Madame Roland, Mémoires de Madame Roland
Another writer imprisoned during the French Revolution, Madame Roland, née Marie-Jeanne Phlippon (1754-93), spent less than 6 months in the Conciergerie before being guillotined for treason in November 1793. Incarcerated in relatively comfortable conditions, Madame Roland spent her last few months writing her memoirs, in which she reflected on her fascinating life and involvement in the French Revolution as she bravely faced death. The Mémoires are a testament not only to her incredible valour but her wonderful education and self-assured and confident personality: ‘I have never been tempted to change my beliefs in order to relax my moral principles’.
Despite growing up in a period when women were meant to be weak and submissive, Madame Roland was strong-willed enough to stand up to the men in her life, influenced by the writings of the philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau: ‘he showed me the possibility of domestic happiness and the delights that were available to me if I sought them’. Despite her great beauty and list of suitors, Roland was far more interested in politics: ‘no one so obviously made for voluptuous pleasure has enjoyed so little of it’. After a year in convent school, she educated herself independently, and travelled widely.
She married Jean-Marie Roland de la Platière, a politically-ambitious philosopher 20 years her senior with whom she collaborated on a number of political writings, but it was she who chose the direction of the published output, and thus through her husband Madame Roland achieved significant political influence. Their writings in support of the Revolution led to Jean-Marie being elected representative for Lyon in Paris, and Madame Roland’s salon played host on many occasions to such figures as Brissot, Pétion, and Robespierre. Unfortunately, she later made a dangerous enemy of the latter, which resulted in her imprisonment and execution.
It was well-known that the real voice behind Jean-Marie’s letters and writings was his irrepressible wife. Thus when Jean-Marie voted against executing Louis XVI and spoke out against the September Massacres of 1792, it was only a matter of time until his dominant wife was arrested for treason. Executed for harbouring royalist sympathies, Madame Roland’s last words were ‘O Liberté, que de crimes on commet en ton nom!’ (‘O Liberty, what crimes are committed in your name!’). Determined, independent, and unwilling to accept a life of subservience to men, Madame Roland is one of history’s most underrated feminist icons.