But how could they justify themselves in their determination to bring about a new “shock,” a second revolution? The Revolution was finished. In the twenty-eight months that the Constituent Assembly had been in operation, it had formed a constitution, accepted by Louis XVI. in September, 1791, which had cut from the nation a score of obnoxious and poisonous social, political, and economic growths. This constitution guaranteed, as natural and civil rights, that all citizens should be admissible to place and to employment without other distinction than that of virtue and talents; that all contributions be levied equally among the people in proportion to their ability, and that the same violations of law be punished in the same way. Every man might go and come as he would, speak, write, print, what he wished. There was no limit to the right to assemble peaceably, or to make petitions. Property was inviolable. Relief for the old, the weak, the poor, was promised. Public education was to be organized. The sovereignty rested in the nation; from it came all the power. The constitution was represented by a legislative body, and the King could not dissolve this assembly. He was King of the French, and his person was sacred, but he was inferior to the law, and reigned by it and in its name.

Undoubtedly, as Étienne Dumont said, “the constitution had too much of a republic for a monarchy, and too much of a monarchy for a republic. The King was a hors d’œuvre. He was everywhere in appearance, and he had no real power,” but evidently here was a basis which gave every man in France a chance, and which offered the opportunity to work out a satisfactory liberal government. To refuse to work with this constitution was to continue and to increase the disorganization, the hatred, the fear, which had been agitating France for so long; it was to prevent the new government having a fair chance, and was to make any correction of the constitution impossible. How could Madame Roland justify her resolve to prevent peace?

Her ideal was not satisfied. It mattered little to her that the people were indifferent to this ideal; that they were satisfied with the constitution and asked for nothing but a chance to let it work. The satisfaction of this ideal had become a necessity, an imperative personal need. She could not give it up. It was too beautiful.

Even if she could support the idea of a constitutional monarchy, she could not believe in the sincerity of the king and court. “I have never been able to believe in the constitutional vocation of a king, born under despotism, raised by it and accustomed to exercise it.” She wrote in her Memoirs: “Louis XVI. would have been a man much above the average had he sincerely desired a constitution which restrained his power. If he had been such a man, he would never have allowed the events which brought about the constitution.”

In her judgment the supporters of the monarchy were “traitors,” the constitutionalists a “cabale.” This suspicion had become a disease.

While she doubted the sincerity, the patriotism, the unselfishness of all parties but her own, she had profound confidence in herself. She saw no rôle in the world she says in her Memoirs, which suited her exactly except that of Providence. She had penetration, and flattered herself that she knew a “false eye” at first glance. She and Roland were “strong in reason and in character,” but she was convinced that she was better than he. “I have as much firmness and more flexibility. My energy has more agreeable forms, but it is founded on the same principles. I shock less and I penetrate deeper.” As for the majority of the human race, it was a “poor” affair.

She not only suspected the old régime, and believed herself superior to it; she cherished a personal grievance against it. It had refused her solicitations although they were just. She did not forgive the humiliation. She was near enough to the Court now to feel her dependence upon it. Years before she had written to Sophie: “I love my prince because I feel my dependence but little; if I were too near him, I should hate his grandeur.” She is “too near” now, and her prophecy is realized. She “hates his grandeur.” It is a species of that resentful jealousy which distorts certain really superior natures when they find themselves in the presence of material splendor or of persons of lofty rank.

When the Rolands went up to Paris in December, 1791, they found there a number of important persons who felt as they did, members of the Legislative Assembly, which had assembled on October 1st. They found, too, that they were already allied with their friends Brissot, Robespierre, and Pétion, all three of whom held prominent public positions, Brissot being a deputy to the Assembly from Paris, and at the head of the diplomatic committee; Robespierre, criminal accuser; Pétion, mayor.

This party of new deputies whom they found so congenial were known as the Gironde from the department whence most of them had come. They were all young and all endowed with great talent. They had been brought up on Plutarch and Rousseau, and their heads were filled with noble doctrines and drafts of perfect constitutions. When they talked, it was in classic phrases. Their arguments were based on what happened in Greece and Rome. Their illustrations were drawn from ancient heroes. There could be no doubt of the sincerity of their patriotism, of the nobility of their aspirations, of the purity of their lives, of their anxiety to die, if need be, for France.

But they had no experience of politics, of men, or of society, save what they had gotten from short terms in provincial law offices and clubs. They had never come into contact with other forces than the petty agitations and wire-pulling of their home towns. Of the force of human passions, of the lethargy and persistence of the mass of men, of the fine diplomacy of the trained statesman, they had not a notion.

They knew their Plutarch well, to be sure; but all they had drawn from him was a glibness in making fine periods and certain lofty sentiments, a species of patriotic emotionalism by which they could move and thrill men. Of practical policy for difficult and complicated situations, like the one they had been elected to face, they had not a shadow.

In courage, in audacity, in buoyancy of spirits, in eloquence, in bright visions, in purity of life, they are all that one’s imagination could paint. A more lovable and inspiring group of young men was never called together. But there was not one of them in whom contact with the world and sober reflection, had developed the common sense, the clear comprehensive judgment, the hard determination to do his best, and the simple honesty which alone make men fit for public office.

They were as blindly partisan as Madame Roland, and what Dumont said of Brissot was applicable to the Gironde as a whole: “He was one of those men in whom the party spirit was stronger than all moral, or rather he saw no moral save in his own party. No one had so much zeal of the convent as he. Dominican, he would have burned the heretics; Roman, he would not have been unworthy of following Cato and Regulus; French republican, he wished to destroy the monarchy and to reach his object did not shrink from calumny, persecution, or death on the scaffold.”

