Madame Roland (Blind 1886)/Chapter 11
THE ROLAND ADMINISTRATION.
The days of the National Assembly had drawn to a close. Its members, who had come in with the audacity of lions, went out with the meekness of lambs. The sublime moments of the Jeu de Paume, and of the 4th of August had already receded into the past. Twenty-eight months of legislative labours accomplished at Revolution speed had more completely used up these men than years of ordinary political activity. From being the vanguard of the popular movement they had fallen into its rear. "You reason like the end of a legislature" had become a proverbial expression of contempt. One of the last acts of the old Assembly—the Constituent as distinguished from its successor, the Legislative—was to disqualify itself by passing a resolution that none of its members were eligible for the next Parliament. This motion, proposed by Robespierre, was calculated, as it proved, to effectually handicap the moderate party, and the new elections showed that the nation wished for a more radical policy.
The Convention of Pilnitz took place in August. The Emperor of Austria, the King of Prussia, the minor German potentates, and the emigrant princes, were concocting measures against the French people, who, since the King's unsuccessful flight, had kept him in semi-durance at the Tuileries. However, since the completion of the Constitution and its acceptance by Louis XVI., there was a fresh upflickering of royalty; but the conspiracies with the foreigner, the bribery, or attempted bribery, of public men, were never given up for long. "Louis XVI.," says Madame Roland, "was always vacillating between the fear of irritating his subjects, his wish to please them, and his incapacity of governing them . . . always, on the one hand, proclaiming the maintenance of what he ordered to be sapped with the other, so that his oblique course and false conduct first excited mistrust and ended by rousing indignation."
The Legislative Assembly met on the 1st October 1791, while the country was distracted by apprehensions of invasion, and by doubt of its ability to meet it. In this crisis of her fate France, as if instinctively, had sent to represent her the men most apt to act with promptitude. In one night the aspect of the Chamber had entirely changed its character. The venerable Constitution-makers had vanished smoke-like into the past. In their stead had come slim figures, clustered locks, eyes flashing infinite hope. So youthful a Senate was never seen before.
Conspicuous among its members was a group of men, sent up from the ardent Gironde, destined to take the lead in the New Assembly. All of them men who had nourished their youth on the literature of Greece and Rome, they entered the arena with little or no practical experience, but with the Republic for watchword. They were the idealists of the Revolution. The free state which they wished to achieve, that would they achieve "holily"; and while they clamoured for war with the foreign foe they deprecated violence at home.
When Madame Roland returned to Paris in the December of 1791, the affinity between her and the new party made her at once the centre of that group of men known as "The Gironde." It seemed as if from their childhood these kindred natures had been converging to this hour of meeting.
With armies ominously collecting on her frontiers, a spirit of defiant heroism entered the heart of France. The representatives she had elected to man the vessel of State were the expression of this spirit. The indefatigable Brissot was chosen as its captain by this gallant crew, chief among whom may be mentioned the headstrong Guadet, as impetuous as Gensonné was deliberate in counsel; Isnard, the Provençal, consumed by a fanaticism he communicated to his hearers; Vergniaud, winged of speech, stamping the topics of the time with the seal of eternity; the silent Grangeneuve, capable of performing a great action without suspecting its greatness; Louvet, ever first to the attack, as dauntless in spirit as delicate in frame; Barbaroux, the resolute young Marseillais, "with the head of Antinous and the heart of a lion"; Pétion, too, and the high-souled Buzot, both tried supporters of the popular cause; not to forget those two figures of an ideal purity and sweetness—Fonfrède and Ducos, the Nisus and Euryalus of the Revolution. Of this young hopeful crew the grave, reverend Roland, he of whom Lavater had said that he "reconciled him to Frenchmen," was presently to assume the pilotage. But high oh the poop above, beautiful, like the impersonation of liberty, stands the heroine of the Gironde, exhorting and stimulating, while the ever-increasing storm lashes the sea, and the wind whisking in the shrouds and rigging foretells a perilous passage. Will they steer the ship safely through, the breakers and whirlpools, those fearless men, singing their "Allons enfants," or will they and that fair woman who is their inspiration founder pitiably in the convulsed elements of the Revolution?
The last months of the year 1791 were crowded with incident. The Assembly, in very self-defence, passed the decree against the emigrant noblesse and the Princes of the Blood, declaring that, unless they returned by the 1st of January 1792, their property should be confiscated and themselves declared traitors to their country. The question had also been mooted and supported of passing a law to stop emigration; but Brissot, with his unflinching love of liberty, had successfully opposed the motion. The decree against the priests, enforcing the civil oath, on penalty of sequestration of stipend and expulsion from the State Church—a measure of far more questionable wisdom—was passed in December 1791. To mix up the social and economic changes with religious ones was dangerously to complicate the situation.
