The Days of the French Revolution (15 page)

Manon Roland was the intelligent, passionate daughter of a Parisian engraver. ‘Her face was not conventionally beautiful,’ wrote a man who came to know her well, ‘but she was extremely attractive…She had a graceful figure and beautifully shaped hands. One suspected that she was witty even before she began to speak; and no woman spoke with more purity, grace and elegance.’ Her own opinion of herself was equally high. ‘My complexion,’ she wrote in her memoirs, ‘is of a dazzling colour. My mouth is rather large but it would be impossible to find a smile more sweet or disarming. Though my hands are not small they are very elegant because of their long slender fingers which suggest cleverness and grace. My teeth are white and well positioned. I enjoy perfect health. Such are the treasures with which nature has blessed me.’ She might with truth have added that she was a thrifty, conscientious housekeeper and an excellent cook.

She had received little formal education but, being of a studious disposition, she had read a great deal ever since she had learned to read at all, and was extremely well informed. She was also opinionated, outspoken, snobbish, high-spirited and undiscerning, incapable of judging men, so fervently did she love and admire her friends and hate her enemies. At the age of twenty-seven she had married Jean-Marie Roland, an inspector of manufactures in Lyons, twenty years older than herself, a staid and righteous man, very conscious of his virtues, pedantic, energetic and ambitious. Manon
was quite as ambitious as her husband for whom she wrote newspaper articles which appeared under his name. Having corresponded with Brissot, they came to Paris where they took cheap, fifth-floor rooms in the Hôtel Britannique. From here Roland walked out one day to join the Jacobin Club in the plain dark clothes he invariably wore, a black hat covering the sparse, neatly brushed hairs on his dome-shaped head. His wife sought out the company of the Girondins to whom she aired sentiments inspired by her study of Plutarch, Voltaire and Rousseau, and made vehement attacks upon the Queen whom she detested.

These attacks were echoed by two journalists of extraordinary vituperative power, Jacques René Hébert and Jean Paul Marat.

The abusive and often obscene language that Hébert used in his journal,
Le Père Duchesne
, was in marked contrast to his appearance and manner. He was a small, polite man, ‘fussy and effeminate’, always neatly dressed and carefully scented, the husband of a former nun. Born at Alençon where his father kept a goldsmith’s shop, he had come to Paris after the family had been ruined by a lawsuit and had lived for a time in dire poverty, writing plays which managements declined to present and having to work as a box-office assistant at the Variétés, until his gift for scurrilous and ribald invective brought him both a wide readership among the disaffected, who had a taste for such language, and a large following in the Cordeliers Club. He insulted the Queen, ‘the Austrian bitch’, her sister-in-law, ‘Big-arse Babet’, and the King, ‘Monsieur Veto, the drunken drip’, with persistent and coarsely imaginative contempt.

Marat’s targets, who were attacked with equal venom if less scabrously in his paper
L’Ami du peuple
, were more diverse. Indeed, suspecting almost everyone and constantly complaining, ‘
Nous sommes trahis
’, Marat attacked the Assembly, the Feuillants, the royal family, the Ministers and municipality with fine impartiality. ‘In order to ensure public tranquillity,’ he once declared, ‘two hundred thousand heads must be cut off.’ Dark and intense, with high cheek bones and wide-set, greenish-yellow eyes, Marat seemed incapable of keeping his body still. When he spoke he gestured
constantly with his strong, thin arms; when he read his wide mouth twitched convulsively. He claimed that he slept only two hours a night, devoted a further hour to ‘eating, dressing and household affairs’ and spent the rest of his time working. He was forty-nine, thirteen years older than Hébert, ten years older than Desmoulins, older indeed than Brissot and Vergniaud and all the leading Girondins. Moreover, in his own opinion, he was not only more experienced than they were but also far more wise and honest. ‘When the Revolution came I immediately saw how the wind was blowing,’ he wrote. ‘And at last I began to breathe in the hope of seeing humanity avenged and myself installed in the place which I deserved.’

