Roland, Madame (1754–1793)

French intellectual who was among the first women to have a marked impact as a journalistic correspondent. Name variations: Marie-Jeanne Roland de la Platière; Manon Roland; Manon Phlipon. Pronunciation: RO-lun. Born Marie-Jeanne Phlipon on March 17, 1754; guillotined on November 9, 1793; only child of Pierre-Gatien Phlipon (d. 1788), a master engraver aided by his wife, Marie-Marguerite (Bimont) Phlipon (d. 1775); provided with tutors; spent one year at a convent school; and had time to peruse books at leisure; learned English and Italian as well as her native French; married Jean-Marie Roland de la Platière, in 1780; children: one daughter, Marie-Thérèse-Eudora (Madame Champagneux, 1781–1858).

Focused on her education and constant reading until the death of her mother (1758–75); helped to manage her father's shop, wrote an essay on the education of girls and met her husband (1775–80); served as her husband's editor, researcher, and coauthor (1780–89); observed and wroteabout the French Revolution that would claim her life (1789–93).

Born on March 17, 1754, to Pierre-Gatien Phlipon and Marie-Marguerite Phlipon , the future Madame Roland was named Marie-Jeanne Phlipon but would be known as Manon to her friends and relatives. Her father was a skilled Parisian engraver who employed a number of apprentices and sold intricately detailed snuff-boxes, frames, and watchcases to wealthy members of the French royal court. Like most wives of master artisans at the time, Manon's mother divided her time between household duties and helping her husband in the shop. Both parents had no personal interest in intellectual pursuits, but when their daughter demonstrated an aptitude for such things, they encouraged it.

Manon Phlipon was taught to read when she was not quite four, and she took to books with a passion. The Phlipons provided their daughter with a succession of tutors. Though Gatien was not a member of France's elite, he sold his wares to the elite, and there may have been the hope that a young woman of learning and refinement might attract a husband above her station. The complexities of 18th-century France were such that not a few members of the elite dabbled in intellectual activities. In these circles, having a brilliant wife was interpreted as an asset to a socially and politically active man. An only child, Manon was being prepared for this role, which also included training in singing, viola, and guitar, so that she might better entertain.

Under the influence of her mother's devout Catholicism, much of Roland's initial endeavors in learning was of a religious bent. At seven, she astounded her parish priest with her knowledge of theological detail as she prepared for her first communion. At nine, however, she ran across a French translation of Plutarch's Lives, and her interest in earthly progress was born. In her Memoirs, Madame Roland reminisced that this introduction to Plutarch made her a believer in the republican form of government through the historic examples of ancient Athenians and Roman republicans therein portrayed.

Before Roland fully embraced a secular intellectual world, she made one last attempt to immerse herself in religion. At age 11, she begged her parents to allow her to enter a convent for the salvation of her soul. Distraught, but still trying to be supportive of their daughter, the Phlipons agreed on the condition that she try convent life as a student-boarder for one year before making a final decision. On May 7, 1765, she entered Paris' Convent of the Ladies of the Congregation. She was so advanced that the nuns quickly placed her in the older girls' classes, where she made two lifelong friends: 18-year-old Henriette Cannet and her 14-year-old sister Sophie Cannet . Both were daughters of a fairly comfortable provincial family of lesser nobles from Amiens.

In 1766, Roland decided to leave the convent and began to exhibit doubts where Christian dogma and her society's mores were concerned. These doubts first came to be revealed in a lifelong correspondence which she initiated with the Cannet sisters. Ironically, she said that she first became aware of the onslaughts that could be leveled against Catholic religious dogma by reading Catholic attacks on Protestants. By noting that different Christian sects held different dogmatic interpretations, she began to question the absolute validity of any dogmatic interpretation.

During this same period, Grandmother Phlipon, her father's elderly mother, decided to take Manon to visit Madame de Boismorel , a wealthy noblewoman whose children she had helped to raise as a servant. Roland was shocked when the noblewoman had Grandmother Phlipon sit on a low stool while Madame de Boismorel and her lap dog sat on a sofa. Manon was developing an aversion to the traditions of a French society built on rank, privilege and limited opportunities. By 14, she would be prepared to become a follower of the Enlightenment movement and its thinkers called philosophes.

