Like all France, they participated in those outbursts of joy which swept over the country at various periods in the reigns of Louis XV. and Louis XVI., when ministers of force and wisdom devised relief.
The call for the States-General, in 1788, interested them more deeply than ever in the reforms needed; the effort of the Parlement of Paris to prevent the Third Estate naming as many members as the nobility and clergy together, and to prevent their sitting together aroused them. When, however, in spite of all opposition, the King issued the edict allowing the Third Estate double representation and called for the election of members to, and the preparation of _cahiers_ for, the coming gathering, the Rolands went to work with energy. It was on the preparation of the _cahiers_[2] sent to the States-General by the Third Estate of Lyons that Roland was principally occupied, and it was with hopefulness that he saw the deputies and the memorials depart for Versailles, where, on May 4th, the twelve hundred representatives of the nation met to begin the work of restoring order in France and of making a constitution.
Memorials prepared by each of the three classes, setting forth their grievances, their demands, and the compromises they were willing to make.
At Le Clos the Rolands watched eagerly every act of the States-General, of the King, and of the people. But the drama played in Paris and at Versailles between May 4th and July 14th, turned their hopefulness to despair, their gratitude to suspicion, their generosity to resentment, their pliability to obstinacy.
Suddenly, on July 14th, the Parisians, terrified at the rumors of a conspiracy on the part of the Court which had for its object the overthrow of the pet minister, Necker, the adjournment of the National Assembly, the abandonment of reforms, and the coercion of the people by the foreign soldiers who had been massed in and around the capitol, razed the Bastille.
With the falling of the Bastille a new ideal arose, full-winged, before Madame Roland. Before the 14th of July she had no idea that out of the events she watched so eagerly anything more than a reform of the existing régime would grow; the old régime, stripped of its abuses and regulated by a liberal constitution, was all she had asked. Now all was changed; compromise, half-way measures, were at an end. Instead of reforms she demanded “complete regeneration.” She saw in the sudden uprising of the people the “sovereign” exercising “the divine right of insurrection.” It was what Jean Jacques Rousseau had declared in the _Social Contract_ the people had the right to do if the government under which they were living was unjust. She seems to have gone at once to the conclusion that, since the rightful “sovereign,” had at last asserted itself, an immediate regeneration was to follow, abuses were to be wiped out, tyranny destroyed, selfishness annihilated, equality created, and the world to run at last with precision and to the satisfaction of all concerned. To her the fall of the Bastille was the revolution of society. “Friends of humanity, lovers of liberty,” she wrote afterwards, “we believed it had come to regenerate the human kind, to destroy the terrible misery of that unhappy class over which we had so often mourned. We welcomed it with transports.”