Madame Roland (Blind 1886)/Chapter 9
THE RIGHTS OF MAN.
Let us return to Madame Roland, who from her solitude in the Beaujolais followed with breathless interest the course of events; the installation of Necker in Turgot's place; the convocation of the Notables; the ineffectual efforts made to extricate the nation from its desperate financial position; and who rejoiced not a little when the Government, having exhausted all its resources, felt driven at last to assemble the representatives of the nation or States-General, which had not met since the year 1614. The winter of 1788–89 resounded with the noise and excitement of these elections. France was in a ferment, as if the assembly of those States would be a cure for all the ills of the people.
The rapidity of events henceforth worked with the inevitable momentum of elemental forces. The elasticity of time was never so apparent in history; when became equivalent to months, months to years, yearn to centuries. That the Court and nobility did not calmly view these changes, that they tried their utmost to retard them, may well be believed; but, their prestige having once departed from them, they resembled that magician who, having forfeited the charm, could no longer lay the spirits he had raised. For the French Guards in those memorable days disobeyed orders, broke open their barracks, and, marched through the capital crying, "Vive le Tiers État! We are the soldiers of the nation."
After this defection of the army, the Royalists found nothing wiser to do than the dismissal and exile of Necker. Lafayette's message to him was: "If you are dismissed, thirty thousand Parisians will bring you back to Versailles." Round the news-shops—whence poured a very flood of papers and pamphlets—in the cafés and public places, crowds of men formed and dispersed and formed again, who all at once flashed into lightning-like action at the cry "To arms, to arms!" uttered by the young Camille Desmoulins, whom we might call the Gallic cock of the Revolution. It was then that the people in a sublime rage battered down the massive doors of the Bastile, and with tears of joy gave liberty to its prisoners; it was then that the National Assembly, kindling with the passion of humanity, abolished in one night—the sacred night of the 4th of August—the legalised wrongs of centuries. "Let those titles be brought to us," cried one representative, "which are an outrage to delicacy, an insult to humanity, titles which force men to harness themselves to carts like beasts of burden! Let those charters be brought to us in virtue of which men have passed long nights in beating the pools so that their frogs might not trouble the slumbers of a voluptuous seigneur!" A torrent of generous emotion swept over the assembled deputies: nobles, priests, dignitaries of the law and municipalities, all parties seemed carried away on that irresistible current. The feudal system with all its iniquitous rights was abolished in fewer hours than it had lasted centuries.
The Declaration of the Rights of Man was the first reconstructive act of the National Assembly, which declared the following principles to be the basis of the new Government. Men are born, and always continue, free and equal in rights. All sovereignty emanates from the nation, and should be wielded for its welfare. The will of the people makes the laws and enforces them by public authority. The voting of taxes belongs to the nation as a whole. Illegal arrests and depositions without trial by jury are abolished. All citizens, without distinction, are eligible for public offices. The natural, civil, and religious liberty of men, and their absolute independence of all authority save that of the law, forbid any inquiries into their opinions, speeches, and writings, as long as they do not disturb order, or interfere with the rights of others.
This Declaration of Rights was adopted on the 26th of August, and its principles were to be embodied in the Constitution which it was the main business of this Assembly to frame.
A combination of three men, by no means united amongst themselves, dominated the Revolution at this the first stage of its progress: Necker—the popular minister, at one moment idolized of the people, and within a few months after his triumphal return to Paris forced to leave it secretly with his wife, a disgraced and heartbroken man; the chivalrous Lafayette—who had won golden opinions by fighting in the American War or Independence, made Commander-General of the National Guards in 1789; and Mirabeau—another Samson, to whose colossal strength alone it seemed given to curb the unloosed forces of the Revolution; unfortunately he also had his vulnerable point, the Delilah who shore him of his strength being the Queen by whom he was bribed.
Under such guidance, while many startling yet salutary changes, impossible to enumerate here, were taking place in France; while the pusillanimous nobles fled pell-mell across the frontiers; while the vacillating King, professing adhesion to the Constitution, was secretly conspiring with foreign potentates, Madame Roland was writing to Bosc letters palpitating with hope, fear, and enthusiasm. "Who is the traitor," she cries, "who at this moment minds any business but that of the nation!"
"I believe," she says, in August 1789, "that the honest Englishman is in the right, and that we must have a small touch of civil war before we are good for anything. All those little quarrels and insurrections of the people seem to me inevitable; nor do I think it possible to rise to liberty from the midst of corruption without strong convulsions. They are the salutary crises of a serious disease. We are in want of a terrible political fever to carry off our foul humours. Go on and prosper then: let our rights be declared; let them be submitted to our consideration; and let the Constitution come afterwards."
