Human Rights: A Brief Documentary History, translated, edited, and with an introduction by Lynn Hunt (Bedford/St. Martin's: Boston/New York), 1996, 122–23.
• Appel aux Francoises sur la régénération des moeurs, et nécessité de l'influence des femmes dans un gouvernement libre, L'imprimerie du Cercle Social, (probably) July, 1791. Facsimile in: Les femmes dans la révolution Française, T. 2, Paris, Edhis, 1982 and on Gallica

• (in Dutch)Instituut voor Nederlandse Geschiedenis (1905), Rijks geschiedkundige publicatiën. v.1 1789-1795, pp. XLVII-LII (Bl. 148 noot)

• (in French) Blanc, O. (1997) "Etta-Lubina-Johana d'Aëlders, Mme Palm", in Les Libertines, Plaisir et Liberté au temps des Lumières, Paris, Perrin, pp. 213–234; 256–258.
• (in Dutch) Hardenberg, H. (1962) Etta Palm. Een Hollandse Parisienne 1743-1799, Assen
• (in Dutch) Koppius, W.J.(1929) Etta Palm. Nederlands's eerste feministe, Zeist
• Vega, J.A. (1989a) "Feminist Republicanism. Etta Palm-Aelders on justice, virtue and men", in: History of European Ideas, special issue on Women and the French Revolution (eds. R.M. Dekker and J.A. Vega), 10, 3, pp. 333–351
• Vega, J.A. (1989b) "Luxury, necessity, or the morality of men. The republican discourse of Etta Palm-Aelders", in: Les Femmes et la Révolution Francaise, Actes du Colloque, I, Toulouse, Presses Universitaires du Mirail, pp. 363–370
• Vega, J.A. (1998) Inventing enlightenment's gender, The representation of modernity in dispute. (doctoral thesis), University of Leiden, pp. 96–116
• (in French)Villiers, M. de (1910) Histoire des Club des Femmes et des Légions d´Amazones, Paris, pp. 14– 41

• Gérald Arboit, « SOUVENT FEMME VARIE » UNE ESPIONNE HOLLANDAISE À PARIS...
• Etta Palm D’Aelders, "Discourse on the Injustice of the Laws in Favor of Men, at the Expense of Women" (30 December 1790)