Madame Roland: A Biographical Study

by Ida M. Tarbell

The prisons of Paris were at that time terribly overcrowded and poorly cared for. It was the custom to confine people together without any regard to their character or lives. “On the same straw, and behind the same bars,” writes an inmate, “the Duchesse de Grammont and a handkerchief thief, Madame Roland and a wretch of the streets, a sister and a habitué of Salpétrière. The quarrelling and the obscenity were often terrible. But from the time of her arrival the chamber of Madame Roland became an asylum of peace in the bosom of this hell. If she descended into the court, her simple presence restored good order, and the unhappy women, on whom no known power had longer any influence, were restrained by the fear of displeasing her. She gave money to the most needy, and to all counsel, consolation, and hope.”

Over many of the prisoners she exercised a kind of spell. “I experienced every day a new charm in listening to her,” says Comte Beugnot, a fellow-prisoner who, rare thing, escaped to write his memoirs; “less from what she said than from the magic of her manner.” “We were all attentive about her in a kind of stupefied admiration,” declares Rioffe.

The next day after her arrival she was questioned for the first time; two days later she underwent a second examination. She had gone into the tribunal in her usual serene way. She came back deeply moved, her eyes wet. The interrogation was indeed most trying. The questions were so couched that in answering them honestly she condemned herself. Did she not entertain Brissot, Barbaroux, Buzot, Pétion, in conference? She must admit it, and explain the “conference” as she would, the Revolutionary tribunal used her admission as a confession of a criminal relation. A letter written to a person, whom she knew but slightly, and who had tried to secure a reading of her letters to the Convention, was used as evidence against her. It was useless to declare that she simply tried through this correspondent to reach the ear of the authorities and to obtain news of her friends. Her friends have been guillotined as traitors to the country, or are in open rebellion at this moment, conspiring for the destruction of the Republic. This person, if he were a patriot, would not have been in communication with them. If she were loyal, she would not want news of them. Let her try to explain and they accuse her of evasion. Roland’s office for creating public opinion was brought up. Was she not the directress of this pretended Bureau of Public Opinion, whose end was evidently to attack the doctrines in their purest source and to bring about the destruction of the Republic by sowing disorder? It was useless to explain the tame and harmless nature of this department of Roland’s work—a department established by public decree; for they accused her of outraging truth when she did, and told her that everybody knew that the correspondence carried on by the perfidious minister had for its principal object to bring the departments to Paris and to spread calumnies against the faithful representatives of the people. They asked her the whereabouts of Roland, and when she refused to tell they informed her that she was in rebellion against the law.

It was evident, indeed, that whatever she might say was useless. She was the friend of the Gironde, and the last of the race must be exterminated just as royalist and émigré had been. The world was being made over, and all who objected to the transformation and wished to fight for another order must be put out of the way. There was not room enough in France any longer for people of different ways of looking at things.

The night after her second interrogation, Madame Roland wrote a defence to read before the tribunal, in which she indignantly denied the accusations against her friends, and declared herself honored to perish for her fidelity to them. The defence was in her haughtiest, most uncompromising style, and showed her at the very end as resolute, as proud, as triumphant, as ever. But this defence was written in the heat of indignation at her examination, and for the hearing of the judges she despised. Away from her persecutors, many times during the days which followed, her strength failed and her fellow-prisoners remarked, almost with awe, that she had been weeping. The woman who served her told them: “Before you she collects all her strength, but in her chamber she remains often hours at a time, leaning against the window, weeping.”

On the 7th of November, the witnesses against Madame Roland appeared. There were three of them;—her faithful bonne, for thirteen years in her service, and who during her imprisonment had dared every danger to be useful to her, a governess of Eudora’s, and a domestic. The weight of their testimony was simply that the Girondins had frequented the house.

That night Madame Roland’s lawyer, a courageous young man, Chauveau-Lagarde by name, who was ambitious to defend her, came to consult with her. She listened calmly to him and discussed several points of her defence. When he rose to go she drew a ring from her finger and, without a word, gave it to him. The young man divined the farewell. “Madame,” he cried, “we shall see each other to-morrow after the sentence.”

“To-morrow I shall not be alive. I know the fate which awaits me. Your counsels are dear to me, but they might be fatal to you. They would ruin you without saving me. Let me never know the sorrow of causing the death of a good man. Do not come to the court, I shall disown you, but accept the only token my gratitude can offer. To-morrow I shall exist no more.”

The next day, November 8th, was her trial. When she came out from her cell to await for her summons to the court, Comte Beugnot joined her. “She was clad carefully in white muslin, trimmed with blonde and fastened by a girdle of black velvet.” He says: “Her face seemed to me more animated than usual. Its color was exquisite and she had a smile on her lips. With one hand she held up the train of her gown; the other she had abandoned to a crowd of prisoners who pressed near to kiss it. Those who understood the fate which awaited her sobbed about her and commended her to God.... Madame responded to all with affectionate kindness. She did not promise to return, she did not say she was going to her death, but her last words to them were touching counsels. She begged them to have peace, courage, hope, to practise those virtues which are fitting for misfortune. An old jailer, called Fontenay, whose good heart had resisted the practice of his cruel trade for thirty years, came to open the gate for her, weeping. I did my errand with her in the passage. She answered me in a few words and in a firm tone. She had commenced a sentence when two jailers from the interior called her to the tribunal. At this cry, terrible for another than her, she stopped and, pressing my hand, said: ‘Good-by, sir, let us make peace, it is time.’ Raising her eyes, she saw that I was struggling violently to keep back my tears. She seemed moved and added but two words, ‘Have courage.’”

The accusation waited her. It was a charge of having “wickedly and designedly participated in a conspiracy against the unity and indivisibility of the Republic, against the liberty and surety of the French people, by collecting at her home the principal leaders of this conspiracy, and carrying on a correspondence with them tending to facilitate their murderous projects.” She was not allowed to read her defence, and the judgment was pronounced at once. She was convicted of being one of the authors, or accomplices, in a “horrible conspiracy against the unity and indivisibility of the Republic, the liberty and surety of the French people,” and was sentenced to be punished by death.