Madame Roland: A Biographical Study

by Ida M. Tarbell

All of the papers of Madame Roland, which had been confided to Bosc, were given by him to Eudora, and she seems to have experienced a certain resentment towards her mother when she found that she had told posterity so frankly that her only child lacked in depth of sentiment and keenness of intellect. This feeling only intensified her admiration for her father, and when Lamartine’s History of the Girondins appeared, she was deeply indignant at the way in which he belittled M. Roland in order to make the figure of Madame Roland more brilliant. It was with the hope that Lamartine’s influence could be counteracted, that she urged a friend, a grand-nephew of Bosc, M. P. Faugère by name, to take possession of all the family papers, and prepare a work which would justify the memory of Roland. M. Faugère was already busy with a new edition of the Memoirs, but he promised Madame Champagneux to do the work on M. Roland as soon as that was finished. The Memoirs he completed, and his edition is by far the best published; but though he began the study of Roland he died before finishing it. The family papers remained in the possession of Madame Faugère, who, in 1888, turned over the most important of them to the Bibliothèque Nationale.

Madame Champagneux lived to be nearly seventy-seven years old, dying in Paris July 19, 1858. The last years of her life were clouded by the death of one of her daughters, a loss from which she is said never fully to have recovered.

Of the three left behind, the fate of Buzot was saddest. At the moment that he escaped to Evreux, the northwest departments felt that the Convention had been coerced into the decree against the Gironde and there was a general revolt against the tyranny of Paris. Buzot and his friends who had escaped decided, on sounding this feeling, that it was sufficiently wide-spread and profound to justify them in undertaking a campaign against the Convention and in favor of federalism. Buzot began by speaking in the cathedral at Evreux and here he was joined by Pétion, Barbaroux, and Louvet. The agitators were not long unmolested. The Convention turned its fiercest anathemas against the “traitors,” as it called them, and the Revolutionary authorities of the northwest were ordered to crush them. At first they fled into Brittany, evidently hoping to find a vessel there for America, but disappointed in this, they made their way to Gascogne, where one of their number had friends.

While Buzot was escaping, the patriotic saviours of their country were exhausting themselves in fantastic efforts to show their hatred of his “treason.” His house was demolished amid civic rejoicings. His effigy was burned and riddled with bullets in the process. On the walls near his residence could be still read a few years ago an inscription written in the excitement.

“Buzot le scélérat trahit la liberté;

Pour ce crime infâme, il sera decapité.”

This effectual and dignified way of dealing with a political opponent reached its climax on December 30, 1793, when Evreux held a fête of rejoicing over the recapture of Toulon. The cathedral in which, six months before, Buzot had spoken had become a “temple of reason and philosophy.” On the altars were the busts of Marat, Lepelletier, and Brutus, where once were the forms of Virgin and Child and peaceable saint. The latter had been transferred to the Place de la Fédération, where, together with effigies of Buzot and other local celebrities who had refused to believe and vote as the authorities desired, they were burned.

In the mean time Buzot had escaped to Saint Émilion, where, for some three months, he and his friends were concealed. They busied themselves, when their places of hiding permitted it, with writing their memoirs. Buzot discussed his political career and made a violent, often vindictive, attack on his opponents. There is no direct avowal, in his work, of his love for Madame Roland, but one feels throughout the despairing, passionate passages the struggling of a great emotion, stifled, but not dead. It is said that when the news of Madame Roland’s death reached Buzot, his friends thought he had gone mad, and it was many days before the violence of his grief was calmed.

At the beginning of 1794 the refugees were obliged to change asylums, and went to the house of a hair-dresser in Saint Émilion, where they stayed until June of that year. At that time, however, the Revolutionary authorities of Bordeaux decided that they were not doing their whole duty in saving the country, and began a house-to-house search throughout the department. Buzot, with his friends, Pétion and Barbaroux, were forced to fly. After days of fatigue and fear and hunger, the end came. Barbaroux, thinking he was discovered, attempted to shoot himself, but succeeded only in wounding himself, and was captured.

Just how death came to Buzot no one knows; for when his body was found it lay beside that of Pétion in a wheat-field, half-eaten by wolves.