During the months that the Rolands were in Paris, they were in constant correspondence with Champagneux at Lyons. Their letters, for the most part unpublished, show the state of mind into which French idealists worked themselves in this period. Dissatisfied because the Assembly had not been able to complete the regeneration of France in two years, suspicious of everybody whose views differed from theirs, anxious to show how reconstruction should be conducted and how easy it is to run a government if you understand the principles and possess civic virtue, this party of which the Rolands are excellent types worked incessantly to discredit the government, to arouse contempt for the work the Assembly had been able to do, and to show that Louis XVI. could not be in earnest in his declaration of fidelity to reforms instituted.

The Rolands lamented daily in their letters to Champagneux and other friends that public opinion was languishing, that the country was falling into the sleep of the enslaved, that the Assembly was worn out. They tried to arouse them to suspicion like their own by repeating all the alarming reports which ran the street without, of course, ever taking pains to verify their truthfulness, and by railing at them because they were inclined to feel that reforms were being brought about quite as rapidly as in the nature of the situation was possible.

It was not many months before their exasperation had reached such a pitch that they were convinced that civil war was necessary, and they began to look about for reasons with which to alarm and push on the people to it. The only adequate one they found was to persuade the country that the King was plotting with the ÉmigrÉs on the border, and that they and the Austrians were watching for a chance to attack France, overturn the new government, and restore the old rÉgime. On June 22d an event occurred which in Madame Roland’s opinion was ample proof of the truthfulness of their opinions. On the morning of that day Madame Roland opened a letter written the day before to Bancal to say: “The King and Queen have fled, the shops are closed, the greatest tumult reigns. It is almost impossible that Lafayette should not be an accomplice.”

For twenty-four hours she was in an ecstasy of patriotic hopefulness. The flight of the King was a renunciation of the contract he had made with his people in taking the oath to support the constitution. The evident duty of the country was to declare him dethroned and to establish a republic. She was so excited she could not stay at home, but went among her friends, urging them to immediate action.

Her fixed principle that a woman should take no part in public proceedings was laid aside now. “As long as peace lasted,” she wrote her friend, “I played a peaceable rÔle and exerted that kind of influence which seems to me suitable to my sex. Now that the flight of the King has declared war, it seems to me that every one must devote himself without reserve. I have joined the fraternal societies, because convinced that zeal and a good thought may sometimes be useful in a time of crisis.”

Her joy was short. The tumult which threatened in Paris was promptly quieted by Lafayette, at the head of the National Guards. The citizens were exhorted to calm, to vigilance, to confidence in the Assembly. Madame Roland writhed under this attitude. “Is this the place to be tranquil and contented?” she cried. She and her friends, convinced that the measures to prevent a riot and restore order were directed especially at themselves, gathered at Robespierre’s, where they considered ways of driving the people to an action of which the Assembly was incapable.

In the midst of their activity the King was brought back, and to their dismay they saw that he would in all probability be kept in place without public trial. Their alarm was intense. Without the King they were convinced all would be well. Regeneration was certain if royalty could be dispensed with. Nothing else was preventing the adoption of a Republic. He was “worse than a stick in a wheel,” declared Roland to Champagneux.

In the mÊlÉe of opinion which followed the King’s return, Madame Roland’s position was well defined: “To put the King back on the throne,” she wrote, “is an absurdity; to declare him incapable is to be obliged, according to the constitution, to name a regent; to name a regent would confirm the vices of the constitution at a moment when one can and ought to correct them. The most just measure would be to try him; but the country is incapable of anything so lofty as that. There is nothing to do but suspend and guard him while searching those who aided in his flight; to go on acting without royal consent and, in order to put more regularity and activity into the distribution and exercise of power, name a temporary President. In this way it would be easy to show Paris and the departments that a king is not necessary and that the machine can go on well enough without him.” This programme she was willing to “preach from the roofs,” but it was not adopted. The King was restored.

The Republic which she and her friends dreamed of at this moment and did not hesitate to announce, was not in the public mind, and when they insisted upon it, they were insisting upon an individual opinion of which the country at large had no conception, and for which it had no sympathy. By her own confession both the Assembly and the Jacobins “went into convulsions” at the mere pronunciation of the name Republic. There were only two societies which, after the flight of the King, dared declare themselves tyrannicides,—the Cordeliers and a group of private individuals. At the Cercle Social they did discuss whether it was suitable or not to conserve kings, but at the Jacobins the very name Republican was hissed. Nevertheless they worked valiantly to spread their ideas. Robert published a pamphlet on the “Advantages of the flight of the King and the necessity of a new government or Republic.” Condorcet published a discussion “Whether a king is necessary to the conservation of liberty”; and Brissot, at the Jacobins, made a hit with a speech in which he showed that the cry that the King was inviolable and could not be tried was false; that even if inviolability were admitted it did not apply in this case; and that according to the constitution the King could and ought to be tried.

