Liberty: The Lives and Times of Six Women in Revolutionary France (23 page)

Their second son, Albert, was born on 20 November. Leaving her children with her parents in Switzerland on 28 December, Germaine arrived in Surrey in January 1793. After only four months she returned to Switzerland. Narbonne saw her off at Dover, promising to join her as soon as he could; it would take him over a year.

8

FEMME POLITIQUE

Manon Roland

AUGUST 1792–MAY 1793

Always in the eye of the storm, always in the shadow of the popular hatchet, we walk in the glint of lightening.

M
ANON
R
OLAND

F
OR
M
ANON
R
OLAND
, the pleasure of having her husband reinstated as Minister of the Interior in August 1792, following the storming of the Tuileries, was marred by the fact that his colleague on the provisional Executive Council was Georges Danton, newly created Minister of Justice. ‘Ferocious in face and probably of heart,’ she wrote of him. ‘I could not apply the idea of a good man to that face.’

Danton represented to Manon the antithesis of all that she valued: discipline, discretion, virtue, self-sacrifice. She imagined him, dagger in hand, inciting the mob on to still greater deeds of butchery. She found Danton’s boldness misplaced, his bonhomie and openness contrived and his extravagant physicality repellent. Her prim disapproval of the easy-going womanizer was heightened by her awareness of her own unfulfilled sensuality; this was a woman, after all, who would write of herself that ‘no one so obviously made for voluptuous pleasure has known so little of it’.

Danton made every effort to win Manon over. He visited her almost daily during the last weeks of August, arriving at the Hôtel de l’Intérieur early before Council meetings or inventing excuses to stay late afterwards to chat to her of patriotism, and asking himself to dinner on evenings when no one else was invited. Although she admitted that ‘no one could have shown more zeal, a greater love of Liberty or a stronger desire to agree with his colleagues in her service’, Manon could not bring herself to accept or trust him. Every fibre of her judgemental soul revolted against Danton: political unity was not worth the price of consorting with a man like him. She whispered to her friends that the Council was tarnished by the presence of a man with such an ‘evil reputation’.

Manon was not alone in her suspicions of Danton’s integrity. ‘If the gratification of his own ambition is to be had at no other price than the sacrifice of his country’s good, he will not refuse the purchase,’ wrote Dr Moore at this time, outlining the means by which Danton consolidated his power base among the deputies: by his own and Robespierre’s eloquence, by bribery and intimidation. Others associated with the Rolands politically were more willing to build bridges, arguing that Danton had made a valuable contribution to the revolution, that he was loved by the people, ‘and that there was no point in making an enemy unnecessarily’. Pierre Vergniaud, the most brilliant of the Girondin orators, admired the man, and tried to work towards a mutual understanding. Danton frequented Vergniaud’s mistress Mme Dodun’s salon in the Place Vendôme, as did Condorcet, who earned Manon’s contempt for refusing to choose sides on the matter.

Mme Roland’s arrogance was beginning to win her enemies. Paul Barras, a former count from Provence who sat in the Convention near the Montagnards, thought highly of Roland’s patriotism and ‘generous ideas’ but found Manon impossible. When he was introduced to her, the bow with which she favoured him was imperious, and he disapproved of the ‘obstinate assurance’ of her occupation of Roland’s office. Barras declined her invitation to dinner at the Hôtel de l’Intérieur.

By the end of August, Manon’s haughty and undisguisedly censorious reserve had finally convinced Danton that she would not melt, and he stopped dropping in at the Hôtel de l’Intérieur. ‘They [Danton and his friend, Fabre d’Églantine] had no doubt concluded that Roland was an upright man who would have no part in their enterprise and that his wife could not be used to influence him,’ she wrote later, with satisfaction. ‘They probably saw that she, too, had principles and a woman’s instinct for recognising false knaves; and they will have conjectured, I little doubt, that she could on occasion use her pen.’