The 18th-century Enlightenment aspired to apply the methods of the 17th century's Scientific Revolution to human social interaction. If Galileo and Newton had discovered physical laws for nature by using reason and sensory experience, the intellectuals of the Enlightenment movement hoped to spread knowledge of science, and to combat superstition and decadence by applying reason and experience in order to promote human social, political, and economic progress. Above all else, they believed that this would be made possible by means of free expression and individualism. Officially banned and censored in France, works of the Enlightenment were nonetheless sold in the backrooms of printers' shops. Some members of the aristocratic elite actually embraced a smattering of Enlightenment doctrines, but the royal government and organized religion insisted on drawing a line beyond which discussion would go no further.

By 14, Roland resorted to circulating libraries to read works of the Enlightenment like the Encyclopedia edited by Denis Diderot. Not only was this encyclopedia highly critical of miracles, magic and religious dogma; it was also highly laudatory where the practical, profitable, and beneficial activities of artisans were concerned, defining the exact methods of making everything from cloth to gunpowder. To understand technological progress better, Roland taught herself algebra, geometry, physics, and natural history. Order, for her as for the philosophes, meant the regular, scientific laws of nature devoid of all special miracles. However, unlike many of her favorite authors, she continued to attend church throughout her life, since she saw organized religion as a means of promoting morality and order among the mass of ordinary people who could not arrive at principles of decorum through reason alone. She also felt that the Christian religion provided ordinary French citizens with comfort as they groaned under 18th-century burdens of underemployment, price inflation, rural landlessness, and increased taxation.

In June 1775, Roland's mother died suddenly. The 21-year-old scholar was now called upon to take over management of the household while her father's fortunes were declining through poor investments and an overzealous dedication to lotteries. Helping in her father's shop, she entertained many elite customers with her wit and intellect, and she used her leisure time to continue her own studies.

In 1776, Roland began an in-depth and extensive reading of the theoretical works and fiction of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Unlike other philosophes, Rousseau emphasized that civilization and the arts had actually hurt humanity by distorting and diverting natural instincts which provided for human survival in the wild. Despite a sexism which made Rousseau denigrate women to a second-class status, Roland found much in his thinking that was attractive. His works helped her to develop a non-Biblical religious sensibility founded on a nearly mystical veneration of Nature and of "Nature's God." Rather than believing the teachings of any single, nonverifiable book, one was to feel the divine presence in the beauty and order of Nature, which transcended the follies of human civilization. Rousseau also confirmed Roland's conclusion that social ranks based on birth were human contrivances to order society. Though hierarchy might not completely disappear, ranking might be based on talent and intellect rather than parentage. This vision appealed to a young woman who had been offended by her grandmother's being treated like a child in the presence of nobility. To Sophie Cannet, she wrote that Rousseau lifted a veil from her tired eyes so that she was finally able to see the "magnificent scene of the universe." Sophie, however, failed to support Roland in this pursuit. After all, she was of the provincial nobility, and here was an author denouncing all rank based on birth and ascribed status. Still, the heartfelt friendship survived all this, just as Roland was able to remain friends with Sister Saint-Agatha , a nun she had met while at the convent school. Differences of opinion in the realm of ideas were not enough to destroy the human relationships which Manon built on kindness and common experience.

Burning to profit from [revolutionary] circumstances, [the ambitious] succeed soon enough, using flattery to mislead the people and to turn them against their true defenders, in order to render themselves powerful and respected.

