Madame Roland: A Biographical Study

by Ida M. Tarbell

But now she saw an insurrection as a bald fact. Danton was a positive, living incarnation of her doctrine. Instead of rhapsodizing over the “divine right of insurrection,” he organized the slums into brigades; instead of talking about Utopia, he gave the populace pikes and showed them how to use them. His policy was one of action. It was a fearful bloody policy, but it was definite and practical, and a logical result of what Madame Roland had been preaching.

The revolt she experienced against Danton’s brutality made her unwilling that the insurrectionary force should be longer recognized. She suddenly became conservative, as the radical who has gotten what he wants always must. She was jealous, too, for her party. They were the patriots, and they must be the ruling element in the new government. It would be a shame to share their power with so terrible a Hydra. It was but a little time before Roland under her influence was at cross-purposes with Danton in the Council. Roland was destined to run athwart a more relentless and savage enemy than Danton could ever be,—Marat, l’Ami du Peuple; that Marat the destruction of whose journal by the “satellites of Lafayette” Madame Roland had complained of but a year ago. The most violent and uncontrolled type of the Revolutionary fury, Marat had won his following by his daring l’Ami du Peuple, where in turn he had bombarded every personality of the Revolution who seemed to him to favor anything but absolute equality, who worked to preserve any vestige of the old régime, or who hesitated at any extreme of terrorism. In the spring of 1792, the “Brissotine faction” had been his target. His complaint against it was the making of the war. Roland he had practically ignored, for until now Roland had been the defender of Marat’s methods.

The 11th of August Marat had had his people carry off from the national printing office four presses,—his due, he claimed, for those that the old régime had confiscated. It was a bit of lawlessness that Roland felt he should rebuke. It was a first point against the minister. Soon after the Department of the Interior received a large amount of money for printing useful matter. Marat considered his productions of the highest importance to the country. He asked for fifteen thousand livres. Roland replied wisely that it was too large a sum for him to give without knowledge of the object to which it was to be put, but that if Marat would send him his manuscripts he would submit them to a council to see if they were suitable to be published at the expense of the nation. But this was questioning the purity of Marat’s patriotism, submitting to scrutiny the spokesman of the people, and Marat was angry. He felt, as Roland had since the beginning of the Revolution, that the right to cry out against all that he suspected, and to voice all the terrors that swarmed in his head, was unlimited and divine.

Thus Roland had antagonized the Commune, Danton, and Marat, before the September massacres, but he had done nothing to show the public that he would not support their policy. On the second day of the massacres, however, acting on the advice of Madame Roland, he put himself in open conflict with them.

It was on the second day of September that the riot began. Revolted by the barbarity of the slaughter, stung by the insult offered them in a raid on their hôtel, half-conscious, too, that they must do something or their power would slip from them, they determined on the 3d, that Roland should protest to the Assembly against the massacre. But to protest was to put himself in antagonism with the Commune, with Robespierre, Marat, Danton. It was to make himself forever a suspect, to take his life in his hand. But that was immaterial to Roland and to his wife. To die was part of the Gironde programme, and they were all of them serenely indifferent to death if they could only serve the public by dying. Roland wrote a letter to the Assembly, which is an admirable specimen of the way in which he applied theories to situations which needed arms and soldiers—a letter of platitude and generalities. He called attention to the danger of disorganization becoming a habit; explained where power legally belonged, and what the duties of the people were in circumstances like those they then faced. As for the massacre, he said: “Yesterday was a day over whose events it is perhaps necessary to draw a veil. I know that the people, terrible in vengeance, showed a kind of justice. They do not seize as victims all who fall in their way. They take those whom they believe to have been too long spared by the law, and whom they are persuaded in the peril of the moment should be sacrificed without delay. But I know that it is easy for agitators and traitors to abuse this effervescence, and that it must be stopped. I know that we owe to all France the declaration that the executive power was unable to foresee and prevent these excesses. I know that it is the duty of the authorities to put a stop to them or to consider themselves crushed. I know, further, that this declaration exposes me to the rage of certain agitators. Very well, let them take my life. I desire to save it only to use it for liberty, for equality.”

These were bold words considering the situation. They were an open defiance to the Mountain. They showed that the Minister of the Interior, hitherto the enemy of the party of Order, had put himself at the head of that party; that he had suddenly determined that he was going to snuff out the candle he had gone to so much pains to light. He did not consider it a serious task. It was only a question of appealing to the people. “The docile people at the voice of their legislators will soon feel that they must honor their own work and obey their representatives.”

The next day, September 4th, Roland wrote to the commander general of the National Guard, Santerre, to employ all the forces that the law gave him to prevent that either persons or property be violated. He sent him a copy of the law and declared that he threw the responsibility of all future disorder on Santerre. It was fully two days after this however, before the massacre was stopped.

Before the end the revolt of the Rolands was complete and terrible. They, with the Gironde, were, indeed, very much in the position of keepers of wild beasts, who, to clear their gardens of troublesome visitors, let loose the animals. The intruders are driven out, but when they would whistle in their beasts they find themselves obliged to flee or to be torn in pieces in turn. “We are under the knife of Robespierre and Marat,” Madame Roland wrote on the 5th of September, and a few days later:

“Marat posts every day the most frightful denunciations against the Assembly and the Council. You will see both sacrificed. You will believe that is possible only when you see it done, and then you will groan in vain over it. My friend Danton directs everything, Robespierre is his mannikin, Marat holds his torch and his knife; this fierce tribune reigns and we are only waiting to become its victims. If you knew the frightful details of this affair,—women brutally violated before being torn to pieces by these tigers, intestines cut off and worn as ribbons, bleeding human flesh eaten.... You know my enthusiasm for the Revolution. Well, I am ashamed of it. It is stained by these wretches. It is become hideous. It is debasing to remain in office.”

She had begun to experience one of the saddest disillusions of life,—the loss of faith in her own undertaking, to see that the thing she had worked to create was a monster, that it must be throttled, that it was too horrible to live.