They all had the malady of the times,—suspicion. It had become a species of superstition with them. “One may laugh if he will,” said Dumont, “at these imaginary terrors, but they made the second revolution.” It was useless to argue with them, to give them proofs to call upon their good-will; they were suspicious and what they imagined was as real to them as if it had actually existed. They did not need proofs, mistrust never does. They were possessed by a sentiment and reason had no place.

As for their self-confidence, it was monumental. “No argument, no criticism, was listened to by them,” says Mme. de Staël. “They answered the observations of disinterested wisdom by a mocking smile. One wore himself out in reminding them of circumstances and what had led to them; if they condescended to answer, they denied the most evident facts and observations and used in opposition to them common maxims, though, to be sure, expressed eloquently.”

Feeling as they did, the only logical thing for them was to struggle to obtain power. If they were the “Providence” of France, it was their duty to get to the front. It was not for the sake of power that they made this effort. It was because they alone in their own judgment were sufficiently virtuous and enlightened to carry out the doctrines. They were “called” to preach liberty and a republic, and they went to their work in the same frame of exaltation and expectation as he goes who preaches the Kingdom of Heaven.

The only way in which they could arrive at power was by uniting with one of the two parties in the Assembly, with the constitutionalists or the Mountain, as the Radicals were termed. The former was composed of the well-to-do and the experienced men of the Assembly. It supported the King. It was the more honest and trustworthy, but it was accused of “aspiring secretly to increase the royal authority and to form two chambers.”

The Mountain was the party of the agitators and the street. It had the audacity, the violence, and the populace of the faubourgs. The talents, education, eloquence, refinement, of the Gironde were in harmony with the conservatives, but they could not believe that there was not a secret plot hidden under the patriotic pretensions of the constitutionalists. Their self-pride was irritated, too, by the aristocratic traditions, the courtly manners, and the reasonableness of the moderates. There was a subtile superiority in their wisdom, their gracious bearing, their finesse which the Girondins resented.

As for the Mountain the Girondins feared its violence, its open advocacy of bloodshed less than they did its suspicion. They wanted to be considered the purest of the patriots and they could not support the idea that there was any one who pushed farther than they in making claims for the “sovereign” and for the “divine right of insurrection.” They had not the practical sense, the experience, and the disinterestedness to judge the Mountain, to see that it was chaotic, violent, irrational. Because it called itself the representative of the poor and the suffering, they imagined that it must be virtuous, and they wished its support. They feared its opinion of them even more than they feared the skeleton in the conservative closet.

To gain its favor they were even willing to sacrifice personal dignity and delicacy. The Mountain was ragged and dirty, ill-bred and foul-mouthed, but they shared a superstition of the day that rags and dirt, little bread and a hut for a home, are signs of patriotism, and if a man is poor, therefore he must have good principles. They found the coarseness of the Mountain more endurable than the etiquette of the Court. Pétion, at his public dinners as mayor, received the Gironde. Among his guests were many “patriots” of the rudest sort, yet Condorcet, Guadet, Gensonné, Roland, laughed at Chabot when he put on a bonnet rouge and went through a series of low buffoonery, mocking the King, and applauded jests of “shocking grossness.”

Thus suspicion drove them from the conservative party, while fear of suspicion drove them towards the Mountain. Resentment at superior refinement turned their sympathy from the decent element of the Assembly, while a superstition about the true meaning of rags, dirt, and disorder awakened it for the wanton element.

Just as they floated between the parties of the Assembly, they vacillated between the clubs,—the Feuillants, which was for the constitution, and the Jacobins, which was for anarchy. Their object was not simply to do what was just and honorable, it was to do what would carry them into power. They must have power in order to carry their cause. To serve their party all means were justifiable. It was their uncertainty about which side would the quicker give them the leadership of the Assembly which explains their wavering over all the questions which absorbed the attention of the Legislative Assembly,—such as the questions of the unsworn priests, the immigration of nobles, and the declaration of war against Austria.

When the Rolands came up to Paris in December, the Gironde was floating between the two other parties, fearing both, suspected by both. Hate, defiance, exaggeration, were at their height. No one knew what would happen next. “You would say it was a fleet at anchor in a thick fog,” wrote Morris to Washington. “No one dares to put up sail for fear of running against a rock.”

When Madame Roland appeared on the scene, she had no hesitation in deciding what should be done by the Gironde. She had been too firmly convinced since the fall of the Bastille of the benefits of anarchy to fear it now. The lack of it had long been her despair. She was too suspicious of all persons of aristocratic origin to tolerate any union with the conservative party. She was too firmly convinced of the value of war as a “great school of public virtue” to hesitate about offensive operations.

Arrived in Paris, they settled in the Rue de la Harpe, where they lived very quietly, Roland occupying himself with the encyclopædia, with his plan for a pension, and with his friends. He went to the chief places of Gironde rendezvous when he had leisure, and they came to him sometimes. His chief political work, however, was at the Jacobin Club, where he was engaged on a committee.

Their life was very quiet until March, when it suddenly changed. A friend dropping in one day told Madame Roland that the patriots were to be asked to form a ministry and that as they were going to seek men of ability and courage, Roland had been thought of for a portfolio. Some days later (March 21, 1792) Brissot came to see her to inquire if Roland would accept if asked. They talked the matter over, considered its dangers, sounded its possibilities,—the next day Brissot was told in classic phrase that Roland’s courage did not falter, that the knowledge of his force inspired him with confidence in his ability to be useful to the country and to liberty.

The movement which had brought about the Girondin ministry had been led by Brissot. After the vetoes of the King to the decrees against the priests and émigrés, every effort had been made by the Jacobins to show that the ministry of the King was in secret sympathy with Court and émigrés, that while posing as constitutional, they were, in fact, anti-constitutional. Brissot had led this movement, and had condescended to some very low manœuvres to discredit certain members of the ministry. His plans had at last succeeded, and Louis XVI., hoping to quiet suspicion, had consented to name a cabinet which would satisfy the Girondins.