—Madame Roland

The year 1776 was a busy one for Madame Roland, and she anonymously entered one of the numerous literary competitions sponsored by the intellectual discussion groups of the day. The Academy of Besançon sponsored an essay contest in which the question was whether the education of women could make men better citizens. In her entry, Roland argued that women should be educated, but that reform must be general and not rely solely on the improvement of one sex through the influence of the other. Girls and boys both were to be educated. For whatever reason, the Academy decided not to name a winner that year, though Roland's anonymous entry was one that received high praise from the jury. She also met her future husband in 1776. A 42-year-old inspector of manufactures in Amiens, Picardy, Jean-Marie Roland de la Platière was one of the royal bureaucrats with Enlightenment sympathies who frequented her father's shop. He was her senior by some 20 years, but in him she found a kindred spirit who valued her intellect. The longtime bachelor appeared to have his doubts, but the marriage contract was finally signed in January 1780.

By 1781, the Rolands were settled in Amiens, the provincial capital of Picardy. Madame Roland spent much of the year facilitating the publication of her husband's Letters from Italy, and she soon became his secretary, editor, researcher, and even coauthor. Jean-Marie was in the process of preparing a number of monographs on several manufacturing processes, and Roland quickly familiarized herself with both technical details and theoretical arguments in favor of free trade and deregulation of craft production. She became integral to the completion of Jean-Marie's Dictionary of Manufactures, Arts, and Trades, which appeared successively in 1784, 1785, and 1790 as part of the publisher Panckoucke's revised edition of Diderot's Encyclopedia. Despite the complete nature of the partnership, however, it was Jean-Marie who received public acclaim as the sole author of these works.

On October 4, 1781, Roland gave birth to daughter Eudora (Madame Champagneux ). Against doctor's orders and the social customs of her class, she decided to breast-feed her daughter herself, rather than sending her out to a wetnurse. In this, she was following the teachings of Rousseau who saw nursing as central to the development of human bonds. As with other aspects of her life, Roland read all she could about nursing in medical dictionaries and Diderot's Encyclopedia. A reliable maid named Marguerite Fleury was found to aid her with childcare and housekeeping, thus providing Madame Roland with time for intellectual and business activities.

In 1784, Jean-Marie decided to apply for an official patent of nobility, which would improve his social standing, and Madame Roland went to Paris in pursuit of the title. On March 18, she left Amiens with Fleury, who was quickly becoming her confidante as well as maid. In her letters to Jean-Marie, Roland revealed how difficult it was to gain the patent, and that she had chosen instead to make an application, on his behalf, to the general inspectorship of Lyons—a position with far more prestige and responsibility than that of Amiens. Jean-Marie gave his support when he was apprised of this endeavor, and he was soon to learn that Manon gained the post for him within three days of the application. She also negotiated an excellent salary and retirement benefits. From 1784 to 1789, the Rolands lived a routine life in Lyons and nearby Villefranche-sur-Saône. Manon started to educate her daughter, but she found, to her disappointment, that Eudora was far more interested in playing than in reading. Then, in 1789, Madame Roland was catapulted into the public arena by the French Revolution.

Since May, elected representatives to France's Estates General had been struggling with King Louis XVI over matters of tax reform. As the representatives of France's commoners began to challenge absolute royal power in legislative matters, Louis XVI assembled troops to threaten them. On July 14, 1789, a Parisian crowd stormed the fortress of the Bastille in search of armaments to protect their representatives from the king. Under this pressure, Louis agreed to become a constitutional monarch. In Lyons, Madame Roland began to take an active interest in the changes around her—changes which promised to reform the society of privileged birth she had always detested. She began a career as the Lyons correspondent for a revolutionary newspaper, Patriote français, which was published in Paris by Jean-Pierre Brissot de Warwille, a lawyer who had met the Rolands in the spring of 1787. Between 1789 and 1790, Madame Roland wrote Brissot, who then extracted long excerpts from her letters for anonymous publication in his paper. Her unpaid correspondence included accounts of public demonstrations in support of the revolution, but she also reported that the nobles of Lyons and the provinces were more opposed to the loss of their privileges than many among the Parisian elites. She wrote that in small cities, "pride and vanity create more distance between the professions than there ever was in Paris between a bourgeois and a titled aristocrat." Hatreds were intense, and she worried that ignorant commoners, without the guidance of established traditions and religion, would soon drift into anarchy, blindly attacking any and all scapegoats to compensate for the difficulties which they faced in their lives.