The stumbling-blocks of the Revolution—its deadliest opponents, in fact—were not the King with his veto, nor yet the truculent aristocrats petitioning for invasion, but the priests and the women; so true is it that no great outward transformation can be effectively achieved without a previous inward and spiritual transformation, in which the female part of the population must take an incalculable share. Now, although the women of the upper and upper middle classes were deeply penetrated by the ideas of the eighteenth century, and had consequently flung themselves into the movement with an emotional impulse that had gone far to accelerate it, the women of the people, except in Paris and some other large centres, where hunger spurred them into insurrection, were wedded to their Church. Here, in fact, lay the real, insuperable difficulty, and the fierce animosities of a semi-religious warfare began to envenom the deadly strife.
The responsibility of the decrees against the emigrants and non-juring priests rests mainly with the Girondins. Their next decisive step was to preach war; not a prudent, self-defensive war, but war on a grander scale than the world had yet known, a crusade for Liberty throughout Europe. And Vergniaud, that storm-bird of the Revolution, who continually rose above the rage of temporal contests to some serene ether of thought, lifted up all hearts in the Assembly as he cried in that richly cadenced voice of his: "A thought rises within me. The shades of the generations of the past seem to come crowding to this your temple, and to conjure you, in the name of the evils they endured from slavery, to deliver from them the unborn generations whose fate is in your hands. Grant this prayer: be the Providence of the future: enter into a covenant with that eternal justice now protecting us."
These solemn words converted the Chamber into a temple. But, unanimous as was the cry for war, one man held out against it, the inflexible Robespierre, who urged, with statesman-like sagacity, that the nation should get rid of its internal foes before attacking the foreigner. The first decisive difference in opinion between him and Brissot broke out on this occasion, for the latter, reposing infinite faith in the new doctrine, was less distrustful of the coadjutors who, for private reasons of their own, might be willing to join hands with him.
At this critical juncture of affairs another illustrious woman exercised a decisive influence on the march of events. Madame de Staël, then but twenty-five, had become the rallying-point of the Constitutionalists, as was Madame Roland of the Gironde. Placed in hostile political camps, they never met, and Madame Roland makes but one allusion, and that a curious one, to the future "Corinne." In a letter from Lyons, dating back as far as November 1789, she says: "Report spreads all kinds of stories about Madame de Staal (sic), who is said to be regularly present at the Assembly, and to send little billets from the gallery to her devoted cavaliers, in order to encourage their support of patriotic measures. The Spanish ambassador, it is said, has gravely reproached her for it at her father's table. You cannot imagine what importance the Aristocrats attach to these absurdities, hatched, no doubt, in their own brains; but they would fain depict the Assembly as led by a few feather-brained youths, egged on by a dozen of women or so." Madame de Staël, either from feminine jealousy, or possibly acquainted with Madame Roland's stinging attacks on M. Necker, her father (of whom she had said, among other things, that he was for ever speaking of his character, without rhyme or reason, as women of gallantry do of their virtue), in her description of the Girondin group, never even alludes to the woman who was its inspiration.
Narbonne, made Minister of War by the influence of Madame de Staël, fell in with the popular war-cry, in the hope of re-establishing the King's authority on a firm Constitutional basis. The Court party proper, however, had no genuine desire for war, as the risks outweighed the advantages. Events eventually justified the fears of the Court, and Brissot's sanguine faith in French arms and the cause of the Revolution, more than they did the cautious apprehensions of Robespierre.
At this period Brissot was not only all-powerful in the Assembly; his direct or indirect influence pervaded all its committees, and, on the break-up of the Narbonne Administration, he imposed a Ministry of his own on the Government. He had now reached the height of his influence, and, while bestowing place and power on those whom similarity of political views had made his friends, he himself, poorer than Robespierre, went about in a shabby old out-at-elbows coat, while his wife in person used to iron out his three shirts on some sixth floor of a lodging. In the teeth of this Spartan disinterestedness, his opponents did not blush afterwards to accuse Brissot of intrigue and place-hunting!
