Roland de la Platière, JEAN MARIE, and his greater wife, MADAME ROLAND (née Marie-Jeanne, or Manon, Philipon), are among the most memorable martyrs of the French Revolution. Roland was born of a decayed legal family at Villefranche near Lyons in 1734. He made his way unaided, and had risen to be inspector of manufactures at Amiens, when about the close of 1775 he made the acquaintance of his gifted wife. She was twenty years his junior, having been born at Paris, 18th March 1754, daughter of an engraver, who had ruined himself by unlucky speculations. From the first an eager and imaginative child, she read everything, even heraldry, and Plutarch made the young idealist a republican for life. At eleven she went for a year into a convent to prepare for her first communion, next passed a year with her grandmother, and then returned to her father's house, where she read Buffon, Bossuet, and Helvétius, and at length found her gospel in the writings of Rousseau. Her admirable mother died in 1775, and the girl, solitary and poor, untouched in heart by her many admirers, and soured to her father by his misconduct, at length in February 1780 married the estimable Roland. He was over forty, thin, yellowish, careless in dress, abrupt and austere in manners, solid and well-informed indeed, but dry, unsympathetic, and addicted to talking about himself. But she buried the latent passions of her heart, and for ten years made herself an admirable wife and mother, with perfect domestic simplicity. They lived at Amiens, where her only child, a daughter, was born (October 1781); and next at Lyons, and travelled in England and Switzerland. The Agricultural Society of Lyons charged Roland to draw up its cahier for the States-general, and in February 1791 he went to Paris to watch the interests of its municipality, returned to Lyons in September, but came back to Paris before the close of the year. It was now that Madame Roland's masculine intellect and woman's heart made her the queen of a coterie of young and eloquent enthusiasts that included all the famous and ill-fated leaders of the Gironde, Brissot, Buzot,
Pétion, and at first even Robespierre and Danton. Her noble beauty, dark expressive eyes, sweet voice, and eloquent words added a charm to patriotism that was irresistible. In March 1792 Roland became minister of the Interior, and his stiff manners, round hat, and unbuckled shoes struck dismay into the court. Three months later he was dismissed for his disloyal remonstrance to the king, who had refused to sanction the decree for the banishment of the priests. It was Madame Roland's vigorous pen that wrote this letter, as indeed she wrote most of the papers that her husband signed. He was recalled after the king's removal to the Temple, made himself hateful to the Jacobins by his protests against the September massacres, and took his part in the last ineffectual struggle of the Girondists to form a moderate party. It was in the last days of the Gironde that the reciprocal affection between Madame Roland and Buzot crossed the indefinite bounds that separate friendship from love. It was the one touch of softness that her nature needed, says Sainte-Beuve, to make it wholly feminine and French. But her Spartan soul sacrificed its passion to duty, and strong in the purity of her heart she made a confidant of her husband, partly perhaps because she sought in this a strange safeguard against herself, but doubtless still more because the ideal love to that exalted virginal heart was a love nourished upon sacrifices, that encircles its object with an aureole of respect, and dreads to find in possession the end of its enchantment. The struggle brought on six days of physical exhaustion, and on the seventh the sound of the tocsin announced the prescription of the Twenty-two (31st May). Roland had been arrested, but escaped and fled to Rouen; Buzot and some of the others fled to Caen to organise insurrection, but in vain; next day she herself was seized and carried to the Abbaye. Set at liberty two days later, she was arrested anew and taken to Sainte-Pélagie. She had five more months of prison before death closed her tragedy of life, and during this time she wrote her unfinished Mémoires, furtively, with a swiftly flowing pen, on sheets of coarse gray paper given her by a kindly turnkey, often blotted by the falling tears. The stern joy with which she had hailed the dawn of revolution, her hatred of the throne, the high hope and heroic disinterestedness of her dreams—all her sincere illusions were now dissipated, and at length she saw into the heart of that declamatory tragedy called the Revolution. Her character, made perfect through suffering, took on a new refinement; she carried with her into death something of the sanctity of the martyr, and still, in Carlyle's phrase, like a white Grecian statue, serenely complete, she shines in that black wreck of things. She bore herself in prison with a gracious and queenly dignity, buried in her Thomson, Shaftesbury, Plutarch, and Tacitus. The approach of death unsealed her lips, and (22d June to 7th July) in four letters to Buzot, strangely discovered in 1863, she spoke out a love that could never now come into conflict with duty. On the 1st November, the morning of the execution of the Twenty-two, she was transferred to the Conciergerie, and there lay for eight days. She went to the Tribunal dressed all in white, her long black hair hanging down to the girdle, and in the dusk of the 8th November 1793 she was carried to the guillotine along with a trembling printer of assignats, whom she asked Sanson to take first to save him the horror of seeing her head fall.—'You cannot,' said she, 'refuse the last request of a woman.' It is usually told how, on the point of entering the awful shadows of eternity, she asked for pen and paper to write down the strange thoughts that were rising within her, but Sainte-
Beuve thinks it impossible, puerile, untrue to the nature of the heroine, as well as unauthenticated by good contemporary evidence. As she looked up at the statue of Liberty, she exclaimed, 'O Liberté, comme on t'a jouée!' or as it is still more commonly given, 'O Liberté, que de crimes on commet en ton nom!' She had often said her husband would not long survive her; a week later he ran himself through with his sword-stick near Rouen, November 15, 1793.
Madame Roland's Mémoires reflects little of the horrors amid which it was written, but is a serene and delightful revelation of her youth in a series of charming glimpses. But in writing she is best and most natural in her letters, as in the series to Bosc, those to Bancal des Issarts, the four to Buzot, and the exquisitely simple letters to her two school friends, Henriette and Sophie Cannet. The best editions of the Mémoires, for the first time printed in their entirety, are those of Dauban (1864) and Faugère (1864). Her Letters were collected by Dauban (2 vols. 1867). See the studies by Dauban (1864), Mathilde Blind (1886), and Ida M. Tarbell (1896); Lamy, Deux Femmes Célèbres (1884); and Austin Dobson, Four Frenchwomen (1890); Sainte-Beuve, in Nouveaux Lundis, and in Portraits de Femmes; Scherer, in his Études.