And again, on the 4th of September, "Your kind letter brought us very bad news; we roared on hearing it, and on reading the public papers, They are going to patch us up a bad Constitution, in like manner as they garbled our faulty and incomplete Declaration of Rights. Shall I never, then, see a petition demanding the revision of the whole? Every day we see addresses of adhesion, and other things of that sort, which bespeak our infancy, and confirm our shame. It behoves you Parisians to set the example in everything; let a temperate but vigorous petition show to the Assembly that you know your rights, that you are determined to preserve them, that you are ready to defend them, and that you insist on their being acknowledged. It is not at the Palais Royal that this should be done; the united districts ought to act; but if they are not so inclined, it should be done by any set of men, provided they be in sufficient number to command respect and to lead on others by their example. I preach to as many people as I can. A surgeon and a village curate have subscribed for Brissot's journal, which we have taught them to relish; but our little country towns are too corrupt, and our peasantry too ignorant. Villefranche overflows with aristocrats, people risen from the dust, which they think they shake off by affecting the prejudice of another class. . . ."
The question which was then agitating the whole country was that of the Royal veto. By giving back into the hands of the King the power of negativing the decisions of the Assembly, the nation seemed to abdicate the power of self-government which it had only just conquered. Fierce and prolonged were the debates in the House; intense the excitement without. The districts began to assemble, as Madame Roland had advised, and to present petitions to the Commune.
But while in the Assembly members were volubly discussing the new Constitution; while the Queen at the famous banquet to the Swiss and other regiments attempted her one supreme effort at fascination; other forces were at work—forces soon to become more potent than either Throne or Assembly.
After the 14th of July, when the National Guard had been levied in the different districts of Paris, a reorganization also took place in the municipalities of the capital. Each district elected two members, so that the Town Council consisted of 120 members, who took possession of the Hotel de Ville, under the name of Representatives of the Commune of Paris. This Commune, destined to play so leading a part in the future of the Revolution, gradually increasing in number, came to be called "The Council of the Three Hundred."
Although the reform of abuses went on steadily enough, it was impossible to eradicate in a few months the rooted evils of centuries. While the new Constitution was being elaborated, the country, badly-farmed as it was, did not grow more productive than of yore, corn was as scarce, bread remained dear, and trade was naturally more than ever depressed. Madame Roland remarks in her Memoirs how at Lyons twenty thousand artisans had been in want of bread during the first winter of the Revolution. In Paris, to which the needy, the outcast, and the miserable gravitated as to a common abyss, the muffled moan of the homeless and hungry accompanied the deliberations of the legislators.
Side by side with the noble efforts of brave and earnest men, were also at work appetites and passions whose sinister power hurried on the men who appeared to be guiding the State vessel. And could it be otherwise, considering the previous national conditions? Could these men and women who had so long borne the bitterest yoke, who had been accustomed to the spectacle of the most ferocious punishments, when suddenly untrammelled, act with perfect clemency, moderation, or humanity? Had they, indeed, done so, it would have gone far to prove that the evils of slavery have been grossly exaggerated. So far, however, from the excesses of the populace—at least, in the first years of the Revolution—being a surprise to us, it should more properly be a surprise that, as a rule, they evinced as much good-feeling and tolerance as they did!
Yes, feudal privileges had been abolished and good laws passed, but the populace of Paris was as hungry as before—if possible, a good deal hungrier; and so it came to pass that a formidable body of women marched to Versailles on that memorable 5th of October, when they appeared below the King's palace, and brought him, Marie-Antoinette, and the Dauphin triumphantly back with them to Paris.
This spontaneous bringing back by the mob of the Royal Family to the Tuileries, there to live under their own eye, was probably due to the growing suspicion of underhand plotting. But in spite of rumours, alarms, and political panics, the majority of the people of Paris, as well as of the Representatives, were monarchical; and had the King given his sincere adhesion to the reconstruction of the Government, there are many indications that the final crash of the Throne might have been averted. If we are to believe Camille Desmoulins, there were not a score of Republicans in France at the first meeting of the States-General. However, it seems useless to speculate on the might-have-beens of history. Madame Roland herself never entertained any illusions. Very early she perceived the interests of the Royalist and popular party to be diametrically opposed to each other, and in the summer of 1789 she wrote with her unflinching judgment: "You busy yourselves about a municipality and you suffer heads to escape which are about to conjure up new horrors. You are nothing but children; your enthusiasm is a momentary blaze; and if the National Assembly do not bring two illustrious heads to a formal trial, or if some generous Decrees do not strike them off, you will all go to the Devil together."