It was in this body that Roland had been asked to take the Department of the Interior. As was to be expected, the conservatives criticised the new ministers harshly from the first. Roland was pictured to the country by the Mercure as one of the principal agitators of Lyons; “no administrative talent, no experience in affairs of state, a hot head, and the principles of the times in their greatest exaggeration.” The conservative element naturally accepted this characterization; for, outside of the manufacturing world, Roland was utterly unknown. As for the Jacobin element, it was a question of how far in anarchy the cabinet would go; if it kept up with them, well and good; if it fell behind, then let it take care.

With Roland’s appointment, Madame Roland was at once put into a position of responsibility and power. The Hôtel of the Interior, into which they moved, was situated in the Rue Neuve-des-Petits-Champs at the point where the Rue Ventadour now opens. It was a fine building which had been arranged elegantly by Calonne for the controller-general. In going into this palace they did not give up their apartment in the Rue de la Harpe. The other ministers settled themselves as if they were to remain for life, but Madame Roland saw only the “luxury of an inn” in the gilded hôtel, and kept her modest apartment on the Left Bank, a “retreat which one must always have in mind as certain philosophers their coffins,” she told Bancal.

In no way were their habits changed by their new position. Roland was, perhaps, even a little more severe than usual, and took virtuous delight in appearing at Court with ribbons on his shoes instead of buckles, to the horror of the courtiers. They called him a Quaker in Sunday dress, with his white hair plastered down and sparsely powdered, his plain black coat, above all his unadorned shoes. Madame Roland arranged her life with strict regard for her notions of classic simplicity. She neither made nor received visits, and never invited women to dinner. Every Friday she had the members of the ministry; twice a week a mixed company of ministers, deputies, and persons Roland wanted to see. Rarely were there more than fifteen covers at table. One sat down at five o’clock to a meal always simple, and at nine o’clock this puritan household was closed. Of course, there was the theatre, with a loge for the minister, but it was not often that she left her duties for it.

These duties were many; for the habit of working with Roland, of copying, polishing, suggesting, begun the first year of her marriage, over the dull pages of the encyclopædia and continued at Amiens and Le Clos, was carried into the ministry of the interior. She went over the daily mail with her husband. Together they noted the disorders in the country, and together decided on the policy to pursue. She gave her opinion on every subject, and exerted an influence on every question of the ministry. This was in private. In her salon she was as quiet as in the little salon of the Hôtel Britannique; nevertheless, she was always the spirit of the gatherings; a skilful and gentle peacemaker in too hot disputes; an inspiring advocate of the most radical undertakings; an ardent defender of her own opinions.

Many of the measures to be proposed in the Assembly by the Girondins originated in her salon; much of Roland’s business with individuals was talked over in her presence. It often happened that those who had business with Roland came to her first with it.

She was especially influential when it came to choosing persons for the positions in the department which Roland controlled. She flattered herself on her ability to tell a true patriot, and criticised and praised candidates fearlessly. A minister of war was wanted soon after Roland’s call to the cabinet. He thought of Servan, because the man had exposed patriotic principles in a creditable book, because he had a reputation for activity, because he had lost a court position on account of civism, and above all because he declaimed bitterly against the aristocrats. They wished to found a journal to represent their party, and wanted a man “wise and enlightened” as editor. They decided on Louvet, the author of the most licentious novel of the day, because of his “noble forehead, the fire which animated his eye,” and the fine and eloquent political pamphlets he had published. Because Pache had the simplicity suitable to a republican and the manners of the ancients, because he came to his office at seven o’clock in the morning and stayed until three in the afternoon with only a morsel of bread brought in his pocket for lunch, because he was prudent, attentive, zealous as a clerk, he was thought fit to be a minister.

They mistrusted all their colleagues who lacked these qualities. In the ministry was General Dumouriez, a diplomat of skill, devoted to the constitution, skilful with men, wise with the King. He had come to see the Rolands in the Rue de la Harpe with Brissot to announce to them the call to the ministry. When he left, Madame Roland said to her husband: “There is a man I have seen for the first time. He has a penetrating mind, a false eye; perhaps it will be more necessary to suspect him than anybody in the world. He has expressed great satisfaction with the patriotic choice he has been charged to announce, but I should not be astonished if one day he caused you to be dismissed.”

She mistrusted Dumouriez at once because of his courtly manners, and his belief that the King was sincere in his efforts to support the constitution. There was so great a difference between him and Roland that she could not imagine the two working together. In the one she saw “uprightness and frankness personified, severe equity without any of the devices of the courtier or of the society-man.” In the other she believed she recognized “an intelligent roué, a bold knight, who sneered at everything except his own interests and his own glory.”

She did not change her idea of Dumouriez, although obliged to confess that he had more esprit than any one else in the ministry, that he was “diligent and brave,” “a good general, a skilful courtier, writing well, capable of great enterprises,” but his “manners!” they were fit only for the ministerial intrigues of a corrupt court.

Her suspicions extended to all his friends. “All these fine fellows,” she said to a friend one day à propos of Dumouriez’s followers, “seem poor patriots to me. They care too much for themselves to prefer the public good to their own interests. I can never resist the temptation to wound their self-sufficiency by pretending not to see the merit of which they are vainest.”

As for the good faith of the King, she would not listen to the idea. During the first three weeks of the ministry of Roland, he and Clavière were disposed to think well of the King, to have confidence in the turn things were going to take. But she would tell them when they started out confidently to the Council meetings: “When I see you go off in that way, it always seems to me that you are going to commit a sottise.” And when they came back with less done than she expected she declared the Council was “nothing but a café.” “It is disgraceful. You are in good humor because you experience no annoyance, even because you are well treated. You have the air of doing about what you wish in your departments. I fear that you are being tricked.” When they reminded her that nevertheless affairs were going well, she replied: “Yes, and time is being lost.”

