Monsieur and Madame Roland had both, throughout their lives, been intelligent observers and critics of, as well as, to a degree, sufferers from, the financial and social causes of the French Revolution. They had both sympathized with the preliminary outbreaks of that revolution which, beginning early in the century, had recurred at intervals throughout their lives. They both had thoroughly imbibed the intellectual causes of the movement, those new ideas of Voltaire, Diderot, HelvÉtius, AbbÉ Raynal, Rousseau, which, coming after the first agitation,—there had been many a riot in Paris, in Lyons, in Rouen; the King had been warned many a time that there were still Ravaillacs; the word RÉvolution had been often spoken by the French of the eighteenth century before these men wrote,—had backed up the revolutionist with philosophy and logic.

Roland was but ten years old, a boy in the Lyonnais, when the war with Austria caused so much misery, and when a new levy of men and the doubling of the taxes desolated and irritated the province. Lyons was obliged to contribute two million livres at that time to aid the King. He was seventeen when, in 1751, the misery again became so terrible that riots occurred throughout France, and D’Argenson wrote: “Nothing but a near revolution is talked of on account of the bad condition of the government.” These things could not but have affected him. Indeed, the bad outlook at Lyons was one reason that he left home with the idea of making his fortune in America. As a boy, then, Roland had felt the financial errors of the French government.

He was at Rouen when, in 1756, the Seven Years’ War broke out. At that moment the annual receipts of the State were two hundred and fifty-three million livres, the expenses between three hundred and twenty and three hundred and thirty millions. That year Roland saw the people obliged to pay a twentieth of their revenue—the detested vingtiÈme. No one was exempt, and no doubt the bill fell heavily on the manufacturing interests. This tax was in addition to the taille, which tormented the small proprietors of the country, and from which the nobles and clergy were free. In addition were the special taxes of which Roland must have felt the injury especially, both in the Lyonnais and at Rouen. These included the aides, or tax on drinks; the octroi, at the gate of every city; the salt-tax; the special duties on iron, leather, and paper; the impost on tobacco, cards, and oils; the custom duties at the frontier of every province of France, as well as at the frontier of the kingdom.

Two years later at Rouen, 1758, Roland no doubt felt the effect in his personal expenses of the result of the gift which the city, in common with all the cities, boroughs, and seignioralties of the kingdom, was obliged to pay to help on the war, and to meet which they received permission to put a tax on all drinks, on meat, hay, and wood. When one has to pay more for his wood and fire, he reflects why.

Two years later the Parlement of Rouen, in common with several others of the kingdom, flatly refused to register the royal edicts creating new taxes, declaring, with a hardihood superior even to that of the Parlement of Paris, that the system of taxation was unjust, and the people the victims of royal abuse, and suggesting audaciously a parlement of France composed of all the parlements of the kingdom. So eloquent and so free was this declaration that it was even printed and sold in Paris.

Roland’s position made him familiar with all these revolts; he heard them discussed as well as the King’s haughty, energetic reply to the deputation of the Parlement. “I am your master. I ought to punish you for the impudence of your principles. Go back to Rouen, register my decrees and declaration without further delay. I will be obeyed.”

He was touched, no doubt, by the remonstrance which the same body sent to the King in 1763: “Your people, Sire, is unhappy. Everything shows this sad fact. Your parlements, the only organs of the nation, repeat it unceasingly.... A deluge of taxes pitilessly ravages our towns and our provinces; the property, the industry, the person of citizens, all are a prey to these extraordinary imposts; poverty itself, and the charity which aids it, have become its tributaries and its victims. The farming out of the aides, whose rules attack all conditions and commerce in general, weighs on the poor in a most inhuman manner. The farming of the salt-tax presents a spectacle not less revolting.”

