This monstrous language was used by Roland in a placard published on the walls of Paris on September 13. The massacres had not then really ceased, and the 'first terrible movement' seemed likely to be followed by a second not less 'terrible,' which might make things dangerous, not for the prisoners huddled under lock and key only, but for certain members of the Legislative Assembly, the Girondists themselves!
Is it conceivable that now, after a hundred years, rational beings should look back with any feelings but those of contempt and horror upon these 'patriots' of 1789? Madame Roland, 'the soul of the Gironde,' was simply the soul of a conspiracy of ambitious criminals masquerading in the guise of philanthropists and philosophers. There is something biblical in the dramatic completeness of the chastisement which overtook this unhappy woman. 'They that take the sword shall perish by the sword.'
The murder of the king, which Madame Roland did so much to compass, led not indirectly to the ruin of her own most trusted political friends and associates. The murder of the queen, for which she had longed and laboured, was brought to pass, on October 16, 1793, by men who had then made up their minds to send herself to the scaffold, and who sent her to it, three weeks afterwards, on November 8, 1793. In the ridiculous revolutionary calendar of the epoch, this date stood as the 18th Brumaire; Year II. It was celebrated six years afterwards on the 18th Brumaire of the year VIII. of the Republic, by the advent to supreme authority of the Corsican soldier who was to found a despotic empire upon the results of that 'universal war' into which France had been insanely driven by 'the soul of the Gironde.' A mere coincidence, of course! It was a mere coincidence, too, that the Girondist, Dufriche-Valazé, who, at the trial of Louis XVI., especially gratified the personal malignity of Madame Roland by the insolence with which he treated the royal captive, should have tried to save his own head when he and his comrades at last were writhing in the iron grip of Robespierre, by eagerly denouncing his friend and associate, Valady, as the real author of a particularly virulent placard intended by the Girondists to turn the fury of the Parisian mob against the Jacobins! Seeing that he had disgraced himself to no purpose, the wretched creature, who had contrived to conceal a dagger about his person, drew it out when the merciless prosecutor, Fouquier-Tinville, rising in his place, demanded, on October 29, 1793, that all the Girondists then on trial, having been found guilty by the jury—though no plea had been heard in their defence, and the judge had not summed up—should be instantly condemned to suffer death and the confiscation of their property under the Law of December 16, 1792—a law passed by the Girondists themselves, and highly approved by 'the soul of the Gironde.'
Unobserved in the general excitement Valazé drove the dagger into his heart, and crying out, 'I am a dead man!' fell bleeding to the floor. When his companions had been removed by the guards, Fouquier-Tinville rose again in his place, and requested that the tribunal would order the corpse before them to be taken with the living criminals to the Place de la Révolution, and there with them guillotined!
From this even the Convention shrank. But the dead body of Valazé was in fact carried in a little cart through the streets of Paris, behind the dismal cortège of the condemned, 'lying stretched upon the back, and the face uncovered,' on October 31. After the execution was over it was flung, with the remains of his companions, into a great pit.
This was the end, for Madame Roland and her worshippers, in four short years, of the 'great reformation' of which, on May 17, 1790, she had written to one of her friends that it could only be carried through by 'burning many more châteaux!'
For France, and the French people, the end of it, I fear, has not yet come.
Rapine and confiscation have not been unknown, unfortunately, in the history of any civilised State. But under what modern government, excepting the government of the first French Republic, has sheer pillage, mere downright robbery, been recognised as a legitimate instrument of political propagandism, and, in fact, as a title to property? While the Girondists predominated in France, Brissot, self-styled de Warville, was their avowed leader; and Brissot, ten years before the Revolution, in his 'Philosophic Researches into the Rights of Property, and Robbery considered in the Light of Nature,' published at Chartres in 1780, had laid it down as a great principle that 'exclusive ownership is, in Nature, a real crime.' 'Our institutions,' said this worthy man, 'punish theft, which is a virtuous action, commended by Nature herself.' Clearly such 'institutions' needed a great reformation. It came. France was 'regenerated by blood,' and the disciples of Rousseau widened the area of human happiness, not by burning only, but by 'looting' all the houses they could break into.
The châteaux having been duly pillaged and burned, and their owners driven to fly for their lives, the government, controlled by the 'principles' of Brissot, made emigration a crime, seized the remaining property of the 'emigrants,' and turned it over with a national title, to other people!
A most interesting and valuable chapter in history is still to be written on the relation of the French Revolution to property in France. Such a history cannot be written by the unassisted light of the statutes and the code. Family records, private correspondence, the reports and despatches of the diplomatic agents of the successive French Governments between 1789 and 1799, must all be laid under contribution, if we are to get at the truth concerning the conditions under which a very large proportion of the land of France passed during that period, from the ownership of men who had much to lose by the changes of the Revolution, into the ownership of men who had everything to gain from those changes.