“What did Mesdemoiselles say to you?” was the general query.
I told them what had passed, and, if it had been possible, they would have crowned me with laurels. “That was right! That is what I call brave and firm; that was just the thing to say; your true republican answer was what it should have been!” was the approving comment on my action.
I repeated for my friends’ benefit every word my father had said: “The Republic was marvellous; we were to have complete liberty and no authority.” Doubtless, and especially now, in the beginning of things, we were not to be impertinent to our governesses, but we should very soon be able to make them feel that, although younger and less clever than they, the Republic considered us their equals!
What discussions, what plans, what different ways of understanding Government there were! “I would do this! I would act thus!” we said. We each of us wanted so many different things, that it was agreed at last that we, the initiated, the Frondeuses, should each make out a programme, which should be read in recess next day, and that which seemed to us the best form of government should be decided upon by vote. Our young minds were filled with the current words of the day.
The uniting of “abilities” was decidedly quite insufficient as a reform; on that point everyone agreed; everybody must vote, men, women, and especially schoolgirls. We had conceived in our minds a foreshadowing of true universal suffrage, and later we were firmly convinced that we had invented it.
The opening of national workshops pleased my father greatly. He wrote to me that at last the people were to be happy; that one hundred thousand citizens were fed by the State and worked for it. He thought at that time, with many others, that Louis Blanc was secretly at the head of the founding and organizing of the national workshops, and his confidence in them grew thereby.
“All other nations admire us, and all will later imitate us,” added my father at the end of his long letter. “The Republic is to arm every Frenchman, so that all shall be prepared to join in delivering other nations.”
My father came to see us again in March. Alas! he seemed already very uneasy. The national assembly was full of reactionists. The Montagne had no authority. True, the establishing of the Republic had taken everyone by surprise. Nothing was ready; certain reforms had been pushed through, certain measures had been too hurried, but the feelings of all the republicans were so noble, so proud, so disinterested, there was such a belief among them in right, in justice, in the divine voice of the people, that it was better not to be disquieted with their indecision, nor to be too hard on mistakes already committed.
In my father’s opinion, the worst of it was the fact that the whole world had its eyes upon us, and that the dream of a Republic and universal fraternity could be realised only by the Republic of France giving definitely, and at once, the example she owed to the world.
My father had just been elected Mayor of Blérancourt. His friends and disciples would never have allowed another to hold power there, however small that power might be, nor that he should not be able to possess the possibility of realising all that his enthusiasm and generosity promised for the Republic.