At Amiens, as inspector of manufactures, Roland had a still better opportunity to see the defects of the financial and commercial system of France. At that time, in almost all the villages of the kingdom, the exercise of the different arts and trades was concentrated in the hands of a small number of masters, united in trades-unions, who alone could make and sell certain objects. The man who wished to enter a trade could only do so by acquiring a maÎtrise. To do this he must go through a long and painful apprenticeship and spend much money to satisfy the numerous imposts and exactions. Frequently a large part of the sum which he needed for setting up his shop or store was consumed in acquiring his license. Certain unions excluded all but sons of masters, or those who had married the widows of masters; others rejected all who were born in another town—foreigners, as they called them. In a number of the unions a married man could not be an apprentice. To practise his trade after having served his apprenticeship, a linen-dealer must pay twenty-one hundred livres; a dyer, thirteen hundred and fifty; a mason, seventeen hundred; a butcher, fifteen hundred; a potter, twenty-four hundred; and so on through all the trades of the community. One could not work if he would, unless the union gave him permission, and all classes of citizens were obliged to submit to the dictation of the unions as to whom they should hire. So narrow was the spirit of these organizations that women were not allowed to carry on even such industries as embroidery.

Worse, in Roland’s eyes, were the restrictions on the way in which an article was to be manufactured. These were so numerous that industrial genius and initiative were practically prevented, that the manufacturer could not respond to the demands of fashion and of taste, and that competition with foreign trade was largely cut off. He could make only certain stuffs. The dimensions were fixed; the dyeing and stamping must follow a certain formula; they must bear a certain mark. If by any accident, intentional or not, a stuff was turned out which did not conform exactly to the rules, the severest penalty was fixed. A system of inspection, most irritating and frequently unjust, was made of every piece of goods; even houses with long reputation for honest manufacturing were subjected to this examination, which was sometimes little more than a kind of spying exercised by young and incapable men who had no commercial training. A grave injustice was according the title of manufacture royale as a favor, or often, to new institutions, for a sum.

Roland clashed constantly with these regulations throughout his term in Amiens.

Mademoiselle Phlipon had likewise, in the days before her marriage, been influenced by public affairs. She was in a centre where the populace throbbed continually. A stone’s throw from her house the Parlement sat, and its every act was a sign for popular joy or discontent. There could be no demonstration without its passing largely under her windows. From the first days of her life, then, her political education commenced. A child of less intellectual curiosity and of less sensibility would not have responded to these popular outbursts. They would have made but fleeting impressions. It was different with her; she watched it all, felt the rage or joy of the people, and brooded over its meaning. There is, indeed, no more fascinating study in her life than the influence which the panorama of the Pont Neuf and the Place Dauphine had upon her.

When she was eight years old she saw the smoke of burning volumes, as she looked from her window towards the Place de la GrÈve. It was Rousseau’s Émile going up in smoke. Every year after she saw the same suggestive sight. Now it was remonstrances against interferences by the King with the rights of the Parlement which were burned; now the seditious utterances of the independent parlements of Bretagne, of Rouen, of DauphinÉ; now a too liberal general history of the present condition of Europe, translated from the English; now too bold reflections on feudal rights; now Voltaire’s Dictionnaire philosophique; now Holbach; now Raynal; now HelvÉtius. In 1775 she heard La Harpe admonished “to be more circumspect in the future,” because of a daring article he had published. These condemned authors she was beginning to read.

She began to hear from her earliest days the word rÉvolution. It had been pronounced frequently for a long time in private, but it began to be said aloud. When she was nine years old, a Paris priest declared: “We approach a state of crisis and an age of revolutions. I believe it impossible that the great monarchies of Europe endure long.” The priest was condemned at the ChÂtelet across the river from her window, but his discourse was printed and scattered right and left. She heard gossip of how the Parlement had told the King that Frenchmen are free men and not slaves; and a little later it is quite possible that she saw the King on his way to the Palais de Justice, where, under the very eyes of the Parlement, he erased their rebellious decree, and declared: “It is in my person alone that the sovereign power exists; it is from me alone that my courts have their existence and their authority; it is to me alone that independent and indivisible legislative power belongs; public order emanates entirely from me.”

