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Of a Republic, where all stood thus far
Upon equal ground, that they were brothers all
In honour, as in one community –
Scholars and Gentlemen – where, furthermore,
Distinction lay open to all that came,
And wealth and titles were in less esteem
Than talents and successful industry.
(#)
Nothing in Wordsworth’s background led him to share the officers’ assumptions about the innate superiority of the landowning classes. On the contrary, their disdain for the uncouth masses rankled with him.
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But anyway, Wordsworth felt that it would be impossible to ‘undo what was done’, whatever the outcome of the war. The Revolutionary reforms were belated and inevitable. As he wrote to Mathews:
… suppose that the German army is at the gates of Paris, what will be the consequence? It will be impossible to make any material alteration in the constitution, impossible to reinstate the clergy in its ancient guilty splendor, impossible to give an existence to the noblesse similar to that it before enjoyed, impossible to add much to the authority of the King: Yet there are in France some [?millions – this word is indecipherable] – I speak without exaggeration – who expect that this will take place.
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It seems likely that he was thinking of the officers when he wrote these words.
Wordsworth could not refrain from contrasting such disillusioned and resentful reactionaries with the gallant volunteers for the citizen army. Once again, as in 1790, he saw the roads of France crowded, this time not with fédérés returning from Paris, but with ‘the bravest Youth of France’ flocking to the frontier, in response to urgent appeals to defend the motherland from invasion. He witnessed many poignant scenes of farewell, the memory of which would move him to tears more than a decade afterwards. News from the front that summer was of disaster after disaster: the patriot army seemed unable to match the superior discipline of their opponents, all professional soldiers. To Wordsworth, the volunteers appeared as martyrs, going willingly to their certain doom.
… they seem’d
Like arguments from Heaven that ’twas a cause
Good, and which no one could stand up against
Who was not lost, abandoned, selfish, proud,
Mean, miserable, wilfully depraved,
Hater perverse of equity and truth.
(#)
Such idealism could scarcely fail to move an open-hearted young man. The fine principles for which the volunteers fought, dressed in heady rhetoric, were universal. The French were fighting to defend their country, but they were fighting in the name of all Mankind. The fire had been kindled in France, but it seemed possible, indeed likely, that the blaze would spread across Europe, perhaps even to England. In such circumstances, it is scarcely surprising that Wordsworth should have come to see himself as ‘a Patriot’:
… my heart was all
Given to the People, and my love was theirs.
(#)
Wordsworth was then a child of Rousseau; he was inclined to believe that men are naturally good, that the existing institutions of society are artificial, tending to perpetuate idleness, luxury and flattery: a rotten carapace that could be peeled back to reveal the healthy flesh underneath. The violence that accompanied the Revolution was not characteristic; it was simply necessary to correct the unnatural abuses of the past. A new social contract would be founded on Justice, Equality and Reason. Government would be by the ‘general will’, for the common good, and by consent of the citizenry. In making a new constitution, free from any encumbrances of the past, the Convention would be making a new kind of Man. For the young Wordsworth, the Revolution promised heaven on earth:
O pleasant exercise of hope and joy!
For great were the auxiliars which then stood
Upon our side, we who were strong in love.
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven! O times,
In which the meagre, stale, forbidding ways
Of custom, law, and statute took at once
The attraction of a country in romance –
When Reason seemed the most to assert her rights
When most intent of making of herself
A prime enchanter to assist the work
Which then was going forwards in her name.
Not favoured spots alone, but the whole earth,
The beauty wore of promise …
(#)
In Orléans Wordsworth became involved with a woman at least four years his senior, Annette Vallon, and it was probably on her account that he moved early in 1792 to her home town of Blois, some thirty miles down the Loire. It seems likely that he was one of the two Englishmen admitted on 3 February to the Revolutionary club in Blois, Les Amis de la Constitution.
