On the whole, Madame Roland was very well off, and her life would undoubtedly have gone on thus to the end, broken after a while, perhaps, with the much desired pension; perhaps, by even the title of nobility; she then would have had the “paradise” she so much desired—“the pretty apartment in town and a bijou at Le Clos”; she might, on the other hand, have had her sad sentimental picture realized and Roland, blind, have made shoe-laces and she done needle-work, while they both shed delicious tears over Rousseau, had there not been something in the air which was about to take away all from him that had and to give it to him who had not; to make leaders of country lawyers, and doctors, and schoolmasters, and to send the diplomats and courtiers a-begging.

The French Revolution was coming, and to trace briefly how it grew in the Lyonnais and how our friends in particular regarded it and were drawn to side with it, is our next affair.

V
HOW THE ROLANDS WELCOMED THE REVOLUTION

Monsieur and Madame Roland had both, throughout their lives, been intelligent observers and critics of, as well as, to a degree, sufferers from, the financial and social causes of the French Revolution. They had both sympathized with the preliminary outbreaks of that revolution which, beginning early in the century, had recurred at intervals throughout their lives. They both had thoroughly imbibed the intellectual causes of the movement, those new ideas of Voltaire, Diderot, Helvétius, Abbé Raynal, Rousseau, which, coming after the first agitation,—there had been many a riot in Paris, in Lyons, in Rouen; the King had been warned many a time that there were still Ravaillacs; the word Révolution had been often spoken by the French of the eighteenth century before these men wrote,—had backed up the revolutionist with philosophy and logic.

Roland was but ten years old, a boy in the Lyonnais, when the war with Austria caused so much misery, and when a new levy of men and the doubling of the taxes desolated and irritated the province. Lyons was obliged to contribute two million livres at that time to aid the King. He was seventeen when, in 1751, the misery again became so terrible that riots occurred throughout France, and D’Argenson wrote: “Nothing but a near revolution is talked of on account of the bad condition of the government.” These things could not but have affected him. Indeed, the bad outlook at Lyons was one reason that he left home with the idea of making his fortune in America. As a boy, then, Roland had felt the financial errors of the French government.

He was at Rouen when, in 1756, the Seven Years’ War broke out. At that moment the annual receipts of the State were two hundred and fifty-three million livres, the expenses between three hundred and twenty and three hundred and thirty millions. That year Roland saw the people obliged to pay a twentieth of their revenue—the detested vingtième. No one was exempt, and no doubt the bill fell heavily on the manufacturing interests. This tax was in addition to the taille, which tormented the small proprietors of the country, and from which the nobles and clergy were free. In addition were the special taxes of which Roland must have felt the injury especially, both in the Lyonnais and at Rouen. These included the aides, or tax on drinks; the octroi, at the gate of every city; the salt-tax; the special duties on iron, leather, and paper; the impost on tobacco, cards, and oils; the custom duties at the frontier of every province of France, as well as at the frontier of the kingdom.

Two years later at Rouen, 1758, Roland no doubt felt the effect in his personal expenses of the result of the gift which the city, in common with all the cities, boroughs, and seignioralties of the kingdom, was obliged to pay to help on the war, and to meet which they received permission to put a tax on all drinks, on meat, hay, and wood. When one has to pay more for his wood and fire, he reflects why.

Two years later the Parlement of Rouen, in common with several others of the kingdom, flatly refused to register the royal edicts creating new taxes, declaring, with a hardihood superior even to that of the Parlement of Paris, that the system of taxation was unjust, and the people the victims of royal abuse, and suggesting audaciously a parlement of France composed of all the parlements of the kingdom. So eloquent and so free was this declaration that it was even printed and sold in Paris.

Roland’s position made him familiar with all these revolts; he heard them discussed as well as the King’s haughty, energetic reply to the deputation of the Parlement. “I am your master. I ought to punish you for the impudence of your principles. Go back to Rouen, register my decrees and declaration without further delay. I will be obeyed.”

He was touched, no doubt, by the remonstrance which the same body sent to the King in 1763: “Your people, Sire, is unhappy. Everything shows this sad fact. Your parlements, the only organs of the nation, repeat it unceasingly.... A deluge of taxes pitilessly ravages our towns and our provinces; the property, the industry, the person of citizens, all are a prey to these extraordinary imposts; poverty itself, and the charity which aids it, have become its tributaries and its victims. The farming out of the aides, whose rules attack all conditions and commerce in general, weighs on the poor in a most inhuman manner. The farming of the salt-tax presents a spectacle not less revolting.”