As the members of the Executive were excluded from the Chamber in which the ruling power actually resided, the leader of the Girondins, averse from crippling his own influence or that of the chief members of his party, looked out for men not yet practically involved in politics, while qualified by previous experience for public life. His choice fell upon Roland de la Platière, as Minister of the Interior. It seemed a happy idea, seeing that for the last thirty-five years of his life the latter had not only been professionally led to comprehend the economic and commercial conditions of his country, but had also studied them with the eye of the philosopher,
On the 23rd of March 1792, Roland entered the new Ministry, and, to all intents and purposes, his wife entered it with him. On the same evening she for the first time saw one of his colleagues, Dumouriez, Minister for Foreign Affairs, and the future hero of the victory at Jemmapes. "This is a man," said she to her husband after their visitor's departure, "who has a vivacious intelligence, a false eye, and of whom, perhaps, we should be more distrustful than of anyone in the world. He has expressed much satisfaction at the patriotic choice with which he was charged, but I should not be astonished if some day he obtained your dismissal from office." Thus, at the first glance, Madame Roland perceived the incongruity between the worldly pliability of Dumouriez and her husband's unbending rigidity of principle. But she was also forced to acknowledge that, if Dumouriez had no character, he had more native capacity and resource than all the other Ministers taken together. Clavière, long esteemed by Brissot for his extensive and intimate acquaintance with the complicated system of Finance, became Minister of that department, and in his case also Madame Roland foresaw possible troubles of another sort. He was upright, no doubt; but then, again, he was too like her husband, whose temper she knew and managed with inimitable tact: she foresaw that, irritable, dogmatic, and tenacious of their views as both were, they would soon disagree. "These two men," she says, "were made to esteem but not love each other, and they have not failed in their vocation." In Degrave she depicts the most ludicrously inadequate Minister of War! How or why placed in that office is not evident. "He was a little man in all respects," she remarks. "Nature had created him gentle and timid, his prejudices made pride obligatory, and his heart inclined him to amiability. Perplexed as he was to harmonise all this, he became truly null. I seem now to see him strutting, courtier-fashion, on his heels, his head erect on his feeble body, showing the whites of his blue eyes, which he could never keep open after dinner without the aid of two or three cups of coffee; speaking little, as if from reserve, but really because he had nothing to say; lastly, so completely losing his head in the midst of affairs that he had to send in his resignation." The able and conscientious Servan, Madame Roland's own choice, replaced him in office.
Charles V., in his retreat having vainly tried to make several watches keep time, railed at his former folly for wishing to regulate an Empire's course. Madame Roland, called from privacy to take part in public affairs at a most momentous crisis, now discovered with dismay how difficult it was for a small knot of men to act in concert, even when agreed as to principles. She was equally struck by the scarcity of men whose "energy of soul, solidity of judgment, and extensive views," might entitle them to be called great. Although she never abated by a jot her devotion to the cause, we henceforth find a considerable change in her tone, hitherto so glowing, and in her appreciation of the leaders of the Revolution. Seeing so closely the wheels of the political machine, and the actors that worked it, she shuddered at their want of union, and asked herself where was the man of sufficiently commanding political genius to weld together these heterogeneous elements. Her sex precluded her, unfortunately, from taking a share in the actual political struggle; otherwise, with her knowledge of men, her practical sagacity, her singleness of purpose, heir magnetic personality, she might herself have become the rallying point of her party, and her potent will would, no doubt, have infused into them a cohesion and a distinctness of aim, for lack of which they ultimately perished. As it was, she could only act indirectly and at second-hand, which naturally weakened the force of her influence. Although she would not have had Roland deviate by an inch from the political principles which they had hitherto entertained; she could have wished him to evince more pliability in unimportant details of business, and greater tact in his intercourse with his colleagues.
But Roland suffered from precisely the same defects which were at the root of so much that was calamitous in the French Revolution. For the men who then came to the forefront of events had not served that apprenticeship to political life—as how should they under a despotic Government?—which would have insensibly prepared them for the complex and difficult art of good government. That very A B C of politics, the daily press, familiar as household words to the meanest drudge in the United States, only came into existence with the French Revolution. Philosophic theories, logical conclusions drawn from abstract reasoning, the speculations of the study, the argumentative rhetoric of the bar, were the equipment with which the prominent members of the Assembly started on their political career. Whereas the subtle involvement of social life is such, that the law of progress seems to be that for every two steps taken in advance there must be made a step backwards, these fanatics of freedom wished to push on at all hazards, even at that of annihilating all resisting human forces.
With Roland the simplicity of Republican manners came upon the Court with a fresh shock. His round hat, his plain dress, his shoes tied with ribbons, shocked and scandalised the whole tribe of flunkeys. Here, indeed, was Royalty compromised as it never had been before. The Master of the Ceremonies, approaching Dumouriez with a disturbed countenance and frowning brow, said in a low, constrained voice, indicating Roland with a side-glance, "Lord! Sir, no buckles to his shoes!" "Ah! Sir, all is lost!" replied Dumouriez, with a most comical self-possession.