At the moment that Roland was called to office the question of public tranquillity was most serious. It was not alone in the cities that riots, pillage, and bloodshed were of constant occurrence. The provinces were in many places almost uninhabitable. Roland, to cure the disorders, wrote circulars and put up posters.

For example, in his own department, Rhone-et-Loire, the question of the priests was causing more and more difficulty. The provocation came now from one side, now from another. In certain parishes the constitutional priests were supported by the municipality, in others the unsworn were favored. In the midst of these dissensions, births, marriages, and deaths often went unrecorded. Here a priest declaimed against the constitution and incited the people not to pay their taxes, there the National Guard and mayor combined to drive a disturber from the community. In the district of Villefranche, the constitutional clergé of “the former province of Beaujolais” brought a long complaint to the authorities: “The inhabitants of the mountains,” they wrote, “influenced by fanaticism, are in a state of insurrection. They believe the churches to be profaned by the mere presence of the sworn priests; during the services they throw stones against the doors, interrupt the services, insult the new curés in the midst of their duties, force the faithful to desert the churches.... The presbyteries are no longer a safe asylum. Those who inhabit them are forced to keep a guard; they cannot travel alone without being attacked and exposed to the greatest dangers. There is not one of them who has not been driven several times from his home. New-born children are baptized by Non-conformists without the ceremonies of the Church—the fanatical and barbarous mothers declare that they would rather choke them than permit them to be baptized by the priests.”

The religious difficulties were inflamed by the rash and suspicious actions of the various parties, whose wisdom and diplomacy were annulled by excessive party spirit. The whole department, in fact, was racked by religious quarrels, bitter party spirit, fear of émigrés’ plots and foreign invasion, hatred of the constitution and “patriots.”

Roland had a formula for such a situation, and when the directory of Rhone-et-Loire asked him for help to restore order, he sent it to them.

“The present troubles which agitate your department at several points,” he wrote them, April 18th, “seem to have their source in the diversity of religious opinions. This diversity of opinion is the fruit of error, and the error comes from ignorance. If, then, we enlighten men, we deliver them from prejudices, and if the prejudices were destroyed, peace would reign on the earth.... It is not by force of arms that one teaches reason.... In the first place a well-organized state has only enough troops to prevent invasions, to meet force by force, and to enable all the citizens to enjoy all the benefits of their own constitution. Second, internal order should be maintained by instruction, by public opinion, and finally by the force of the National Guards.... Elected by the people, you ought to have their confidence. Your instruction ought to produce the greatest effect, and you ought to be able through confidence and reason to form and direct public opinion. These means, used energetically and wisely, are sure. Is there a rare circumstance when they are too slow? You have all the public force of your department; you can use it as it is necessary, and you ought to direct it according to the circumstances. These are your means, sirs, and you rest responsible before the nation and its representatives, before the King and your constituency, for all the disorders that you do not foresee and prevent.”

One can imagine the feelings of a board of county directors harassed by daily riots, by incessant quarrels, by threats and plots, on receiving such a letter from the minister, charged with executing the laws relative to the internal tranquillity of the State. The directory must have been composed of men singularly devoid of humor, if even in their grave situation they did not laugh at Roland’s application of instruction to the Lyons street-fights.

To a department which had asked him for troops to restore order, and secure the free circulation of grain in its territory, he responded that if it was necessary to use force they must take the National Guards, and he added: “But must I counsel this step? So soon as one employs arms to execute the laws, one not only proves that he has not known how to make himself loved, but that he will never be able to do so. A constitution which is enforced by the bayonet only, is not a constitution. Other means are necessary to attach a free people to the laws that it has made.... Instruct the administrations that you direct, and if they deviate from the observation of the rules, use that sweetness which commands so easily, that persuasion which leads to the repentance of a fault often involuntary. It is so easy for a superior administration to make itself agreeable to those that it has under its surveillance that, in fact, I believe I might say it is always the fault of the former when harmony is broken.”

And he continued this doctrinal campaign throughout his ministry. For all the riot-ridden country he had but one formula. And while the people burnt châteaux, stoned priests, pillaged storehouses, waylaid and stole grain, murdered nobles, he serenely preached how easily the difficulty could be ended by applying the dogma. And he believed it with the incomparable naïveté of the theorist. If some one called his attention to the fact that the disorders increased in spite of his preaching, he was unmoved; that was the fault of the “stick in the wheel.” He was not dissatisfied that disorder should increase. It would show the need for a new shock.

Armed with his formulas, his forty years of service, and his “virtue,” Roland could see no reason why he was not adequate to the situation, and why he should not act as he saw best. The conviction of his own sufficiency made him tactless with those who were, in his judgment, less infallible than he. He assumed a pedagogic tone, a severe mien, a stiff, patronizing air towards them. He read them lectures, posed before them as impeccable. To men of experience, used to the world and to politics, as convinced as Roland of their own sincere desire for the good of France, and of the sufficiency of their own ideas, this attitude was exasperating beyond expression.

It was not long before Roland and Servan, who was charged with the portfolio of war, began to regulate the King, “to kill him by pin-pricks,” said Dumouriez. Madame Roland was responsible, to a large extent, no doubt, for their unpatriotic and traitorous conduct. Servan was as completely under her rule as Roland, and she had cured both of them of the confidence and support they gave the King at the beginning of their ministry, and convinced them of his intention to betray the constitution and restore the old régime. To deserve their support he should, she believed, withdraw the vetoes he had put to the measures against priests and émigrés.

