Marie Antoinette and the Downfall of Royalty

by Imbert de Saint-Amand

Roland took the portfolio of the Interior, March 24, 1792, and installed himself and his wife in the ministerial residence, then occupying the site afterwards built on by the Théâtre Italien. This very beautiful and luxurious mansion had formerly been the controller's office, and both Calonne and Necker had lived in it. Madame Roland found no small pleasure in queening it under the gilded canopies of the old régime. It was not at all disagreeable to her to give dinners in the sumptuous banqueting hall erected by the elegant Calonne, nor did the austere admirer of the ancients set the black broth of Sparta before her guests.

Once arrived at power, was this great enemy of nobility and prescription simple, and easy of approach? Not in the least. There is often more arrogance displayed by parvenus of both sexes than by those who are aristocrats by birth. Madame Roland was extremely proud of her new dignity, and at once resolved, as she tells us in her Memoirs, neither to make nor receive visits. Her attitude and manners while at the ministry were those of an Asiatic sovereign. She secluded herself, permitting only a small number of privileged courtiers to enter her presence. Under the old régime, the wives of ministers and ambassadors, dukes and peers, had never felicitated themselves on "cultivating their private tastes" to the detriment of the proprieties and obligations of good breeding. But the Revolution had changed all that. French politeness was now mere old-fashioned rubbish. At the Ministry of the Interior, the etiquette whose "severity" is vaunted by Madame Roland was more rigorous than that of the court of Versailles, and it was easier to see the wife of the King than the wife of the minister. With what hauteur the latter expresses herself concerning "the self-seeking crowds who throng about those who hold great places"! Assuredly, the Queen had never spoken of her subjects in this tone of disdainful patronage.

MADAME ROLAND

Madame Roland, who "was tired of fools," incommoded herself for nobody. The agreeable side of power was all she wanted. Suppressing the receptions which annoyed her, she gave none but men's dinners, where she perorated and paraded, and where, being the only woman present, she had no rivals to fear. Self-sufficiency and insufficiency are, for the most part, what fall to the share of parvenus. What would have been said in the old days of a noble dame who did the honors of a ministry so strangely, who never invited another woman to dinner, and admitted no one to her presence but a little clique of flatterers? Everybody would have accused such a lady as lacking in good breeding. But to Madame Roland all that she did was right in her own eyes. How could a woman so superior be expected to submit to the tyranny of polite usages? Was not the first of all despotisms the very one to be shaken off? and ought not a person so proud of the originality of her genius feel bound before all things, as she said herself, "to preserve her own mode of being"? Madame Roland did at the ministry just what she did from her cradle to her grave: she posed.

"To listen to Madame Roland," said Count Beugnot in his witty and curious Memoirs, "you would have thought she had imbibed the passion for liberty from reading the great writers of antiquity.... Cato the Elder was her hero, and it was probably out of respect for this hero that she showed a lack of courtesy towards her husband. She was unwilling to see that there was as much difference between Roland's wife and the Roman minister as there was between the Brutus of the Revolutionary Tribunal and him of the Capitol. Self-love was the means by which this woman had been elevated to the point where we have seen her; she was incessantly actuated by it, and does not dissimulate the fact." It was she, and not her husband, who was Minister of the Interior. If the aristocrats treated Roland as a minister sans-culottes, it might have been added that the breeches which he lacked were worn by his spouse. Out of all the rooms composing a vast apartment, she had chosen for her own daily use the smallest that could be converted into a study, and kept her books and writing-table in it. It was from this boudoir, half literary, half political, that she conducted the ministry according to her own whims. "It often happened," says she, "that friends or colleagues desiring to speak confidentially with the minister, instead of going to his own room, where he was surrounded by his clerks and the public, came to mine and begged me to have him called thither. Thus I found myself in the stream of affairs without either intrigue or idle curiosity. Roland took pleasure in talking these subjects over with me afterwards with that confidence which has always reigned between us, and which has brought our knowledge and our opinions into community."

On this head, M. Dauban makes the very just remark: "A community in which there is no equilibrium of forces, becomes a sort of omnipotence for the strongest." The omnipotence in this case was not on the side of the beard, but of Madame Roland. The wife wrote, thought, and acted for her husband. It was she who drew up his circulars and reports to the National Assembly. "My husband," she tells us, "had nothing to lose in passing through my hands. Roland, without me, would have been none the less a good administrator; with me, he has made more sensation, because I imparted to my writings that mixture of force and sweetness, that authority of reason and charm of sentiment, which perhaps belongs only to a sensitive woman, endowed with sound understanding." And the "virtuous" Roland took pride in the magnificent phrases which he naïvely believed to be the expression of his own genius, when his wife had saved him not merely the trouble of writing, but even of thinking. "He often ended," she says, "by persuading himself that he had really been in a good vein when he had written such or such a passage which proceeded from my pen."

Madame Roland had at her orders a man of letters, salaried by the Ministry of the Interior, who was the official defender of the minister and his policy. "It had been felt," she tells us, "that it was needful to counteract the influence of the court, the aristocracy, the civil list and their journals, by popular instructions to which great publicity should be given. A journal posted up in public places seemed to be the proper thing, and a wise and enlightened man had to be found for its editor." This wise and enlightened man was Louvet, the author of the Amours de Faublas. He was the writer whom Madame Roland esteemed most capable of instructing and of moralizing the masses. "Men of letters and persons of taste," she says, "know his charming romances, in which the graces of imagination are allied to lightness of style, a philosophical tone, and the salt of criticism. He has proved that his skilful hand could alternately shake the bells of folly, hold the burin of history, and launch the thunderbolts of eloquence. Courageous as a lion, simple as a child, a sensible man, a good citizen, a vigorous writer, he could make Catiline tremble from the tribune, dine with the Graces, and sup with Bachaumont."

Madame Roland admired the author of Faublas, now become the editor-in-chief of the Sentinelle; but among her intimates there was a man whom she admired much more. This was Buzot. With what complacency she draws in her Memoirs the portrait of this man "of an elevated character, a haughty spirit, and a vehement courage, sensitive, ardent, melancholy; an impassioned lover of nature, nourishing his imagination with all the charms she has to offer, and his soul with the principles of the most touching philosophy; he seems formed to enjoy and to procure domestic happiness; he could forget the universe in the sweetness of private virtues practised with a heart worthy of his own." Needless to say that in Madame Roland's thought, this heart worthy of the heart of Buzot was her own. "He is susceptible," says she, "of the tenderest affections" (always for Madame Roland), "capable of sublime flights and the most generous resolutions." Into what ecstasies she falls over the noble face and elegant figure of this handsome man, in whose costume "reigns that care, cleanliness, and decency which manifest the spirit of order, taste, the sentiment of decorum, and the respect of an honest man for the public and himself"! How she contrasts with men who think patriotism consists in "swearing, drinking, and dressing like porters, in order to fraternize with their equals," this attractive, this irresistible Buzot, who "professes the morality of Socrates and the politeness of Scipio"!