We have no space for the details of Roland's ministry, nor the events then passing. The king had undertaken the difficult game of satisfying his enemies by slight concessions and apparent good humour; but he refused to sanction a severe decree against the clergy, which their inveterate opposition to the party in power rendered necessary in the eyes of the lovers of liberty; and another to establish a camp of 20,000 volunteers to protect the assembly and the capital, during a grand federative assembly to be held during the summer. It was projected to address a letter to the king, on this refusal, in the name of all the ministers: but they declined presenting it. Madame Roland insisted that her husband should singly remonstrate with the monarch, and he resolved on so doing. She wrote the letter. It was one calculated to irritate rather than to persuade Louis; but she liked bold measures, and Roland, once persuaded, was obstinate. The girondists wished, in fact, to bring the king to an explanation, and preferred a rupture to uncertainty. Some obstacles arising to Roland's reading his letter to the king, he sent it to him; but this was not enough; and he took a speedy occasion to read it aloud in full council, and to force the king to hear the rebukes and remonstrances it contained. Louis listened with admirable patience, and, on retiring, said he would make known his intentions. On the following day, Roland and two of his more zealous colleagues were dismissed, while Dumouriez took on himself to reform the ministry.
It was certainly a bold, and, if not beneficial, a presumptuous act in a woman thus to put herself forward during these political agitations. Madame Roland hated monarchical institutions, and her desire to subvert them in her own country partook of the vehemence with which women too usually follow up their ideas. She had always been accustomed to copy and arrange her husband's writings. At first she did this servilely: by degrees she emancipated herself from the task of being a mere copyist. The pair were agreed in views, opinions, and plans of action. There was a driness and hardness in Roland's writings that did not please her more demonstrative nature. When he became minister, they conferred together as to the spirit of any proposed writing, and then she, who could better command leisure, took up the pen. "I could not express any thing," she writes, "that regarded reason or justice, which he was not capable of realising or maintaining by his character and conduct; while I expressed better than he could whatever he had done or promised to do. Without my intervention Roland had been an equally good agent: his activity and knowledge, as well as his probity, were all his own; but he produced a greater sensation through me, since I put into his writings that mixture of energy and gentleness, of authority and persuasion, which is peculiar to a woman of a warm heart and a clear head. I wrote with delight such pieces as I thought would be useful, and I took greater pleasure in them than I should have done had I been their acknowledged author."
Of the letter itself, we may say that it is eloquent, but very ill judged, if it was meant to conciliate the king; but it was not. It was written in a spirit of contempt for Louis's conduct; of menace, if he did not pass the decrees; and of sturdy independence and republicanism as far as regarded the minister himself. It naturally alienated the monarch; but Roland and his wife were too enthusiastically attached to the cause of liberty and equality, not to glory in expressing their sentiments openly and boldly at the foot of the throne, even at the expense of loss of office. On this event they secluded themselves in private life, living in an obscure and modest abode in Rue St. Jaques. They mingled in no intrigues, while they deplored the misfortunes of their country, being persuaded that the king and his friends were about to call in foreign troops to destroy its new-born liberty.
After the events of the 10th of August, Roland was recalled to the ministry. He and his wife, both hating monarchy, could not understand why the ruins of it in France should not at once be cast aside, and a republic erected on the vacant space. Hitherto they had feared monarchical reaction; add to which many of the tumults in the preceding months had been fomented by the court party under the idea that popular outrage would cause a return to loyal feeling among the moderate party. The fear of the success of the court had made them, together with Barbaroux and Servan, consult how far it would be possible to found a republic in the south of France, if monarchy triumphed in the north. There was no fear of this now: Louis XVI. was dethroned and imprisoned; and the lovers of their country witnessed a more frightful scene than any that had yet stained its annals, when the more violent jacobins, who went by the name of the Mountain, excited the people to fury, so to maintain their own power. Marat, Robespierre, and Danton were beginning their reign of terror.