From the beginning of the Gironde ministry matters had steadily grown worse. In April war had been declared. It had opened badly for the French and terror and suspicion were greater than ever in Paris. Religious troubles flamed up all over the provinces, made more intense by the fear of foreign invasion. As rumors ran, the army was not doing its duty; the generals were traitors; the court party was plotting to receive the Prussians, to massacre the patriots, and to overthrow the constitution. To meet the perils which threatened, Madame Roland had two measures: the proscription of the Non-conformist priests, and a camp of twenty thousand soldiers, five from each canton of France, around Paris, to guard the city from the attack of the foreigners.

This latter plan she persuaded Servan to present to the Assembly on June 4th without the King knowing anything of his minister’s plans and without any of the Council save Clavière and Roland being in the secret. The measure was voted by the Assembly, but it made a noise in Paris. The National Guards regarded it as a reflection on their patriotism and capacity. The Feuillants raised a petition of eight thousand names (largely of women and children, sneered the patriots), protesting against the measure. At the Assembly and at the Jacobins the measure was hotly discussed; in the club it was opposed by Robespierre, now in open rupture with the Girondins, and almost daily attacked by Brissot in the Patriote français.

The King hesitated to sign the measure when it was presented to him. In Madame Roland’s eyes this refusal was due to nothing but his disloyalty, and she advised forcing him to a decision. She was, she says, in a kind of “moral fever” at the moment, and felt the absolute necessity of some kind of action which would determine the situation. In her judgment Roland should withdraw from the ministry if the King did not sign the measures. But she wished that if he withdrew everybody should know that he did it because the King would not take his advice.

In these circumstances Madame Roland proposed to Roland to send a letter to Louis XVI., stating his opinions, urging the King to consent to the proscription of the priests and the camp about Paris, and warning him against the consequences of a refusal. She dashed off this letter in a single sitting, in the passion of conviction and exaltation which possessed her.

“Sire,—The present condition of France cannot long endure. The violence of the crisis has reached the highest degree; it must be terminated by a blow which ought to interest Your Majesty as much as it concerns the whole Empire.

“Honored by your confidence, and placed in a position where I owe you the truth, I dare to speak it; it is an obligation that you yourself have imposed upon me.

“The French have adopted a constitution; there are those that are discontented and rebellious because of it; the majority of the nation wishes to maintain it, has sworn to defend it with its blood, and has welcomed joyfully the war which promises to assure it. The minority, however, sustained by its hopes, has united all its forces to overthrow it. Hence this internal struggle against the laws, this anarchy over which good citizens groan, and of which the wicked take advantage to heap calumny on the new régime. Hence this discord which has been excited everywhere, for nowhere is there indifference. The triumph or the overthrow of the constitution is desired; everywhere people are eager to sustain it or to change it. I shall refrain from examining it, and consider simply what circumstances demand; taking as impersonal attitude as possible, I shall consider what we can expect and what it is best to do.

“Your Majesty enjoyed great privileges which you believed belonged to royalty. Brought up in the idea of preserving them, you could not see them taken from you with pleasure; your desire to recover them was as natural as your regret at seeing them destroyed. These sentiments, natural to the human heart, must have entered into the calculation of the enemies of the Revolution. They counted then on secret favor, until such times as circumstances permitted open protection. This disposition could not escape the nation itself, and it has been driven to defiance. Your Majesty has been constantly between two alternatives: yielding to your prejudices, to your private preferences, or making sacrifices dictated by philosophy and demanded by necessity; that is, either emboldening the rebels by disturbing the nation; or quieting the nation by uniting with her. Everything has its course, and this uncertainty must end soon.

“Does Your Majesty ally yourself openly to-day with those who are pretending to reform the constitution? Are you going generously to devote yourself without reserve to its triumph? Such is the true question, and the present state of things makes a solution necessary.

“As for the very metaphysical question, are the French ripe for liberty, the discussion is of no importance here; it is not a question of judging what we shall be in a century, but of seeing of what the present generation is capable.

“The Declaration of Rights has become a political gospel, and the French Constitution, a religion for which the people are ready to die. Already violence has sometimes supplanted the law. When the law has not been sufficiently vigorous to meet the situation, the citizens have taken things in their own hands. This is why the property of the émigrés, or persons of their party, has been exposed to pillage. This is why so many departments have been forced to punish severely the priests whom public opinion had proscribed, and who otherwise would have become its victims.

“In the shock of interests, passion has controlled. The country is not a word that the imagination amuses itself in embellishing; it is a being for whom one makes sacrifices, to whom one becomes attached according to the suffering that it causes, who has been created by great effort, and raised up in the midst of disturbances, and who is loved for what it has cost as well as for what it promises. Every attack made upon it inflames enthusiasm for it.

“To what point is this enthusiasm going to rise when the enemy’s forces, united without, intrigue with those within to deal it the most fatal blows?

“The excitement is extreme in all parts of the Empire; unless confidence in the intentions of Your Majesty calm it, it will burst forth in terrible fury. Such confidence can never be based on professions; it must have facts.

“It is evident to the French nation that the constitution will work; that the government will have the necessary strength the moment that Your Majesty sincerely desires the triumph of the constitution, sustains the legislative corps with all your executive power, and takes away every pretext for uneasiness from the people and every hope from the discontented.

“For example, two important decrees have been passed; both concern the tranquillity and the safety of the State. A delay to sanction them awakens defiance; if it is prolonged, it will cause discontent; and, it is my duty to say it, in the present state of excitement discontent may lead to the worst.

“There is no longer time to hesitate; there is no longer any way of temporizing. The Revolution has been accomplished in the minds of the people; it will be finished at the price of blood if wisdom does not forestall the evils that it is still possible to avoid.

