Marie-Jeanne Phlipon Roland (1754-93): a great-souled author of her own life

From the National Bibliotheque: Marie-Jeanne Phlipon later Roland

Madame Roland, the last year of her life, a sketch from the life

Friends,

Marie-Jeanne or Manon Phlipon Roland (1754-93) was our fourth writer, witness, and in her case sufferer — egregiously unjustly imprisoned and executed woman — as a direct result of her public and powerful activity on behalf of her and husband’s political vision in the earliest phases of the French revolution. As I knew the probability was that none of the people in the room would ever have heard of Roland, I was very worried people wouldn’t even buy her book as too unfamiliar and therefore daunting. It turned out that Politics and Prose got in about 15 copies of the abridged Memoirs, chosen, arranged, introduced, translated by Evelyn Shuckburgh. And all 10 who stayed for the last 2 and 1/2 weeks seemed to  have read or at least perused her book.

Paperback copy

She riveted people as she opened her book explaining how she came to be arrested, how she is treated (not with any particular respect to keep her separate form prostitutes to “great men”), and how she came to be there. And they kept reading the portraits of important French philosophes and politicians, the story line of being welcome into Paris to being pariah hunted down and out. Not omit the second half, her own private experience of life up to the time of her marriage to Marie-Jean Roland (they had the same name, backwards). More than one person declared what an irony that had she not been imprisoned, and not under threat of immediate execution, she would not have written this great masterpiece of a political autobiography. Perhaps the first one. She could not break through the taboo against women writing and publishing. Others agreed that it was more than a little naive) (insane) of her not to have fled as her husband, (chaste) lover and many others did once it was clear the Jacobins were going to arrest of them on charges of treason. She hoped people would admire her as an example, she’d be allowed to put her case forward publicly at the show trials at last. One memorable phrase was “Madame Roland sought all her life to be the author of her life.” Yes. Whatever it was, a deep determination to shape the conditions she lived in once her beloved mother died, together with luck or chance, and one older man, Jean-Marie Phlipon (1734-93), recognizing in her the deeply passionate reciprocating partner he had longed for — enabled her to become her best self and hold to that until the moment of death.

She came from the same artisan class Diderot and Johnson hailed from. Her father was a prosperous master engraver, her mother a fringe aristocrat, religious, had lost seven children before Marie-Jeanne was born and they lavished attention on her once they discovered how intelligent she was. She was studious, contemplative, a “blue-stocking” who ranged far and wide in the classics: from Plutarch’s Lives to Rousseau, devotional authors to poetry and plays, the 17th century French feminist women (Scudery, Lafayette), to D’Epinay and Madame de Genlis; in her later years Voltaire, Montesquieu, Diderot and treatises, doubtless the English radicals in French translations. Since she never rebelled against the male hegemonic order in her writings (indeed never wanted to be published under her own name until she wrote her memoir), never tried for public office or recognition (she sat at the back of the room and did not talk in most sessions), the question asked is, how far was she feminist? She is not interested in women’s issues but in restructuring the gov’t (she would not put it this way) to redistribute education and wealth to reach far more people and bring prosperity. Not at all one might say except her whole life shows someone who given any chance dedicates herself to public service. She learns to loathe the social life imposed on a middle class woman seeking a husband, and puts off several candidates for her hand before she met Roland, a man 20 years older than she.

M. Roland from the Bibliotheque nationale

Her book is ostensibly divided into two parts: the first half, a political memoir, where she first wrote out her principles and gave a rigorous account of the revolution’s story before descending to particular people. Alas, when she smuggled that out, it was burnt — or so she was told. Can you imagine how she felt? It’s arguable she went into prison to be able to make an example of herself and she realized she needed to tell the story from her point of view. With astonishing fortitude, she rewrote this first half but this time just as portraits, anecdotes, an explanation of what went wrong so in the assembly’s early years (people refused to act, to agree, to be explicit, followed their own particular interests), her experience as the wife of a minister (visits from Danton whom she did not cultivate though he invited this), then her and her husband’s life during his first and then second term of office, ending on the dismal now of awaiting trial, execution; she begins with her first arrest, and ends with the fake release and her second arrest. This part is very immediate — both are. She recurs to the conditions she is living in again and again, the prostitutes, the debauchery, when she is interrupted, what she is eating, the weather. Originally the first half of our book book had a lot more particulars of politics, probably a treatise of sorts too.