Thomas Paine was then in Paris, believing as Dumont says, that he had made the American Revolution and was called upon to make another in France. With Condorcet, Brissot, and a few others as sympathizers, Paine formed a republican society. Their first concern was to publish a journal, the prospectus of which was posted by Paine on the morning of the first of July. In it he declared that the King by his flight is “free of us as we are of him. He has no longer any authority; we no longer owe him obedience; we know him now only as an individual in the crowd, as M. Louis de Bourbon”; and he concluded his harangue by the announcement that “A society of republicans had decided to publish in separate sheets a work entitled The Republican. Its object is to enlighten people’s minds on this republicanism which is calumniated because it is not understood; on the uselessness, the vices, and the abuses of the royalty that prejudice persists in defending, although they may be known.” This poster made a great noise in the Assembly, where it was denounced as “worthy of all the rigor of the law.” According to Madame Roland, it was only by flattering the Assembly’s love for the monarchy and by abusing republicanism and its partisans, that it was possible to convince the body that however ridiculous the idea might be, still it was necessary to leave it free course.

Only two numbers of The Republican appeared, says Madame Roland, in her Memoirs; only one, says Moncure D. Conway, in his life of Paine. As a matter of fact, there were at least four issues, that number being in the collection of Revolutionary pamphlets in the BibliothÈque Nationale.

It was soon evident that the new cause would not be supported. Nevertheless, the new word was launched. The effect of the injudicious, impractical action of Paine, Brissot, and their friends, Robespierre described a few months later when he had broken with the Brissotins. “The mere word Republic caused division among the patriots, and gave the enemies of liberty the evidence they sought to prove that there existed in France a party which conspired against the monarchy and the constitution; they hastened to impute to this motive the firmness with which we defended in the Constituent Assembly the rights of national sovereignty against the monster of inviolability. It is by this word that they drove away the majority of the Constituent Assembly; it is this word which was the signal for that massacre of peaceable citizens whose whole crime was exercising legally the right of petition, consecrated by the constitutional laws. At this word the true friends of liberty were travestied as factious by perverse or ignorant citizens; and the Revolution put back perhaps a half a century. It was in those critical times that Brissot came to the society of the Friends of the Constitution, where he had almost never appeared, to propose changes in the form of government, when the simplest rules of prudence would have forbidden us to present the idea to the Constituent Assembly.”

As soon as the Rolands and their friends saw that the demand for the Republic was not welcomed by the people, they turned their efforts towards securing a trial for Louis XVI.

It seemed to be the only thing for which they were strong enough. To do this they were willing to unite with even demagogues, agitators, and with the worst elements of the people. They had only their voice and their pen, explains Madame Roland; if a popular movement came to their aid they welcomed it with pleasure without looking after, or disturbing themselves about, its origin. Beside they could not believe that a party made up of the idle and the violent, and led by demagogues, could be formidable. It was a force to be used when needed, and crushed when the result desired had been obtained. Even when the union of the Brissotins with the populace had produced so serious a riot as that of July 17, the “Massacre of the Champ-de-Mars,” as the radicals called it, Madame Roland did not change her views. She refused to see that the disorder was provoked in any degree by the people, and attributed the fault entirely to the Assembly and Lafayette.

The letters they wrote to their friends after the riot of the Champ-de-Mars are full of alarms and of suspicions. “In less than twenty-four hours,” Roland wrote to Champagneux, “there have been about three hundred imprisoned at the Abbaye and they are kept there in secret. People are taken up in the night. There has just passed on the Pont Neuf [it will be remembered that the Rolands were in the Rue GuÉnÉgaud and could easily see] three loaded wagons escorted by many National Guards. They say Marat is there, and different club members. Desmoulins is said to have fled; they are after Brissot. The patriotic journalists are in bad repute, and frightful charges against them are being spread. The cross of Saint Louis multiplies incredibly. The aristocrats are more sly and insolent than ever. It was said yesterday in the Luxembourg that this legislature could not endure more than six weeks or two months; that there would be war with the foreigners in this interval; that the King and the ministers would come out ahead; that they would displace everybody, annul everything; and that they would re-establish things on the old basis, but assuredly not less despotic than before.... There is nothing but treason, lies, poisons. Those who live in hotels, or who are served by caterers, are afraid. A great number sleep away from home. There were hundreds of deaths at the Champ-de-Mars; husbands killed their wives; relatives, relatives; friends, friends. Saint Bartholomew, the dragonades, offered nothing more horrible.”

