Fatal Purity by Ruth Scurr

Author:Ruth Scurr
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
Published: 2006-11-14T16:00:00+00:00

about the excellent spirit in the Midi, the energy of the departments there and the facilities which that part of France might provide for the foundation of a Republic should the Court succeed in subjugating the north of France and Paris. We got out the maps; we drew the line of demarcation. Servan studied the military positions; we calculated the forces available and examined the means of reorganizing supply. Each of us contributed ideas as to where and from whom we might expect support.50

Roland’s wife had come a long way since she married an obscure bureaucrat twenty years her senior out of intellectual respect. Now she was poring over maps of France and helping the ministry to divide it into putative republican and monarchical segments. On 10 June she prompted Roland to write an open letter to the king denouncing his threat to use his veto to delay the assembly’s decrees on the refractory priests and the new federal army (due to arrive in Paris in time for the third anniversary of the fall of the Bastille on 14 July). She may even have drafted the words in which Roland effectively accused the king of treason: “Much more delay and a grieving people will see in its king the friend and accomplice of conspirators.”51 Unsurprisingly, the king responded, two days later, by dismissing Roland and his friends from the ministry. They had lasted just three months in office.

General Lafayette heard the news on the front line. The war continued to go badly. Lafayette struggled more than ever to integrate new rank-and-file soldiers recruited from the National Guard with remnants of the old regime army. There were not enough funds or weapons; the frontier moved closer to Paris every day. In an open letter to the capital, he welcomed the fall of Brissot’s friends and blamed all France’s recent troubles, including the grim news from the front, on the Jacobin Club: “This sect, organized like a district empire, in its metropolitan and affiliated societies, blindly guided by ambitious chiefs, forms a separate corporation in the midst of the French people, whose power it usurps by governing its representatives and proxies.”52 What did Lafayette have in mind—a military coup to coincide with the 14 July observation, as Robespierre feared? Might he sweep down from the north on his white charger and put a stop once and for all to the relentless bickering in the capital when the nation already had its work cut out fighting a foreign war? If so, there would be bloodshed again on the Champ de Mars, for Paris meanwhile was planning a popular protest in support of the dismissed ministers. Robespierre disapproved. He hated and feared Lafayette. “Strike at Lafayette and the nation will be saved,” was his improbable advice to the Jacobins.53 But he hated Brissot’s faction just as bitterly, so he stood at the tribune and denounced the forthcoming protest:

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