Madame Roland: A Biographical Study

by Ida M. Tarbell

A map was brought out and they traced the natural boundaries of the new State. The Vosges, the Jura, the Loire, and a vast plain between mountains and river divide France. The plain they would take for a camp; the river and mountains could be easily defended. If this position was lost, there was a second boundary; on the east, the Doubs, the Ain, the Rhone; on the west, the Vienne, the Dordogne; in the centre, the rocks and rivers of Limoges. Farther still was Auvergne, the mountains of Velay, the Cévennes, the Alps, Toulon. “And if all these points were forced, Corsica remained,—Corsica where Genovese and French had not been able to naturalize tyranny.”

As they traced the boundaries, they devised plans for fortifications and for mobilizing the army, but they concluded their council by the decision that a final effort must be made to save Paris. There must be another revolt if possible; the King must be deposed and a convention called which would give France entire a republic. Barbaroux was ready with a plan to help bring this about and he left them, promising to bring a battalion and two pieces of cannon from Marseilles.

They understood that it was an insurrection that he meant to prepare, but they did not hesitate. All the violence, excess, passion, fear of Paris must be excited this time; there must not be another 20th of June; the stick must come out of the wheel now or never; and indifferent to the possibility that the passion they proposed to use might assert its right to help rule if it helped create, confident in the sufficiency of their theory and of themselves, they awaited the promised insurrection.

But not all of their friends were so serene. Several members of the party had begun to realize the force of the popular fury they had been arousing. They began to feel nervous at the prospect in Paris of the horde of Marseillais Barbaroux had called. The bloodthirstiness of the Cordeliers clubs began to revolt them. They were forced to admit that Marat’s journal was more influential than their own. They saw, too, a threatening thing—hitherto the insurrectionary element had been more or less chaotic, it was now well organized and it had at its head a man whom they feared, Danton. What if the mob should refuse to retire after the overthrow of the King? Would anarchy be an improvement on monarchy? Would a sans-culotte be a more enlightened administrator than an aristocrat?

Vergniaud, Guadet, and Gensonné tried to frighten Louis XVI. into recalling the ministers by telling him how formidable the threatened insurrection appeared to them to be, and by assuring him that it might be avoided by restoring the Girondins. Brissot in the Assembly denounced “the faction of regicides, which wishes to create a dictator and establish a republic.” He declared that men who were working to establish a republic on the debris of the constitution were worthy to be “smitten by the sword of the law.” If the King was guilty he should not be deposed in haste, but a commission should be appointed to investigate the affair thoroughly. Pétion, who, as mayor, had aided in bringing about the 20th of June, became frightened, and counselled calm.

But this sudden change could effect nothing now. It was too late for the Girondins to do anything but join with the Jacobins, making a pretence to leadership, although already feeling it slipping from them.

Towards the end of July the allied force summoned France to lay down her arms. Suspicion was at its height. Excitement and disorder were increased by the arrival of the Marseillais on July 30th. Either the allies would reach Paris and save the Court, or Paris must lay hands on the Court and go out and subdue the allies. There was no certainty of which it would be. At heart every faction was fearful. The King, the Court, Lafayette, the allies, the émigrés, the Feuillants, Girondins, Jacobins, Cordeliers, faubourgs, all hesitated. Something was coming. What was it? There is no period of the Revolution of such awful tension as this,—the months between the fall of the Gironde ministry and the 10th of August.

In this exciting period it was the party of insurrection which organized most thoroughly and most intelligently. The leaders who had taken this organization upon themselves were Barbaroux, Danton, Camille Desmoulins, Santerre. They worked through municipal organizations, which, instituted since the Revolution, were turbulent, impetuous, fierce; these were the forty-eight sections into which Paris had been divided, and in nearly all of which the officials were sympathizers with insurrectionary methods of getting what they wanted. Under the influence of the cry the Country is in danger, Paris must act, the sections had aroused the people within their limits. During the first days of August, frequent reunions were held in the Place de la Bastille, at which the most alarming rumors of the treachery of the King and the approach of the enemy were circulated. These sections sent deputations to the Assembly with incendiary addresses. They patrolled the Tuileries lest the executive power escape, they said in unintentional irony. They fraternized with the Marseillais, over whom the enthusiasm in revolutionary circles was constant. They swore repeatedly in their gatherings to save the country.

By the 9th of August, the populace was in a tumult of alarm and of exaltation. They were persuaded that they were the providence of France, and they believed every man who did not join them was a traitor. It had taken a long time to work up the sections of Paris to the united effort which Madame Roland had demanded from them in 1789, but it was done at last, and they were as convinced of the falsity of everybody but themselves, and of their own call to save the country, as ever Madame Roland herself had been.

The 9th of August the ferment was perfect, and the order was given for sounding the tocsin. At that moment the sections decided that three commissioners should be appointed in each quarter of Paris to unite with the Commune, with full powers to devise prompt means of saving the country. The insurrectionary force thus had a legal representation. This representation received at the Hôtel de Ville by the regular municipal council, on evening of August 9th, had before morning superseded it, and was the governing force of Paris. It was a transfer of power, probably with the acquiescence of the legal municipality, glad to escape from the turmoil of things. The new body, to be known as the Commune, was composed of men almost without exception unknown outside of their neighborhoods, and there only for agitation and violence.