Madame Roland: A Biographical Study

by Ida M. Tarbell

They knew their Plutarch well, to be sure; but all they had drawn from him was a glibness in making fine periods and certain lofty sentiments, a species of patriotic emotionalism by which they could move and thrill men. Of practical policy for difficult and complicated situations, like the one they had been elected to face, they had not a shadow.

In courage, in audacity, in buoyancy of spirits, in eloquence, in bright visions, in purity of life, they are all that one’s imagination could paint. A more lovable and inspiring group of young men was never called together. But there was not one of them in whom contact with the world and sober reflection, had developed the common sense, the clear comprehensive judgment, the hard determination to do his best, and the simple honesty which alone make men fit for public office.

They were as blindly partisan as Madame Roland, and what Dumont said of Brissot was applicable to the Gironde as a whole: “He was one of those men in whom the party spirit was stronger than all moral, or rather he saw no moral save in his own party. No one had so much zeal of the convent as he. Dominican, he would have burned the heretics; Roman, he would not have been unworthy of following Cato and Regulus; French republican, he wished to destroy the monarchy and to reach his object did not shrink from calumny, persecution, or death on the scaffold.”

They all had the malady of the times,—suspicion. It had become a species of superstition with them. “One may laugh if he will,” said Dumont, “at these imaginary terrors, but they made the second revolution.” It was useless to argue with them, to give them proofs to call upon their good-will; they were suspicious and what they imagined was as real to them as if it had actually existed. They did not need proofs, mistrust never does. They were possessed by a sentiment and reason had no place.

As for their self-confidence, it was monumental. “No argument, no criticism, was listened to by them,” says Mme. de Staël. “They answered the observations of disinterested wisdom by a mocking smile. One wore himself out in reminding them of circumstances and what had led to them; if they condescended to answer, they denied the most evident facts and observations and used in opposition to them common maxims, though, to be sure, expressed eloquently.”

Feeling as they did, the only logical thing for them was to struggle to obtain power. If they were the “Providence” of France, it was their duty to get to the front. It was not for the sake of power that they made this effort. It was because they alone in their own judgment were sufficiently virtuous and enlightened to carry out the doctrines. They were “called” to preach liberty and a republic, and they went to their work in the same frame of exaltation and expectation as he goes who preaches the Kingdom of Heaven.

The only way in which they could arrive at power was by uniting with one of the two parties in the Assembly, with the constitutionalists or the Mountain, as the Radicals were termed. The former was composed of the well-to-do and the experienced men of the Assembly. It supported the King. It was the more honest and trustworthy, but it was accused of “aspiring secretly to increase the royal authority and to form two chambers.”

The Mountain was the party of the agitators and the street. It had the audacity, the violence, and the populace of the faubourgs. The talents, education, eloquence, refinement, of the Gironde were in harmony with the conservatives, but they could not believe that there was not a secret plot hidden under the patriotic pretensions of the constitutionalists. Their self-pride was irritated, too, by the aristocratic traditions, the courtly manners, and the reasonableness of the moderates. There was a subtile superiority in their wisdom, their gracious bearing, their finesse which the Girondins resented.

As for the Mountain the Girondins feared its violence, its open advocacy of bloodshed less than they did its suspicion. They wanted to be considered the purest of the patriots and they could not support the idea that there was any one who pushed farther than they in making claims for the “sovereign” and for the “divine right of insurrection.” They had not the practical sense, the experience, and the disinterestedness to judge the Mountain, to see that it was chaotic, violent, irrational. Because it called itself the representative of the poor and the suffering, they imagined that it must be virtuous, and they wished its support. They feared its opinion of them even more than they feared the skeleton in the conservative closet.

To gain its favor they were even willing to sacrifice personal dignity and delicacy. The Mountain was ragged and dirty, ill-bred and foul-mouthed, but they shared a superstition of the day that rags and dirt, little bread and a hut for a home, are signs of patriotism, and if a man is poor, therefore he must have good principles. They found the coarseness of the Mountain more endurable than the etiquette of the Court. Pétion, at his public dinners as mayor, received the Gironde. Among his guests were many “patriots” of the rudest sort, yet Condorcet, Guadet, Gensonné, Roland, laughed at Chabot when he put on a bonnet rouge and went through a series of low buffoonery, mocking the King, and applauded jests of “shocking grossness.”