Her joy was short. The tumult which threatened in Paris was promptly quieted by Lafayette, at the head of the National Guards. The citizens were exhorted to calm, to vigilance, to confidence in the Assembly. Madame Roland writhed under this attitude. “Is this the place to be tranquil and contented?” she cried. She and her friends, convinced that the measures to prevent a riot and restore order were directed especially at themselves, gathered at Robespierre’s, where they considered ways of driving the people to an action of which the Assembly was incapable.
In the midst of their activity the King was brought back, and to their dismay they saw that he would in all probability be kept in place without public trial. Their alarm was intense. Without the King they were convinced all would be well. Regeneration was certain if royalty could be dispensed with. Nothing else was preventing the adoption of a Republic. He was “worse than a stick in a wheel,” declared Roland to Champagneux.
In the mêlée of opinion which followed the King’s return, Madame Roland’s position was well defined: “To put the King back on the throne,” she wrote, “is an absurdity; to declare him incapable is to be obliged, according to the constitution, to name a regent; to name a regent would confirm the vices of the constitution at a moment when one can and ought to correct them. The most just measure would be to try him; but the country is incapable of anything so lofty as that. There is nothing to do but suspend and guard him while searching those who aided in his flight; to go on acting without royal consent and, in order to put more regularity and activity into the distribution and exercise of power, name a temporary President. In this way it would be easy to show Paris and the departments that a king is not necessary and that the machine can go on well enough without him.” This programme she was willing to “preach from the roofs,” but it was not adopted. The King was restored.
The Republic which she and her friends dreamed of at this moment and did not hesitate to announce, was not in the public mind, and when they insisted upon it, they were insisting upon an individual opinion of which the country at large had no conception, and for which it had no sympathy. By her own confession both the Assembly and the Jacobins “went into convulsions” at the mere pronunciation of the name Republic. There were only two societies which, after the flight of the King, dared declare themselves tyrannicides,—the Cordeliers and a group of private individuals. At the Cercle Social they did discuss whether it was suitable or not to conserve kings, but at the Jacobins the very name Republican was hissed. Nevertheless they worked valiantly to spread their ideas. Robert published a pamphlet on the “Advantages of the flight of the King and the necessity of a new government or Republic.” Condorcet published a discussion “Whether a king is necessary to the conservation of liberty”; and Brissot, at the Jacobins, made a hit with a speech in which he showed that the cry that the King was inviolable and could not be tried was false; that even if inviolability were admitted it did not apply in this case; and that according to the constitution the King could and ought to be tried.
Thomas Paine was then in Paris, believing as Dumont says, that he had made the American Revolution and was called upon to make another in France. With Condorcet, Brissot, and a few others as sympathizers, Paine formed a republican society. Their first concern was to publish a journal, the prospectus of which was posted by Paine on the morning of the first of July. In it he declared that the King by his flight is “free of us as we are of him. He has no longer any authority; we no longer owe him obedience; we know him now only as an individual in the crowd, as M. Louis de Bourbon”; and he concluded his harangue by the announcement that “A society of republicans had decided to publish in separate sheets a work entitled The Republican. Its object is to enlighten people’s minds on this republicanism which is calumniated because it is not understood; on the uselessness, the vices, and the abuses of the royalty that prejudice persists in defending, although they may be known.” This poster made a great noise in the Assembly, where it was denounced as “worthy of all the rigor of the law.” According to Madame Roland, it was only by flattering the Assembly’s love for the monarchy and by abusing republicanism and its partisans, that it was possible to convince the body that however ridiculous the idea might be, still it was necessary to leave it free course.
Only two numbers of The Republican appeared, says Madame Roland, in her Memoirs; only one, says Moncure D. Conway, in his life of Paine. As a matter of fact, there were at least four issues, that number being in the collection of Revolutionary pamphlets in the Bibliothèque Nationale.
It was soon evident that the new cause would not be supported. Nevertheless, the new word was launched. The effect of the injudicious, impractical action of Paine, Brissot, and their friends, Robespierre described a few months later when he had broken with the Brissotins. “The mere word Republic caused division among the patriots, and gave the enemies of liberty the evidence they sought to prove that there existed in France a party which conspired against the monarchy and the constitution; they hastened to impute to this motive the firmness with which we defended in the Constituent Assembly the rights of national sovereignty against the monster of inviolability. It is by this word that they drove away the majority of the Constituent Assembly; it is this word which was the signal for that massacre of peaceable citizens whose whole crime was exercising legally the right of petition, consecrated by the constitutional laws. At this word the true friends of liberty were travestied as factious by perverse or ignorant citizens; and the Revolution put back perhaps a half a century. It was in those critical times that Brissot came to the society of the Friends of the Constitution, where he had almost never appeared, to propose changes in the form of government, when the simplest rules of prudence would have forbidden us to present the idea to the Constituent Assembly.”
As soon as the Rolands and their friends saw that the demand for the Republic was not welcomed by the people, they turned their efforts towards securing a trial for Louis XVI.
It seemed to be the only thing for which they were strong enough. To do this they were willing to unite with even demagogues, agitators, and with the worst elements of the people. They had only their voice and their pen, explains Madame Roland; if a popular movement came to their aid they welcomed it with pleasure without looking after, or disturbing themselves about, its origin. Beside they could not believe that a party made up of the idle and the violent, and led by demagogues, could be formidable. It was a force to be used when needed, and crushed when the result desired had been obtained. Even when the union of the Brissotins with the populace had produced so serious a riot as that of July 17, the “Massacre of the Champ-de-Mars,” as the radicals called it, Madame Roland did not change her views. She refused to see that the disorder was provoked in any degree by the people, and attributed the fault entirely to the Assembly and Lafayette.
The letters they wrote to their friends after the riot of the Champ-de-Mars are full of alarms and of suspicions. “In less than twenty-four hours,” Roland wrote to Champagneux, “there have been about three hundred imprisoned at the Abbaye and they are kept there in secret. People are taken up in the night. There has just passed on the Pont Neuf [it will be remembered that the Rolands were in the Rue Guénégaud and could easily see] three loaded wagons escorted by many National Guards. They say Marat is there, and different club members. Desmoulins is said to have fled; they are after Brissot. The patriotic journalists are in bad repute, and frightful charges against them are being spread. The cross of Saint Louis multiplies incredibly. The aristocrats are more sly and insolent than ever. It was said yesterday in the Luxembourg that this legislature could not endure more than six weeks or two months; that there would be war with the foreigners in this interval; that the King and the ministers would come out ahead; that they would displace everybody, annul everything; and that they would re-establish things on the old basis, but assuredly not less despotic than before.... There is nothing but treason, lies, poisons. Those who live in hotels, or who are served by caterers, are afraid. A great number sleep away from home. There were hundreds of deaths at the Champ-de-Mars; husbands killed their wives; relatives, relatives; friends, friends. Saint Bartholomew, the dragonades, offered nothing more horrible.”