Tricoteuse is French for a knitting woman. The term is most often used in its historical sense as a nickname for the women in the French Revolution who sat in the gallery supporting the left-wing politicians in the National Convention, attended the meetings in the Jacobin club, the hearings of the Revolutionary Tribunal and sat beside the guillotine during public executions, supposedly continuing to knit. The performances of the Tricoteuses were particularly intense during the Reign of Terror.
Contemporary depiction of Tricoteuses by Jean-Baptiste Lesueur
Contemporary depiction of a Revolutionary Women's Club, also by Lesueur
The Reign of Terror was a period of the French Revolution when, following the creation of the First Republic, a series of massacres and numerous public executions took place in response to revolutionary fervour, anticlerical sentiment, and accusations of treason by the Committee of Public Safety. While terror was never formally instituted as a legal policy by the Convention, it was more often employed as a concept.
Nine émigrés are executed by guillotine, 1793
Historical caricature of the Reign of Terror
Bertrand Barère by Jean-Louis Laneuville
Heads of aristocrats on pikes