In 1770 she saw bread riots and seditious pamphlets posted in Paris. In January, 1771, came the dissolution and exile of the Parlement because of its refusal to record Louis XV.’s humiliating decree abrogating its power and condemning its conduct. Little Manon saw a surging crowd of Parisians filling the palace and its neighborhood—a crowd in which, wrote one who watched it, “there was sometimes a dull silence, as in times of great calamities; sometimes a noise and a murmur like that which precedes great revolutions.”

She saw the new and detested body—organ of the King’s despotism—sitting in a veritable camp, and the walls of the palace covered with abusive inscriptions. She read, too, many of the hardy pamphlets which flooded the country after this despotic coup d’État. In them the doctrine of power residing in one individual was roundly attacked; the divine authority of kings was denied flatly, and the Constitution of England, with the example of 1688, was held up to the country. We know she followed the exciting seven months of the trial of Beaumarchais and GoËzmann. When Louis XVI. came to the throne, she shared the general joy at his promises, and doubtless felt that it was a true prophet who printed resurrexit on the statue of Henry IV., in front of her door.

When in the next year the bread riots began and across the river the people pillaged the markets, she saw much of the disorder,—people dancing with joy over a loaf they had secured; guards about the bakeries to give the bakers an opportunity properly to bake the bread: hungry men waiting with their eight sous, taking the loaves from the very oven; shops closed in terror, as the rioters moved from quarter to quarter.

Married, the Rolands saw together all the abuses of the realm and aided in the struggles against them. The first year of their married life Roland labored in vain at Paris with the committee which the King had summoned from the manufacturing centres of France, to obtain greater freedom in the industries, and was forced to go back to Amiens with a list of vexatious restrictions still encumbering all varieties of manufacturing.

After their marriage they were constantly cramped for money, for Roland’s salary was very small, and he had but few privileges in connection with his position. For instance, when Madame Roland was in Paris in 1784 seeking the letters of nobility, she was forced to guard her expenses with the greatest care; to avoid taking fiacres as often as possible, and to take cheap seats at the theatre. In the Beaujolais she had been forced to give up going to Lyons often, on account of the expense of life there, to stay much at Le Clos, and to administer her household with greatest economy.

There was no complaint on their part because of their poverty, but there was dissatisfaction with the system which did not reward properly a man who had given his life to the interests of his country, and had produced numbers of valuable works, while it took up insignificant individuals, and, through favoritism or for a round bribe, gave them easy and amply paid positions, and allowed them to keep them whatever they did or did not do; a system which, in short, justified Beaumarchais’ characterization: “Il fallait un calculateur pour remplir la place, ce fut un danseur qui l’obtint.” (An accountant was wanted in the place, a dancer received it.)

After the Rolands left Amiens, they came into personal contact with the feudal rights; for in the Beaujolais the peasant was still often obliged to give personal service to his lord. It was to the lord’s wine-press he was obliged to take his grapes, to his mill that he must take his wheat. They saw the effect of the wretched salt-tax, an indirect tax which forced every inhabitant to buy seven pounds of salt a year, and it cost eight times what it does to-day, considering the value of money. Not only was he forced to buy, he was forced to use it in certain ways,—not a grain of that seven pounds could be employed anywhere except in his table food. If he wanted to salt pork, he must buy another kind.

They probably saw, in their rides to and from Lyons, the peasants bent at their corvÉe, or road tax; for the peasants still made the royal roads in the Lyonnais. On an average, they gave twelve days a year, and the use of their own implements, to the highways which they rarely had the advantage of using. The terrible tolls were another unjust imposition from which they suffered personally. They were innumerable. Let a boat of wine attempt to go from DauphinÉ, by the Rhone, Loire, and the canal of Briare, and it paid thirty-five to forty kinds of duties, not counting the entrÉe to Paris. From Pontarlier to Lyons there were twenty-five or thirty tolls. If Madame Roland had bought ten cents worth of wine in Burgundy, it would have cost her fifteen to eighteen sous before she got it to Lyons.