The second her own story, and we get a depiction of a middle class girl’s early childhood, her admiration for her loving religious mother, for her grandmother, her sceptical analysis of her worldly, pragmatic, and (after her mother’s death she was to learn) superficial, incompetent, shallow father (he took a young mistress for a while, and the business began to fail badly). The happiest sections of the early part of her autobiography tell of her, her mother and father’s Sunday afternoons in the Paris parks. Then we learn a little of then engraving business and then an incident which in 1796 (when her book was first published in an early shorter form) caught the attention of the public: she was sexually harassed by her father’s apprentice. He took out his penis in front of her and attempted foreplay with her. She was profoundly shocked and also allured, but upon a second encounter, told her mother, who turned the incident into something far more traumatic than it had to be. Manon was persuaded to think herself intensely sinful, and put in a convent for her adolescent education. Her mother feared for her reputation, but what she did was make sex into an experience to be dreaded, a view she probably never got over. In the convent she did make two important friends who she stayed close to by visits and then letters for the rest of her life: Sophie and her sister, Henriette Cannett. She was not religious even then — and when we meet her seems to be a deist — and returned home. Then begins her this stifling snobbish social life she learns to detest; the courtships that go nowhere. She was probably intimidating, and the two young men who tried to get close (showing her love of reading and writing was known), one of whom promised to open a periodical and publish her (she rejected this offer vociferously — from afar there is a comedy in this scene) gradually realized she had not much of a dowry.

This facsimile of a 19th century scholarly study contains letter by Roland to Sophie and to Buzot — Charles Dauban is the 19th century scholar to whom we are indebted for this first collection of her correspondence: letters to and from her. An old fashioned biography: life and times, with insertions of letters and documents. Her best friend Sophie. The man she loved Buzot Unfortunately it does not contain the large book of essays that were published anonymously that she obviously wrote. There’s been no attempt to bring them together and publish as a single scholarly book. So I suppose Roland studies are in their infancy: this is not uncommon for women’s writing and women writers.

A devastating turning point is the death of her mother – who had become her world, her best companion, her meaning. A long section called bereavement is of deep interest for a mother-daughter relationship. Roland appealed as a father figure she needed, a substitute for this mother too, someone she can trust, look up to, admire, work with. He came from a higher echelon of the middle class and as a man was very well educated, especially on his own in the new technologies, sciences, arts: he held various local political positions: an inspector, assiduous and accurate, imagine him as an expert in industrial and agricultural matters. He had begun a distinguished public career in Amiens, just the type Trump hates and is slowly eradicating from all gov’t – tremendously competent in his areas, publishing learned tomes and articles on manufacturing processes, and trade. At first they courted, then he hesitated, her father resented him, and he disappeared for a while, only finally to return and then they married. She became his helpmate. She wrote the articles which appeared under his name in the Courrier de Lyon – gradually they were known to be by her. Again happy moments are the birth of her daughter, her years running the household, a trip to Switzerland and then England — in the footsteps of Rousseau and Voltaire. They return, and her husband had been active in questions of debt and was useful in Lyons, and came to the attention of prominent national politicians and was invited to come to the National Assembly — and of course took his wife, and a daughter who had been born to them, their whole household.

He was ambitious and gradually rose to have a position of authority in the new Parliament formed in 1789 May; which became the National Assembly in June 1789, promulgated the Declaration of the Rights of Man, August. He was not humanely that astute and she was; she could write far more eloquently, more talented; she held a weekly salon and gradually it was understood she was in herself powerful through him. She wrote in the Sentinelle. Madame Roland never had an official position; she didn’t want it. She never published anything. Her husband attended the Jacobin Club and she sat in the back; Tuesday evenings became her night to have politicians over and gradually a Girondist group, for constitutional monarchy, for gradual revolution but real emerged. It was almost inevitable that she should find herself in the centre of political aspirations and presiding over a company of the most talented men of progress. She ends her story of herself with her present time in prison: her disillusion, her waiting to die, her attempt at self-starvation, how she was taken to a hospital and then brought back. The book ends on a justification of herself, eloquent and passionate.

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Women’s march on Versailles … Modern rendition of original caricature

The first question to ask of the book and what I went over is, What happened that went wrong? We returned to 1788 when the overt events began to pile up.

