[In this essay, Outram connects Roland's presentation of herself as an “embodied” woman with her political writings and activism.]

Fût-on un Caton, on doit craindre les Circés.

Hébert, 1793

En lisant les Mémoires de Mme Roland, on aperçoit l'actrice qui travaille pour la scène et qui noie dans une foule de puérilités l'apologie de ses amis et la satire de ses enemies; toutes les figures y sont peintes en buste, et le plus souvent par le pinceau des passions. J'ai connu personnellement cette femme dont la mort héroique a expié l'égarement, dont l'âme ardente et la tête ambitieuse eussent mérité un cloître ou une principauté; dont l'esprit fin et turbulent était aussi propre à diriger des intrigues qu'incapable d'écrire avec fidelité les scènes d'horreur où elle n'avait pas craint de jouer un rôle.

Mallet du Pin, 1798¹

So far, one of the major themes of this book has been the construction of human bodies, predominantly male, as arenas of public authority. We have looked in some detail at the very male ethos of Stoicism, dignity and self-containment, the political practices to which it gave rise, and its insertion into political culture as a whole. We have not yet asked, however, whether such an ethos can be examined wholly as a self-sustaining entity: was it self-supporting, or was it sustained by a continuous relocation, within the culture at large, of physical and political attributes antithetical to it? We may ask if the male Stoicism which appears as the dominant political ethos of the Revolutionary period could have been so without the formation of a contrasting ethos of women's public responses. In trying to answer this question we can gain much additional insight into the public embodiment of this period, for clearly, if we look at only one side of the making of public physical representation—the side of the male actors we have so far discussed—we do not go very far towards understanding, for either sex, the problem of public physical embodiment.

It is also, however, important to lead on from the criticisms of Foucault expressed earlier in this volume, and not explore this theme ‘from the outside’. We have to ask too how, and to what extent, women in this period constructed their own physical self-image and how that self-image was related by them to experiences in the public realm. In particular, how did women begin to deal with experiences of the body necessarily denied to men, such as childbirth and breast-feeding, or with experiences which weighed more heavily on them, such as life in the family? How, if at all, could they relate such gender-specific experiences in the lived body, to the creation of a body which could carry public weight?

The period of the French Revolution is a key one in the evaluation of this problem. It is not only that then, for the first time, though for a brief period only, a minority of women, especially in Paris, began to be politically visible.² It was also that the Revolution defined its difference from the old regime partly in terms of a difference in the impact of women on politics. In the rhetoric, the monarchy was par excellence a regime characterized by the corruption of power through the agency of women. Boudoir politics, the exchange of political gifts for sexual favours, were seen both as a cause of the weaknesses of the old regime, and as a justification for the Revolution itself. Perhaps the most visible example of this attitude is constituted by the trial of Queen Marie-Antoinette, in 1793. The ‘political’ counts against her—instigating the flight of the royal family which ended at Varennes, inciting foreign states to invade France—were inseparable from, and bolstered by, the accusations of sexual perversion and incest which accompanied them. In corrupting the Dauphin, heir to the throne of France, her accusers implied that she had corrupted the body politic at one and the same time as she had corrupted the actual physical body of her son.³ As Furet remarks, the Revolution could only legitimate its own seizure of power, and distinguish itself from the corrupt power of the old regime, by attacking power itself.⁴

To the degree that power in the old regime was ascribed to women, the Revolution was committed to an anti-feminine rhetoric, which posed great problems for any women seeking public authority. Male politicians, on the other hand, could find in this rhetoric an escape from the guilt arising from the destruction of the French monarchy and its complex religious sanctions: what looked like a sacrilegious act had in fact been a crusade for virtue; what looked like an attack on the supreme political symbol, the king's body, had in fact been a purging of the female from the body politic. As the woman activist Olympe de Gouges remarked, ‘Women are now respected and excluded; under the old regime they were despised and powerful’.⁵ Thus, in the rhetoric of the Revolution, the entire struggle for the achievement of legitimacy, for the creation of a new legitimate public embodiment by the Revolutionary governing class, was predicated not on an inclusion of the female, but on its exclusion. The production of male political embodiment cannot be understood as a self-standing development; it has also to be read as a process of exclusion, and differentiation.