He came from Neuchâtel, but his father was Sardinian and his mother Swiss. He had studied medicine at Bordeaux and had become an expert on diseases of the eye, suffering himself from one which he managed to cure by his own treatment. He had practised as a doctor in London and Holland after leaving Paris and, following a visit to Scotland, had been recommended for an honorary degree at the University of St Andrews. Thereafter there is no reliable record of his activities, but he seems to have run heavily into debt and to have endeavoured to extricate himself from his difficulties by stealing some medals from a museum. On his return to France, vain, quarrelsome but undoubtedly ingenious, he had found himself again in demand as a fashionable physician whose writing-paper was adorned with an imaginary coat of arms. He had composed various scientific papers, on light, heat and electricity, which he had presented to the Académie des Sciences whose members, shocked by his contradictions of Newton, refused to admit him to their number, thus increasing the sense of persecution which haunted him and drove him to excess.

Abandoning medicine and science for politics on the eve of the Revolution, he became a prolific pamphleteer, attacking a variety of targets with more concern for wide-ranging insult than accurate aim. A visitor, Charles Barbaroux, once called upon him to find him busy writing. ‘He was in a hurry: the printer was calling for copy. You should have seen the casual way in which he composed his articles. Without knowing anything about some public man, he would ask the first person he met what he thought of him and write it down.
“I’ll ruin the rascal,” he would say.’ In 1789 he founded the paper which, though he held the people as a whole in low esteem, he was to call
L’ Ami du peuple
. Being perpetually in trouble with authority, warrants were more than once issued for his arrest. He was imprisoned for a time towards the end of 1789, but on a later occasion escaped by fleeing to London. After the day of the Champ du Mars his presses were seized and, accompanied by his kindly and devoted mistress, the former laundress, Simone Évrard, he went into hiding in the cellars and sewers of Paris where he contracted that painful and unpleasant skin disease known as prurigo. At the end of 1791 he again escaped to London, returning in April the following year to castigate the policies of the Girondins in the pages of the revived
L’Ami du peuple
and to denounce their call for war as being inspired not so much by anxiety for the future of the Revolution as for their own. He had taken to wearing ostentatiously grubby clothes with open shirts revealing a yellowish neck, and a red bandana soaked in cheap vinegar around his forehead and his greasy, matted hair to alleviate his headaches. On occasions the smell that emanated from him was nauseous. Men would recoil from him, sickened as much by his physical presence, by the ‘open sores, often running, that pitted his terrible countenance’, as by the ferocity of his political opinions. But no one doubted his courage or his importance as a propagandist of the Left.

Marat’s suspicions of the ‘
propagandistes de guerre
’ were shared by certain members of the Jacobin Club, one of whom declared, ‘We should be betrayed, thus defeated. Or else, were we to be the victors, the triumphant general would become the enemy of the people.’ These were not popular views, though. The Feuillants still feared war, but what influence the Feuillants had once enjoyed had now been largely dissipated and most of their leaders had been dispersed. Barnave had retired to Grenoble whence, like Bailly, he was to be brought back for execution. The revolutionary careers of his closest associates were also virtually over: Adrien Duport was soon to be arrested and to die in exile in Switzerland; Alexandre de Lameth left to join the army; so did his brother, Théodore.

Thus the cries for war became more insistent. The respected and profoundly boring mathematician and philosopher, the Marquis de Condorcet, who sat in the Assembly as one of the deputies for Paris and who, while aligning himself with no political group, had already spoken in favour of a republic, now lent his great influence to the war party. So did the King’s War Minister, the Comte de Narbonne, the only one of his Ministers who enjoyed any respect in the Assembly. And so did the Queen who had long since come to the view that the Constitution which the King had been required to accept was ‘monstrous’ and that their ‘only source of help [lay] with the foreign powers’. ‘At whatever price,’ she told the Austrian Ambassador, ‘they must come to our aid.’ ‘It is for the Emperor to put an end to the disturbances of the French Revolution,’ she added in a letter to her brother Leopold who had succeeded to the Austrian throne on the death of Joseph II. ‘Compromise has become impossible. Everything has been overturned by force and force alone can repair the damage.’

