Girondins

“ Gironde (794) , a maritime department in SW. France, facing the Bay of Biscay on the W. and lying N. and S. between Charente-Inférieure and Landes; the Garonne and the Dordogne flowing through it form the Gironde estuary, and with their tributaries sufficiently water the undulating land; agriculture and some manufactories flourish, but wine is the chief product.
Girondins or Girondists, a party of moderate republican opinions in the French Revolution ”

“ The crisis was postponed, and some weeks of July were spent in parliamentary warfare. Here the Girondins had the lead; but the Feuillants were the majority in the Assembly, while the Jacobins were supreme in Paris. The Girondins were driven into a policy both tortuous and weak. The Republic would give power to one of their enemies as the Monarchy gave it to the other. All they could do was to increase hostile pressure on the king, in the hope of bringing him to terms with them. They oscillated between open attack and secret negotiation and offers of defence. ”

“ While these things were happening in the Place de la Bastille, this is what was taking place at the Palais Bourbon:
There is at this moment a man whose name is in everybody’s mouth and the thought of whom is in everybody’s mind; that man is Lamartine. His eloquent and vivid History of the Girondins has for the first time taught the Revolution to France. Hitherto he had only been illustrious; he has become popular and may be said to hold Paris in his hand. ”

“ But as soon as these important measures had been taken, which the majority of the Convention believed would enable France once more to free her frontiers from the invaders, the Girondins and Jacobins turned upon each other with redoubled ardour, and the death-struggle between them recommenced. The Girondins reopened the struggle with an attack upon Marat. Few steps could have been more foolish, for Marat, though in many ways a real statesman, had from the exaggeration of his language never obtained the influence in the Convention to which his abilities entitled him. ... ”

“ Roland, as an instrument of the Girondins, feared that among the papers in the chest might be discovered some which would show in what close relations the Girondins stood to the Court. She decided that her husband should go to the Tuileries, accompanied by Gamain, an architect, and a servant. The chest was opened by the locksmith, Roland removed all the papers, tied them up in a napkin, and took them home. They were taken the same day to the Convention; and the commission charged the minister with having abstracted such papers as would have been inconvenient to him to deliver up. ”

“ The King then resumed his authority at the head of the new monarchical constitution, but with power strangely clipped, and with an Assembly the leading members of which, the Girondins (so called because their leaders were representatives from the Gironde, a district near Bordeaux) , eager and ambitious men, preferred theoretically a republic, and believed that their power would be best secured by plunging France into a war. It is not in fact true to assert, as is commonly done, that it was the attacks of the combined monarchs of Europe which drove France to war. ”

“ A new ministry had been forming, consisting of Feuillants and men friendly to Lafayette, one of whom, Terrier de Montciel, enjoyed the confidence of the king. On the opposition side were the Girondins angry and alarmed at their fall from power, the more uncompromising Jacobins, Pétion at the head of the Commune, and behind Pétion, the real master of Paris, Danton, surrounded by a group of his partisans, Panis and Sergent in the police, Desmoulins and Fréron in the press, leaders of the populace, such as Santerre and Legendre, and above them all, the Alsatian soldier, Westermann. ”

“ Where the Girondins stood for Republicanism, the Jacobins stood for Anarchy. War was declared between the two. The Girondins arraigned Marat and Robespierre for complicity in the September massacres, and thereby precipitated their own fall. The triumphant acquittal of Marat was the prelude to the ruin of the Girondins, and the proscription of twenty-nine deputies followed at once as the first step. These fled into the country, hoping to raise an army that should yet save France, and several of the fugitives made their way to Caen. ”

“ As an exposé of keen policy and all-dominating opportunism, "Le Souper de Beaucaire" is admirable. In a national crisis anything that saves the State is justifiable—that is its argument. The men of the Mountain are abler and stronger than the Girondins: therefore the Marseillais are foolish not to bow to the men of the Mountain. The author feels no sympathy with the generous young Girondins, who, under the inspiration of Madame Roland, sought to establish a republic of the virtues even while they converted monarchical Europe by the sword. ”

“ Undoubtedly this Trial of the Girondins is the greatest that Fouquier has yet had to do. Twenty-two, all chief Republicans, ranged in a line there; the most eloquent in France; Lawyers too; not without friends in the auditory. How will Tinville prove these men guilty of Royalism, Federalism, Conspiracy against the Republic? Vergniaud's eloquence awakes once more; 'draws tears,' they say. And Journalists report, and the Trial lengthens itself out day after day; 'threatens to become eternal,' murmur many. Jacobinism and Municipality rise to the aid of Fouquier. ”

“ The fall of the Girondins on the 31st of May was a triumph for Marat. But it was his last. The skin disease he had contracted in the subterranean haunts was rapidly closing his life; he could only ease his pain by sitting in a warm bath, where he wrote his journal, and accused the Girondins, who were trying to raise France against Paris. Sitting thus on the 13th of July he heard in the evening a young woman begging to be admitted to see him, saying that she brought news from Caen, where the escaped Girondins were trying to rouse Normandy. ”

“ At the end of the year 1795, after the complete defeat of the Girondins, the persecutions against the priests and the ci-devant nobles were redoubled, and some of the effects of the general were exposed to sale. This courageous wife repaired to Brionde, where the auction took place. "Citizens," said she, to the district, "I feel myself obliged to protest before the sale about to take place, against the enormous injustice of applying the laws of emigration to him who now is the prisoner of the enemies of France. ”

“ Their rejection of the hand that bore the crimson stain is the cause of their ruin, but also of their renown. They were always impolitic, disunited, and undecided; but they rose, at times, to the level of honest men. Their second line of attack was not better chosen. Party politics were new, and the science of understanding the other side was not developed; and the Girondins were persuaded that the Montagnards were at heart royalists, aiming at the erection of an Orleanist throne. Marat received money from the Palais Royal; and Sieyès to the last regarded him as a masked agent of monarchy. ”