At the beginning of September, during the massacres in the prisons, madame Roland wrote to Brancal, "We are under the knife of Robespierre and Marat, These men agitate the people, and endeavour to turn them against the national assembly and the council: they have a little army, which they pay with money stolen from the Tuileries, or which is given them by Danton, who, underhand, is the chief. Would you believe that they meditated the arrest of Brissot and Roland? Had the arrest been executed, these two excellent citizens had been taken to the abbey and massacred with the rest. We are not yet secure; and, if the departments do not send a guard for the assembly and the council, both will be lost." Again she wrote, "My friend, Danton leads all; Robespierre is his puppet; Marat holds his torch and dagger: this ferocious tribune reigns, and we are his slaves until the moment when we shall become his victims. If you only knew the frightful details of what is going on. You are aware of my enthusiasm for the revolution; well, I am ashamed of it: it is deformed by monsters, and become hideous. "What may happen within a week? it is degrading to remain, but we are not allowed to quit Paris: they shut us in to murder us when occasion serves." From this moment madame Roland struggled unflinchingly to overthrow the power of the jacobins. Her ill success conducted her to the scaffold.
The moderation and opposition of the girondists rendered them hateful to the mountain, and every endeavour was made to excite the Parisians against them. They cast on Roland the stigma of being governed by his wife. When it was proposed in the national assembly to invite him to resume the ministry, Garat said, "We had better invite madame; she is the real minister." They accused her of using every feminine art to secure partisans. These were the mere calumnies of the day, powerful for her ruin, but not tarnishing her after-glory. Every impartial pen describes her as carrying her simplicity and grace into her political enthusiasm, and charming even those whom she did not convince.
Le Montey writes of her—"I met madame Roland several times in former days: her eyes, her figure, and hair were of remarkable beauty; her delicate complexion had a freshness and colour which, joined to her reserved yet ingenuous appearance, imparted a singular air of youth. She spoke, too, well, yet there was no affectation in what she said; it was merely nature carried to a great degree of perfection. Wit, good sense, propriety of expression, keen reasoning, naïve grace, all flowed without effort from her roseate lips. I saw madame Roland once again at the commencement of her husband's first ministry. She had lost nothing of her air of freshness, youth, and simplicity: her husband resembled a quaker, and she looked like his daughter. Her child flitted about her with ringlets reaching to her waist. Madame Roland spoke of public affairs only, and I perceived that my moderation inspired pity. Her mind was highly excited, but her heart remained gentle and inoffensive. Although the monarchy was not yet overthrown, she did not conceal that symptoms of anarchy began to appear, and she declared herself ready to resist them to the death. I remember the calm and resolute tone in which she declared that she was ready, if need were, to place her head on the block. I confess that the image of that charming head delivered over to the axe of the executioner made an ineffaceable impression—for party excesses had not yet accustomed us to such frightful ideas. Thus, in the sequel, the prodigious firmness of madame Roland and her heroic death did not surprise me. All was in harmony, nor was there any affectation in this celebrated woman: she had not only the strongest but the truest mind of our revolution."
Dumont writes of her—"Madame Roland had every personal attraction, joined to excellence of character and understanding. I saw many assemblies of ministers, and the principal girondists, held at her house. A woman seemed somewhat out of place among them; but she did not mingle in the discussions: she usually sat at her desk, writing letters, and appeared to be occupied by other things, while she did not lose a word. Her modest style of dress did not lessen her attractions, and, though her occupations were those of a man, she was really adorned by all the grace and exterior accomplishments of her sex. I reproach myself now that I did not perceive then the full extent of her merit; but I was rather prejudiced against female politicians; and I found in her a too great tendency to mistrust, which springs from want of knowledge of the world."
The influence of earnestness, sincerity, and clear views were great over her husband and his party. If she had, from a rooted disapprobation of royalty, urged him to any extremities with Louis, not less did she abhor anarchy, and fearlessly incite him to oppose it.
During the frightful massacres of the 2d and 3d of September Roland displayed an energy and heroism worthy of the woman who was said to be the soul of his counsels. On the 3d, while terror still reigned, he wrote to the mayor, Petion, who was in ignorance of the atrocities that were going on, and to Santerre, who remained in ignominious inaction, pressing them earnestly to come forward. He addressed a letter also to the assembly, in which he fearlessly denounced the crimes of the people; offering his own head as the sacrifice, but calling on the authorities to suppress the massacres. The assembly applauded the letter; while Marat and his partisans denounced him as a traitor, and issued an arrest against him. Danton, whose views were more systematic, intervened, and prevented an act which at that time had injured the jacobins more than the party against whom it was directed.