In 1788 Louis XVI forced to call the Estates-General for the first time in nearly a couple of hundred years. There had been an absolute mismanagement of budget – court extravagances were horrendous but they needed a minister to reorganize the national debt; the way business was conducted in many phases of life was utterly corrupt patronage system. Several ministers brought in to re-organize and to reform and failed. I’ll name Jacques Necker, sometimes today referred to as Madame de Stael’s father; banker of Genevan origin. Bread riots were common in the 18th century: price of bread kept artificially high; the gov’t had overspent helping the Americans in their war. Necker made the budget pubic in 1781 – shock and horror, hitherto it had been kept secret. He was dismissed. Within a few years of his dismissal and other failed attempts, there is a devastating fiscal crisis, he is recalled but it doesn’t help. The truth was the King did not want to change the system.

Storming of Bastille July 11, 1789 is a symbol. The estates-general had convened in May and it became immediately apparent nothing could be passed when nobles had 300 votes, clergy 300 (a tiny percentage of population) and everyone else 600. So they reconvened without nobles and clergy (except those who broke away) in the tennis court, and took a oath they would not be suspended. August 26 Declaration of Rights of Man – extraordinary document. Drafted by Abbe Sieyes and Lafayette in consultation with Thomas Jefferson: based on idea “self-evident” that human beings have certain natural rights. Born free, and only those social distinctions should exist which are for the common good. Inalienable rights: liberty, property, safety, right to resistance against oppression. Law has right to forbid only actions harmful to society. Free communication of thoughts and opinions. State expenditures should be taken from people only in accordance with their ability to pay. If you think about these, you begin to see definitions must make all this more precise. There was a women’s march to Versailles where they forced the royal family to come and live in Paris, 5-6 October 1789. 1790 monasteries dissolved; nobility abolished.

Hubert Robert imagining the demolition of the Bastille prison

Height might be the famous Fete de Federation, July 14, 1790 – a vast public spectacle where everyone professed great principles – at the site of the current Eiffel Tower – pavilion with king and queen, people were joyous, much gaiety – big picnic for the nation.

But then the push-back began: from emigres fleeing and forming armies, and wanting to return to overturn this new order; in the countryside outbreaks of mixed violence –- it was a many sided civil war. Servants revolted and got back after years of oppression; those who had been deprived of the common for the master to drain his land, took back their land or tried to. They fought among themselves. Civilian armies emerged called People’s armies formed by the national assembly to go out into the provinces and get money and supplies. Many peasants were loyal to the church and while the poorest curates might be revolutionary, the church was not and had firm grip on people’s outlook. Counter-revolutions begin. Austria, the UK began to form armies to invade France on behalf of their order.

In the assembly, there were ruptures as they argued over what to do or were just vague and held out. Madame Roland is sardonic over how people dithered, did nothing because while they were for a principle, they were never for giving anything up of their own or their friends. King used his veto power again and again. June 21-22, 1791 he and his wife fled to Varennes and bought back. They were to meet with armies across the border. In 1792 March, Roland had been made minister of interior, he had a very brusque manner and she was writing decrees and suggestions that were very radical economically and politically. March 1792, Madame Roland wrote a letter addressing the question of the king’s vetoes, he read it aloud and it was judged so disrespectful that he was dismissed from his office. There were very conservative people among Girondins and constitutional monarchs. August 10th 1792 the National Guard stormed the Tuileries where the royal family lived and the monarchy was considered to have fallen. Roland is reinstated but liked by no one. A group of Jacobins tired of the stalling began to meet separately; Montagnards they were called as they sat high up. Roland and other moderate Girondists opposed the formation of a sort of rump to rule the capital and country called the Paris Commune which began to exclude the Girondists. The Commune was in charge of the army and took over.

The Mayor of the town coming down from apologetic visit to the King and Queen, now going to be arrested by the People’s Army (Ettore Scuola)

An army under the Duke of Brunswick invaded in August and captured Verdun.

Then a wave of killings, hysterical massacres of people in prison, September 9, 1792 – as traitors, as non-juring clergy, as against the revolution. Who fomented this? Madame Roland blamed Danton. She saw him as a hard vulgar man, corrupt yes, but radical and he did try to win her over in the early days and she didn’t like him. No manners, very working class. Never tried for a “de” in his name. Alas, had she joined him, she might not have ended up dead. Much like say when in Charlottesville two summers ago Trump did not call out national guard to stop the violence or protect people, or closer, Selma Alabama (I recently saw that film) where Johnson did not call out National Guard to protect black people or anyone demonstrating or marching — Georges-Jacques Danton and Maximillian de Robespierre did not call for any protection of the people in the prisons. Just the opposite: Jean-Paul Marot whipped up feeling. He was a very effective journalist, vehement invective against people, and exerted power through his newspaper, The Friend of the People, L’ami du peuple. She saw him as a monster and he attacked her vehemently, deeply misogynistic accusations of her as sex-mad (promiscuous) and power-hungry. Marot is still recognized by a wider audience today because of a painting by David made of him in his bathtub after the unhinged Charlotte Corday murdered him – he had caught some terrible skin disease from living in sewers. He was at times very poor.