(#) Its President was Henri Grégoire, a radical cleric closely identified with the iconography of the Revolution: his image appears at the centre of Jacques-Louis David’s famous composition The Tennis-Court Oath.* (#) As ‘Constitutional Bishop’ of Blois he had served as a member of the Constituent Assembly until its dissolution in September 1791. Former members of the Constituent Assembly were debarred from sitting in the new Legislative Assembly, so after its dissolution Grégoire had returned to Blois. On 14 July 1792, Federation Day, he delivered a fiery speech to Les Amis de la Constitution in which he prophesied that the Revolution would spread across the world. He hailed the patriot armies fighting for ‘la liberté de l’univers’:
The present augurs well for the future. Soon we shall witness the liberation of all humankind. Everything confirms that the coming revolution will set all of Europe free, and prove a consolation for the whole human race. Liberty has been fettered to thrones for far too long! She will burst those irons and chains and as she extends her influence beyond our horizons, will inaugurate the federation of all mankind!
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Whether Wordsworth was present while this speech was being delivered is unknown. If not, he may well have read the transcript when it was published soon afterwards. In any case, Grégoire’s rhetoric gives a sense of the millenarian atmosphere in Revolutionary Blois at the time. Wordsworth was certainly aware of Grégoire; he later referred to him admiringly and quoted his words with approval.
In Blois, Wordsworth again lodged in a house with army officers, but here he met one different from the rest (and ostracised as a result): Michel Beaupuy, a captain who, though an aristocrat by birth, embraced the changes brought by the Revolution wholeheartedly. Beaupuy was thirty-seven, fifteen years older than Wordsworth, and he became a mentor to the younger man. Together they walked many a mile along the banks of the Loire, or in the forests that grew along the valley, engaged in earnest dialogues’, putting the world to rights:
Why should I not confess that earth was then
To me what an inheritance new-fallen
Seems, when the first time visited, to one
Who thither comes to find in it his home?
He walks about and looks upon the place
With cordial transport – moulds it and remoulds –
And is half pleased with things that are amiss,
T’will be such joy to see them disappear.
(#)
In this spirit of comradely idealism, Wordsworth may even have fantasised about joining Beaupuy in an armed crusade to liberate Britain from monarchy and aristocracy. There is a passage in The Prelude that seems to hint at such a possibility, when he writes of a ‘philosophic war/Led by philosophers’.
(#) And why not? However unrealistic, Wordsworth’s dream of revolution in Britain was consistent with the rhetoric used by men like Grégoire.
Among Beaupuy’s qualities that impressed Wordsworth was his compassion for the poor, ‘a courtesy which had no air/Of condescension’. On one of their walks they chanced on a ‘hunger-bitten girl’, leading a heifer by a cord.
… at the sight my friend
In agitation said, ‘ ’Tis against that
Which we are fighting,’ I with him believed
Devoutly that a spirit was abroad
Which could not be withstood, that poverty,
At least like this, would in a little time
Be found no more …
(#)
Such sympathies would linger in Wordsworth’s heart long after he had abandoned hope of revolutionary change.
On 2 September 1792, the fortress of Verdun fell to the Prussians. The French army prepared to make a last stand; if this failed, the road to Paris lay open before the invaders. Panic seized the capital; rumour spread that as the enemy arrived at the gates a ‘fifth column’ of aristocrats and priests would emerge from prison to murder the defenceless families of citizens away fighting. Marat fed the paranoia, urging the people to eliminate this threat from within. Mobs stormed prisons across the city, dragging out the inmates and slaughtering them in the street: old and young, men and women alike. The often mutilated corpses were stripped of their clothing, then loaded onto wagons and carted away for disposal. The newly severed head of one of Marie Antoinette’s closest friends, her former lady-in-waiting the Princesse de Lamballe, was impaled on a pike and waved jeeringly outside the Queen’s window. About half of all those imprisoned in Paris were massacred, among them more than two hundred priests. Three years before, the Revolution had begun with the joyous release of prisoners from their dark cells; now prisoners were hauled out into the light to be butchered.