Another experience which intensified their disgust with the ancien rÉgime was the study of the affairs of Lyons. In a report made, in 1791, on the condition of the city, Roland showed how Lyons, after having been for a long time one of the most flourishing cities of the world, because of her active and peculiar industries, and having earned a world-wide credit, attracted the attention of the government, at that time completely corrupt. The State forced the city to compromise her industries and credit in order to lend money. She borrowed again and again, and gave in return the saddest, most ruinous compensation,—the permission to tax herself. This had gone on until Lyons was bankrupt, her industries ruined, her streets full of beggars.

This condition of finances and society they had long seen, as had the whole country, must be changed or there would be an upheaval. They had even calculated on this change when Madame Roland was soliciting the letters of nobility at Paris, and the probability that when it came something would fall to them. Like all France, it was in a reform of the finances that they saw hope, and it was that which they demanded. They did not believe that France was hopelessly involved, but were confident that she could extricate herself by severe economies in the administration, by cutting off favoritism, by arranging a just system of taxes. Up to 1789 that was all that was demanded.

Like all France, they participated in those outbursts of joy which swept over the country at various periods in the reigns of Louis XV. and Louis XVI., when ministers of force and wisdom devised relief.

The call for the States-General, in 1788, interested them more deeply than ever in the reforms needed; the effort of the Parlement of Paris to prevent the Third Estate naming as many members as the nobility and clergy together, and to prevent their sitting together aroused them. When, however, in spite of all opposition, the King issued the edict allowing the Third Estate double representation and called for the election of members to, and the preparation of cahiers for, the coming gathering, the Rolands went to work with energy. It was on the preparation of the cahiers^[2] sent to the States-General by the Third Estate of Lyons that Roland was principally occupied, and it was with hopefulness that he saw the deputies and the memorials depart for Versailles, where, on May 4th, the twelve hundred representatives of the nation met to begin the work of restoring order in France and of making a constitution.

At Le Clos the Rolands watched eagerly every act of the States-General, of the King, and of the people. But the drama played in Paris and at Versailles between May 4th and July 14th, turned their hopefulness to despair, their gratitude to suspicion, their generosity to resentment, their pliability to obstinacy.

Suddenly, on July 14th, the Parisians, terrified at the rumors of a conspiracy on the part of the Court which had for its object the overthrow of the pet minister, Necker, the adjournment of the National Assembly, the abandonment of reforms, and the coercion of the people by the foreign soldiers who had been massed in and around the capitol, razed the Bastille.

With the falling of the Bastille a new ideal arose, full-winged, before Madame Roland. Before the 14th of July she had no idea that out of the events she watched so eagerly anything more than a reform of the existing rÉgime would grow; the old rÉgime, stripped of its abuses and regulated by a liberal constitution, was all she had asked. Now all was changed; compromise, half-way measures, were at an end. Instead of reforms she demanded “complete regeneration.” She saw in the sudden uprising of the people the “sovereign” exercising “the divine right of insurrection.” It was what Jean Jacques Rousseau had declared in the Social Contract the people had the right to do if the government under which they were living was unjust. She seems to have gone at once to the conclusion that, since the rightful “sovereign,” had at last asserted itself, an immediate regeneration was to follow, abuses were to be wiped out, tyranny destroyed, selfishness annihilated, equality created, and the world to run at last with precision and to the satisfaction of all concerned. To her the fall of the Bastille was the revolution of society. “Friends of humanity, lovers of liberty,” she wrote afterwards, “we believed it had come to regenerate the human kind, to destroy the terrible misery of that unhappy class over which we had so often mourned. We welcomed it with transports.”

Their transports soon turned to irritation; for the immediate regeneration she had pictured was replaced by struggles more fierce than ever before.

To those of her liberal aspirations, determined on a constitutional government, recognizing the sovereignty of the people and the equality of men, two political courses were open at that moment. They could unite with the liberal party of reform in a struggle to frame a constitution; could insist while this was doing upon respect for the National Assembly; could recognize the difficulty of the situation; could respect the laws and be patient;—or they could refuse alliance with this party on the ground that reforms were no longer the need of France, but that complete regeneration must be demanded; could suspect, and induce others to suspect, the sincerity of all those who applied the doctrines less vigorously than they did; could encourage by excuses or tacit sympathy the riotous party which with incredible fecundity was spreading over France, explaining its actions as the lawful efforts of the sovereign people to get rid of its oppressors and to take possession of its own rights.

