Madame Roland: A Biographical Study

by Ida M. Tarbell

Madame Roland was convinced of the truth of all these rumors, just as her opponents were convinced that she and her husband meant anarchy and violence by their patriotic and determined support of the people and the Revolution. In every letter to Bancal, since June 22d,—she had been writing him constantly,—she repeated her distrust. In her judgment, it was her duty to report very alarming signs. Her two principles, at this, moment, were “security is the tomb of liberty,” “indulgence towards men in authority tempts them to despotism.”

Throughout the summer and fall of 1790, the rumors of counter-revolution, accusation, denials, suspicion, terror, similar to what Madame Roland was attempting to spread among her friends, agitated Lyons; and the preparations for the elections of the year were made in savage excitement. Roland was again a candidate for a position in the municipality and from day to day was more detested. Madame Roland’s name was everywhere associated with his. “They write me from Lyons,” she says, “that at the mention of my name the aristocrats writhe as those possessed of devils are said to do when holy water is sprinkled on them.”

Roland was elected a member of the municipal government in spite of the machinations of the aristocrats, the power of whom had been greatly weakened by the discovery in November of an extensive royalist plot. There was no doubt of the plot this time, and the reaction in favor of the Revolution was general.

They left Le Clos after Roland’s election to establish themselves at Lyons, which they had made up their minds not to abandon until after its complete regeneration. So serious were the affairs of the city that the new municipality soon decided to send representatives to Paris to claim from the National Assembly the payment of the debt that the ancient régime had made her take upon herself. Roland was one of the deputies chosen to go. When he went up on this mission his wife accompanied him.

The opinions on the work of the Assembly which Madame Roland carried up to Paris were not friendly. She had watched its work all through the year with critical keenness. All its actions had been tested by her pure republican standards, and wherever they fell short had been sharply condemned. She had absolutely no sympathy with delays, with compromises, with tentative measures, and she was as aggressively suspicious of the patriotism of the members as she was of the sincerity of the aristocrats. The condition of the finances troubled her. She could see no excuse for a delay in giving the country an exact statement of the public accounts. The press had not enough liberty to please her. “A people is not free,” she declared, “and cannot become so, unless each one has the means of uncovering perfidious designs, of revealing the abuses of talent as well as of authority, of exposing the opinions of everybody, of weighing the laws in the scales of universal reason. What does it matter if one is abused, providing one is innocent and always ready to prove it? This kind of war on virtue seems to me excellent; perhaps custom and security do nothing for virtue but take away its energy. It must be attacked to be strong, and it is danger which renders it sublime.”

The manner in which the National Assembly did its work inspired her contempt. It was stupid, mere patch-work. “It jumps perpetually from one thing to another,” she complained, “and is behind with the things of the first importance without our knowing why.”

On account of this feebleness of the Assembly, she insisted that it must be watched; that addresses should be made to it by the clubs; that the bons esprits should unite and sketch the objects which it was suitable for the legislature to consider, to the exclusion of everything else. She failed to see that it was largely just this interference with the Assembly which was preventing its doing its work; that it was because the patriots in their zeal did not mind their own business, but encumbered the sittings with demands of the most varied character, threatened the body with disaster if it did not hear them, sent delegations on errands, now of private and selfish, now of large import, that the continuity she demanded was wanting.

They reached Paris towards the end of February, 1791, and installed themselves at the Hôtel Britannique, in the Rue Guénégaud, opposite the Hôtel des Monnaies. Here she was within easy reach of all her old neighbors, and whenever she went out on the street which opened on the quay, she could see her old home. She had not been in Paris for five years. In her intimate circle great changes had taken place. Her father had died in the rude winter of 1787–88; her uncle Bimont, the good curé of Vincennes, and the Curé Roland, whom they loved so well, who made the trip in Switzerland with them, and who had welcomed the Revolution as they did, were both dead. There was left only “the débris of a family, which in the last ten years had become almost extinct.” She took the greatest pleasure in going over the places where her early years had been passed, and the tears of tenderness she shed in looking on these familiar scenes delighted her. They proved that she had not allowed ambition, cares, and petty passions to dry up the springs of her soul.

Her visits to her old friends were scarcely finished before she began to devote herself to public affairs. The Assembly was sitting only a little distance from her hotel, in the Manège of the Tuileries, now destroyed, but then running along the north side of the garden, parallel with the Rue de Rivoli, and thither she went frequently, but her first impression of the body saddened and irritated her. All the opinions she had formed at Le Clos were only intensified by the nearer view.

Two years and a half afterwards, when she recalled these visits, she noted an impression which explains unquestionably something of her harshness towards the Assembly. “I saw, with secret resentment, that if reason, honesty, principle, controlled the Left, there were advantages on the Right, that I would have gladly turned over to the good cause because of their great effect on an assembly. I mean that easy and noble elocution, that nicety of expression, that polish in the tones of the voice,—if I am allowed to express myself so,—which a superior education and familiarity with good society give.”