Marie Antoinette and the Downfall of Royalty

by Imbert de Saint-Amand

The Gironde kept silence, or, if it spoke, it was to attribute, like Vergniaud, the massacres "to the émigrés and the satellites of Coblentz." Later on, they were horrified by the crimes, but it was when others were to profit by them. Each taken by himself, the Girondins did not hesitate to condemn the murders; but taken as a whole, they considered merely the interests of their party. Were not three of them still in the Ministerial Council? What had they to complain of, then? The September massacres are the most striking expression of what abominations the ambitious may commit or allow to be committed in order to maintain themselves a few weeks longer in power.

But there is a voice in the depths of conscience which neither interest nor ambition can succeed in stifling. Madame Roland could not blind herself. The odious reality appeared to her. At last she saw the yawning gulf beneath her feet, and she uttered a cry of terror. A secret voice warned her that her fate would be like that of the September victims. After the 9th of that fatal month her imagination was vividly impressed. Bloody phantoms rose before her. She wrote on that day to Bancal des Issarts: "If you knew the frightful details of these expeditions.... You know my enthusiasm for the Revolution; well, I am ashamed of it; it has become hideous. In a week ... how do I know what may happen? It is degrading to remain in office, and we are not permitted to leave Paris. We are detained so that we may be destroyed at the propitious moment."

From that time a rising anger and indignation took possession of the mind and heart of the Egeria of the Girondins, and constantly increased until the hour when she ascended the steps of the scaffold. She writes in her Memoirs, apropos of the September massacres: "All Paris witnessed these horrible scenes executed by a small number of wretches (there were but fifteen at the Abbey, at the door of which only two National Guards were stationed, in spite of the applications made to the Commune and the commandant). All Paris permitted it to go on. All Paris was accursed in my eyes, and I no longer hoped that liberty might be established among cowards, insensible to the worst outrages that could be perpetrated against nature and humanity, cold spectators of attempts which the courage of fifty armed men could have prevented with ease.... It is not the first night that astonishes me; but four days!—and inquisitive people going to see this spectacle! No, I know nothing in the annals of the most barbarous peoples which can compare with these atrocities."

What a striking lesson for those who play with anarchical passions and end by falling themselves into the snares they have laid for others! Nothing is more deserving of study than this retaliatory punishment which is found, one may say, on every page of revolutionary histories. The hour was coming when the Girondins and their heroine would repent of the means they had employed to overset the throne. This was when the same means were employed against them, when they recognized their own weapons in the wounds they received. Then, when they had no more interest in keeping silence, they sought to escape a complicity that gained them nothing. Instead of the luminous heights which in their golden dreams they had aspired to gain, they fell, crushed and overwhelmed, into a dismal gulf, full of tears and blood. How bitter then were their recriminations against men and things! It was only to virtue that the dying Brutus said: "Thou art but a name." The Girondins said it also to glory, to country, and to liberty. Those among them who did not succeed in fleeing, disavowed, denounced, and insulted each other before the revolutionary tribunal. At the Conciergerie they intoned the Marseillaise, but parodying the demagogic chant in this wise:—

Contre nous de la tyrannie[[1]]
Le couteau sanglant est levé.

Read the Memoirs of Louvet, Buzot, Barbaroux, Pétion, and Madame Roland, and you will see to what extremes of bitterness the language of deceived ambition can go. They are paroxysms of rage, howls of anger, shrieks of despair. Consider the difference between philosophy and religion! The philosophers curse, and the Christian pardons. Yes, as Edgar Quinet has said, "Louis XVI. alone speaks of forgiveness on that scaffold to which the others were to bring thoughts of vengeance and despair. And by that he seems still to reign over those who were to follow him in death with the passions and the furies of earth." Louis XVI. will be magnanimous and calm. A celestial sweetness will overspread his royal countenance. An infernal rage will distort the heart and the features of the Girondins. What pains, what tortures, in their death-struggle! Earth fails them, and they do not look to heaven. What accents of disgust and hatred when they speak of their former accomplices, now become their executioners!

"Great God!" Buzot will say, "if it is only by such men and such infamous means that republics can arise and be consolidated, there is no government more frightful on this earth nor more fatal to human happiness." He will address these insults, worthy of the imprecations of Camillus, to the city of Paris: "I say truly, that France can expect neither liberty nor happiness except from the irreparable destruction of that capital."

Barbaroux will be still more severe. His anathemas are launched not only at Paris, but at all France. "The people," he says, "do not deserve that one should become attached to them, for they are essentially ungrateful. It is the absurdest folly to try to conduct to liberty people without morals, who blaspheme God and adore Marat. These people are no more fit for a philosophic government than the lazzaroni of Naples or the cannibals of America.... Liberty, virtue, sacred rights of men, to-day you are nothing but empty names." Pétion, before dying, will write to his son this letter, which is like the testament of the Gironde: "My greatest torment will be to think that so many crimes went unpunished; vengeance is here the most sacred of duties.... My son, either the murderers of thy father and thy country will be delivered to the severities of the law and expiate their crimes upon the scaffold, or thou art under obligation to free thy country from them. They have broken all the ties of society; their crimes are of such a nature that they do not fall under ordinary rules. From such monsters every one is authorized to purge the earth."

Madame Roland will be not less vehement than Buzot, Barbaroux, and Pétion. She will address these severe but just reproaches to her friends who had not been valiant enough in their own defence: "They temporized with crime, the cowards! They were to fall in their turn, but they succumb shamefully, pitied by nobody, and with nothing to expect from posterity but utter contempt.... Rather than obey their tyrants, than descend from the bar and go out of the Assembly like a timid flock about to be branded by the butcher, why did they not do justice to themselves by falling on the monsters to annihilate them rather than be sentenced by them?" It is not her friends alone whom her anger will lash, but the sovereign people, the people once so flattered, whom she will pursue with her anathemas. "The people," she will say, "can feel nothing but the cannibal joy of seeing blood flow, in order that they may run no risk of shedding their own. That predicted time has come when, if they ask for bread, dead bodies will be given them; but their degraded nature takes pleasure in the spectacle, and the satisfied instinct of cruelty makes the dearth supportable until it becomes absolute." The Egeria of the Girondins will comprehend that all is lost, that even her blood will be sterile, and that France is condemned either to anarchy or a dictatorship. "Liberty," she will exclaim, "was not made for this corrupt nation, which leaves the bed of debauchery or the dunghill of poverty only to brutalize itself in license, and howl as it wallows in the blood streaming from scaffolds." Like the damned souls in Dante, Madame Roland will leave all hope behind, and when, a few days after Marie Antoinette, she ascends the steps of the guillotine, instead of thinking of heaven, like the Queen, she will address this sarcastic speech to the plaster statue which has replaced that of Louis XV.: "O Liberty! how they have betrayed thee!"