Madame Roland did not approve of the first party. It attempted nothing but reforms. She wanted every vestige of the old rÉgime wiped out. She suspected it, hated it. It had proved itself unworthy and must be abolished. The real sovereign must be allowed to prepare a government. She had no particular idea of what this government should be; certainly she did not suggest a republic. She was convinced, however, that it would be a simple matter to arrange something where happiness and justice and prosperity should be the lot of all.

To obtain this ideal condition she believed riot and civil war justifiable; indeed she believed them necessary now that the fall of the Bastille had not been enough. They were necessary to keep the usurper in terror and the people suspicious. For her part, even if she were a woman and for that reason excluded from public activities, she meant to keep her friends aroused to the necessity of insurrection.

There is no doubt that the policy of Roland in the Revolution and the relations which he formed and which shaped his course of action were due to this determination of Madame Roland to use her influence in agitation. All their contemporaries remark her ascendency over her husband. But she did not content herself with inspiring Roland. The two friends with whom she had been so long in regular correspondence, Bosc and Lanthenas, she strove, with all her eloquence, to urge to action. “I write you now but little of personal affairs. Who is the traitor who has other interest to-day than that of the nation?” Once Bosc wrote her a story of an interesting adventure; she replied: “I do not know whether you are in love or not; but I do know this, that in the situation where we now are, no honest man can follow the torch of love without having first lit it at the sacred fire of country.” She formed new political relations—the first, with Brissot de Warville, was of particular importance to them.

The Rolands had had a slight correspondence with Brissot before the Revolution; for he, having been attracted by Roland’s writings, had sent him certain of his manuscripts as a mark of his esteem. This had led to an exchange of courteous letters, and, through one of their common friends in Paris, the relation was still further cemented, and a regular correspondence had grown up. When the Revolution came, Brissot started Le patriote franÇais and the Rolands sent him “all,” said Madame Roland, “which, under the circumstances, seemed to us to be useful to publish.” A large number of these letters were published in the Patriote franÇais.

It was not only in Paris that her letters inspired by their ardent patriotism. They were in relation with a young man at Lyons, called Champagneux. The 1st of September, 1789, he started the Courrier de Lyon, a journal something in the style of Brissot’s, intended to preach the principles of 1789, and to show what was passing in the National Assembly. Madame Roland wrote often to this journal.

The most important correspondence which she carried on at this time was with Bancal des Issarts, a lawyer, formerly of Clermont, who had left his profession for politics. Bancal had been a deputy to the National Assembly, and, after the closing of the session, had returned to Clermont, where he had established a society of Friends of the Constitution. Returning to Paris, he made the acquaintance of Lanthenas and the two had planned a community in which they wished to associate the Rolands. Their idea was to buy a quantity of national property and found a retreat where they could together prosecute the work of regenerating France, while at the same time having the delights and the stimulus of intelligent companionship.

Lanthenas introduced Bancal by letter to the Rolands, and a correspondence was at once begun. Madame Roland, as a rule, wrote for both herself and her husband. Her letters are as patriotic and as passionately vindictive as those she wrote Bosc.

At the same time she preached to her acquaintances at Villefranche and Le Clos, and solicited subscribers for Brissot’s journal.

There was nothing vague or uncertain about her position at this moment. Her convictions, her plan of action, had been taken. It was uncompromising, unflinching war against the existing government. Twelve days after the fall of the Bastille, she wrote to Bosc: “You are occupying yourself with a municipality, and you are letting heads escape that are going to conjure up new horrors. You are nothing but children; your enthusiasm is a straw fire and if the National Assembly does not put on trial two illustrious heads, or some generous Decius does not take them, you are all mad.” She made the demand because she did not believe in the King’s and the Court’s sincerity. Every action of theirs which was liberal, a concession to the popular party, she scoffed at. Of the appearance of the King and his beautiful Queen in the Assembly she wrote: “They were abominably frightened, that is all the business shows. Before we can believe in the sincerity of their promise to agree to what the Assembly shall do, we must forget all that has passed... the King must send away all the foreign troops... we are nearer than ever to a frightful slavery if we allow ourselves to be blinded by false confidence.”

