Brave Men and Women: Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs

by Osgood E. Fuller

The king, instead of adopting the policy recommended, dismissed his ministers. The letter was then made public through the newspapers. Few state papers have ever produced such an effect. It became a popular argument, and the people demanded the restoration of the ministry for the reasons which it contained, and for expressing which the ministry had been dismissed.

While the Girondists were supporting the ministry of their choice, they, with the king, were the object of furious attacks by the Jacobins. When the ministry was dismissed the Gironde renewed its attacks upon the monarchy, emulated the Jacobins in the severity of its assaults, and began to conspire for a federative republic, similar to the United States, which to Madame Roland was the ideal of a free government.

Madame Roland went from the palace to hired lodgings, and in the temporary fusion which followed of the revolutionists of all parties, the most eminent leaders gathered around her again. Robespierre came, but said little, for he was waiting his hour. Danton laid his lion mane in her lap, all his savagery for the moment tamed. Vergniaud, Buzot, and all the chiefs of the Gironde, gathered around this oracle of liberty. Anarchy supervened. Paris and all France were filled with riotings and murder. The king finally declared war, but battles went against France. Riot and murder increased. A mob of twenty thousand invaded the Tuileries then occupied by the royal family. It was divided into three divisions. The first was composed of armed and disciplined men, led by Santerre. The male ruffians of Paris, blood-thirsty and atrocious beyond any thing that civilization has ever produced, formed the second division. The third, most terrible of all, was composed of the lost women of Paris, led by Theroigne de Mericourt, clad in a blood-red riding dress, and armed with sword and pistol. This notorious woman had acted a prominent part in former scenes. She led the attack upon the Bastille. She led the mob which brought the king from Versailles to Paris. In the subsequent riots life and death hung upon her nod, and in one of them she met her betrayer. He begged piteously for her pardon and his life, and this was her answer, if we believe Lamartine: "My pardon!" said she, "at what price can you buy it? My innocence gone, my family lost to me, my brothers and sisters pursued in their own country by the jeers of their kindred; the maledictions of my father; my exile from my native land; my enrollment among courtesans; the blood by which my days have been and will be stained; that imperishable curse of vice linked to my name instead of that immortality of virtue which you once taught me to doubt--it is for this that you would buy my forgiveness--do you know of any price on earth sufficient to purchase it?" And he was massacred. She died forty years afterwards in a mad-house, for in the fate of the revolution, she was stripped and whipped in the streets to madness by the very women she had led.

These loathsome cohorts forced their way into the palace. They invaded the rooms of the king and queen. They struck at him with pikes, and forced upon his head the red bonnet of the Jacobins, while the most wretched of her sex encircled the queen with a living wall of vice, and loaded her with obscene execrations, charges, and epithets.

Although this outbreak has been charged to both the great political parties, it is probably nearer to truth to say that it originated spontaneously with that demoniac mob soon to rule France, and which from this time carried all political organizations with it. The Girondists, however, still retained enough of their constitutional conservatism to be the only hope which royalty could have for its preservation. The king again threw himself into their arms. Roland was reinstated in his ministry, and the palace again received his wife.

Then every revolutionary element began at once to combine against the king and the party which was thus supporting him. It was soon apparent that the king and the Girondists could neither govern the country nor save themselves if they acted together. The Gironde, from about this time, pusillanimously conceded point by point to the anarchic demands made by their enemies and the king's. Madame Roland did not join them in this, but when she saw that her husband was but a minister in name, that he and his associates were powerless to punish murder and prevent anarchy, doubtless the vision which she had seen of a people regenerated and free began to fade away. The Gironde consented to the imprisonment of the royal family in the Temple. This was not concession enough. The Jacobins, with the mob at their back, accused them not only of lack of works, but of lack of faith, and when such an accusation against a party becomes the expression of a popular conviction, that party has nothing to do except to die. To prove this charge untrue, the Gironde united with their enemies in abolishing the monarchy and establishing a republic. Madame Roland drew up a plan for a republic, but it was too late for such a one as she desired. Her scheme was federative, like our own, in which the provinces of France should have the status of states. This plan was a blow at the mob of Paris, which, through the Jacobin clubs, with which France was thickly sown, controlled the nation. The republic which followed was such only in name. The mob of Paris now stepped from behind the transparent screen, whence it had moved all parties like wire-hung puppets, and stood disclosed before the world in all its colossal horror, stained with blood, breathing flames, and grasped directly the springs of power. The national assembly was like a keeper of lunatics captured by his patients. Its members were crowded in their seats by blood-thirsty men, depraved women, and by merciless visionaries, who clamored for extirpation and destruction, absolute and universal.