Roland, as Minister of the Interior, was responsible for maintaining public order, but when the massacres began on 2 September he had no forces with which to achieve it. Manon insisted in her
Memoirs
that as soon as he heard what was happening in the prisons that day, Roland wrote to the mayor Jérôme Pétion and to Antoine Santerre, head of
the National Guard, requesting extra security for the gaols; according to her, he had these letters printed and posted up around the city to add extra authority to his words. However, no trace of these documents survives, and it seems likely that Roland’s first public response to the killings was his weak declaration twenty-four hours later, in front of the National Assembly, that the Executive Council ‘had been unable either to foresee or to prevent the excesses’.

At five on the afternoon of the 2nd, two hundred men appeared, drums beating, outside the Hôtel de l’Intérieur. They were demanding arms with which to set off to Verdun to fight the Prussians, and calling for Roland, who was in council session at another ministry. The demonstrators refused to accept that he was not at home, and seemed about to storm the building when Manon had ten of them shown in to see her. She managed to convince them that she had no hidden weapons, and directed them to the War Ministry. Finally they left, taking the
valet de chambre
with them as a hostage and complaining that all ministers were fucking traitors. Manon sprang into a coach and rushed to tell Roland and the Council, but met with a lukewarm response. ‘Most of them thought it was a natural result of the prevailing conditions and of the public agitation.’

On the same day the Commune’s Surveillance Committee, headed by Marat, issued warrants for the arrest of Roland, Brissot and other leading Girondins whom Robespierre had denounced, without naming them, in front of the Commune. Marat was especially determined to destroy Roland, who had in the past month refused him state funding for his newspaper. Danton recalled the warrants, saying, ‘You know that I do not hesitate at such things when they are necessary, but I disdain them when they are useless.’ Although she knew it was Danton himself who had countermanded the orders of what he called ‘that fanatical cabal’, still Manon attributed to him the worst of motives.

She was convinced that Danton, Robespierre and Marat had orchestrated the September massacres and that the mob that converged on the Hôtel de l’Intérieur on the 2nd had been sent to kill Roland. It is true that Danton, and perhaps most of France, saw the murders as an unfortunate but inevitable explosion of popular feeling–an exigency of revolution. Danton and his friends’ incendiary words in the last few
days of August had inflamed public fears. When he was informed that the massacres had begun, Danton responded, ‘I don’t give a damn for the prisoners. They can go to the devil.’ Brissot recorded him saying, on 3 September, that the executions were the expression of common will and ‘necessary to appease the people of Paris’. Danton made no effort to staunch the flow of blood; but then, neither did anybody else.

Roland, sallow, unable to eat or sleep and nursing a stress-induced rash, was in no position to condemn Danton. When he was told a week later that a warrant had been issued for his arrest (Manon had kept the news from him), the way he spoke of ‘this personal predicament…enabled his enemies to suggest that his opposition to the executions was due to fear for his own neck’.

It must have been hard for Manon, so brave and spirited, to have been married to a man who so completely lacked her charisma and drive. Roland was upright, diligent and devoted to his wife and the revolutionary cause, but he could also be petulant, affectedly grave, suspicious, inflexible and timorous. As General Dumouriez, his former colleague, observed, he would have been better suited to a minor bureaucratic position than to the great office of state he held. Although she defended him loyally in her account of their life together and of his career, and declared she wanted nothing more in writing her memoirs than to ‘see my husband’s glory intact’, Manon’s frustration is at times almost palpable. Her husband’s most glorious or courageous deeds resulted from courses she had advised him to take or letters she had written in his name; when he acted alone, he was always less than inspirational.

The sole man on whom she felt she could rely, after the horrors of early September, was François Buzot, one of the three Incorruptibles from her
petit comité
of spring 1791. Pétion was compromised by his vanity and Robespierre had distanced himself from the Rolands; Buzot alone remained to make Manon’s political dreams a reality. He had spent the previous year, since September 1791, as president of the local criminal court at his home town in Normandy, but had kept in regular touch with the Rolands. On 13 September Manon wrote to beg him to get himself chosen as a deputy to the new National Convention and return to Paris so as to save Roland from the Commune; implicit in
her appeal was her own desire to have him near her in such terrifying times. A week later, Buzot was in the capital.

