Marie Antoinette and the Downfall of Royalty

by Imbert de Saint-Amand

XXXVI.

MADAME ROLAND DURING THE MASSACRES.

Madame Roland's hatred was appeased. The ambitious bourgeoise throned it for the second time at the Ministry of the Interior, and the Queen groaned in captivity in the Temple tower. The Egeria of the Girondins had not felt her heart swell with a single movement of pity for Marie Antoinette. The fatal 10th of August had seemed to her a personal triumph in which her pride delighted. The parvenue enjoyed the humiliations of the daughter of the German Cæsars. Her jealous instincts feasted on the afflictions of the Queen of France and Navarre.

Lamartine, indignant at this cruelty on Madame Roland's part, has repented of the eulogies he gave her in his Histoire des Girondins. In his Cours de Littérature (Volume XIII. Conversation XXIII.), he says: "I glided over that medley of intrigue and pomposity which composed the genius, both feminine and Roman, of this woman. In so doing, I conceded more to popularity than to truth. I wanted to give a Cornelia to the Republic. As a matter of fact, I do not know what Cornelia was, that mother of the Gracchi who brought up conspirators against the Roman Senate, and trained them to sedition, that virtue of ambitious commoners. As to Madame Roland, who inflated a vulgar husband by the breath of her feminine anger against a court she found odious because it did not open to her upstart vanity, there was nothing really fine in her except her death. Her rôle had been a mere parade of true greatness of soul." What Lamartine finds fault with most of all is her hostility to the martyr Queen. He adds: "She inspired the Girondins, her intimate friends, with an implacable hatred against the Queen, already so humiliated and so menaced; she had neither respect nor pity for this victim; she points her out to the rebellious multitude. She is no longer a wife, a mother, or a Frenchwoman. She poses as Nemesis at the door of the Temple, when the Queen is groaning there over her husband, her children, and herself, between the throne and the scaffold. This ostentatious stoicism of implacability is what, in my view, kills the woman in this female demagogue."

Alas! if Madame Roland was guilty, she was to be punished cruelly. The colleague of the virtuous Roland was the organizer of the September massacres. The republican sheepfold dreamed of by the admirer of Jean-Jacques Rousseau was invaded by ferocious beasts. Human nature had never appeared under a more execrable aspect than since its so-called regeneration. Madame Roland was filled with a naïve astonishment. After having sown the wind she was utterly surprised to reap the whirlwind. What! she said to herself, my husband is minister, or, to speak with great exactness, I am the minister myself, and yet there are people in France who are dissatisfied! Ungrateful nation, why dost thou not appreciate thy happiness? Madame Roland resembled certain politicians, who, having attained to power, would willingly disembarrass themselves of those by whose aid they reached it. For the second time she had just arrived at the goal of her ambition. Who dared, then, to pollute her joy? Why did that marplot, Danton, come with his untimely massacres to destroy such brilliant projects and banish such delightful dreams? The man who, as if in derision and antithesis, allowed himself to be called the Minister of Justice, produced the effect of a monster on Madame Roland. The republic as conceived by him had not the head of a goddess, but of a Gorgon. Its eyes glittered with a sinister lustre. The sword it held was that of an assassin or a headsman.

Madame Roland was greatly astonished when, on Sunday, September 2, 1792, toward five in the evening, when the massacres had already begun, she saw two hundred men of forbidding appearance arrive at the Ministry of the Interior and ask for her husband, who was absent. Lucky for him he was; for albeit a minister, they had come to arrest him in virtue of a mandate of the Communal Council of Surveillance. Not finding Roland, the two hundred men retired. One of them, with his shirt-sleeves rolled up to his elbows, and a sabre in his hand, declaimed furiously against the treachery of ministers. A few minutes later, Danton said to Pétion: "Do you know what they have taken into their heads? If they haven't issued a decree to arrest Roland!"—"Who did that?" demanded the mayor.—"Eh! those devils of committeemen. I have taken the mandate; hold! here it is!"

What was Madame Roland doing the next day, when the worst of the massacres were going on? She gave a dinner, and allowed the Prussian, Anacharsis Clootz, who came, moreover, uninvited, to make a regular defence of these horrible murders. "The events of the day," she says in her Memoirs, "formed the subject of conversation. Clootz pretended to prove that it was an indispensable and salutary measure; he uttered a good many commonplaces about the people's rights, the justice of their vengeance, and of its utility to the welfare of the species; he talked a long while and very loudly, ate still more, and fatigued more than one listener."

And yet, revolutionary passions had not extinguished every notion of humanity and justice in Madame Roland's soul. On that very day she induced her husband to write a letter to the National Assembly concerning the massacres. But how weak and undecided is this letter, and how public opinion must have been lowered and debased when it could regard Roland as a courageous minister! In place of scathing the murderers with the energy of an honest man, he pleads extenuating circumstances in their favor. "It is in the nature of things and according to the human heart," he said in his pale missive, "that victory should lead to some excesses. The sea, agitated by a violent storm, continues to roar long after the tempest; but everything has its limits and must finally see them determined. Yesterday was a day over whose events we ought, perhaps, to draw a veil. I know that the terrible vengeance of the people carries with it a sort of justice; but how easy it is for scoundrels and traitors to abuse this effervescence, and how necessary it is to arrest it!" This language produced not the least effect. The massacres went on, and Roland remained minister; although in his letter of September 3 he had written: "I ask the privilege of resigning if the silence of the laws does not permit me to act." The virtuous Roland sat in the Council beside his colleague, the organizer of this human butchery. September 13, he addressed a letter to the Parisians in which he burnt incense to himself, bragged about his character, his actions, and his firmness, and carried his infatuation so far as to write: "I have twice accepted a burden which I felt myself able to bear." Ah! how difficult it is to renounce even a shadow of power, and of what compromises with their consciences are not ministers capable in order to retain for a few days longer the portfolios that are slipping from their hands! In the depths of his soul Roland, like his wife, had the profoundest horror of the murders and the murderers. And yet notice how he extenuates them in his letter to the Parisians: "I admired August 10; I trembled over the results of September 2; I carefully considered what the betrayed patience of the people and their justice had produced, and I did not blame a first impulse too inconsiderately; I believe that its further progress should have been prevented, and that those who were seeking to perpetuate it were deceived by their imagination or by cruel and evil-minded men. If the erring brethren recognize that they have been deceived, let them come; my arms are open to them." That was a very prompt amnesty. Already the assassins are but erring brethren, and the minister welcomes them to his arms!