M Roland was accused of hiding documents showing the king’s relationship with corrupt politicians. They now put the king on trial — they felt he couldn’t be trusted and was a site around which counter-revolutionaries would form movements. During the trial of the king, Roland and the Girondists demanded that the sentence should be decided by a poll of the French people rather than the new National Convention. After the king was executed in January 1793 Roland and others were denounced. He among others fled.

So on June 3, 1793 a group of Girondists were arrested (all her friends), her husband and others flee, and 21 days she is arrested. In truth she had the whole winter and spring to flee. She arranged for her daughter to stay with people who would take permanent responsibility for the girl if necessary. The charges were seen as trumped up, she was released and re-arrested before she could flee – she should have immediately upon getting out. And she tells of all this in part one. She is interrogated and her judges and the court insinuate she was part of a wide conspiracy to overthrow the republic and replace it with a monarchy. 8 November she is killed. Sophie Cannett was there at the front of the crowd. I said that last time. Courageous to do that – reminds me of how Thomas Wyatt, English poet, friend and protected by Thomas Cromwell in 1533 was on the scaffold when Cromwell was murdered. These are all murders. Cannett described the scene and her death but I am not sure who presented the scene of her with sufficient presence of mind to say as she mounted the scaffold: “O liberty! What crimes are committed in thy name!”

So why didn’t she get out when she had time? Was she so disillusioned that she wanted to escape the reality of what her life would be in hiding? depressed? She had fallen in love with another Girondist, Francois Buzot was his name. I don’t see that. She had had a number of close male friends though – all politicians and local people –- Brissot with his followers called Brissotins. Almost no women. There was great guilt after she died — her husband killed himself two days after she died. Buzot killed himself in June. She says she wanted to be an example. She learnt that this was naive, and to be grateful to the prison keeper’s wife in the earlier part of her imprisonment when she was given a room apart, permitted to leave her cell and come to the woman’s space to read and to write. Why didn’t she try to escape since she had real flexibility until her second arrest? Was she more than a little insane by that time? she says she went on a hunger strike but couldn’t keep it up? As a class we hashed this out thoroughly.

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Then I talked of the aftermath of the book’s reception, the earliest publications and the woman’s context. It was first published in 1796 so it’s possible Jane Austen read it. The passages about sexual harassment were the ones that made the most scandal, and in some 19th century notices she is criticized severely for telling of this incident.

I brought in the unabridged 19th century facsimile edition of Roland’s Memoirs supervised by her daughter. This so people could get a feel for what the book is. Nowadays there is a multi-volume edition of Roland’s Memoirs and letters from a French university, the kind with full introductions, annotations, notes and expensive abridgements you can buy of these. Published by her loving daughter who she didn’t give enough credit to: the first part is her autobiography of her life, and the second part the political story. It’s a facsimile and not that easy to read because it uses a “o” where modern French has an “A.” But that is how I read it. This is the fine recent biography in English that I by Gita May: it sets her in context and tells of phases of her existence. Hardships of courting. Also a trip she and her husband took to England and saw all the important sites pointed out by Voltaire. A deeply psychologically insightful account by Francoise Kermina, Madame Roland ou la passion révolutionnaire (1977). Kermina shows Roland shows to have been intensely ambitious, and bitter at her failure. Her writing hides her frustration, two years of intense politicking, and “une amertume terrible.” Her writings reveal a woman who valued the few friendships she managed to sustain intensely; she argues that Roland was throughout her life profoundly depressed (angry). When she and her husband fell from power and she was anathematized (with salacious slander), a barely controlled hysteria and paralyzing trauma actuated her decision not to flee death. She kept herself sane and explored this trauma by writing the famous memoir.

I had thought I would talk about the early phases of the French revolution, but one you can find this on wikipedia, and two we have two periods so I’d like first to talk about early feminism. There is no doubt in my mind that Roland, Olympe de Gouges were guillotined partly because they were women and taking power; Charlotte Corday is famous for being guillotined; let us say she was not a well person. A couple of people read the (not very good) pair of essays I sent by attachment: two different women writers argue over whether we can consider Roland’s apparently complete obliviousness to women’s issues at the time (divorce based on incompatibility, the right to custody of her children) and her refusal to publish under her own name a sure sign she was no feminist and therefore only of historical interest. So I decided to try to tell of the early history of feminism and the two good chapters in English from two books I know that deal fairly with Roland.

