French history

Goodness, I’m blogging queen for the day. Enjoy it while it lasts; you and I both know it won’t for long…

I’m confused. Robespierre, the French revolutionary-turned-apparent-dictator who was guillotined when the people had had enough. You know what I’m talking about. Well, S. T. Coleridge, in the third act of his “The Fall of Robespierre,” has Barrere making a speech. Here’s part of that speech:

…When the tyrant
Hurl’d from his blood-cemented throne, by the arm
Of the almighty people, meets the death
He plann’d for thousands. Oh! my sickening heart
Has sunk within me, when the various woes
Of my brave country crowded o’er my brain
In ghastly numbers—when assembled hordes,
Dragg’d from their hovels by despotic power,
Rush’d o’er her frontiers, plunder’d her fair hamlets,
And sack’d her populous towns, and drench’d with blood
The reeking fields of Flanders.—When within,
Upon her vitals prey’d the rankling tooth
Of treason; and oppression, giant form,
Trampling on freedom, left the alternative
Of slavery, or of death. Even from that day,
When, on the guilty Capet, I pronounced
The doom of injured France, has faction reared
Her hated head amongst us. Roland preach’d
Of mercy—the uxorious dotard Roland,
The woman-govern’d Roland durst aspire
To govern France; and Petion talk’d of virtue,
And Vergniaud’s eloquence, like the honeyed tongue
Of some soft Syren wooed us to destruction.
We triumphed over these. On the same scaffold
Where the last Louis pour’d his guilty blood,
Fell Brissot’s head, the womb of darksome treasons,
And Orleans, villain kinsman of the Capet,
And Hébert’s atheist crew, whose maddening hand
Hurl’d down the altars of the living God,
With all the infidel’s intolerance.

I can kind of see the reference… I think. Roland, in the Italian-connected cycle, is bewitched by a Pagan princess from China, and more or less travels the entire known world in search of her, madly in love. He’s blinded by a woman, etc.

But was Robespierre? I can’t find any information on him that would make the uxorious-dotard lines make sense. Nevermind that a French historical character making wholly disparaging reference to Roland is in itself more than a little strange. Help?

EDIT 23.47: Oh! It was Madame Roland. THAT explains it. From the Britannica:

(1754�93). The wife of a French politician during the French Revolution, Madame Roland greatly influenced the policies of the moderate Girondist faction of the revolutionaries. The Girondists professed moderate republican views and opposed the excesses of the more radical party.

Jeanne-Marie Phlipon was born in Paris on March 17, 1754, the daughter of an engraver. An avid reader, she absorbed the democratic ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and other 18th-century French philosophers. In 1780 she married Jean-Marie Roland de La Plati�re. He was a government official who afterward became a leader of the Girondist party.

When the French Revolution came, Madame Roland became the intellectual leader of a group of young enthusiasts who gathered in her salon. Her visitors included the famous and ill-fated leaders of the Gironde. At first even Maximilien Robespierre and Georges Danton, leaders of the opposing Jacobins, belonged to her circle.

So, this isn’t my Roland at all.