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