Champagneux, Madame (1781–1858)

Daughter of Madame Roland. Name variations: Eudora Roland. Born Marie-Thérèse-Eudora de la Platière on October 4, 1781; died in 1858; daughter of Madame Roland (1754–1793, a journalist) and Jean-Marie Roland de la Platière.

On February 1, 1791, Madame Roland's husband was appointed by the municipal government of Lyons to go to Paris and negotiate a loan to revitalize commerce and manufacturing in Lyons. He successfully completed his mission by August 1791. Coming to the attention of the leading elected officials who then held sway in the government, he was named minister of the interior by France's newly elected Legislative Assembly at the end of March 1792. His experience with internal commerce and trade issues seemed to make him an ideal choice. The only problem was that the members of the Assembly were then separating into opposing factions who imagined different futures for the new France. Madame Roland's husband, like their family friend Brissot, soon identified with the Girondins, who favored limited, decentralized government. Their chief opponents were the Jacobins, headed by Maximilien Robespierre—a group which favored centralization and active government intervention on behalf of the poor. The new ministers, like Jean-Marie Roland, demonstrated marked Girondin tendencies. They spent hours with a king who was intent on deflecting them from consequential issues, and this willingness to compromise with Louis XVI eventually stigmatized the Girondins.

Ever the working observer, Madame Roland quickly became one of the many spectators in the gallery of the Assembly. There she made note of the events and personalities of the revolution in great detail, and her idealistic vision of a revolution free of selfish ends was quickly shattered. She wrote of her increasing awareness that many of the people's representatives were far more interested in promoting their own careers than in promoting the common welfare. She did note that the Jacobin leader Robespierre seemed incorruptible and dedicated to Rousseauian goals above all else. At the time, she did not know that Robespierre and she would become bitter enemies, and that she would later write that he was the puppet of the Parisian mobs and their demagogues.

Since 1791, the Rolands' Parisian abode had served as a gathering place for those with Girondin sympathies. Brissot and his colleagues gathered in what would be known as the Salon of Madame Roland, where political theories and policies were discussed at the end of legislative sessions. Such salons, hosted by famous women of the day, were typical of the Enlightenment, and they aided immensely in the exchange of information and ideas. Unlike other women who hosted such salons, however, Madame Roland sat quietly throughout the meetings, serving the men and doing her needlework. In her writings, she admits to having bitten her tongue at times, but, with the instincts of a reporter, she quietly observed, eventually recording what she witnessed in her Memoirs.

The rifts between Girondins and Jacobins grew all the while, and when King Louis XVI tried to flee the country in order to join a counter-revolution abroad, the Jacobins saw

their opportunity to seize power. After the king's execution in January 1793, they used gutter language to stir crowds in their speeches and newspaper essays. The Girondins responded in La Sentinelle, a newspaper financially underwritten by Jean-Marie at the behest of Manon. However, with no immediate solutions to the economic difficulties faced by the urban multitudes, the Girondins, who had compromised with the "traitor king," quickly became the scapegoats of Jacobin rhetoric. As early as December 7, 1792, Madame Roland had been called before the legislature which was now known as the National Convention. She was actually charged with having been a moving force behind the royalist conspiracy, but she so eloquently defended herself that the Convention rose in a standing ovation after her presentation.

On January 22, 1793, the day after Louis XVI's execution, Jean-Marie Roland resigned his post as minister of the interior. Among other things, he saw the execution of the king as excessive, and, in a surviving document, he wrote that he resigned since there was no longer any man in the Convention who would oppose the Jacobins. However, the public turmoil merely added to domestic troubles then being experienced by the Rolands. Manon had recently told Jean-Marie that she had fallen in love with a young Girondin legislator named François Léonard Buzot, who was making his mark by combating the Jacobins. However, she also told her husband that she admired him for his intellect and could not leave him at a time when he needed her support, even though the revolutionary government had introduced legal divorce into France. By stating that she had to be honest and tell him the painful truth, Roland perhaps was emulating the call to veracity found in the novels of Rousseau and others. A man approaching 60, Jean-Marie chose this time of disappointment to announce his official retirement from public life.