“I know that it is imagined that anything can be done by extreme measures; but when force shall have been used to constrain the Assembly, terror spread throughout Paris, and disunion and stupor in the suburbs, the whole of France will rise in indignation, and, throwing herself into a civil war, will develop that sombre energy always so fatal to those who have provoked it.

“The safety of the State and the happiness of Your Majesty are intimately allied; no power can separate them; cruel anguish and certain misfortune will surround your throne, if you yourself do not found it on the constitution and if it is not strengthened by the peace which it ought to bring us.

“Thus the disposition of the popular mind, the course of events, the reason of politics, the interest of Your Majesty, make it indispensable that you unite with the legislative corps and carry out the desire of the nation; that which principle shows to be a duty, the present situation makes a necessity.... You have been cruelly deceived, Sire, by those who have sought to separate you from your people. It is by perpetually disturbing you that they have driven you into a course of conduct which has caused alarm. Let the people see that you are determined to carry out the constitution upon which they feel that their happiness depends, and you will soon become the object of their gratitude.

“The conduct of the priests in many places, the pretext which fanaticism has given the discontented, have led to a wise law against these agitators. Will not Your Majesty give it your sanction? Public peace demands it. The safety of the priests depends upon it. If this law does not go into force, the departments will be forced to substitute violent measures for it, as they are doing on all sides; and the irritated people will make up for it by their excesses.

“The attempts of our enemies, the disturbances in the capital, the great unrest which the conduct of your guard has excited, the situation of Paris,—all make a camp in this neighborhood necessary. This measure, whose wisdom and urgency are recognised by all good citizens, is waiting for nothing but the sanction of Your Majesty. Why is it that you delay when promptness would win all hearts? Already the efforts of the staff of the National Guard of Paris against this measure have awakened the suspicion that it was inspired by superior influence; already the declamations of certain demagogues awaken suspicions of their relations with those interested in overthrowing the constitution; already the intentions of Your Majesty are compromised; a little more delay, and the people will see in their King the friend and the accomplice of the conspirators!

“Just Heaven! have you struck the powers of the earth with blindness? will they never have other counsels than those which bring about their ruin?

“I know that the austere language of virtue is rarely welcomed by the throne; I know also that it is because it is so rarely heard there, that revolutions are necessary; I know above all that it is my duty to use it to Your Majesty, not only as a citizen, obedient to law, but as a minister honored by your confidence and fulfilling the functions which it supposes; and I know nothing which can prevent me from fulfilling a duty which is on my conscience.

“It is in the same spirit that I repeat what I have already said to Your Majesty on the obligation and the utility of carrying out the law which provides for a secretary in the Council. The simple existence of this law speaks so powerfully that it seems as if its execution would follow without delay; it is a matter of great importance to employ all possible means to preserve in our deliberations the necessary gravity, wisdom, and maturity; moreover, for the ministers, some means of verifying their expressions is necessary. If such existed, I should not be addressing myself in writing at this moment to Your Majesty.

“Life is nothing to the man who regards his duties as higher than everything else; after the happiness of having fulfilled them, the greatest good that he can know is that he has discharged them with fidelity; and to do that is an obligation for the public man.

“10 June, 1792. Year IV. of Liberty.”

Roland sent this letter to the King on June 11th, although he had had the idea of reading it to the Council the day before, but there was no opportunity, so says Madame Roland in her Memoirs. According to Dumouriez, the letter was sent earlier; for he relates that Roland read the letter at the Council, and that when he had finished it the King remarked with sang-froid: “M. Roland, it was three days ago that you sent me your letter. It was useless to read it to the Council if it was to remain a secret between us two.”

This letter was the climax to the irritating policy which the Gironde ministers had been pursuing with Louis, and he decided to dismiss them.

Servan received his discharge first. “Congratulate me,” he cried when he saw Madame Roland. “I have been put out.”

“I am piqued,” she replied, “that you are the first to have that honor, but I hope it will not be long before it is accorded to my husband.” It was not, for on the 13th Roland followed Servan. He hurried home to tell his wife.

“There is only one thing to do,” she cried with vivacity: “it is to be the first to announce it to the Assembly, sending along a copy of the letter to the King.”

The idea was put into effect at once. They were convinced that both “usefulness and glory” would result.

If this letter to the King began, as Dumouriez says, with a promise of secrecy, then to send it to the Assembly was, considering the position Roland occupied and the oath he had taken, a most disloyal act. But did it begin so? Madame Roland does not speak of such a promise in her Memoirs. The report of the letter given in the Moniteur contains no such opening phrase, though naturally Roland would have cut it out in sending the document to the Assembly. Many of the memoirs and newspapers of the day, however, either quote the promise or assume that the letter was private.

Dumont, in writing of Madame Roland, says that the greatest reproach that could be made upon her conduct during the Revolution was persuading her husband to publish this letter, which commenced, according to him: “Sire, this letter will never be known save to you and me.”

Mathieu Dumas says in his Souvenirs that it was confidential, and declares that it was read in the Council in the presence of the King, “although the minister had promised to keep it a secret between himself and His Majesty.” Of the presentation to the Assembly he adds: “It was a new violation of the secret that the minister had imposed upon himself. After his retreat propriety made the obligation of secrecy much more rigorous.”

The Guardian of the Constitution of June 16th called the letter “criminal” and its reading sufficient cause for delivering Roland to the public prosecutor. Among the pamphlets which the publication of the letter called forth was an anonymous one, in which the author told the minister that he was under the greater obligation to keep the secret, as he had promised, because the letter was an attempt to regulate the King’s private conduct and because it insinuated that His Majesty intended to betray the constitution.

The result Madame Roland had foreseen, followed the presentation of the letter to the Assembly. The reading was interrupted frequently by applause, and it was ordered printed and distributed throughout the eighty-three departments.

