The Rolands were not long in embroiling themselves in Lyons and in the Beaujolais. Disorganization and disorder were increasing daily there, as in Paris and throughout the country. The aristocracy, clergy, and commercial portions of the community, irritated at the failure of the government to restore tranquillity, and discouraged over the delay of the National Assembly in forcing its way through the difficulties of the situation, grew hard against the Revolution. There was a universal demand for order. Disorder grew from day to day. The conservative party was firmly convinced that the disorder was the fault of the friends of the Revolution. There was a suspicion of everybody who professed the new doctrines. Those who taught them were regarded as dangerous “agitators.” The reforms to which they had consented, and which they had left to the National Assembly, would never be made, they felt, unless the people could be quieted. They saw a general and universal catastrophe awaiting society if organization was not restored. On the other hand, the liberals saw in the policy of the aristocrats and clergy a plot against the people; sympathy with the Court. The disorders which occurred they attributed either to the just indignation of the long-oppressed “sovereign,” or to hired agitators, brought in by the conservative party to stir up riots, and thus cover the popular cause with odium. On either hand there were accusations without proof, suspicions without cause, violence and hatred instead of patience and good-will. All of the generosity, the dignity, the reasonableness, which the different estates had shown a year before in the memorials which they had sent to the States-General, had disappeared. Roland and his wife were known to be deeply in sympathy with democratic ideas, to preach them constantly. In spite of the fact that his natural relations were with the aristocratic class, Roland was active in the people’s clubs at Lyons; he was called the Mæcenas of Champagneux. He was suspected, if not of inciting to disorder, yet of sympathizing with it, and of regarding it as an instrument for forcing the Court, and driving the Assembly. He began to be considered a “suspect” by the conservatives. Such was the feeling towards him when he was a candidate for mayor, in 1789, that the most improbable stories were circulated about him. The Abbé Guillon declares in his Memoirs that Roland disguised himself and went into the taverns, begging the people’s votes; that he joined in their orgies and distributed among them seditious pamphlets. These charges are so inconsistent with the real character of Roland that it is not worth considering them, and they are only worth quoting as a specimen of the violent suspicions of the liberals, or _révolutionnaires_, held and spread by the conservative party.