The Friendship: Wordsworth and Coleridge

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.26

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.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.

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.’34

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.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 for my support.43

* This is a low estimate. They travelled about two thousand miles in all, but some of the journey was by boat.

* The term came into usage around 1800.

† Coach travel cost 2d or 3d per mile, a prohibitive expense for all but the wealthy.

* It seems likely to have been on this trip that Wordsworth visited the celebrated travel writer Thomas Pennant, whose Tour in Scotland had stimulated Johnson and Boswell to make their journey to the Western Isles.

* Generally known as such after the place where members of the club met in the rue St Jacques. Their official name was the Society of the Friends of the Revolution.

* Until the Revolution, commissions in the army had been reserved for scions of families whose aristocratic lineage went back at least four generations.

* Confusion is caused by the term ‘aristocrat’. The French noblesse was not the same as the English aristocracy: even allowing for the difference in population size, they were far more numerous – perhaps a quarter of a million people, compared to the 10,000 or so in Britain. By no means all ‘aristocrats’ were wealthy, despite occupying a privileged position under the ancien régime. It was not unknown for a French ‘aristocrat’ to push his own plough. In Britain, the term ‘aristocrat’ had a political as well as a social meaning; it was used as shorthand to denote anyone opposed to reform; while a ‘democrat’ was defined as one who demanded radical changes to the constitution, together with an immediate peace with France and recognition of the French Republic.

† His MPs were known as ‘Lonsdale’s ninepins’

* Lonsdale was Sir James Lowther until ennobled in 1784.

* Commissioned by the Jacobin Club but never completed (in part because of the need for constant changes; some of those who had been present became personae non gratae, and thus had to be excluded, while others, who had not, now wished to be included): existing only in the form of David’s preliminary (but detailed) sketches, some of which portray the assembled oath-swearers as classically severe nudes.

* It may be significant that Louvet had been elected to the Convention to represent the Loiret, the département in which Wordsworth had been living; perhaps this fact contributed to Wordsworths interest in him

* Joseph Priestley was made a citizen of France in September. He too was elected to the Convention, but declined the election.

2 REACTION

Wordsworth arrived in England in December 1792 overflowing with love for humanity, only to find the majority of his fellow countrymen suspicious or even belligerent. Recent events in France had thoroughly alarmed conservative opinion in Britain. It was one thing to limit the powers of the monarchy: quite another to abolish the monarchy altogether. With each passing week came news of further excesses; émigrés arrived by the boatload on British shores, every one bringing stories of fresh outrages. In its anxiety to avoid war, Pitt’s government had striven to remain neutral towards Revolutionary France, while stifling radical agitation at home. On 21 May 1792 a Royal Proclamation had been issued, encouraging magistrates to be more vigorous in controlling riotous meetings and seditious writings. Not much had ensued at the time, beyond a decision (perhaps taken beforehand) to prosecute Paine.

Meanwhile the victorious French armies had continued their advance, carrying all before them. The Prussians were driven back across the Rhine, and in November the French occupied Belgium, while in the south Savoy was annexed. On 19 November the Convention promised ‘fraternity and assistance’ to ‘all those wishing to recover their liberty’. The war changed its character: it was no longer a defence of the Republic, but a war of liberation. In the Convention Brissot declared, ‘We cannot relax until all Europe is in flames.’

The Convention’s threat to export the Revolution prompted Pitt to act, beginning a succession of prosecutions of radical authors, printers and publishers. At the same time the government released a flood of crude anti-French, pro-monarchist propaganda. Stories spread of plots, of insurrection, of traitors in our midst. Spies, informers and agents provocateurs proliferated. Support for the Revolution was portrayed as unpatriotic. It was not difficult to stir up popular sentiment against France, nor against those who appeared to side with the Old Enemy. Dissenters were especially vulnerable. By this time religious dissent and political radicalism had become synonymous; it was easy to portray prominent dissenters as pro-French Revolutionary conspirators. There had already been an ominous indication of what could happen if the crude prejudices of the people were inflamed. Back in 1791, a dinner in Birmingham to celebrate the second anniversary of the fall of the Bastille had provoked three days of rioting. Though the mob chanted ‘No Popery’ (as well as the inevitable ‘Church and King’), its victims were mainly prosperous dissenters with progressive views, most prominently Joseph Priestley, whose house (including his precious library) and laboratory were burned to the ground.

Britons were encouraged to draw up loyal addresses to George III. Those who declined to add their signatures were deemed to be suspect. Loyalists powdered their hair in the traditional style, while radicals let it hang loose in the ‘French’ fashion. Inns displayed gilt signs: ‘No JACOBINS ADMITTED HERE’. In November the MP John Reeves founded an anti-Jacobin association, and branches sprang up around the country, a counter-revolutionary equivalent to the Jacobin clubs. A month later Reeves founded an Association for Preserving Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers, which met fortnightly at the Crown and Anchor tavern in The Strand. Burke proposed the toast: ‘Old England against new France’.