Madame Roland was now installed in the Ministerial residence, magnificently fitted up, in the early days of Louis XVI.'s reign, by M. de Calonne while, like so many others, trying his hand at regulating the finances. To her private use she appropriated only a small cabinet. The only change she made in her life was to restrict her intercourse even more severely than of old, partly to economise time and partly to keep the host of place-seekers at a distance. Twice a week she presided at a Ministerial dinner, to which, besides her husband's colleagues, members of the Assembly and other political friends, to the number of fifteen, were bidden, but at which no lady save herself was present. Lemontey, a distinguished writer, though not a political partisan, describing Madame Roland as she was at this period, says: "Head, eyes, and hair were of remarkable beauty. The freshness and brilliancy of her delicate complexion, added to an air of reserve and candour, gave her a singularly youthful appearance. I did not discover that easy elegance of the Parian to which she lays claim in her Memoirs, yet she was devoid of awkwardness, because what is simple and natural must also be graceful. On my first seeing her she realised my idea of the little girl of Vevay, who has turned so many heads, the Julie of Rousseau. Madame Roland spoke well—too well. The listener would fain have discoveied signs of preparation in her speech, but could not. Hers was simply too perfect a nature. Wit, reason, common-sense, and sweetness flowed with spontaneous felicity of diction from between ivory teeth and rosy lips; there was nothing for it but to resign yourself . . . At the beginning of her husband's ministry I saw Madame Roland for the last time. She had lost nothing of her freshness, youthfulness, or simplicity. Roland looked like a Quaker, for whose daughter she might have passed. Her child capered round her with hair rippling down to her waist. You would have said inhabitants from Pennsylvania transplanted to the salon of M. de Calonne. Madame Roland spoke only of public affairs, and I could see that my moderation inspired her with some pity. Her soul was wrought up, but her heart remained gentle and inoffensive. Although the wreck of monarchy had not yet occurred, she did not disguise from herself that signs of anarchy were beginning to show themselves, and she promised to oppose them unto death."
Although the power of the executive in reality rested not so much in the Ministry as in the Representative Assembly, the conscientious Roland was preparted to fulfil his duties to the utmost. The good-nature and apparent sincerity of the King had charmed him at first, and he had come home from the Cabinet meetings full of hope concerning the future working of the Constitution, seeing the excellent hitherto misanderstood intentions of the monarch. His wife was not so easily duped, and warned him not to be too credidous. Her misgivings proved only too well founded, for, in spite of his protestations of devotion, Louis XVI.'s policy consisted mainly in putting a stop to all active measures of government. Thus he cunningly evaded sanctioning two decrees of the utmost importance to the State: one against the recalcitrant priests, now fomenting civil war in the provinces; the other—war having been declared against Austria—that of the formation of a federate camp of twenty thousand men to protect Paris, on the one hand exposed to the foreign foe by its proximity to the frontier, and on the other, to the foe within, in that suspicious guard of picked men which had gradually been formed in the Tuileries.
The idea of this camp had originated with Madame Roland. Convinced of the King's duplicity and its attendant dangers, she had persuaded Roland that a patriotic Ministry should either make an effort to save the country or retire from office. With more than her usual promptitude, she wrote off a letter destined to be sent to Louis XVI. in the name of the Council. None of the Ministers being prepared to take so bold a step, Roland sent it in his own name. A lesson and an exhortation in one, it implored the Sovereign not to rouse the suspicion of the nation by constantly betraying his suspicion of it, but to secure his country's love by adopting in all sincerity the measures fitted to ensure the welfare and safety of the State. The Declaration of Rights, he was told, had become a politicial Gospel, and the French Constitution a religion, for which the people were prepared to perish.
The only effect of this letter was to bring about the fall of the Ministers, with the exception of Dumouriez, who had secret leanings to the Court. Servan was the first to get his dismissal. Entering Madame Roland's room with a radiant face, he said, "Congratulate me: I have been turned off." "I am much nettled," replied the lady, that you should be the first to enjoy this honour; but I hope that it will be conferred on my husband without delay." Her hopes were not disappointed; and her advice, when he brought her the news, was that he should be the first to let the Legislative Assembly know of his dismissal by sending it a copy of his letter to the King.
The Girondin Ministers now became the popular idols of the hour. There were many signs abroad that the Court wished to strike some decisive blow. The Moderates and the Constitutionalists seemed on the point of uniting with the Ultra-Royalists; and General Lafayette, from his camp, wrote a threatening letter to the Assembly, justifying the King's veto, and exhorting it to respect royalty. The immediate result of these ominous movements was the insurrection of the 20th of June, when the Palace of the Tuileries was invaded, as by enchantment, with a tumultuous crowd of sans culottes and fish-wives, and which saw the descendant of the Bourbons don the bonnet rouge. Cries of "Recall of the Ministers!" "Repeal of the Veto!" were heard at intervals; but, without committing himself to any promise, the King knew how to amuse the people by pinning a cockade to the red cap of liberty, and joining in the shouts of "Long live the Nation!" At last, admonished by the Mayor, the crowd dispersed peaceably enough, and this singular insurrection ended in the Royal apartments being thrown open to the populace to see on its way out!