Nowhere was this process of exclusion and differentiation more marked than in the case of the most important word of the Revolutionary political vocabulary: ‘virtue’. We have already seen how strong was the presupposition that political revolution could only take place if the niche formerly occupied by women's vice was taken over by male virtue. Of that male virtue, Brutus was the supreme personification, Brutus who put the safety of the republic above private emotion, or the protection of his family, in agreeing to the execution of his sons on the discovery of their involvement in a conspiracy to overthrow the Roman republic and restore the monarchy.⁶ Brutus could not have been a woman. The embodiment of female virtue, Lucretia, who killed herself after her rape by King Tarquin, was defending virtue in quite a different sense, that of intimate physical reserve. And although the stories of the virtue of both Brutus and Lucretia were ultimately concerned with the defence of the republic against monarchy, their juxtaposition demonstrates, none the less, the immense gulf between men's and women's virtue: the one public, the other private. The word ‘virtue’, in the Revolutionary context, existed in a perpetual slide between these two meanings, rather than in the rigid ‘discourse of the Revolution’ of which Furet speaks. The existence of this continuum between virtue as chastity or female fidelity within marriage, and virtue as the upholding of the republic at whatever private cost, carries a whole series of messages: that female chastity is the prerequisite for political innovation undertaken in the name of the general will and against monarchy; that women threaten the revolution, because any deviation from chastity/virtue involves the collapse of republic/virtue; and because through their unrestrained sexuality women can personalize politics and factionalize it with competition for their ‘favours’ (a significantly two-edged word). Virtue, far from being the linchpin of a monolithic ‘discourse of the Revolution’, in fact bisected the apparently universalistic discourse of the general will into distinct political destinies, one male and the other female. Both were part of le souvereign, but somehow one half of le souvereign could function only at the price of the sexual containment of the other.⁷

But somehow, women's desires and passions, and the bodies through which they expressed these passions and desires, refused to abandon the consciousness of the Revolution. The trial of Marie-Antoinette was staged virtually as a morality play on the evil impact of women on the body politic, as well as an epitome of monarchical corruption. Charlotte Corday's assassination of Marat, ‘L'Ami du Peuple’, and Mme Roland's allegedly fatal influence on her husband, twice Minister of the Interior in 1792-3, and on members of the group loosely called Girondins, were test cases of the female potential for danger in the new politics. Contemporaries were quick to link the three women together, whatever their differences in birth and outlook, and to use their common fate of condemnation and execution as a warning to other women who attempted, like the members of women's political clubs in Paris, to gain visibility for themselves in the political process.⁸ Women's virtue, it was felt, disappeared when subject to public exposure in the arena of politics: the same arena which created public man, made woman into fille publique. Connections with women were also a favourite stick to beat political enemies. Nothing was simpler, for example, than for Marat to trivialize attacks in the Convention on the Jacobin, Pache, in November 1792 by Buzot and Barbaroux, both friends of Mme Roland, by allegations of a sexual reward:

Ce n'est qu'à cette condition [of making the attack on Pache] qu'on a laissé à Barbaroux l'espoir de continuer ses fonctions de premier frère servant. On dit même que c'est dans l'espoir d'avoir la clef du boudoir que Buzot a donné dans cette affaire un si grand coup de collier.⁹

It is unfortunately true that the historiography of women's experience in the French Revolution for a long time did little else but reproduce the prejudices of the Revolution itself. An image of women, as destructively propelled by physicality, passion and desire, was adopted whole by the nineteenth century. As Louis Devance puts it:

… the way in which the ‘famous women’ of the Revolution have been studied, and the fatal role which historians such as Michelet have ascribed to them, and above all the equation of the three terms ‘women’, ‘madness’, and ‘revolution’, have meant that a mythical or stereotyped approach to women has often predominated in historical writing.

In particular, it was an approach which emphasizes the ‘unnatural fury’ of the women of the Revolution. It functions to distract attention from the fact that the ‘so-called special cruelty’ of the ‘furies of the guillotine’ and others was nothing more than a response by women to ‘sadistic spectacles thought up and executed by men’.¹⁰

Later in the nineteenth century, historians continued this tradition but medicalized its explanation. ‘Hysteria’ rather than ‘fury’ became the main description of alleged episodes of feminine destructive ruthlessness, a hysteria arising out of the subjects' physical constitution as women. If Elias's identification of the modern state with the restraint of drives and affects is true, then no wonder women were identified as the enemies of political virtue precisely at the moment of the creation of the first modern state, during the Revolution, precisely by virtue of their lack of control of emotion and their physical violence. It is only in the twentieth century, with the rise of a ‘women's history’, that an attempt has been made to see women's role in the Revolution as anything more than a ‘dark history’ of the male revolution. But for all its feminist credentials—or maybe even because of them—even the new history of women poses considerable problems. It has, first of all, very often been tempted to see the actions of militant women during the Revolution, and their political clubs in particular, as forerunners of modern feminist movements, rather than examining them in the context of the history of the Revolution. Because of this, few historians have attempted to isolate the causes of the failure of the clubs in terms of the problems raised by the political culture of the Revolution for all its participants, including women—problems such as the mastery of public discourse, and the achievement of public embodiment. The implication often remains that the minority of female activists or ‘first feminists’ within the Revolution failed because of male hostility to ‘feminism’.