Manon saw the Girondins, who held the majority in the National Convention, as true representatives of France, while the Paris Commune, ever more powerful, were a group of opportunistic villains who ‘had nothing to lose and everything to gain by the revolution [and]…felt the imperative need to commit new crimes in order to cover up the old’. Through Roland, Manon began to press for a federal system like that in the United States in order to deprive the Commune–and the Parisian mob–of its power. Robespierre and his allies presented this as counterrevolutionary treason.

As Bertrand Barère said the following spring, the Girondins believed the revolution was achieved, whereas the Montagnards wanted to push it still further. As for Germaine and her friends in 1789-90, for the Girondins the revolution had been accomplished when they were granted access to power. The historian Alexis de Tocqueville described ‘the unfortunate and almost ridiculous situation of the sincerely republican party [the Girondins], that honest third party, running after an ideal and ever receding republic, caught between those who wanted the Terror and those who wanted the monarchy’.

Although neither group was especially cohesive, and both were made up of men from similar backgrounds and professions, increasingly the Montagnards (who dominated the Jacobin Club, and whose power base was in Paris rather than the provinces) were a more effective political coalition than the Girondins. The latter were united by their political moderation, romantic devotion to liberty and high-minded principles–they saw themselves as ‘
honnêtes gens
’–but lacked the increasingly ruthless, focused energy of the Montagnards and their willingness to champion and harness the popular energy of the people on the streets.

Those people saw Robespierre as the epitome of fundamental revolutionary concepts such as patriotism and virtue. As the historian
François Furet observes, while the Girondins, who had not identified so deeply and personally with the stylized language of revolution, could not find a way to attack him, Robespierre was able to ‘dispatch them in advance to a guillotine of their own making’. Monopolizing this new language and imagery made it easy for Robespierre, and Marat to a lesser extent, to portray the Girondin fears of popular involvement in politics as elitist and their moderation as faint-hearted and hypocritical.

One of the obvious differences between the Montagnards and the Girondins in the first weeks of the National Convention was that while the Montagnards were content to draw a veil over the events of early September, the Girondins wanted to bring the perpetrators to justice–hoping in doing so that they would implicate their political opponents. Many Girondins, like Roland, believed that they had barely escaped cold-blooded murder. Both sides cried conspiracy. When Roland stood up in the Convention on 22 September, its second day in session, and demanded an end to arbitrary power exercised by revolutionary committees, his words were applauded but nothing was done.

When the Convention was asked to punish the perpetrators of the massacres, the Montagnards justified their decision not to pursue them on the grounds that during revolutions ‘very vigorous measures were necessary’. Jean-Lambert Tallien, secretary to the Commune’s council and member of the Surveillance Committee during the massacres, insisted that existing laws were sufficient to protect people. The Girondins took the line that all those who would not condemn the murders were implicated in them. ‘There can be neither esteem nor union between the heroes of August 10 and the assassins of September,’ cried Buzot. ‘There can be no union between virtue and vice.’

Buzot’s first speech to the Convention, on 24 September, demonstrated his commitment to Girondin, and more particularly Manon Roland’s, ideology. He proposed three resolutions: a reconciliation between the capital and the rest of the country; a law condemning the instigators of death and murder; and a project to create a new domestic force at the Convention’s command and drawn from each of the Republic’s eighty-three departments–a national rival, in effect, to the gangs of armed sans-culottes roaming the streets of Paris.

When the issue of Roland continuing as Interior Minister was
brought before the Convention on the 29th–no government minister could also be a deputy to the Convention, so Roland (like Danton, if he was to remain as Minister of Justice) would have to choose between the two responsibilities–Buzot introduced the motion inviting him to stay on in office. Danton pushed back his chair and roared, ‘No one is more fair to Roland than I, but I suggest that if you invite him to be Minister, you should also extend the invitation to Mme Roland, for everyone knows he was not alone in his department!’ Buzot replied that he was proud to call Roland his friend.