The Friendship: Wordsworth and Coleridge. Adam Sisman
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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.35
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.36
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.’37
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’.38 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.39 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.40
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?’41
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.
Another prominent deputy, the Minister of the Interior Jean Marie Roland, announced the discovery amongst the King’s belongings of an iron chest filled with papers, apparently incriminating not just the King himself, but also some of the more moderate deputies. Those trying to defend the King were now on the defensive, fearful that they might in turn come under attack. A number chose to abandon Louis in order to protect themselves.
Early in December the Convention ended its discussion on the principle of trying the King and ordered an indictment to be prepared. On the eleventh Louis was brought before the Convention to answer the charge of fomenting counter-revolution. His replies, though dignified, were unconvincing.
Wordsworth had planned to be back in London during the month of October.42 He had two poems ready for publication, and a woman in an advanced state of pregnancy who needed his support. But he lingered a month or more in Paris, no doubt fascinated to be on hand while the future of the world was being decided. It seems that he may have attended some of the debates in the Convention as a spectator. Two years earlier he had been unwilling to make a small detour to come to Paris; now he was unable to drag himself away. At last, he returned reluctantly to England,
Compelled by nothing less than absolute want
Of funds