Madame Roland participant of French Revolution
Marie-Jeanne 'Manon' Roland de la Platière (Paris, March 17, 1754 – Paris, November 8, 1793), born Marie-Jeanne Phlipon, and best known under the name Madame Roland, was a French revolutionary, salonnière and writer.
Initially she led a quiet and unremarkable life as a provincial intellectual with her husband, the economist Jean-Marie Roland de la Platière. She became interested in politics only when the French Revolution broke out in 1789. She spent the first years of the revolution in Lyon, where her husband was elected to the city council. During this period she developed a network of contacts with politicians and journalists; her reports on developments in Lyon were published in national revolutionary newspapers.
In 1791 the couple settled in Paris, where Madame Roland soon established herself as a leading figure within the political group the Girondins, one of the more moderate revolutionary factions. She was known for her intelligence, astute political analyses and her tenacity, and was a good lobbyist and negotiator. The salon she hosted in her home several times a week was an important meeting place for politicians. However, she was also convinced of her own intellectual and moral superiority and alienated important political leaders like Robespierre and Danton.
Unlike the feminist revolutionaries Olympe de Gouges and Etta Palm, Madame Roland was not an advocate for political rights for women. She believed that women should play a very modest role in public and political life. Already during her lifetime, many found this difficult to reconcile with her own active involvement in politics and her important role within the Girondins.
When her husband unexpectedly became Minister of the Interior in 1792, her political influence grew. She had control over the content of ministerial letters, memorandums and speeches, was involved in decisions about political appointments, and was in charge of a bureau set up to influence public opinion in France. She was both admired and reviled, and particularly hated by the sans-culottes of Paris. The publicists Marat and Hébert conducted a smear campaign against Madame Roland as part of the power struggle between the Girondins and the more radical Jacobins and Montagnards. In June 1793, she was the first Girondin to be arrested during the Terror and was guillotined a few months later.
Madame Roland wrote her memoirs while she was imprisoned in the months before her execution. They are – like her letters – a valuable source of information about the first years of the French Revolution.The Revolution
From a distance: 1789–1791
Throughout France, and especially in Paris, protests against the social, economic and political conditions were mounting. The Rolands were in many ways representative of the rising revolutionary elite. They had obtained their social position through work and not through birth, and resented the court in Versailles with its corruption and privileges. They deliberately chose a fairly sober, puritan lifestyle. They favoured a liberal economy and the abolition of old regulations, and advocated relief for the poor. When the French States General were convened in 1789, Madame Roland and her husband were involved in drawing up the local Cahier de Doléances, the document in which the citizens of Lyon could express their grievances about the political and economic system. Politics had played no major role in Madame Roland's correspondence before 1789, but in the course of that year she became more and more fascinated by political developments.
After the storming of the Bastille on July 14, 1789, her thinking radicalised quickly and there was a complete change in the tone and content of her letters. She was no longer interested in societal reform, but advocated revolution. Institutions from the old regime were no longer acceptable to her; now that the people had taken over sovereignty, a completely new form of government had to be developed. Unlike many other revolutionaries, she was quick to argue for the establishment of a republic. In her political thinking, Madame Roland was irreconcilably radical at this point in time. She was not inclined to compromise on anything; to achieve her revolutionary ideals she found the use of force, and even civil war, acceptable.During the first eighteen months of the French Revolution the Rolands were based in Lyon, although they still lived in Villefranche part of the time. Madame Roland soon became convinced that a counter-revolution was being plotted. She tried to mobilize her friends through her letters, not hesitating to spread unfounded rumors about events and about people she did not agree with. Meanwhile, it had become common knowledge in Lyon that the Rolands sympathized with the revolutionaries and had supported the establishment of radical political clubs. They were hated by representatives of the old elite because of this. She was happy when, on February 7, 1790, an uprising broke out in Lyon that led to the ousting of the city council and an increase of the number of men eligible to vote.Madame Roland did not publicly take part in political discussions, but still managed to gain political influence during this period. She corresponded with a network of publicists and politicians, including the Parisian journalist Jacques Pierre Brissot, the future leader of the Girondins, and the lawyer Jean-Henri Bancal d'Issarts. In her letters she described and analyzed the developments in Lyon. At least on five occasions Brissot published excerpts from her letters as articles in his newspaper Le Patriote Francaise, so that her opinions were discussed outside Lyon. Luc-Antoine de Champagneux did the same in his newspaper Le courier de Lyon. She was one of the few female correspondents in the revolutionary press. Because her contributions were not published under her own name, but anonymously or as 'a woman from the south,' it is impossible to determine with certainty how many articles written by Madame Roland appeared in the press.Political ideas
The name of Madame Roland is inextricably linked to the Girondins. Both she and her husband were considered to be part of the leadership of this political faction, also called the Brissotins after their leader Jacques Pierre Brissot. Originally, the Girondins - and also the Rolands - were part of the wider Jacobin movement. As the revolution progressed, they began to distance themselves from the Jacobins, who became dominated by radical Parisian leaders like Georges Danton and Jean-Paul Marat. The Girondins opposed the influence Paris had on national politics in preference to federalism; many of the Girondins politicians came from outside the capital. They belonged to the bourgeoisie and positioned themselves as the guardians of the rule of law against the lawlessness of the masses. In this aspect too they differed fundamentally from the Jacobins, who saw themselves as the representatives of the sans-culottes, the workers, and shopkeepers.In power: the Ministry of the Interior
Revolution gathering speed
In the months immediately after her arrival in Paris, Madame Roland was not satisfied with the progress of social and political change in France, which she felt to be not fast and far-reaching enough. When King Louis XVI tried to flee the country with his family in June 1791, the revolution gained momentum. Madame Roland herself took to the streets to lobby for the introduction of a republic; she also became a member of a political club under her own name for the first time, despite her conviction that women should not have a role in public life. She felt that at that point in time there was so much at stake that everyone - man or woman - had to fully exert themselves to bring about change. In July of that year, a demonstration on the Champs de Mars led to a massacre: the National Guard opened fire on demonstrators, killing possibly as many as 50 people. Many prominent revolutionaries feared for their lives and fled; the Rolands provided a temporary hiding place for Louise de Kéralio and her husband François Robert.Soon divisions began to occur within the revolutionaries in the legislative assembly, particularly as to whether France should start a war against Prussia and Austria. Brissot and most of the Girondins were in favour (they feared military support for the monarchy from Prussia and Austria), while Robespierre first wanted to put internal affairs in order. The political situation was so divided that it was next to impossible to form a stable government: there were no ministerial candidates that were acceptable to all parties (including the king and the court). The Girodins were given the opportunity to put their ideas into practice: King Louis XVI asked them to appoint three ministers. In March 1792 Roland was appointed Minister of the Interior. This appointment came so unexpectedly that the Rolands at first thought Brissot was joking. There is no indication that they were actively seeking a government post for Roland. The couple moved into the Hôtel Pontchartran, the official residence of the minister, but kept on their small apartment in the city - just in case.