Concentration on the activists also means in effect that women's history of the Revolution has stayed well within the canon of ‘famous women of the Revolution’ first established by nineteenth-century male historians such as Michelet, in his La Femme et la Révolution. The only change made is that upper-class or non-activist ‘famous women’, such as Mme Roland, have been dropped from the canon, as there has also been little interest in searching out hitherto unknown private responses by non-activist, non-canonical ‘founding mothers’.¹¹ Sadly, concentration on a small band of female activists such as Etta Palm, Théroigne de Méricourt or Pauline Leclerc means that women's history in the Revolutionary period has remained isolated from that of the general history of the Revolution, and that mainstream history has accordingly taken little note of the conclusions of the feminist historians, just as they themselves have taken little note of the reactions and responses of the vast numbers of women caught up in the Revolution. Concentration on the small band of female extra-Parliamentary activists has had several other consequences: most importantly, it has led to a neglect of women's self-consciousness. It is precisely the aim of this book to restore that self-consciousness, by examining the interaction, as we will later do in the case of Mme Roland, between private experience of the body and the problems of the achievement of public embodiment. Such an enquiry would, it is clear, tell us much not only about women's difficulties under the Revolution, but also about the stresses within Revolutionary political culture.

In the modern historiography of women during the Revolution, we also find, surprisingly, an almost circular movement towards the revival of some of the basic nineteenth-century approaches to the topic. The concentration of social historians such as Olwen Hufton on the actions of working-class women—often, thanks to their family responsibilities, in the forefront of the food riots and the great journées of the Revolution—arose from a laudable desire to end a situation where the attitude of working women and their Revolutionary experience remains an‘enigma, conceded but passing reference even in works concerned exclusively with the attitudes and actions of the working class’. But in spite of these aims, to a disturbing degree Hufton's working women remind one of the passionate ‘furies’ of the older historians, when she writes that: ‘In every outward manifestation in 1793, women were more frenzied, more intense, doubly gullible, doubly credulous, doubly vindictive and the only exception to this is that they were less publicly garrulous than men—but here it may merely be a question of lack of opportunity’.¹²

The modern ‘feminist’ history of the women of the Revolution has in fact not succeeded either in creating a new and satisfactory history of women, or of laying the ghost of the old. Even more surprising, in view of the importance of the problem of political embodiment in the Revolutionary period, and the efforts of modern feminists to recapture the female body from male appropriation, is the fact that recent women's history of the Revolution has considered its female actors as without embodiment. In the rest of this chapter I am going to consider, through the medium of a case study of an exceptionally well-documented life, that of Mme Roland, what such a reconstruction of female embodiment would involve, and how a specifically female physical consciousness could overlap with, and be transformed into, a series of responses to political situations. I also intend to show how such responses were inextricably linked to the way that the pre-Revolutionary culture of the eighteenth century had given drama and visibility to women's physicality.

The life of Mme Roland has always attracted attention.¹³ Partly this has been due to the enormous volume of self-documentation which she produced. She is probably the most extensively intimately documented woman of the French eighteenth century. Her voluminous correspondence, running from early adolescent years to her death in 1793 at the age of thirty-nine, and the lengthy and detailed Mémoires written in her imprisonment during the Revolution, have been impeccably edited by Claude Perroud; there also exist from her pen writings on her journeys to England and Switzerland, and about Roman history and its moral lessons—volumes of standard eighteenth-century interest which, together with a harrowing and minutely detailed account of the birth of her only child, Eudore, were issued in a collected edition very shortly after her execution.¹⁴ Mme Roland's was a life in which the art of writing played an almost obsessionally large part; it was also one in which, particularly in the Mémoires, writing is used repeatedly to create both the self and its physical embodiment. Editors before Perroud were often perturbed by the mixture of frankness and risqué coyness in these writings, to the extent that much material relating to Mme Roland's physical experiences of all kinds, and her celebration of her physicality, was expurgated from early editions of her works.¹⁵ Present-day historians are perturbed by the strength with which her writings demand that we consider the close links between the written word and the growth of a physical identity.