The power of Roland as a minister became as feeble as a shadow's hand. The blade of the guillotine rose and fell automatically. Thousands fled from the city, upon which heaven itself seemed to rain fire and plagues. The armies of foreign kings were upon the soil of France, and were fast advancing, and the wild rumors of their coming roused the people to panic, and frenzied resolutions of resistance and retribution. Thousands, whose only crime was a suspected want of sympathy, were crowded into the prisons of Paris. Hoary age, the bounding boy, the tender virgin, the loving wife, the holy priest, the sainted nun, the titled lady, filed along with the depraved of both sexes in endless procession through those massive gates, never more to see the sky and the green earth again. For the mob had resolved to extirpate its enemies in the city before marching against foreign invaders. It went from prison to prison, bursting in the doors, and slaughtering without distinction of age, sex, or condition. Madame Roland was nearly frantic over these scenes. Her divinity had turned to Moloch in her very presence. Her husband called for troops to stop the horrible massacre, but none were furnished, and it went on until men were too tired to slay. These acts were doubtless incited by the Jacobin leaders, though they cloaked with secrecy their complicity in these great crimes. The Jacobins became all-powerful. The Girondists became the party of the past, and from this time their history is a record of a party in name, but in such act of dissolution as to make its efforts spasmodic, clique-like, and personal; sometimes grand, sometimes cruel, and often cowardly. They were under the coercion of public opinion, but were dragged instead of driven by it. They frequently held back, but this was merely a halt, which accelerated the rapidity of the march which left them at the scaffold, where they regained their heroism in the presence of death, while the bloody mob went on to a similar ending a little distance beyond.

When the lull came, after the massacre, the two parties stood looking at each other across the river of blood. The Jacobins accused the Girondists of being enemies of the country. It is characteristic of revolutionary times to accuse vaguely and to punish severely. Socrates died as an alleged corrupter of youth. Pilate, after acquitting Jesus of the crime of high treason, suffered him to be executed for "teaching throughout all Jewry." "Roundhead" and "Cavalier" were once expressive terms of condemnation. In our own times the words "slave-holder," "abolitionist," "loyal," "disloyal," and "rebel" have formed the compendious summing up of years of history. An indictment is compressed into an epithet in such times. In the time of Madame Roland, to be "a suspect" was to be punishable with death. So the Jacobins suspected the Girondists, and accused them of being enemies of France. They introduced measures which pandered to the bloodthirst of the mob, and for which the Girondists were compelled either to vote or to draw upon themselves its vengeance. Madame Roland urged and entreated the Girondists to make one last struggle for law, liberty, and order, by moving to bring to justice the ringleaders in the massacre, including the Jacobin chiefs, who instigated it. This issue was made in the assembly, but it was voted down before the tiger-roar of the mob which raged in the hall. The Jacobins resolved to destroy Madame Roland, whose courage had prompted this attack upon them, and for which she had become the object of their intensest hate. They suborned an adventurer named Viard to accuse her of being privy to a correspondence with the English Government for the purpose of saving the life of the king. She was summoned before the assembly to confront her accuser. She appeared in the midst of her enemies, armed with innocence, resplendent with beauty, defended by her own genius. Her very presence extorted applause from reluctant lips. She looked upon her accuser, and he faltered. By a few womanly words she tore his calumny into shreds, and left amid plaudits. Justice thus returned once more to illumine that place by a fleeting gleam, and then with this woman left it forever.

The Jacobins pressed the trial of the king. The mob demanded him as a victim. The Girondists voted with the Jacobins that he was guilty; but they voted to leave the sentence to the determination of the French people, and when they were defeated in this they voted for his death. I am unable to find any thing in the memorials of Madame Roland which shows that she had any sympathy with this. What is written tends rather to show that she was in the very apathy and lassitude of horror. From the time when her courageous effort to work justice upon the abettors and perpetrators of the massacre failed, her history ceases to be political and becomes personal.

The revolutionary tribunal was reorganized, consisting of twenty judges, a jury, and a public accuser. Merlin of Douai, a consummate jurist, proposed a statute, in every line of which suspicion, treachery, and hate found an arsenal of revenge. It provided that: "Immediately after the publication of this present decree, all suspected persons who are found in the territory of the republic, and who are still at liberty, shall be arrested.