“Usefulness and glory” were attained. The Rolands were convinced that the letter would enlighten France; that it would serve as the shock necessary to start the movement which would crush the remnants of monarchical authority. Madame Roland retired to the Rue de la Harpe more jubilant than she had entered the Hôtel of the Interior. She had not been proud of their appointment to the ministry; she was of their dismissal.

What she and her friends expected would follow the dismissal of the Girondin ministers, was a popular uprising, forcing the King to reinstate them. The disturbance did not come of itself, and they set about to prepare one—the artificial and abortive riot of the 20th of June. On this date fell the anniversary of the oath of the Tennis Court, and the citizens of the faubourgs Saint Antoine and Saint Marcel had asked permission to celebrate it by presenting petitions to the Assembly and to the King, and planting a tree of liberty. In the effervescence of public spirit such a demonstration might easily be turned into a riot, and there was opposition to it from the authorities; however, the Gironde succeeded in securing the permission.

On the 20th, the petitioners assembled, a motley crowd of men, women, and children, armed and carrying banners, and marched to the Assembly, where they demanded admission. It was against the law, but Vergniaud and Guadet contended that it should be granted. It was, and eight thousand persons filed through the hall.

From the Assembly they pressed to the palace of the King, broke down the doors, invaded the rooms, surrounded Louis XVI., put the red cap on his head, but they did not strike. There was no popular fury. There were cries of Sanction the decrees, Recall the patriotic ministers, Away with the priests, Choose between Coblentz or Paris, but there were no blows. For the people, the affair was simply a species of Mardi-gras, and when they were tired of gazing at the splendors of the palace and at the poor King, who, fearless and patient, let them surge about him, they retired. The King was still king, the decrees were not signed, the ministers were not recalled. Said Prudhomme in his report of the day: “Paris is in consternation, but it is at seeing that this day has not had the effect that the friends of liberty promised themselves.”

The reaction was terrific. Lafayette left his army and hurried to Paris to protest before the Assembly and to demand measures against the Jacobins. The Feuillants rallied their friends for a desperate effort. The Court—openly contra-revolutionary now—worked with the émigrés to make a coup which would sweep out entirely the new régime.

The patriots were not idle. In their supreme last struggle, never did Girondin eloquence and intrigue run higher. The open contra-revolutions in Paris and the foreign enemies now each day nearer the city were reasons enough for action. By a burst of magnificent eloquence Vergniaud secured a vote from the Assembly that the country was in danger, and a call upon France to enlist for its defence. A movement of superb patriotism followed the declaration. Here was an unmistakable enemy. Vague alarms were at an end. The foreigners were actually approaching the capital, and anybody could understand that they were not wanted. The irritated, harassed country opened its heart and poured out its blood,—young and old, weak and strong, even women and girls, offered themselves.

But this was a movement against foreign invasion—not against the remnants of monarchical authority. The result looked uncertain. Consternation and despair seized the Rolands. They foresaw the triumph of the Court, the hope of a republic lost, and they calculated on what course the patriots ought to pursue if the émigrés and their allies reached Paris and combined with the Court to restore the old régime.

Walking one day in the Champs-Élysées with Lanthenas, Roland met two Southerners who were in Paris on a commission from their department. Their names were Barbaroux and Rebecqui. Since the opening of the Revolution they had been active in the cause of the patriots in Marseilles, Arles, and Avignon. The overthrow of the Girondin ministry had alarmed them. Roland’s letter to the King had inspired them with warm admiration for his courage and patriotism.

Like all the young blood of the country, they were planning action against the dangers which threatened. Their plans were well advanced when they met Lanthenas and Roland. The latter wished to discuss the situation seriously with them, and the next day Barbaroux went to the Rue de la Harpe. Madame Roland was with the ex-minister, and the three were not long in understanding each other. Barbaroux soon won their confidence by his enthusiasm and eloquence. He was young, but twenty-five, and of a beauty that won him the name of Antinoüs from Madame Roland. He was animated, too, by a fiery scorn of “tyrants,” “courts,” and “kings,” as unbelieving as Madame Roland in the sincerity of any party outside his own, profoundly convinced of his call to reverse the monarchy, and already with a record of services rendered to the Revolution. The Rolands found him “active, laborious, frank, and brave,” and they opened their hearts to him on the means of saving France.

“Liberty is lost,” cried Roland, “if the plots of the courts are not immediately checked. Lafayette is meditating treason in the North. The army of the centre is disorganized, in want of munitions, and cannot stand against the enemy. There is nothing to prevent the Austrians being in Paris in six weeks. Have we worked for three years for the grandest of revolutions only to see it overthrown in a day? If liberty dies in France, it is forever lost to the rest of the world. All the hopes of philosophy are deceived. The most cruel tyranny will reign upon the earth. Let us prevent this disaster. Let us arm Paris and the departments of the North. If they fail, let us carry the statue of liberty to the South. Let us found somewhere a colony of independent men.”

His words were broken by sobs. Madame Roland and Barbaroux wept with him. Rapidly then the young man sketched his plan. It was Roland’s own. Arm Paris; if that failed, seize the South.

A map was brought out and they traced the natural boundaries of the new State. The Vosges, the Jura, the Loire, and a vast plain between mountains and river divide France. The plain they would take for a camp; the river and mountains could be easily defended. If this position was lost, there was a second boundary; on the east, the Doubs, the Ain, the Rhone; on the west, the Vienne, the Dordogne; in the centre, the rocks and rivers of Limoges. Farther still was Auvergne, the mountains of Velay, the Cévennes, the Alps, Toulon. “And if all these points were forced, Corsica remained,—Corsica where Genovese and French had not been able to naturalize tyranny.”

