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.
Early years
Childhood
Marie-Jeanne Phlipon, known as Manon, was the daughter of Pierre Gatien Phlipon, an engraver, and his wife Marguerite Bimont, daughter of a haberdasher. Her father ran a successful business and the family lived in reasonable prosperity on the Quai de l'Horloge in Paris. She was the couple's only surviving child; six siblings died in infancy. The first two years of her life she lived with a wet nurse in Arpajon, a small town south-east of Paris.
Manon taught herself to read as a five-year-old and during the catechism lessons, the local priests also noticed she was very intelligent. Therefore, and because she was an only child, she received more education than was customary for a girl from her social background at that time; however, it still fell short of the level of schooling a boy would have received. Teachers came to the family home for subjects such as calligraphy, history, geography and music. Her father taught her drawing and art history, an uncle who was a priest gave her some Latin lessons and her grandmother, who had been a governess, took care of spelling and grammar. In addition, she learned from her mother how to run a household.
As a child, she was very religious. At her own request, she lived in a convent for a year to prepare herself for her first communion when she was eleven. Only a few years later she would begin to question the doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church. Although she eventually turned away from the church, she continued to believe all her life in the existence of God, the immortality of the soul, and the moral obligation to do good. Her ideas are very close to deism.
Studying and writing
After returning home from the convent, she received little additional formal education but continued to read and study; she was largely an autodidact. She read books on all subjects: history, mathematics, agriculture and law. She developed a passion for the classics; like many of her contemporaries, she was inspired by the biographies of famous Greeks and Romans in Plutarch's Vitae Parallelae (Parallel Lives.