page_title: Madame Roland
section_title: Activist and salonniere
hierarchical_section_title: Madame Roland / The Revolution / Activist and salonniere
context_page_description: Marie-Jeanne 'Manon' Roland de la Platière, 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.
context_section_description: In 1790 Jean-Marie Roland was elected in the city council of Lyon where he advocated a moderate revolutionary administration. The Rolands now settled in Lyons but in order to get money for the revolutionary reform they left for Paris in 1791, for what should have been a short stay.
  Madame Roland soon became a well-known figure in political circles in Paris, especially thanks to Brissot, who introduced her everywhere. As always, she worked alongside her husband, although the routine copying and editing work was now done by an assistant, Sophie Grandchamp. Madame Roland wrote most of her husbands official letters and regretted that she could not go to the new National Assembly herself to argue the case of Lyon: women were admitted only to the public gallery. When she observed the debates from the gallery, it annoyed her that the conservatives were so much better and more eloquent in the debates than the revolutionaries, who she considered ideologically superior. Outside the assembly she was active as a lobbyist. With Roland, she was a regular visitor the Jacobin club (here too women were only allowed access to the public gallery).
  From April 1791 she hosted a salon in her home several times a week, attended by republicans from bourgeois circles. Among the visitors were Maximilien de Robespierre and the American revolutionary Thomas Paine.
  During these events, Madame Roland always sat at a table by the window, reading, writing letters or doing needlework. She never involved herself in the conversations going on around her but listened carefully. Her considerable political influence was not exerted by participating in public debate (which she found unseemly for a woman), but through letters and personal conversations. She was known for her sharp political analyses and her ideological tenacity, and was widely recognized as one of the most important people in the group around Brissot. She was always asked for advice on political strategy and she contributed to the content of letters, parliamentary bills and speeches. She was described by contemporaries as a charming woman and a brilliant conversationalist.
  Madame Roland's salon is one of the main reasons why she is remembered but it may not have been a salon in the usual sense of the term. The gatherings she hosted were strictly political and not social in character; hardly any food or drink was served. They took place in the few hours between the end of the debates in the assembly and the beginning of the meetings in the Jacobin Club. There were also - apart from Madame Roland herself- no women present. This distinguished them from the events hosted by Louise de Kéralio, Sophie de Condorcet and Madame de Staël; although also attended by revolutionaries their gatherings were more like the aristocratic salons of the ancien regime, an impression that Madame Roland wanted to avoid at any cost.
caption: Jacques Pierre Brissot, journalist and later leader of the Girondins, published Madame Rolands articles in his newspaper and introduced her in revolutionary circles.
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