Madame Roland: A Biographical Study

by Ida M. Tarbell

The Commune believed that there was more need of it now than ever. The passions which had been excited to call it into being were more violently agitated than ever. The body felt, and rightly, that only the greatest vigilance would preserve what had been gained on the 10th of August; for now, as never before, the aristocratic and constitutional part of France was against the Jacobin element; now more than ever the allied powers felt that it was the business of kings to reinstate Louis XVI. The Commune understood the force against it, saw that only audacious and intrepid action would conquer it, and went to work with awful energy to “save the country.”

The tocsin was set a-ringing: the conservative printing offices were raided; passports were suspended; barriers were put up; those who had protested against recent patriotic measures were declared unfit for duty; the royal family was confined in the Temple; lists of “suspects” were made out; houses were visited at night to surprise plots, seize suspected persons, examine papers, and search for firearms; a criminal court of commissioners from the sections was chosen; the guillotine was set up in the Carrousel. So much for the interior. To meet the enemy without they seized horses and ammunition, set up stands where volunteers could be enrolled, put every able-bodied man in Paris under marching orders. All of this with a speed, a resolution, a savage sort of fury which terrified the aristocrats, inflamed the populace, rejoiced Marat, and alarmed the Assembly.

From the first Roland found himself in conflict with this new body. He was the law now, and they were called to act above all law. They had a reason, the same that he had held for many months,—the divine right of taking things into your own hands and compelling people to be regenerated according to your notion. But Roland had reached the point where all the essentials in his scheme of regeneration had been gained—the Commune had not. Suddenly he who had been the vigorous champion of revolutions for removing sticks from government wheels, found himself the “stick in the wheel.” If he demanded information of the Commune, he did not receive it. If he complained of its irregularities, he was called a traitor. If he called attention to the law, he was ignored. All through August Roland and the Commune continued to irritate and antagonize one another.

There was one man through whom they might have been reconciled,—Danton, he who, with Robespierre and Marat, formed the triumvirate of the new party of Terror. Danton represented the insurrectionary idea in the ministry and it was through him alone that Roland and the Gironde might have worked with the Commune.

But from the first Madame Roland would have nothing to do with Danton. When it was announced to her that he had been chosen to the ministry, she told her friends: “It is a great pity that the Council should be spoiled by this Danton, who has so bad a reputation.” They told her that he had been useful to the Revolution; that the people loved him; that it was no time to make enemies; that he must be used as he was. She could do nothing to keep him out, but she was not convinced of the wisdom of the choice.

He sought her at once; for after the suspension of the King, Danton never ceased to repeat that the safety of France lay in union,—in an effort of all parties against the foreign invaders. “The enemy is at our door and we rend one another. Will all our quarrels kill a Prussian?” was his incessant warning. Few days passed that he did not drop into the Hôtel of the Interior; now it was for the Council meeting, to which he came early, hunting her up in her little salon for a chat before the meeting began: again he dropped in on the days she was unaccustomed to receive, begging a cup of tea before he went to the Assembly. Fabre d’Eglantine often accompanied him. It was not a warm welcome they received. They talked to her of patriotism, and she replied in a tone of superiority and with a tinge of suspicion which was evident enough to Danton and his colleague and could not fail to irritate them. She gave them to understand that she saw through them, that she felt herself incorruptible, and that no consideration would induce her to unite with an element she suspected.

Danton soon realized her inflexibility and before the end of August he had ceased his visits. Madame Roland had refused the only mediator between Gironde and Mountain, and in so doing had lighted another interior blaze. She was too intelligent a woman for one to suppose that she did not see the danger in further disunion. Why then for the Republic’s sake, for humanity’s sake, did she not unite with him?

The only reason she gives is the physical repugnance that Danton inspired in her. She confessed that no one could have shown more zeal, a greater love of liberty, a livelier desire to come to an understanding for the sake of the public cause, than he. Certainly she had based her judgments thus far in the Revolution on such indications, but Danton was of a different nature from the men who surrounded her. A volcanic animal tremendous in passions as in energy, in intellect, in influence. She says that never did a face seem to her to show brutal passion so perfectly. Her imagination had been awakened. All her life she had been the plaything of this imagination, and every face that came under her eyes had been read, its owner’s character analyzed and his rôle in life assigned. Danton she figured poniard in hand, exciting by voice and gesture a troup of assassins more timid or less bloodthirsty than he. She could not conquer the effect of this vision and for this reason she refused his proffer of reconciliation.

Had Danton offended her by some coarse familiarity? The best reason for rejecting this explanation of her dislike is that she says nothing about it. If an unwarranted gallantry had ever occurred, we may be positive that she would not have kept it to herself. The “confessions” of her Memoirs make such an interpretation impossible; even her friend Lanthenas was not spared on this score. It is impossible to suppose that Danton would have been.

For the first time, Madame Roland found herself face to face with a man who was an embodiment of the insurrectionary spirit. Hitherto that spirit had been an ideal, a theory, an unseen but powerful force which was necessary to accomplish what she wanted. Personally she had never come in contact with it. She had idealized it as an avenging spirit, “terrible but glorious,” cruel but just, awful but divine. That this force had an end to reach, a personal ambition to satisfy, an ideal to attain, that it might come into conflict with her, she had not calculated. In her plan it was simply an avenging fire which she could use, and which, when she had had enough of it, she could snuff out.