But this is an alarmist’s letter, a repetition of rumors, not a serious effort to picture what actually occurred. Compare simply its statement of the number of killed at the Champ-de-Mars—“hundreds”—with the most trustworthy accounts, and Roland’s and his wife’s state of mind is clear. Gouverneur Morris, who was in Paris at the moment, went to the “elevation opposite”—the present TrocadÉro—to see the trouble. He says there were a “dozen or two” killed; Prudhomme says fifty; the official report gives twelve killed and the same number wounded. The same exaggerated statements characterize all their letters.

Before the summer of 1791 was over Madame Roland was certain that public opinion could not be aroused to another revolution; that the “stick” was going to stay in the “wheel”; that the Republic could not be established. As this conviction grew on her, she lost heart. “I have had enough of Paris, at least for this time.” She wrote: “I feel the need of going to see my trees, after having seen so many dolts and knaves. One rejoices in this little circle of honest souls when his cause triumphs, but when the cabale is on top, when the wicked succeed and error is ahead, there is nothing to do but go home and plant cabbages.”

And this she decided to do very soon, for the beginning of September she left Paris for Villefranche. Everything on the trip discouraged her. She wrote Robespierre: “I find the people on the route, as in Paris, deceived by their enemies or ignorant of the true state of things; everywhere the mass is well disposed; it is just because its interest is the general interest, but it is misled or stupid. Nowhere have I met people with whom I could talk openly and advantageously of our political situation; I contented myself by distributing copies of your address in all the places through which I passed; they will be found after my departure and furnish an excellent text for meditation.”

It was even worse at Villefranche, where, on arriving, she made a tour of observation. She was convinced that the most of the inhabitants were utterly despicable, and made so by the existing social institutions; that they loved the Revolution only because it destroyed what was above them, but that they knew nothing of the theory of free government, and did not sympathize with that “sublime and delicious theory which makes us brothers”; that they hated the name of Republic, and that a king appeared to them essential to their existence.

She was as disgusted with Lyons for its devotion to the aristocracy. Its elections she declared detestable and the deputies nothing but enemies of liberty. The officers in the department were as badly chosen as the representatives; “if one was to judge of representative government by the little experience we have had of it so far, we cannot esteem ourselves very happy”; the elections were bought, so were the administrators, so the representatives, who in their turn sold the people. Even at Le Clos, where she went immediately for the fall vintage, there was a cloud; for the calumnies spread at Lyons about Roland when it was a question of nominating him for the Assembly, had reached the hills, and the people attributed their absence in Paris to the supposed arrest of Roland for counter-revolution. When she went out to walk she heard behind her the cry Les aristocrates À la lanterne.

Although Madame Roland sighed to escape from the “dolts and knaves” of Paris and longed for the peace of the country, the sentiment was only a passing one. The charm of the little circle she criticised so freely, the friendships she had formed, her devotion to the public cause, all these things made the absence from Paris hard to bear. On leaving she had hoped it would be only temporary. Roland was much talked of as a candidate for the new Assembly, and if he succeeded, it would take them back to Paris. She knew before her arrival at Le Clos that he had failed to secure the nomination. The news deepened her irritation at the condition of public affairs, strengthened the sense of oppression which the province produced, made her dissatisfied with Le Clos, her husband’s future, Eudora.

She had not seen her little daughter for seven months. She was deeply disappointed that she had changed so little. It seemed to her that she had gained nothing in the interval of separation, and that she had no idea of anything but loving and being loved. There was one way of awakening the child, however, in her judgment. She told Roland of it in one of the first letters she wrote him after reaching Villefranche, when she said: “Hasten back so that we may put our affairs in shape, and arrange to return to Paris as often as possible. I am not ambitious of the pleasures there, but such is the stupidity of our only child that I see no hope of making anything of her except by showing her as many objects as possible, and finding something which will interest her.”

For Roland, too, she felt that Paris was necessary. She was pained at the idea that he was going to be thrown back into silence and obscurity. He was accustomed to public life; it was more necessary to him than he himself thought, and she feared that his energy and activity would be fatal to his health, if they were not employed according to his tastes.

When Roland came back, he shared her feelings. He soon finished his affairs at Lyons, for the National Assembly had abolished the office of inspector of manufactures, and they spent the fall at Le Clos, occupied with the vintage, but they were restless. They had but little income and they turned their minds again to the idea of the pension, to which Roland’s forty years of service had certainly entitled him. If they were at Paris, perhaps it could be obtained. Then Roland’s work, which was simply the encyclopÆdia, would certainly be easier “at the fireside of light among savants and artists than at the bottom of a desert”; for such their retreat seemed to them. They felt the need, too, of being near the centre of affairs; they ought to be where they could “watch”; where they could help bring about the “shock” which must come soon or the public cause would be lost forever. Their dissatisfaction became so great in the end, and public affairs so exciting, that they decided to go to Paris.