Roland is seen as this great souled woman and unfortunately that prompts discussions of her character: how far was she feminist or what kind of feminism did she practice? Well, none except her whole life shows a person who given any chance dedicates herself to public service. She is not interested in women’s issues but in restructuring the gov’t (she would not put it this way) to redistribute education and wealth to reach far more people and bring prosperity. Many women weren’t. My other example I’ll talk a bit about: Helen Maria Williams did not write about women’s issues particularly – though she got closer. You might look upon writing about women not as inferior, not in condemnatory ways – there were hundreds of anti-feminist tracts from the time books have been printed on – as a whole new outlook.

There were poems written about the need for liberty, education and a whole new attitude towards in the early modern period; it’s arguable that novels written by women in the 18th century implicitly carve out this new area of discourse: they have realistic heroines at the center. Such a writer was Henry Fielding’s sister, Sarah Fielding. Diderot’s La Religieuse is part of this conversation: how women mistreated. Sarah Scott, Millenium Hall: about a community of women to which abused women can flee, where you are educated and helped to find a new life. Jane Austen’s books are indirect, but not Fanny Burney’s.

The first writer though to carve out this area, but in an ambiguous way was Jean-Jacques Rousseau. People reading him can be perplexed on why his works meant so much to women, why they read him and imitated: his Emile, a book on education, has Sophie educated to be his good wife not on her own account; his exaltation of breast-feeding and motherhood has had mixed results: but he cared, he wrote about women as women separately and said what they do in private and public life too matters.

They take off from him, books correcting him, Louise D’Epinay, books arguing with him: a long section of Mary Wollstonecraft’s Rights of Women is about how women are mis-educated. It’s a beginning. Another step she took was to show that when women became mothers they were not well treated, not helped. A later step was to stop tethering what a woman’s life could be from the biological – her as a mother. That comes later after a fight over rights: to custody, to separation and divorce, freedom from male violence in marriage or as a daughter. In his Subjection of Women, 1869, a kind of companion treated to his On Liberty (mostly civil) he argues we don’t know what women’s nature and capabilities are because the way society has been structured has been to prevent them from doing anything but the narrowest of tasks.

I then described Mary Trouille’s book, Women Read Rousseau: Sexual Politics in the Enlightenment (1997), where Prof Trouille shows however narrowly anti-feminist Rousseau seems at first, he is the one man to pay attention to women’s needs, the naturalness (and ease) of breast-feeding, and to write to persuade them to see their functions as mothers as centrally important. Trouille has a long section on the paradoxical subversive use Roland made of Rousseau, and her demonstration by quoting the venomous attacks on her by the newspapers of the day that she was murdered for having as a woman tried to take public power on behalf of women and a moderate stance. Then Marilyn Yalom’s Blood Sisters: The French Revolution in Women’s Memory (2004): Roland’s memoir belongs to a subgenre of memoirs by women about the revolution who were imprisoned or suffered directly for a time: most are vitriolically reactionary so hers shines out (like Helena Maria Williams’s letters on the revolution) for remaining true to the ideals of the revolution and presenting these ideals as good, true, capable of making a good society from the ashes of the ancien regime. What all agree is that she was no diplomatic, never detached, not a manipulator and thus a poor politician.

I then asked them, how would they say Madame Roland saw herself? What is her portrait of herself? Anyone? she sees herself as grave, serious, earnest, and moral. One woman said she found Roland irritating; another said she saw herself as correct in her judgement. She had a passionate romantic nature. She saw herself as embodying the best of the revolution an example to others. She says so. You see this in her letters to Buzot. She did have a rage to write – and finally found her metier without censure in the prison. So many denigrate her – she is not social enough, not sexy. lead a life at odds with her era’s mores and customs: the power of an intensely rebellious and non-religious private spiritual life. Solitary. That was when one man said she wanted to the author of her own life.

So what did they think was at risk today from the enlightenment. One man said we were returning to authoritarianism, not thinking for ourselves. Another said we were returning to intolerance.  We needed to return to good education.  People today don’t read enough, know enough. I then read from Richard Feynman’s closing paragraphs from his eloquent speech to the National Academy of Sciences when he resigned from the organization on “The Value of Science”. And so the course ended.

Detail from Greuze’s The Woolwinder (with her cat) 1759

Ellen