Madame Roland (Blind 1886)/Chapter 15
STRUGGLE BETWEEN MOUNTAIN AND GIRONDE.
On the 11th of December 1792, the Prince, whose coronation a few years ago had been hailed as the advent of better times, appeared as a prisoner to be tried at the bar of the Convention. Was it only a few years ago, or had centuries elapsed, since he, who now stood there attainted, shorn of crown and titles, wrapped in unbecoming brown overcoat, had lorded it in the glittering halls of Versailles, and been pensively observed in his royal scarlet and gold uniform, amid his fawning courtiers, by an obscure daughter of Paris? To the heir of the proudest race of kings in Europe the total subversion of the old order of things must have had something so stunning in its effects that be might well have questioned his own identity. There must have crept over him a sense of phantasmagoric unreality, which, superadded to temperament, may have helped to produce his singular apathy under such astonishing circumstances.
Was ever in history sterner illustration of the inexorable truth: "The sins of the fathers shall be visited upon the children unto the third and fourth generation"! For behind Louis, in Louis himself—more weak than wicked, the people saw—even as Macbeth did in the magic glass of Hecate—a whole long line of kings, who to the wail of hanger and agony around them had been deaf as the walls of those palaces where, in shameless orgies, were dissipated the revenues of the State: so that in Louis XVI. they beheld, not him alone, but the scapegoat of an entire dynasty.
On the 20th of January 1793, by a considerable majority in the Convention, he was sentenced to death.
What Madame Roland's vote would have been does not appear. Michelet, with his fondness for diving into the recesses of the human heart, would like to know who represented her opinion on this memorable occasion. The man she loved, he declares, though no one, according to him, was lofty enough to be her ideal. In Michelet's time the secret of that noble spirit had not been divulged, nor had those heart-moving letters been discovered which cast such a new, pathetic light on her life. But this student of womanhood felt that under the Amazon's breast-plate there throbbed a passion as strong as the nature which curbed it. His conjecture as to Bancal des Issarts was wrong; but, passing in review the men she confided in, he characterises Buzot as the heart of the Gironde. A subtle touch this, the fire and daring with which this man always took the lead in the struggle of parties springing not from his heart only, but from that of the heroine of the Gironde, Buzot voted for the King's death, with the proviso of its ratification by the people.
Already, during the King's trial, the position of the Girondins in Paris had grown full of peril. The Rolands had become the target at which Hébert through his paper, the Père Duchesne, daily flung the dirt of his scurrilous vituperations. Marat, to whom every person in power straightway became a traitor, held them up as objects of fear and suspicion to the mob. He had, in fact, a special subject of grievance against the Minister who refused him a grant of 15,000 francs for his paper L'Ami du Peuple. But in spite of the continuous attacks against him in the Paris press and by the Clubs, Roland remained firm to his convictions of freedom of the press and of public meetings, fearing nothing so much as to act despotically in the name of liberty.
How far things had already gone with them at this time is shown by Madame Roland's letter of the 25th December, year first of the Republic.[1] She begins:—
The date is not indifferent, for who knows what to-morrow may bring forth? it is on the cards that many worthy people may not see its end. There are dreadful designs afloat against Louis, so as to give occasion to include the Deputies and the Minister of the Interior in the massacre. . . . I have sent my daughter to the country, and settled my little affairs as if for the long journey, and can now calmly await whatever may happen. Our social institutions render life so painful to honest hearts that its loss ceases to be a hardship, and I have so thoroughly familiarised myself with the thought of death that, should the assassins come, I shall go to meet them, persuaded as I am that the only thing in the world likely to arrest their blows is to show an unmoved front. . . . Warnings of intended assassinations come pouring in, for they honour me with their hate, and I know the reason why! During the first fortnight of Roland's Ministry the scoundrel Danton and the hypocritical Fabre were always about us, aping a love of what was good and honest. They saw through me, and, without my ever saying anything to coufirm their opinion, concluded that I sometimes wield the pen and these writings of M. R have produced some effect; therefore, etc.
Since this Marat has been set to bark at me, and has never left me a minute's peace; I have been pelted with pamphlets. . . . My silence has only increased their rage; I am Galigaï, Brinvilliers, Voisin, everything that is most monstrous, and the women of the markets intend treating me like another Lamballe.
So I send you my portrait, for I would still wish to leave something of myself to my friends. It pleases me to tell you that, with the exception of my husband, my daughter, and one other person, you are the only friend to whom I am giving it. Nobody knows of its existence, not even the general run of friends.
I cannot imagine what things will come to; but if Paris goes to ruin, the South must save us. . . . Most of our deputies only walk out now armed to the teeth. Numbers of people implore us not to stay at night at the Ministerial residence. How charming is this Parisian liberty! Well! Had you stayed in office we should not have come to this. Had the federate troops been placed under your command, you could, by discipline, have turned them into a respectable sort of support. They might have served instead of the guard, which they have not dared to levy. Pache has done nothing but disgust, annul, and send them away again. If they save us to-morrow, it will be of their own accord, and in disregard of orders.
In truth, I am weary of this world; it is not made for honest folk, and there is some reason for dislodging them from it. Farewell, brave citizen; I esteem and love you with all my heart. I shall write to you in a few days, if the storm has not engulfed us. In case it has, remember my daughter sometimes, and the pleasant plans we had formed! . . .
