Madame Roland: A Biographical StudyTarbell, Ida M. (Ida Minerva)
History
Madame Roland: A Biographical Study
Tarbell, Ida M. (Ida Minerva)
France -- History -- Revolution, 1789-1799; Roland, Madame, 1754-1793
Of the three left behind, the fate of Buzot was saddest. At the moment
that he escaped to Evreux, the northwest departments felt that the
Convention had been coerced into the decree against the Gironde and
there was a general revolt against the tyranny of Paris. Buzot and his
friends who had escaped decided, on sounding this feeling, that it was
sufficiently wide-spread and profound to justify them in undertaking a
campaign against the Convention and in favor of federalism. Buzot began
by speaking in the cathedral at Evreux and here he was joined by Pétion,
Barbaroux, and Louvet. The agitators were not long unmolested. The
Convention turned its fiercest anathemas against the “traitors,” as it
called them, and the Revolutionary authorities of the northwest were
ordered to crush them. At first they fled into Brittany, evidently
hoping to find a vessel there for America, but disappointed in this,
they made their way to Gascogne, where one of their number had friends.
While Buzot was escaping, the patriotic saviours of their country were
exhausting themselves in fantastic efforts to show their hatred of his
“treason.” His house was demolished amid civic rejoicings. His effigy
was burned and riddled with bullets in the process. On the walls near
his residence could be still read a few years ago an inscription written
in the excitement.
“Buzot le scélérat trahit la liberté;
Pour ce crime infâme, il sera decapité.”
This effectual and dignified way of dealing with a political opponent
reached its climax on December 30, 1793, when Evreux held a fête of
rejoicing over the recapture of Toulon. The cathedral in which, six
months before, Buzot had spoken had become a “temple of reason and
philosophy.” On the altars were the busts of Marat, Lepelletier, and
Brutus, where once were the forms of Virgin and Child and peaceable
saint. The latter had been transferred to the Place de la Fédération,
where, together with effigies of Buzot and other local celebrities who
had refused to believe and vote as the authorities desired, they were
burned.
In the mean time Buzot had escaped to Saint Émilion, where, for some
three months, he and his friends were concealed. They busied themselves,
when their places of hiding permitted it, with writing their memoirs.
Buzot discussed his political career and made a violent, often
vindictive, attack on his opponents. There is no direct avowal, in his
work, of his love for Madame Roland, but one feels throughout the
despairing, passionate passages the struggling of a great emotion,
stifled, but not dead. It is said that when the news of Madame Roland’s
death reached Buzot, his friends thought he had gone mad, and it was
many days before the violence of his grief was calmed.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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