The religious difficulties were inflamed by the rash and suspicious actions of the various parties, whose wisdom and diplomacy were annulled by excessive party spirit. The whole department, in fact, was racked by religious quarrels, bitter party spirit, fear of émigrés’ plots and foreign invasion, hatred of the constitution and “patriots.”
Roland had a formula for such a situation, and when the directory of Rhone-et-Loire asked him for help to restore order, he sent it to them.
“The present troubles which agitate your department at several points,” he wrote them, April 18th, “seem to have their source in the diversity of religious opinions. This diversity of opinion is the fruit of error, and the error comes from ignorance. If, then, we enlighten men, we deliver them from prejudices, and if the prejudices were destroyed, peace would reign on the earth.... It is not by force of arms that one teaches reason.... In the first place a well-organized state has only enough troops to prevent invasions, to meet force by force, and to enable all the citizens to enjoy all the benefits of their own constitution. Second, internal order should be maintained by instruction, by public opinion, and finally by the force of the National Guards.... Elected by the people, you ought to have their confidence. Your instruction ought to produce the greatest effect, and you ought to be able through confidence and reason to form and direct public opinion. These means, used energetically and wisely, are sure. Is there a rare circumstance when they are too slow? You have all the public force of your department; you can use it as it is necessary, and you ought to direct it according to the circumstances. These are your means, sirs, and you rest responsible before the nation and its representatives, before the King and your constituency, for all the disorders that you do not foresee and prevent.”
One can imagine the feelings of a board of county directors harassed by daily riots, by incessant quarrels, by threats and plots, on receiving such a letter from the minister, charged with executing the laws relative to the internal tranquillity of the State. The directory must have been composed of men singularly devoid of humor, if even in their grave situation they did not laugh at Roland’s application of instruction to the Lyons street-fights.
To a department which had asked him for troops to restore order, and secure the free circulation of grain in its territory, he responded that if it was necessary to use force they must take the National Guards, and he added: “But must I counsel this step? So soon as one employs arms to execute the laws, one not only proves that he has not known how to make himself loved, but that he will never be able to do so. A constitution which is enforced by the bayonet only, is not a constitution. Other means are necessary to attach a free people to the laws that it has made.... Instruct the administrations that you direct, and if they deviate from the observation of the rules, use that sweetness which commands so easily, that persuasion which leads to the repentance of a fault often involuntary. It is so easy for a superior administration to make itself agreeable to those that it has under its surveillance that, in fact, I believe I might say it is always the fault of the former when harmony is broken.”
And he continued this doctrinal campaign throughout his ministry. For all the riot-ridden country he had but one formula. And while the people burnt châteaux, stoned priests, pillaged storehouses, waylaid and stole grain, murdered nobles, he serenely preached how easily the difficulty could be ended by applying the dogma. And he believed it with the incomparable naïveté of the theorist. If some one called his attention to the fact that the disorders increased in spite of his preaching, he was unmoved; that was the fault of the “stick in the wheel.” He was not dissatisfied that disorder should increase. It would show the need for a new shock.
Armed with his formulas, his forty years of service, and his “virtue,” Roland could see no reason why he was not adequate to the situation, and why he should not act as he saw best. The conviction of his own sufficiency made him tactless with those who were, in his judgment, less infallible than he. He assumed a pedagogic tone, a severe mien, a stiff, patronizing air towards them. He read them lectures, posed before them as impeccable. To men of experience, used to the world and to politics, as convinced as Roland of their own sincere desire for the good of France, and of the sufficiency of their own ideas, this attitude was exasperating beyond expression.
It was not long before Roland and Servan, who was charged with the portfolio of war, began to regulate the King, “to kill him by pin-pricks,” said Dumouriez. Madame Roland was responsible, to a large extent, no doubt, for their unpatriotic and traitorous conduct. Servan was as completely under her rule as Roland, and she had cured both of them of the confidence and support they gave the King at the beginning of their ministry, and convinced them of his intention to betray the constitution and restore the old régime. To deserve their support he should, she believed, withdraw the vetoes he had put to the measures against priests and émigrés.
From the beginning of the Gironde ministry matters had steadily grown worse. In April war had been declared. It had opened badly for the French and terror and suspicion were greater than ever in Paris. Religious troubles flamed up all over the provinces, made more intense by the fear of foreign invasion. As rumors ran, the army was not doing its duty; the generals were traitors; the court party was plotting to receive the Prussians, to massacre the patriots, and to overthrow the constitution. To meet the perils which threatened, Madame Roland had two measures: the proscription of the Non-conformist priests, and a camp of twenty thousand soldiers, five from each canton of France, around Paris, to guard the city from the attack of the foreigners.
This latter plan she persuaded Servan to present to the Assembly on June 4th without the King knowing anything of his minister’s plans and without any of the Council save Clavière and Roland being in the secret. The measure was voted by the Assembly, but it made a noise in Paris. The National Guards regarded it as a reflection on their patriotism and capacity. The Feuillants raised a petition of eight thousand names (largely of women and children, sneered the patriots), protesting against the measure. At the Assembly and at the Jacobins the measure was hotly discussed; in the club it was opposed by Robespierre, now in open rupture with the Girondins, and almost daily attacked by Brissot in the Patriote français.