Madame Roland: A Biographical Study

by Ida M. Tarbell

Upon Roland the effect of the atrocities of September, and the consciousness of his own powerlessness, was terrible. His health was undermined; he could not eat; his skin became yellow; he did not sleep; his step was feeble, but his activity was feverish; he worked night and day. Having a chance to become a member of the new legislative body, the Convention to meet September 21st, he sent in his resignation as Minister of the Interior. The resignation raised a cry from the Gironde, and hosts of anxious patriots urged him to remain.

In the session of September 29th, the question came up in the Convention of inviting Roland, and those of his colleagues who had resigned with him, to remain in office. His enemies did not lose the opportunity to attack him. Danton even went so far as to say: “If you invite him, invite Madame Roland too; everybody knows that he has not been alone in his department.”

This discussion, and the discovery that his election as deputy would be illegal, persuaded Roland to withdraw his resignation. He announced his decision in an address which was an unmistakable arraignment of the Commune and the Mountain, an announcement that the Minister of the Interior, in remaining in office, remained as their enemy. He abandoned in this same address an important point of his old policy. Formerly it had been to Paris that he had appealed. She alone had the energy, the fire, the daring to act. The rest of the country was apathetic, passionless; but now he says Paris has done all that is necessary. She must retire, “must be reduced to her eighty-third portion of influence; a more extensive influence would excite fears, and nothing would be more harmful to Paris than the discontent or suspicion of the departments—no representations, however numerous, should acquire an ascendency over the Convention.”

At that particular moment no policy could have been more antagonistic to the Parisian populace. They were “saving the country.” None but a traitor would oppose their efforts. Roland not only declared that they must cease their work; he called for an armed force drawn from all the departments and stationed about Paris to prevent the city from interfering with the free action of the Convention. The suspicion which before the 10th of August he had applied to the constitutional party he now turned upon the party which had produced that day; the measure he had proposed to prevent the treason of the Court, he now proposed as a guard against the excesses of the patriots.

He ran a Bureau of Public Opinion, which scattered thousands of documents filled with the eloquent and vague teachings of the Gironde schools. He urged the pastors to stop singing the Domine Salvum fac Regnum, and to translate their services into French; he discoursed upon how and when the word citizen should be used, advised a national costume, suggested that scenes from the classics be regularly reproduced in public to stir to patriotism, that fêtes celebrating every possible anniversary be instituted; but chiefly he defended himself against the charges of his antagonists, extolling his own impeccability and the exactness of his accounts. No sadder reading ever was printed than the campaign of words Roland carried on during the four months he struggled against the Mountain. Fearless, sincere, honest, disinterested as he was, he was still so pitifully inadequate to the situation, so ridiculously subjective in his methods, that irritation at his impotence is forgotten in the compassion it awakens.

While Roland carried on his Bureau of Public Opinion and defended his character, Buzot, in the Convention, fought the Mountain more openly and more bitterly. He had no excuse whatever for the excesses of September; no veil to draw over the first twenty-four hours, no patience, no thought of compromise with Robespierre and Danton, the leaders of the Commune. To his mind they were murderers pure and simple, and the country was not worth saving, if it could not be saved without them. In Roland’s case there is always the feeling that if the Commune had regarded him as necessary, obeyed his directions, let him run his Public Opinion Office to suit himself, and ceased maligning his character, he would have condoned their massacre as one of the unhappy but necessary means of insuring the Revolution; that if these “misled brothers,” as he called them, had recognized their mistake, he would have opened his arms to them. Never so with Buzot. Sensitive, idealistic, indifferent to public applause, from the first he took a violent and pronounced position against the Mountain, and refused to compromise with them. It was not hatred alone of the excesses. It was sympathy with Madame Roland, who had revolted against the Revolution. From the day at Evreux, when he received a letter from her, telling of her disgust and disillusion, and setting up a new cause,—the purification of the country of agitators and rioters,—Buzot’s ideas on the policy of Terror changed. When he came up to the Convention he immediately made a violent attack on Robespierre, declared that the Mountain was the most dangerous foe of the country, that Paris was usurping the power of France, and he never ceased his war.

The measure which Madame Roland had suggested a few months before to protect Paris, the patriots, and the Assembly against the aristocrats, he now proposed to thwart the activity of Paris and the Commune,—a guard drawn from all the departments for the defence of the Convention. Naturally, this drew upon him the hatred of the sections and leaders, and he was accounted in the Convention, from the 1st of October, the avowed opponent of the Terrorists.

Nothing intimidated him. He followed up the proposition for a guard by a demand for a decree against those who provoked to murder and assassination. Systematically he refused to believe in the sincerity of Robespierre and Danton,—they were usurpers aiming at dictatorship. When in March they sought to organize a revolutionary tribunal, Buzot, furious and trembling, declared to the Convention that he was weary of despotism. He signalled the abuses that were made all over France by the revolutionary bodies, and violently attacked members of the Jacobin society and of the Mountain, denouncing them as infamous wretches, as assassins of the country. It was not only murder of which he accused them,—it was corruption. “Sudden and scandalous fortunes” were noted among the Terrorists in the Convention,—and he demanded that each deputy give the condition and origin of his fortune.

In all these measures Buzot was in harmony with Roland, and he fought the minister’s cause in the Convention so far as possible. Indeed, it came to be a sort of personal resentment he showed when Roland was attacked in the body, and once he went so far that they cried out to him, “It is not you we are talking about.” It was a lover’s jealousy against anything which harmed his lady.

But while attacking the Terrorists Buzot was obliged to prove his patriotism, to show that he was a republican, and a hater of the monarchy. He did it by radical measures. While insisting on an armed force to protect the Convention, he demanded the perpetual banishment of the émigrés, and their death if they set foot in France. A few weeks later he demanded that whosoever should propose the re-establishment of royalty in France, under whatsoever denomination, should be punished by death; afterwards he asked the banishment of all the Bourbons, not excepting Philippe of Orleans, then sitting in the Convention.