If there is a fierce ring in these words, she, on another occasion, says: "I weep over the blood that has been spilt; one cannot be too chary of that of human beings. . . ." But, terrified at the dangers which menace the new-born freedom of her country, she adds the warning: "The philosopher shuts his eyes to the errors or weaknesses of private men; but even to his father he should show no mercy where the public weal is at stake."
The burning missives addressed by Madame Roland to Bosc and other political friends were widely circulated; the greater portion of them, without the author's name, found their way into the public press. They chiefly appeared in the Patriote Français, edited by Brissot, then one of the leading members of the Commune of Paris. As yet personally unacquainted with the Rolands, he had, attracted by the articles in the New Encyclopædia, been for some time in correspondence with them.
Brissot de Warville—afterwards the leader of the Girondins—was born at Chartres in 1754. A disciple of Plutarch and Rousseau, he had gravitated to Paris, and, by a strange coincidence, had been fellow clerk with Robespierre in a notary's office. A rapid and discursive writer, who could dash off a political treatise as others would a letter, he was preoccupied from the beginning of his career with questions of public interest, to the detriment of his own. Perpetually flitting from France to Switzerland, from Switzerland to England, from England to America, he had had better opportunities than most of the French patriots of studying the workings of different systems of government, so as to be able to institute a comparison between them. "The English Constitution, which I had studied on the spot," says Brissot in his Memoirs, seemed to me, in spite of its defects, well adapted to serve as a model to societies desirous of changing their system." Republican at heart, Brissot was no advocate for the Republic in the early days of the Revolution; for he believed in a gradual transition from the old order to the new, and wished that on its completion the Constitution should be given a fair trial by the nation.
Madame Roland, who first made his personal acquaintance in the winter of 1791, hits off his character in these telling lines: "He knew man but not men: was meant to live with sages and to be the dupe of rogues." Such a dupe he had time after time been made, as, for example, during his literary connection with such vile offscourings of journalism as Morande, Lointon, and Latour, the editor of the Courrier de l'Europe. This facility of being hoodwinked by designing men afterwards furnished a fatal instrument of attack to his political opponents. "What a pleasant intriguer is that man," says Madame Roland, "who never considers himself nor his family, who is as incapable as he is averse to occupy himself with his private interests, and who is no more ashamed of poverty than afraid of death." This disinterestedness of character kept him in a state of chronic impecuniosity, in spite of his great facility as a writer. Brissot composed whole chapters of those works hurled like thunderbolts from the Jove-like hand of Mirabeau; he attempted to form an International College in London, with the object of establishing a bond of union between the literary and scientific men of Europe, and, in such works as the Theory of Criminal Laws, he advocated the mitigation of punishments; but never did he reap any reward from his many well-intentioned efforts. One reward only, and that worthy his humane character, was awarded him. Into his hands, to his immortal honour be it said, the people gave the keys of the Bastile. Thenceforth Brissot's best energies were spent in disseminating his political principles through the Patriote Français.
In the meantime signs and portents did not bode speedy subsidence of the high-wrought waves of political passion. The French people resembled a captive who, after languishing a life-time in the clammy darkness of a dungeon, is too suddenly liberated, and, dazed with the plenitude of light and air, staggers as one intoxicated. Violent reprisals for the past, conspiracies and rumours of conspiracies, pangs of hunger and want, drove the artisans in towns, the peasants in the country, to deeds of arson and bloodshed.
Woe to the Seigneurs who had so unmercifully drained the tillers of the soil; woe to the Tax-farmers who had sent the labourers to the galley and to the hangman for defrauding the revenue of some pennyworths of salt; woe to the Regraters who bad greedily stored up vast quantities of grain to sell it at famine prices to the starving poor. The hour of retribution had struck. In the livid smoke of burning châteaux and flaming mansions, the Eumenides seemed to pursue the territorial lords as they fled in disguise across the frontier from an infuriated peasantry.
The moderate Constitutionalists, shocked at these excesses, concocted a new martial law, which they hoped would serve as a dyke wherewith to stem the steadily-rising tide of the Revolution, as vainly, however, as he who should bid the roaring sea turn its flow.