That to consider Mme Roland from this standpoint appears as a new enterprise merely bears out our earlier remarks about certain features of the historiography of women in the Revolutionary period. Apart from a fairly recent and intelligently written biography, and another study of her literary output, both by Gita May, Mme Roland has been conspicuously neglected by the most recent generation of women's historians of the Revolution, being neither working class, nor a radical political activist.¹⁶ For nineteenth-century historians, however, Mme Roland was one of the canonical femmes célèbres de la Révolution. Apart from her famous apostrophe on the scaffold, variously rendered as ‘Liberty, what crimes are committed in your name’ and ‘O Liberté, comme l'on t'a jouée’, she was seen as having a preponderant influence over her husband, Jean-Marie Roland, as Minister of the Interior, and also over the fall of the Girondin faction, in the purge of the Convention of 31 May and 2 June 1793 which established Jacobin predominance and war government in France. It was she, it was alleged, who was the true author of her husband's famous letter of resignation of 1792 to Louis XVI, which was the first overt challenge to Louis's adherence to the new constitution; and it was also she, as even her husband's biographer claims, in terms which could have been borrowed from the classic historiography of women and the Revolution, who, contributing violence and acrimony, heightened the factional struggles of the Convention by working on the passions of her ‘champions’, the deputies Buzot and Barbaroux.¹⁷ It took the Girondins' first English chronicler, Martin Sydenham, to begin to dismantle this myth, to point out how difficult it was to isolate ‘the Girondins’ as a coherent political group, how few of them Mme Roland actually knew, and how little real influence she seemed to have exerted on the passage of events. Sydenham's path-breaking work on the problem of ‘the Girondins’ also allowed it to become visible for the first time that the myth of Mme Roland's involvement with the Girondins had existed to absolve the Girondins themselves of responsibility for their downfall: it also had had the merit, for the hard-pressed historian, of resolving the problem of defining just who were the ‘Girondins’: by definition, they became that group of politicians known to Mme Roland.¹⁸

This historiography has been rehearsed at length, not only to be the more effectively discarded for the remainder of this chapter, but also as a measure of the variety of the questions we propose to ask of Mme Roland's life, which will be questions not relating to her alleged historical responsibility for and relations to male political actors, but to and for herself; and by attempting an answer to that question, we may end up with a far truer picture of her real importance in the French Revolution than it has hitherto been possible to draw, and also a far better picture of the way in which male and female political embodiment interacted with each other. Neither makes sense alone.

We approach this project through an area neglected in the historiography at large, and in studies of Mme Roland in particular: her attitudes to her own physicality and to that of men and other women. These are important to understand on many different levels. Firstly, they represent an area of her experience which, in spite of its copious documentation in the correspondence, mémoires and other writings produced by her, has received little attention even from twentieth-century biographers, and was the first area to be excised from the early editions of her writings. Where these attitudes have been examined, as in recent work by Marie-France Morel, it is within the straitjacket of the now conventional historiography on women and the family in the Enlightenment, ‘medicalizing’ the experiences of childbirth and breast-feeding, and relating them to the alleged emergence of the warm, nuclear family in this period.¹⁹

The production of a new interpretation of the area of physicality in Mme Roland's life, however, does not simply aid us to gain a more accurate idea of an individual experience. It enables us to chart, in the case of a woman, as well as for the men whose experiences have so far concerned us, the interaction of physical self-consciousness, reactions to the physicality of others, and the delineation of the public realm. These interactions emerge far more clearly and directly in the case of Mme Roland than in the case of many of the male actors we have so far considered, not only because she left extensive autobiographical materials and correspondence, and they did not, but also because of her femininity, a condition which required her to be both explicit and circumspect in relation to the area of the physical in a way unnecessary for a man, with his greater freedom. There are two final reasons for our interest in Mme Roland's account of her self. Firstly, Mme Roland constructed her own self-image, in which physicality played a great part, through the medium of words. And the enormous size of her written output, and the immensely important part it played in her life, was matched only by the intensity of her relationship with the experience of reading. Indeed, as we will see, for Mme Roland the experience of reading and the experience of physical arousal were never far apart. Reading also supplied her with roles to play, roles which contributed decisively to the public personifications she would adopt. It is thus an important component in the discussion of public personification which we have identified as one of the major problems of Revolutionary politics. As against the arguments of many feminist historians, we may insist from the example of Mme Roland that women's actions are not determined simply by their biologically given bodies, but also by the repertoire of images which they use to recreate those bodies, and which may be drawn from both male and female experience.