The King was, predictably, in two minds. His brothers, both of whom were now in exile, had told him that he must not accept the Constitution; that if he did so they would take it that he had been forced to do so and that they were, therefore, no longer bound by his commands. They strongly advocated war and, like their sister Elisabeth, urged Austria to invade France. For the moment the Emperor Leopold hung back from taking such a step. By the Declaration of Pillnitz of August 1791 he and the King of Prussia had announced that they regarded the situation of King Louis XVI as ‘an object of interest to all the sovereigns of Europe’, and that they were willing to restore a monarchical system in France. The Declaration was, however, nullified by the proviso that the intervention would not take place without the cooperation of the other powers; and, while some might have agreed to this, others, including Britain, would not.

The King’s indecision was brought to an end in March 1792. In that month, which saw the death of the Emperor Leopold and the accession of his son, the young, impetuous and adventurous Francis II, the King dismissed Narbonne who had been intriguing against His Majesty’s favourite Minister, de Molleville. The dismissal of
Narbonne caused uproar in the Assembly where Vergniaud rose to condemn it on behalf of the Girondins and to threaten the Court at the Tuileries in the most violent terms. ‘Terror and dread have often sallied forth from that place,’ he cried. ‘Let them today enter it in the name of the law. Let all those who now live there know that the King alone is inviolable, that the law will, without distinction of persons, overtake all the guilty sheltered there, and that there is not a single head which, once convicted of crime, can escape its blade.’

Overawed by such assaults as these, the King’s Ministers resigned. The Girondins in the Assembly could not replace them as the provision in the Constitution that none of its members could serve in the Government was still in force. So men closely involved with the Girondins were chosen instead. Jean Roland became Minister of the Interior and moved from his shabby rooms in the Hôtel Brittanique to the palatial
hôtel particulier
of Calonne where his wife presided over an increasingly influential salon. And Charles François Dumouriez, a brave, vain, pushing and dashing lieutenant-general, and in Madame Roland’s opinion ‘a very witty rake’, who had successively attached himself to whichever political party seemed most likely to advance his career, became Minister for Foreign Affairs. A few weeks later the King felt compelled to give way to the demands for war which were now almost universal. He appeared before the Assembly looking tired and abstracted. Necker’s daughter, Madame de Staël, described the scene in her memoirs:

I was present at the sitting in which Louis was forced to a measure which was painful to him for many reasons. His features were not expressive of his thoughts…a combination of resignation and dignity suppressed every sign of his true feelings. On entering the Assembly he looked to the right and left with that sort of vacant curiosity which is not unusual with persons who are so short-sighted that their eyes appear to be of no use to them. He proposed war in the same tone of voice that he might have used in proposing the least important decree imaginable.

‘Gentlemen,’ he said, ‘you have just heard the result of the negotiations in which I have been engaged with the Court of Vienna. The conclusions of the report have been unanimously approved by
my Council. I have adopted them myself. They are conformable with the wish the National Assembly has several times expressed and with the sentiments communicated to me by a great number of citizens in different parts of the Kingdom. All would rather have war than see the dignity of the French people insulted any longer…Having done my best to maintain peace, as I was in duty bound to do, I have now come – in conformity with the terms of the constitution – to propose war to the National Assembly.’

The proposal was loudly applauded. There were shouts of ‘
Vive le Roi!
’ from all sides. And soon France was at war with Prussia as well as with Austria.

The French army, with a strength of less than 140,000, was in no fit state to fight the combined forces of these enemies. Over 3,000 officers had left their regiments since a new oath of loyalty, omitting the King’s name, had been required of them after the flight of the royal family to Varennes. Many of those that remained exercised little authority over their men. Mutinies were common, equipment defective, ammunition in short supply. The troops and insubordinate volunteers marched towards the enemy in their wooden sabots and blue jackets without enthusiasm or confidence, and were soon retreating in confusion, throwing away their arms, and crying out, ‘We are betrayed!
Sauve qui peut!
’ General Théobald Dillon, an officer of Irish descent, whose corps had advanced on Tournai, was murdered during the precipitate withdrawal to Lille; General Rochambeau offered to hand in his resignation; the Duc de Biron was reported to have had to rescind an order for a bayonet charge when his men voted against it; the Marquis de Lafayette, refusing to comply with the ill-considered plans of Dumouriez, eventually returned to Paris in the hope of restoring order by a
coup d’état
.