Things had come to such a pass that now the only question left was when the threatening storm would burst. The two parties—but one in their opposition to the Moderates of 1791—were now engaged in such a deadly duel that the trial of Louis (judged really on the 10th of August, and an old story by now) dwindled by comparison into insignificance. And this struggle is so engrossing, because on its issue really depended the fate of the Republic. But had its fate not been decided already from the fact that such a struggle existed? Was there any chance of success when those who united should have faced their common foes, hated each other fully, as bitterly as them? They should have united—yet it lay in the fatality of circumstances that they could not unite any more than will oil and vinegar, however much you may shake them up together. Although their aims were practically the same—for there was no difference in kind between the Republic which Danton wanted and that for which Brissot strove—yet were their methods radically opposed. The Gironde tried to found the new order on law; the Mountain on terror. The Gironde considered that the Revolution had gone far enough, and that the crying need was to inspire the nation with a sense of security; the Mountain held that whole sections must be exterminated before a reorganization could take place. It is the fashion now to praise up the last as the strong party, who knew what they wanted and managed to get it; but, if success is the test of capacity, their twelve months more of rule, or so, does not give them such vast superiority over the Girondins. Had they really managed to establish a permanent government there would be some reason for extolling their superior sagacity; but where was the advantage of their system, seeing that their wholesale executions—if they intimidated for a time—only turned the nation's love into loathing.
It is said that the strong coercive measures which they adopted ensured the splendid triumphs of the French army, whereas they had chiefly suffered reverses during the Girondin ascendancy. But one of the most glorious battles, that of Jemmapes, had been won by Dumouriez, a man appointed by the Gironde, but for whose subsequent treachery it could in no wise be blamed. When one remembers how largely the army of France was composed of raw volunteers, inexperienced if full of enthusiasm, their early reverses followed by subsequent victories may be explained quite apart from party policy.
In fact, most of the successful measures, such as the formation of some of those powerful committees—to be turned into engines of destruction against their founders—were originated by the Girondins and appropriated by the Jacobins afterwards. Thus the important measure of sending republican commissioners to the camps to control the generals and keep the Convention informed of their spirit had been a proposition of Vergniaud. No single cause contributed more, perhaps, than this measure to the success of the Revolutionary army; yet was the Gironde too short-lived to reap the benefit of this, and its credit redounded to their political persecutors.
But the capital charge, that which ruined the Girondins in public opinion, was the accusation of federalism. The one inexpiable sin in the eyes of the Revolutionists was the sin against the unity and indivisibility of the Republic. But had they entertained such a design? And if so, was it really so culpable? In Madame Roland's letter to Servan her expression "If Paris goes to ruin, the South must save us" sufficed to send her to the guillotine. We see from her Memoirs that when the enemy was expected to march upon Paris, the expediency of removing the seat of Representatives to the south-east had been discussed. But these changes were only talked of as expedients in critical moments, not as permanent modifications of the State. The deputies from Bordeaux and Marseilles were credited with a dislike to Paris, and the wish of reducing its influence to the level of that of the provinces; but how about Madame Roland, who laughingly called herself a badaud (cockney), and who from dreary Villefranche had turned longing eyes towards Paris, every association of her childhood being inwoven with its streets. Yet she represented the spirit of the Gironde in its entirety more completely than any of its male members.
No doubt the September massacres did for a time set Madame Roland's heart against Paris. In the heat of her indignation she called it a city of cowards! To her belief the massacres had not been the spontaneous act of a population impelled by panic, but the deliberately-planned crime of a band of miscreants. And so she argued that the National Convention should be placed out of reach of the terrorism of Paris—where an insurrectionary commune, with an armed force at its back, practically deprived it of free agency—and pointed to the United States as an example to be followed! And she strenuously advocated the formation of a Departmental Guard as a bulwark to the Representative Assembly.
But these suggestions and provisional schemes have no connection with any plan of parcelling out France into a number of small federate communities; Madame Roland herself owns that whatever might be advanced in favour of such federate republics as Greece, Switzerland and the United States, the actual situation of France—threatened on all sides by invasion—called imperatively for unity. Buzot, in a conversation where this was discussed, she says, asserted for argument's sake, that that growing patriotism, which had inspired the whole body of Athenians to take refuge on ships and abandon their city to the enemy, was possible in a small state only whose inhabitants all knew and loved each other like the members of a common family. These remarks, reported and denounced by Anacharsis Clootz, became one of the chief instruments by which the destruction of the Gironde was eventually brought about.
In fact, there exists no evidence whatever of the Girondins having contemplated the foundation of a federate Republic: on the contrary, they were as deeply convinced of the necessity of its unity as the Jacobins. But supposing that they had contemplated the future possibility of such a form of government, was it for Robespierre to stigmatise such a conception as a crime? Robespierre, according to Louis Blanc, the most thorough-going disciple of Rousseau. Had he then forgotten these sentences in the Contrat Social, which he who runs may read?
"Moreover, if a State cannot be restrained within moderate limits, there still remains an expedient: that, namely, of not having a permanent capital, but of shifting the seat of the government from town to town where the representatives of the nation shall meet in turn.
"Let the land be peopled in equal proportions, let the same rights obtain everywhere, and life and plenty be everywhere diffused. By this means your State will become the strongest and most wisely-governed in existence. Remember that the walls of towns are only raised on the dilapidation of villages. For every palace that is building in the capital I seem to see a whole country-side falling into decay."
If ever there were a strong protest against centralization of government Rousseau made it, yet Robespierre shrank not on mere suspicion and loose reports of such doctrine from sending the Gironde to the guillotine.
- ↑ This letter, which is of great interest, only recently came to light at a sale of autographs, and has hitherto only been published in a French newspaper. It is addressed to the ex-Minister of War, then Général Servan.