Her dissatisfaction with the National Assembly was complete. She sneered at the emotion when Marie Antoinette appeared in their midst seeking protection: “The French are easily won by the fine appearance of their masters, and I am persuaded that the half of the Assembly has been bÊte enough to be touched at the sight of Antoinette confiding her son to them. Morbleu! is it then of a child of which it is a question! It is the safety of twenty million men. All is lost if we do not take care.” The constitution displeased her, too: “We blush in reading the public papers. They are plastering up a bad constitution just as they have botched an incomplete and faulty declaration. Am I not going to see a demand for the revision of all?”

She saw clearly that it was not from the people of France, as a whole, that she would get the revision of the constitution which she asked, or a second to her demand for the heads of the king and queen. “There is only one hope,” she said, “it is in Paris. It is for you, Parisians, to give the example. By a wise and vigorous address show the Assembly that you know your rights, that you mean to preserve them, that you are ready to defend them, and that you demand that it declare them. Without such a movement all is worse than ever. It is not the Palais Royal which must do it; it is the united districts. However, if they do not respond, let it be done by whomsoever it may, provided it be in sufficient numbers to impose and to carry others by its example.” She was even ready to go a little farther and did it cheerfully: “A civil war is necessary before we shall be worth anything. All these little quarrels and insurrections seem to me inevitable; I cannot imagine that it is possible to come from the bosom of corruption and rise to liberty, without strong convulsions. They are the salutary crises of a severe sickness, and a terrible political fever is necessary to take away our bad humors.”

Truly, there were few better Jacobins in 1793 than Madame Roland was two months after the fall of the Bastille; for we have here in purity the doctrine of the sovereignty of the people, the divine right of insurrection, the demand for the head of Louis XVI., the call to Paris to take into her hands what the people of the country are not ready to do, even to use its power of terrorism against the Assembly, composed of the representatives of the people.

This spirit, this restless energy, never left her, though she was buried at Le Clos almost all the first eighteen months of the Revolution. She kept herself aflame by correspondence with her friends and by her propagandism among her neighbors, most of them decidedly recalcitrant. Especially did she incite herself by her reading. Writing to Bancal once she told him: “I have left all the Italian poets for the Tacitus of Davanzati. It is not permitted in a time of revolution to turn to pleasant studies, or objects remote from the public interest. If I can give a little time this winter to English, I shall read Macaulay’s history. I shall leave the historian only for the novel of Rousseau, which is perfectly suited to civism.”

She saw no danger in her doctrines. They moved to noble sentiments, to great aspirations. What greater good? That they incited to crimes, too, she did not admit. She was recklessly indifferent to what is; she looked only at what might be. Her eyes were turned to America, to Greece, to Rome, and not to the facts of the struggles of these countries, only to the fine actions of their heroes, the rounded phrases of their orators.

The reasonable girl who welcomed Louis XVI. to the throne, the politic woman who for years had been seeking a title and its advantages, and who had been willing to devote all her splendid power to reforming the old rÉgime, had become suddenly inexorable in her demands, unyielding in her suspicions, fierce in her thought. She believed that one must “watch and preach to the last sigh or else not mingle with the Revolution.” It was the revolt of the idealist against compromises made in the past; resentment for wrongs suffered; the “strike back” for the title not granted, and for Roland’s talent and services unrecognized; the hope of realizing dreams of an ideal society.

Nor was it a momentary enthusiasm. Her conviction never wavered. Others as firmly founded in the doctrines as she, and as eloquent in their defence of them, hesitated sometimes, drew back with apprehension at the torrents of passion and of demagogy they were loosening on France. But she never admitted that anything but “complete regeneration” could come of their teachings. It was the woman’s nature which, stirred to its depths by enthusiasm or passion, becomes narrow, stern, unbending,—which can do but one thing, can see but one way; that inexplicable feminine conviction which is superior to experience, and indifferent to logic.