The September Massacres, as they became known, shocked even the by-now hardened French public. More than a thousand people were murdered before the frenzy faded. Among the dead were fifty or so prisoners being transferred from Orléans, ambushed by a band of armed Parisians at Versailles. Blood was shed in Orléans itself in early September: a mob protesting against the high price of bread went on the rampage, burning and looting houses. The city authorities imposed a curfew and declared martial law, but by the time the National Guard had restored order, thirteen people had been killed in the riots. Wordsworth returned to Orléans from Blois some time in September; it is not known whether he was in time to witness the violence. He was then putting the finishing touches to his poem ‘Descriptive Sketches’; its conclusion welcomed the proclamation of the Republic by the Convention on 21 September:
Lo! From th’innocuous flames, a lovely birth!
It seems probable that these lines were written even as bloodstains were being scrubbed from the pavements of Paris.
Wordsworth was preparing to return to England. By this time it must have been obvious that Annette Vallon was pregnant; she would give birth to a daughter on 15 December. So why did Wordsworth leave France, just as he was about to become a father? He was certainly short of money. He may have believed that the time was ripe to publish his poems. Maybe he felt that he must return home to secure his future, to establish himself in the Church or some other profession, so that he would be able to provide for Annette and his child. Possibly he intended to marry her once he was established; Annette’s subsequent letters suggest that she expected him to do so. But she may have been deluding herself. It would have been difficult for him to make a career in the Church, with a foreign, Catholic wife and a child born out of wedlock. Perhaps he made promises to Annette that he did not mean to keep. The frustrating truth is that there is not enough evidence on which to base anything more than guesses at Wordsworth’s intentions.
The very day before the proclamation of the Republic, the French repelled the Prussians at Valmy, about a hundred miles east of Paris. This was the turn of the tide; the crisis had passed. Goethe, who was accompanying his patron, a general in the defeated army, immediately recognised the significance of the Revolutionary victory. That same evening, sitting in a circle of demoralised Prussian soldiers around a damp campfire, he attempted to lift the prevalent gloom by telling them: ‘From this place and this time forth commences a new era in world history and you can all say that you were present at its birth.’
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In the House of Commons, Fox did not hide his delight at the French victory. For him, the ‘conspiracy’ of the reactionary powers (Prussia and Austria) threatened ‘not merely the ruin of liberty in France, but the ruin of liberty in England; the ruin of the liberty of man’. Like Fox, Wordsworth had come to see the fate of mankind as being bound up with that of the Revolution; he ‘laid this faith to heart’,
That if France prospered good men would not long
Pay fruitless worship to humanity.
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In late October Wordsworth, ‘enflam’d with hope’, arrived in Paris on his way back to England. It was a moment of high political tension. The majority in the new Convention was attempting to assert its authority over those extra-parliamentary forces that had so recently wrought havoc in the capital. One of the most prominent of those trying to re-establish the rule of law was the leader of the loosely organised ‘Girondin’ group of deputies, Jacques Pierre Brissot. In this he was resisted by Maximilien Robespierre, who by a process of manipulation and intimidation dominated the Jacobin clubs and the Commune. Robespierre’s supporters were known as ‘the Mountain’, after the position they took in the new chamber in the Tuileries, on the benches high up against the wall. The majority of uncommitted deputies sat lower down, close to the debating floor, and thus became known as ‘the Plain’. Brissot and his allies had already made one attempt to rein in Robespierre, which failed when Marat brandished a pistol in the Convention chamber and melodramatically threatened to blow out his own brains.
On his first morning in the capital, after a disturbed night dreaming of the massacres, Wordsworth emerged onto the street to find hawkers selling copies of a speech denouncing Robespierre. In the Convention, Robespierre dared his opponents to identify themselves – and, after a silence, the Girondin journalist Louvet stepped forward to the tribune to accuse him, amongst other crimes, of encouraging the creation of a personality cult, and aspiring to a dictatorship.