Completely in control of the government by the end of May, the Jacobins decided to arrest Jean-Marie and other Girondin partisans. Learning of these plans, Madame Roland determined to appear before the National Convention yet again. She immediately preceded to the Convention, but was kept waiting at the door. Manon hurried back to her husband at that point, and he then decided to make his escape from Paris. While Madame Roland approved of this decision, she decided to remain behind and persevere in trying to gain access to the Convention. The two parted, never to see each other again. Around midnight, soldiers arrived at the Rolands' apartment, and Madame Roland was arrested as part of the "Girondin conspiracy against the republic." She now awaited her trial in custody, writing the Memoirs which have been the source of much information regarding her life. Composed in prison, her Memoirs have, in fact, become her major contribution to French letters. They contain numerous sketches of some of the leading figures of the French Revolution, including Robespierre and Brissot.

While she was incarcerated, Madame Roland was permitted reading material and visits from the maid Fleury, who was allowed to purchase articles of comfort for her mistress. Still, conditions were crowded, and, though physical torture was not employed, verbal abuse was practiced consistently. Beyond prison walls, Jacobin newspapers published innumerable articles, inventing nonexistent orgies at which Madame Roland had officiated. This highly visible woman was now being attacked falsely in such a way as to maximize sentiment against her.

On October 24, the trial of the Girondins began in earnest. Madame Roland admitted in writing that she contemplated suicide, but she would not do it in order to speak on behalf of her friends. In fact, to the bitter end, testimony to her dedication as a friend persisted. Sister Saint-Agatha, despite the religious differences which existed between them, came to visit her former charge on a number of occasions. Roland kept in touch with the Cannet sisters, and Henriette, now a widow, actually came to prison and offered to take Manon's place so that she could escape in disguise. Of course, Madame Roland refused to allow this sacrifice, which would have cost Henriette her own life.

On November 8, Madame Roland went to trial. When she took the stand, she started a prepared speech in defense of the Girondins and of Jean-Marie's service as minister of the interior. The judges intervened, saying it was not permitted to sing the praises of known traitors. She then appealed to the assembled spectators, but the Jacobin press had done its job, and the crowd denounced her as a traitor to the republic. The judges' decision was a foregone conclusion. Madame Roland was condemned to death as one of the participants in a conspiracy against the "indivisibility of the Republic, and the liberty and safety of the French people." She was allowed no appeal, and on November 9, 1793, she was guillotined. Her last words were, "O Liberty, what crimes are committed in thy name!" Word of his wife's execution reached Jean-Marie Roland the very next day. That night, he committed suicide. Her lover Buzot, who was incoherent upon learning of her death on November 15, took his own life in June of the following year.

In her Memoirs, Madame Roland wrote observations and character sketches which continue to be used by historians of the French Revolution. In short, she has become the historian's correspondent at the scene. Through her writings, she warns future generations that ambitious individuals will constantly seek ways to sway poorly educated and desperate throngs. On a more personal level, she still allowed herself to soar while discussing the ideals of Rousseau and other Enlightenment thinkers, even though she had seen many of those hopes and goals shattered by harsh reality.

sources:

Clemenceau-Jacquemaire, Madeleine. The Life of Madame Roland. Translated by Laurence Vail. London: Longmans, Green, 1930.

Doyle, William. The Oxford History of the French Revolution. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989.

Furet, François, and Mona Ozouf, eds. A Critical Dictionary of the French Revolution. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1989.

May, Gita. Madame Roland and the Age of Revolution. NY: Columbia University Press, 1970.

Roland, Marie-Jeanne. Mémoires de Madame Roland. Edited by Paul de Roux. Paris: Mercure de France, 1986.

Abel A. Alves , Assistant Professor of History, Ball State University, Muncie, Indiana, and author of Brutality and Benevolence: Human Ethology, Culture, and the Birth of Mexico (Greenwood Press, 1996)