Adam Sisman - The Friendship - Wordsworth and Coleridge

… my heart was all

Given to the People, and my love was theirs. 27

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 … 28

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. 29 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! 30

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. 31

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’. 32 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 … 33

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.