Madame Roland: A Biographical Study

by Ida M. Tarbell

When it came to the question of the death of Louis XVI., Buzot wished that the King be heard and not condemned immediately; when he came to vote, it was for his death with delay and a referendum that he decided.

But no amount of violence against the royalists could now prove him a patriot. That which made a patriot in the fall of 1792 was an altogether different thing from what made one in the spring of 1792. Buzot, with the Gironde, was suspected. It was not enough that he opposed the old régime and approved a Republic, he must approve the vengeance of Terrorism and support the Terrorists. But he could not do it. He was revolted by the awful excess, and he underwent a physical repulsion which was almost feminine and made any union with the party impossible, whatever the demands of politics were.

As a matter of fact, the Mountain feared Buzot but little. His irritability, haughtiness, lack of humor, made him of small importance as a leader in the Gironde. He could not move the Convention as Vergniaud; he had none of the wire-pulling skill of Brissot; he was important chiefly as the spokesman of Madame Roland’s measures. Buzot’s intimate relations to the Rolands seem to have been well understood. The contemptuous way in which Marat treated him shows this. Marat called him frère tranquille Buzot; and sneered at him for “declaiming in a ridiculous tone”; said the frère tranquille had a pathos glacial; called him le pédant Buzot; the corypheus of the Rolands.

In this chaotic and desperate struggle neither Roland nor Buzot were more active than Madame Roland. She had become a public factor by Marat’s accusations, and by Danton’s sneers in the Convention. She kept her place. At home she was as active as ever in assisting her husband. Many of the official papers of this period, which have been preserved, are in her hand, or have been annotated by her. Important circulars and reports she frequently prepared, and Roland trusted her implicitly in such work. She was his adviser and helper in every particular of the official work, and at the same time saw many people who were essential to them. This social activity brought down Marat’s abuse. She was “Penelope Roland” for him, and in one number of the journal under the head “Le Trantran de la Penelope Roland,” he wrote: “The woman Roland has a very simple means of recruiting. Does a deputy need her husband for affairs of the department, Roland pretends a multiplicity of engagements and begs to put him off until after the Assembly,—‘Come and take supper with us, citizen and deputy, we will talk of your business afterwards.’ The woman Roland cajoles the guests one after the other, even en portant la main sous le menton de ses favoris, redoubles attention for the new-comer, who soon joins the clique.”

Marat professes to have this from a deputy who had visited her. It is abusive and false, but it is well to remember that a year before Madame Roland had not hesitated to believe and repeat equally ridiculous stories of Marie Antoinette. Indeed, Madame Roland had the same place in the minds of the patriots of the fall of 1792, that the Queen had a year before in the minds of the Gironde. “We have destroyed royalty,” says Père Duchesne, “and in its place we have raised a tyranny still more odious. The tender other half of the virtuous Roland has France in leading-strings to-day, as once the Pompadours and the Du Barrys. She receives every evening at the hour of the bats in the same place where Antoinette plotted a new Saint Bartholomew with the Austrian committee. Like the former Queen, Madame Coco (the name Père Duchesne usually gives Madame Roland), stretched on a sofa, surrounded by her wits, reasons blindly on war, politics, supplies. It is in this gambling-den that all the announcements posted up are manufactured.”

In December she was even obliged to appear before the Convention. Roland had been accused of being in correspondence with certain eminent émigrés then in England, and to be plotting with them the re-establishment of the King. One Viard was said to be the go-between, and to have had a meeting with Madame Roland. Roland was summoned to answer the charge and, having responded, demanded that his wife be heard. Her appearance made a sensation in the Convention, and she cleared herself so well of the charges that she was loudly applauded, and was accorded the honors of the session. The spectators alone were silent and Marat remarked, “See how still the people are; they are wiser than we.”

At the beginning of the year 1793, the danger of mob violence was added to the incessant slanders by Hébert and Marat. “Every day,” says Champagneux, who was then employed by the minister, “a new danger appeared. It seemed as if each night would be the last of her life, as if an army of assassins would profit by the darkness to come and murder her as well as her husband. The most sinister threats came from all sides. She was urged not to sleep at the Hôtel of the Interior.”

At first the alarm was so great on her account that she yielded to her friends’ wishes, but she hated the idea of flight. One evening the danger was such that every one insisted on her disguising herself and leaving the hotel. She consented, but the wig they brought did not fit, and in a burst of impatience she flung the costume, wig and all, into the corner and declared she was ashamed of herself; that if any one wanted to assassinate her, he might do it there; that she ought to give an example of firmness and she would. And from that day she never left the hotel until Roland resigned on January 22d.

The little apartment in the Rue de la Harpe was waiting them. To leave the Hôtel of the Interior was no trial to them privately. No one could have been more indifferent to considerations of position and surroundings. Their convictions of their own right-doing made them superior to all influences which affect worldly and selfish natures. It is impossible for such people as the Rolands to “come down” in life. Material considerations are so external, so mere an incident, that they can go from palace to hut without giving the matter a second thought. But retirement did not mean relief. Roland’s reports which he had made to the Convention, and which he felt justly were a complete answer to the charges against him, were unnoticed. He begged the body repeatedly to examine them. He urged his ill-health and his desire to leave Paris as a reason, but no notice was taken of him. To Roland this neglect seemed insolence. He felt that he deserved honorable recognition. He craved it, and was irritated and discouraged when he did not receive it.

It was evident, too, that his retirement from office had not made his enemies forget him. They followed him as they had priests, émigrés, and nobles, and Marat repeatedly denounced him as connected with the opposition to the Mountain.