While the new Commune was settling itself at the Hôtel de Ville, the populace it represented was in motion. The force with which the Court and constitutional party attempted to control the movement was insufficient, and in part unreliable. In a few hours the leaders of the opposing force had been disposed; Mandat, the commander of the National Guards, had been murdered; Pétion had been “chained by ribbons to his wife’s side”; Louis XVI. and his family had taken refuge in the Assembly; the Swiss guards, who had attempted to defend the château, had been ordered by the King to retire to their barracks, and had been murdered as they went; the château had been invaded.

The mob filled not only the Tuileries, but the Manège where the Assembly sat. That body, composed the 10th of August of Girondins and Jacobins alone, the constitutionals absenting themselves, found itself under the pressure of a new force,—the populace. They had worked for fifty days to arouse it. They had allowed it to organize itself. They had permitted it to do the work of the day. But what were they going to do with it now? Could they use it? Was there not a possibility that it may use them? In any case, the objects for which the insurrection had been prepared must be attained and the suspension of Louis XVI. was voted; the Gironde ministers, Roland, Servan, and Clavière, were returned, Danton, Monge, and Lebrun being added to them.

Madame Roland’s policy had been carried out to the letter; the united sections had acted; the King was out of the way; the patriots were in power.

IX
DISILLUSION

Madame Roland’s plan had carried. Since the beginning of the Revolution she had urged it. In 1789 when she called for “two illustrious heads,” for “the united sections and not the Palais Royal”; throughout 1790 in her demands for “blood, since there is nothing else to whip you and make you go”; in her incessant preaching of civil war; in her remonstrances in 1791 against the seizure of Marat’s sheets, against the arrest of the turbulent, against shutting the doors of the Assembly on those who prevented it doing its work; in the Hôtel of the Interior scoffing at Roland’s weakness in believing in the sincerity of Louis XVI.; in urging Servan to present his plan for a camp of twenty thousand soldiers around Paris without the King’s knowledge; in writing the letter to the King and in pushing Roland to present it to the Assembly; in encouraging Barbaroux in his preparations for the 10th of August,—she had preached the necessity and the wholesomeness of insurrection.

Throughout this period there is not a word to show that she hesitated about the wisdom of her demand. She was convinced, and never wavered. It was her conviction which held Roland. It was her inspiration that fired the Gironde. Now that the force that she had evoked was organized, logically she must unite with it.

Roland began his ministry consistently enough. Within twelve hours after his appointment he had changed every one in his bureaux suspected of sympathy with the constitution. He wrote immediately to the departments describing the Revolution and sending copies of “all the laws and all the pieces relative to the great discoveries of the 10th of August,” and lest the people should not hear of them, he urged the curés and officials to read them aloud whenever they could secure a gathering of people.

Everywhere in the departments he upheld the Jacobin party. Thus at Lyons where the directory of Rhone-et-Sâone had been continually at war with the municipality because of its moderation, the former body was deposed and the latter put into power with the compliment that in all cases it had maintained peace and tranquillity in spite of the fanaticism of the enemies of the Revolution. Chalier, who came to Paris to represent the municipality,—Chalier, who believed that calm could only be obtained in Lyons by filling the streets with “impure blood” and who led in the horrible massacres of the city,—was, through Roland’s influence, sent home “with honors.”

Never was Roland’s energy greater. He worked twenty hours out of twenty-four, and even his four hours of repose were often interrupted. By the 20th of August he was able to present the Assembly with a report on the condition of France. In all his work he was logically in harmony with the Second Revolution.

But Roland soon found himself hindered in his activity by an important part of the insurrectionary force which had produced the 10th of August,—the Commune of Paris. The commissioners who had been sent to the Town Hall the night of the 9th, with orders from their sections to devise means to save the country, had refused to go away; large numbers of violent Jacobins had joined the body, among them Robespierre and Marat. The regular municipality had disappeared.