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Thus did the original idea of a federative republic arise in the first interview between Barbaroux and Madame Roland. What they dreamed of as a desperate measure of Liberty, was afterwards made a reproach to them for having conspired as a plot. This first sigh of patriotism of two young minds who met and understood each other, was their attraction and their crime.
Barbaroux, and other persons who had made much noise in the world, were made shorter by a whole head because they happened to claim the "American federal system" to be the "best political form."
And Barbaroux, who had promised Madame Roland to bring up from Marseilles and other towns in the south a band of men capable of any atrocity, had collected a gang of five hundred miscreants, the refuse of the galleys and the jails, and paraded them in triumph through the streets, which their arrival was destined and intended to deluge with blood.
Henriot, Sillery, Louvet, Laclos, and Barbaroux, the emissary of Roland and Brissot, were the principal instigators of the émeute of the 20th of June. The passions of these men were different, but their impatience was the same; some wished to terrify, others to strike, but all wished to act; when once the people were let loose, they would stop where destiny willed.
The meetings of conspirators were attended not only by the Girondin leaders, to whom Madame Roland had recently added a new recruit, a young barrister from the South, named Barbaroux, remarkable for his personal beauty, and, as was soon seen, for a pitiless hardness of heart, and energetic delight in deeds of cruelty that, even in that blood-thirsty company, was equaled by few; with them met all those as yet most notorious for ferocity Danton and Legendre, the founders of the Cordeliers; Marat, daily, in his obscene and blasphemous newspaper, clamoring for wholesale bloodshed; Santerre, odious as the sanguinary leader of the very first outbreaks of the Revolution; Rotondo, already, as we have seen, detected in attempting to assassinate the queen; and Pétion, who thus repaid her preference of him to La Fayette, which had placed him in the mayoralty, whose duties he was now betraying.
Never was there such pounding since Thackeray's old Pierre, who, "just to keep up his drumming, one day drummed down the Bastile": At midnight I beat the tattoo, And woke up the Pikemen of Paris To follow the bold Barbaroux. On the waves of this drumming the people poured out from every gate of the garden, until the last loiterer passed and the gendarmes closed the portals for the night.
The Convention, which hitherto had been divided in something like equality between the two factions, yielded to the terror of a new insurrection, and on the 2d of June ordered the arrest of the Girondin leaders. A very few escaped the search made for them by the officers Roland, to commit suicide; Barbaroux, to attempt it; Pétion and Buzot reached the forests to be devoured by congenial wolves.
Couhey, indeed, was sent to the Abbaye for applauding a Federalist speech. Cf. on these three months. Mortimer-Ternaux, vol. Osselin: "I demand the decree of accusation against them all." Amar: "The apparently negative conduct of the minority of the Convention since the 2nd of June, was a new plot devised by Barbaroux." Report by Amar. Wallon, II., 407, 409.
"Their heads shall fall within a fortnight," croaks the eager People's-friend, clutching his tablets to write: Barbaroux, Pétion, writes he with bare shrunk arm, turning aside in the bath: Pétion, and Louvet, and Charlotte has drawn her knife from the sheath; plunges it with one sure stroke, into the writer's heart.
She seldom gave any opinion on the revolution, but frequently attended the municipalities to solicit the pensions of the expelled religious, or on any other occasion where she could be useful to her friends. On the arrival of Petion, Barbaroux, and others of the Brissotin faction, she began to frequent the clubs, and to take a more lively interest in political affairs.
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