Madame Roland: A Biographical Study

by Ida M. Tarbell

In the spring and summer of 1791, which the Rolands spent at the Hôtel Britannique, they formed many relations which lasted throughout the Revolution. In this number was a member of the Constitutional Assembly, François-Nicolas-Léonard Buzot, a young man thirty-one years of age, coming from Evreux, in Normandy. Buzot had had the typical Gironde education, had been inspired by the Gironde heroes, and had adopted their theories.

Like Manon Phlipon at Paris, Vergniaud at Bordeaux, Barbaroux at Marseilles, Charlotte Corday at Caen, Buzot had lived an intensely sentimental life, nourishing himself on dreams of noble deeds and relations; like them, he had become devoted to a theory of complete regeneration; and like them, he had proudly flung himself into the Revolution, aspiring, inexperienced, impassioned, and confident.

Son of a member of the court of Evreux, Buzot became a lawyer in that town, and took an active interest with the liberal and enlightened part of the community in the political struggles of the Revolution. When the notables were called together in 1787, he was elected one of them. He aided in naming the deputies to the States-General, in preparing the petition which the Third Estate sent to that body, and later was elected a deputy. But his real political cares began in the Constituent Assembly, where he sat with the extreme Left. His attitude towards the confiscation of the property of the clergy is a specimen of his radicalism at this period. “In my judgment,” he declared, “ecclesiastical property belongs to the nation,” and this was at a moment when the right of the clergy to hold property had not been seriously questioned.

When the Rolands came up to Paris in the spring of 1791, they found Buzot allied with that part of the Assembly most sympathetic to them and he supported, during the time they spent in the city, the measures which they advocated.

He lived near the Rolands, and soon became a constant visitor at the house. His wife, an unattractive woman of no special intellectual cast, was nevertheless amiable and sincere and the four fell into the habit of visiting back and forth and of often going in company to call on Pétion and Brissot.

Madame Roland was more and more attracted by Buzot’s character as she watched him in the little circle. He not only held the same theories as she, but he developed them with ardor and a sort of penetrating and persuasive eloquence which stirred her sympathetic, oratory-loving nature. His courage was endless, and it was combined with a pride and indifference to popular opinion, which harmonized with her notion that the ideal was to be kept in sight rather than the practical means of working towards it. His suspicion of others, even of some of their associates, based as it was on sentiments of patriotism, struck her as an evidence of unusual insight.

Buzot had less of that gay versatility which annoyed her in many of her circle, and which seemed to her inconsistent with the serious condition of public affairs. His nature was grave and he looked at life with a passionate earnestness which gave a permanent shade of melancholy to his conduct and his thoughts. In affairs of great importance he became tragic in his solemn concern. In lighter matters he was rather sober and reflective. It was an attitude towards life which appealed deeply to Madame Roland.

The gentleness of Buzot’s character, the purity of his life, his susceptibility to sentiment, the strength of his feelings, his love for nature, his habit of revery, all touched her imagination and caused her to select him from the circle at the Hôtel Britannique as one possessing an especially just and sympathetic nature.

When she left Paris, in the middle of September, 1791, she found the parting with Buzot and his wife most trying. She was more deeply attached to them than she knew. But if the two families were to be separated, they were not to lose sight of each other. A correspondence was arranged between them, which soon fell quite into the hands of Madame Roland and Buzot, as the correspondence had done before between the Rolands and other of their friends. Almost nothing remains of the letters exchanged between them from the middle of September, 1791, when she returned to Villefranche, and September, 1792, when Buzot went back to Paris, a member of the Convention from Evreux, where he had been acting as president of the civil court.

But it is not necessary to have the letters to form a clear idea of what they would be. Letters had always been a means of sentimental expansion for Madame Roland. She wrote, as she felt, invariably in the eloquent and glowing phrase which her emotion awakened; now with pathos and longing, frequently with the real grace and playfulness which her more spontaneous and natural moods caused. Her letters were invariably deeply personal. It was her own life and feelings which permeated them, and it was the sentiments, the interests, the tastes of her correspondent, which she sought to draw out and to which she responded. An intimate and sympathetic correspondence of this sort, even if the pretext for it and the present topic of it is public affairs, as it was in this case, soon takes a large part in a life. Close exchange of thought and sentiment, complete and satisfactory, is, perhaps, the finest and truest, as it is the rarest, experience possible between a man and a woman. When once realized, it becomes infinitely precious. Madame Roland and Buzot poured out to each other all their ambitions and dreams, their joys and their sorrows, sure of perfect understanding. At this time the thoughts which filled their minds were one, their emotions were one; both relied more and more upon the correspondence for stimulus.