As they traced the boundaries, they devised plans for fortifications and for mobilizing the army, but they concluded their council by the decision that a final effort must be made to save Paris. There must be another revolt if possible; the King must be deposed and a convention called which would give France entire a republic. Barbaroux was ready with a plan to help bring this about and he left them, promising to bring a battalion and two pieces of cannon from Marseilles.

They understood that it was an insurrection that he meant to prepare, but they did not hesitate. All the violence, excess, passion, fear of Paris must be excited this time; there must not be another 20th of June; the stick must come out of the wheel now or never; and indifferent to the possibility that the passion they proposed to use might assert its right to help rule if it helped create, confident in the sufficiency of their theory and of themselves, they awaited the promised insurrection.

But not all of their friends were so serene. Several members of the party had begun to realize the force of the popular fury they had been arousing. They began to feel nervous at the prospect in Paris of the horde of Marseillais Barbaroux had called. The bloodthirstiness of the Cordeliers clubs began to revolt them. They were forced to admit that Marat’s journal was more influential than their own. They saw, too, a threatening thing—hitherto the insurrectionary element had been more or less chaotic, it was now well organized and it had at its head a man whom they feared, Danton. What if the mob should refuse to retire after the overthrow of the King? Would anarchy be an improvement on monarchy? Would a sans-culotte be a more enlightened administrator than an aristocrat?

Vergniaud, Guadet, and Gensonné tried to frighten Louis XVI. into recalling the ministers by telling him how formidable the threatened insurrection appeared to them to be, and by assuring him that it might be avoided by restoring the Girondins. Brissot in the Assembly denounced “the faction of regicides, which wishes to create a dictator and establish a republic.” He declared that men who were working to establish a republic on the debris of the constitution were worthy to be “smitten by the sword of the law.” If the King was guilty he should not be deposed in haste, but a commission should be appointed to investigate the affair thoroughly. Pétion, who, as mayor, had aided in bringing about the 20th of June, became frightened, and counselled calm.

But this sudden change could effect nothing now. It was too late for the Girondins to do anything but join with the Jacobins, making a pretence to leadership, although already feeling it slipping from them.

Towards the end of July the allied force summoned France to lay down her arms. Suspicion was at its height. Excitement and disorder were increased by the arrival of the Marseillais on July 30th. Either the allies would reach Paris and save the Court, or Paris must lay hands on the Court and go out and subdue the allies. There was no certainty of which it would be. At heart every faction was fearful. The King, the Court, Lafayette, the allies, the émigrés, the Feuillants, Girondins, Jacobins, Cordeliers, faubourgs, all hesitated. Something was coming. What was it? There is no period of the Revolution of such awful tension as this,—the months between the fall of the Gironde ministry and the 10th of August.

In this exciting period it was the party of insurrection which organized most thoroughly and most intelligently. The leaders who had taken this organization upon themselves were Barbaroux, Danton, Camille Desmoulins, Santerre. They worked through municipal organizations, which, instituted since the Revolution, were turbulent, impetuous, fierce; these were the forty-eight sections into which Paris had been divided, and in nearly all of which the officials were sympathizers with insurrectionary methods of getting what they wanted. Under the influence of the cry the Country is in danger, Paris must act, the sections had aroused the people within their limits. During the first days of August, frequent reunions were held in the Place de la Bastille, at which the most alarming rumors of the treachery of the King and the approach of the enemy were circulated. These sections sent deputations to the Assembly with incendiary addresses. They patrolled the Tuileries lest the executive power escape, they said in unintentional irony. They fraternized with the Marseillais, over whom the enthusiasm in revolutionary circles was constant. They swore repeatedly in their gatherings to save the country.

By the 9th of August, the populace was in a tumult of alarm and of exaltation. They were persuaded that they were the providence of France, and they believed every man who did not join them was a traitor. It had taken a long time to work up the sections of Paris to the united effort which Madame Roland had demanded from them in 1789, but it was done at last, and they were as convinced of the falsity of everybody but themselves, and of their own call to save the country, as ever Madame Roland herself had been.

The 9th of August the ferment was perfect, and the order was given for sounding the tocsin. At that moment the sections decided that three commissioners should be appointed in each quarter of Paris to unite with the Commune, with full powers to devise prompt means of saving the country. The insurrectionary force thus had a legal representation. This representation received at the Hôtel de Ville by the regular municipal council, on evening of August 9th, had before morning superseded it, and was the governing force of Paris. It was a transfer of power, probably with the acquiescence of the legal municipality, glad to escape from the turmoil of things. The new body, to be known as the Commune, was composed of men almost without exception unknown outside of their neighborhoods, and there only for agitation and violence.

While the new Commune was settling itself at the Hôtel de Ville, the populace it represented was in motion. The force with which the Court and constitutional party attempted to control the movement was insufficient, and in part unreliable. In a few hours the leaders of the opposing force had been disposed; Mandat, the commander of the National Guards, had been murdered; Pétion had been “chained by ribbons to his wife’s side”; Louis XVI. and his family had taken refuge in the Assembly; the Swiss guards, who had attempted to defend the château, had been ordered by the King to retire to their barracks, and had been murdered as they went; the château had been invaded.

The mob filled not only the Tuileries, but the Manège where the Assembly sat. That body, composed the 10th of August of Girondins and Jacobins alone, the constitutionals absenting themselves, found itself under the pressure of a new force,—the populace. They had worked for fifty days to arouse it. They had allowed it to organize itself. They had permitted it to do the work of the day. But what were they going to do with it now? Could they use it? Was there not a possibility that it may use them? In any case, the objects for which the insurrection had been prepared must be attained and the suspension of Louis XVI. was voted; the Gironde ministers, Roland, Servan, and Clavière, were returned, Danton, Monge, and Lebrun being added to them.

Madame Roland’s policy had been carried out to the letter; the united sections had acted; the King was out of the way; the patriots were in power.