“ For a few days matters looked most threatening for the victorious members of the Mountain, but they were well served by the deputies on mission. The Norman army was easily defeated at Pacy on the 13th of July; Bordeaux and Marseilles quickly submitted, and Lyons was invested. But the success of the Mountain was due to something more than the vigour of its representatives in the provinces. The general sentiment in France was that the conduct of the Girondins in causing civil war showed the very excess of want of patriotism ”

“ The Girondists were, indeed, rather a group of individuals holding certain opinions and principles in common than an organized political party, and the name was at first somewhat loosely applied to them owing to the fact that the most brilliant exponents of their point of view were deputies from the Gironde. These deputies were twelve in number, six of whom—the lawyers Vergniaud, Guadet, Gensonné, Grangeneuve and Jay, and the tradesman Jean François Ducos—sat both in the Legislative Assembly and the National Convention. ”

“ The Gironde had no constitutional remedy for its anxieties. The next step would be taken by the democracy of Paris, and their victory would be a grave danger to the Gironde [Pg 234] and a triumph for the extreme revolutionary faction. Up to this time they had struggled for mastery; they would now have to struggle for existence. They accepted what was inevitable. After the flight of the Feuillants, the Gironde, now supreme in the legislature, capitulated to the revolution which they dreaded, and appeared without initiative or policy. ”

“ Some, like Barbaroux, Buzot, Louvet, and their friends, retired to the provinces, which they endeavored to rouse for one last struggle. Others, like Madame Roland and the twenty-two, prepared themselves in their silent prison solitude for death and the scaffold. The name of the Girondists now became a sound as proscribed as that of Royalist had been during their brief sway. No voice gifted with power was raised throughout the republic in favor of the men by whom, in the midst of such enthusiastic acclamations, that republic had been founded. ”

“ A soldier, diplomatist, gentleman, there was in his soul a wholly different feeling for degraded royalty than the sentiment of satisfied jealousy which filled the minds of the Girondists. The prestige of the throne existed for Dumouriez; the prestige of liberty only existed for the Girondists. This feeling, revealed in his attitude, language, gestures, could not long escape the observation of Louis XVI. Kings have twofold tact, misfortune makes them more nice; the unfortunate perceive pity in a look; it is the only homage they are allowed to receive, and they are the more jealous of it. ”

“ The Gironde, from the tribune itself, made that appeal to the people against the king which it was subsequently doomed to make in vain in favour of the king against the Jacobins. In order to control the city, Brissot, Roland, Pétion, excited the suburbs, those capitals of miseries and seditions. Every time that a people which has long crouched in slavery and ignorance is moved to its lowest depths, then appear monsters and heroes, prodigies of crime and prodigies of virtue; such were about to appear under the conspiring hand of the Girondists and demagogues. ”

“ So we planned: and so it came about that we were free to enjoy ourselves and look about us critically, as the smoky little tender bore us up the wide channel of the Gironde from Pauillac, where our ship bound for South America had contemptuously dropped us, to Bordeaux itself. A little below the city, the Gironde, which is really the estuary of the Garonne and Dordogne, shrinks to the Garonne pure and simple, but under either name it seems equally a waste of turbid clay-laden waters. ”

“ When the English reached the hilly centre of France food failed them. The winter came, and horses and men died of cold and want. A rabble of half-starved fugitives was all that reached Bordeaux after a march of six hundred miles. Aquitaine, where the inhabitants were for the most part hostile to the English, and did everything in their power to assist the French, was before long all but wholly lost, and in 1375 a truce was made which put an end to hostilities for a time, leaving only Calais, Cherbourg, Brest, Bayonne, and Bordeaux in the hands of the English. ”

“ It took its rise originally at Bordeaux, the great commercial city of the department of the Gironde. Bordeaux was of Roman origin. It had always displayed a warm love of independence, which its Parliaments had continually kept alive. It had of late years become the chief commercial link between France and the revolutionised United States. It had early, too, become leavened with the new philosophy; it was the birthplace of Montaigne and Montesquieu. The Gironde sent up to the new Assembly twelve deputies, all as yet unknown, but all deeply imbued with the new principles. ”

“ More conversant with politics than the young orators of the Gironde, he did not comprehend the Revolution without government; anarchy, in his opinion, did not destroy the monarchy more than it did liberty. ”

“ One evening, I was sauntering along the beach at Paulliac—a little town on the river’s bank, about a dozen of miles from the mouth of the Gironde, and holding precisely the same relation to Bordeaux as Gravesend does to London—when a band of vintagers, men, women, and children, came up. They were bound to some village on the opposite side of the Gironde, and wanted to get ferried across. A long parley accordingly ensued between the chief and a group of boatmen. The commander of the vintage forces offered four sous per head as the passage-money. ”

“ On a bright Saturday afternoon we steamed into the wide mouth of the Gironde, a name stirring vague memories of romance and terror. The French passengers gazed wistfully at the low-lying strip of sand and forest, but our uniformed pilgrims crowded the rail and hailed it as the promised land of self-realization. ”

“ Being deputed to Paris in order to give an account of the events of the south to the National Assembly, the Girondists, Vergniaud and Guadet, who were desirous of obtaining an amnesty for the crimes of Avignon, did all in their power to attach this young man to their party. Barbaroux, impetuous as he was, did not justify the butchers of Avignon; but detested the victims. He was a man requisite to the Girondists. Struck by his eloquence and his enthusiasm, they presented him to Madame Roland: no woman was more formed to seduce, no man more formed to be seduced. ”