In The Prelude, Wordsworth chose to dramatise this as a decisive scene in the Revolution, the moment when its future would be decided, for good or ill. He may have overestimated its significance – historians disagree on the subject – but there seems little reason to doubt his sincerity. It was clearly an important moment for him.* (#) He bemoaned the fact that ‘Louvet was left alone without support/Of his irresolute friends’. Though ‘an insignificant stranger’, Wordsworth contemplated taking sides in this struggle:
Mean as I was, and little graced with powers
Of eloquence even in my native speech,
And all unfit for tumult and intrigue,
Yet would I willingly have taken up
A service at this time for cause so great,
However dangerous.
(#)
It was not unprecedented for an Englishman to engage in French politics. Tom Paine, for example, had been elected to the Convention after receiving a letter from the President of the Assembly announcing that ‘France calls you to its bosom,’ as well as invitations from no fewer than three different départements to stand as one of their deputies. In August the Assembly had conferred on Paine the title of ‘French citizen’.* (#) It is possible that Wordsworth had already met Paine in 1791 through his publisher Joseph Johnson, the original publisher of Rights of Man; possible too that Wordsworth attended the dinner of expatriate Englishmen at White’s Hotel in Paris on 18 November, at which Paine was toasted and diners offered their ‘fraternal homage’ to the new Republic. Ten days later, a delegation from the Society for Constitutional Information in London presented a congratulatory address to the Convention. In response, Grégoire evoked the memory of the English revolutionaries of the 1640s. ‘The moment is at hand,’ he declared, ‘when the French Nation will send its own congratulations to the National Convention of Great Britain.’
(#)
Nearly fifty years afterwards, an elderly Wordsworth chucklingly confessed that he had been ‘pretty hot in it’ while in Paris, but what he meant by this is unclear. In a letter to his brother Richard written soon after his first visit to the French capital, he had referred to an unnamed member who had introduced him to the Assembly, ‘of whose acquaintance I shall profit on my return to Paris’.
(#) This was probably Brissot. Thomas De Quincey, who first met Wordsworth in 1807 and whose source was likely to have been Wordsworth himself, recorded that Wordsworth ‘had been sufficiently connected with public men to have drawn upon himself some notice from those who afterwards composed the Committee of Public Safety’, i.e. Robespierre and his associates. He implied that Wordsworth had been prominent enough to be in danger had he remained longer in France.
(#) In The Prelude Wordsworth would later suggest that had he stayed in Paris he ‘doubtless should have made a common cause/with some who perished’ – and maybe would have perished himself.
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As well as Brissot, Wordsworth knew at least one other prominent Girondin deputy, the journalist Jean-Antoine Gorsas. Moreover, he was familiar with and may have known Grégoire, who in September had returned to Paris from Blois to sit in the Convention as deputy for Loir-et-Cher. It was Grégoire who had proposed the motion to abolish the monarchy, initiating the Republic. On 16 November he would be elected President of the Convention.
Robespierre replied to the charges against him in a speech to the Convention a week later. It was delivered in his usual style: self-dramatising, paranoid, brimming with righteous indignation. Far from seeking power for himself, he claimed to be no more than a repository of Historical Truth. He defended the recent violence, and dismissed the charges of illegality, pointing out that the Revolution was from its outset ‘illegal’. To judge the Revolution by standards of conventional morality was to rob the people’s uprising of its natural legitimacy. He concluded with a rhetorical flourish: ‘Do you want a Revolution without a revolution?’
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The speech carried the Convention; his accusers melted under the heat of Robespierre’s high-minded rhetoric. He now turned his attention to the fate of the King, demanding that he should face trial. Robespierre’s protégé, the young fanatic Louis-Antoine Saint-Just, went further: he asserted that a trial was unnecessary, because Louis was by definition guilty: ‘one cannot reign innocently’. There was only one possible solution: the surgical removal of this excrescence from the body of the nation.
