Madame Roland, Makers of History

Madame Roland, from the Makers of History Series is a popular biography by John Stevens Cabot Abbott of the French Revolutionary figure Manon Roland (1754-1793). Madame Roland was one of the central political figures of the early French Revolution and ran a famous Paris salon that became the meeting place for the Girondin faction of moderate revolutionary politicians.

Manon Phlipon was born in Paris to a middle-class engraver and his wife. She received an unusually thorough education for a young woman of her social position and developed strong political and philosophical interests across her youth. She married Jean-Marie Roland de la Platière, a substantially older industrial inspector with Girondin political sympathies, in 1780. The marriage was apparently affectionate without being passionate, and Madame Roland increasingly directed her husband’s political career as the French Revolution developed across the late 1780s and early 1790s.

The Roland salon became one of the central Paris political gathering places during the years of Girondin influence in the revolutionary government. Jean-Marie Roland served as Minister of the Interior in 1792, with his wife widely understood to be the actual political mind directing his decisions. The Girondin faction lost power to the more radical Jacobins under Robespierre in the spring of 1793, and the leading Girondins were arrested in June. Madame Roland was arrested at the same time and imprisoned for five months before her execution by guillotine in November 1793. Her husband, who had escaped Paris, killed himself when he learned of her death.

Madame Roland wrote substantial memoirs during her imprisonment. The Memoires de Madame Roland survived and were published in various editions across the nineteenth century, becoming one of the great primary documents of the French Revolution from the Girondin perspective.

Abbott’s biography draws on these memoirs and on the broader French Revolutionary literature available in mid-nineteenth-century American libraries. The treatment is sympathetic to Madame Roland as a figure of personal courage and moral seriousness. It pairs with Abbott’s other Makers of History volumes on French Revolutionary subjects.