One of the major purposes of this chapter is to release one woman's history from a historiography of women which is either overmedicalized or overmaternalized. Mme Roland created her own physical self-consciousness and in doing so, created her own public fate. She ended her life in a considerable blaze of public notoriety owing to the contemporary estimate of her influence on politics; moreover, she ended it in exactly the same way as the majority of the men whose reactions we have been examining: in prison, and under sentence of death. In other words, her search for a self-image and for physical dignity ended by facing exactly the same challenge as theirs. In her reaction to that challenge we may try out the degree of difference, if any, which existed in the male and female response to the challenges of political life in the Revolution.

From the beginning, Mme Roland's relationship with her own body was a focus of contradiction, and irreconcilable demands. The first physical experience she recounts in her Mémoires sets the pattern for the future. Having partly encouraged, partly rejected, the fumbling physical contact offered her by one of her father's apprentices, intrigued, yet terrified that the young man would bring their meetings to their logical conclusion, she confessed the episode to her mother, who reacted in horrified panic, lectured the young girl on the sinfulness of sexual acts and thoughts, and hurried her off to make amends in the confessional. She was, as she remarks, treated as the sinner before she had sinned, to such a degree that she became virtually unable to confront sexual topics openly for many years afterwards, and was never able to mention the incident even to Roland.²⁰ The problem was that her mother's response had identified the degree to which Manon Phlipon had indeed been ‘guilty’ in the episode, and on the basis of the ambiguity in the girl's feelings had managed also to instill in her feelings of guilt and shame in the whole sexual area, far more effectively than if Manon had either straightforwardly repulsed the young man with horror, or straightforwardly encouraged his dishonourable intentions. Was she chaste, or was she not? The question lay unresolved in Mme Roland's mind—unresolved even at the time of the writing of the Mémoires, so shortly before her death. She admits: ‘Je suis un peu embarassée de ce que j'ai à raconter ici, car je veux que mon écrit soit chaste, puisque ma personne n'a pas cessé de l'être, et pourtant ce que je dois dire ne l'est pas trop’.²¹

It is important to link these uncertainties in Mme Roland's own self-portrait with the uncertainties which prevailed in the culture at large in relation to women's public role. Mme Roland's uncertainty as to whether to regard herself as chaste or not, exactly mimicked the way in which, under both the old regime and the Revolution, chaste women were denied public authority and confined, for the preservation of that chastity, to their domestic roles, while women who aspired to public authority or influence were automatically regarded as sexually uncontrolled and thereby threatening to the political order. Unable to define herself as either chaste or unchaste, Mme Roland's attitude to the influence she did wield during her husband's brief tenure of office was equally ambiguous, as we will see when we turn to an examination of her attitudes and actions in this period, and in doing so attempt to resolve the question of the real extent of her political importance—a problem which has eluded each successive generation of commentators.

Mme Roland's ambiguities in relation to her own physicality, it must also be noted, were hardly startlingly personal; they show her efficiently internalizing the presuppositions of her culture at large. What is unusual is the extent to which her Mémoires insist upon the relationship between female physicality and the public world. This is a theme to which she returns time and again, and in ways which mirror the conflict between her own fascination with sexuality, and her efficient rejection of it. It is clear that Mme Roland found the use of eroticism by other women at once fascinating and disturbing: fascinating in its attractiveness, disturbing in its ability to corrupt the public sphere. Let us take as an example of this, her detailed description in the Mémoires of an acquaintance of her family, the middle-aged novelist Mme Benoît, whom Mme Roland encountered as an adolescent. The passage is worth quoting at length:

Mme Benoît avait été belle; les soins de la toilette, et le désir de plaire, prolongés au delà de l'âge qui assure d'y réussir, lui valaient encore quelques succès. Ses yeux les sollicitaient avec tant d'ardeur, son sein toujours découvert jusqu'au delà de la petite rose dont la fleur se réserve ordinairement pour les secrets mystères, palpitait si vivement pour les obtenir, qu'il fallait bien accorder, à la franchise du désir et à la facilité de le satisfaire, ce que les hommes accordent d'ailleurs si aisément dès qu'ils ne sont pas tenus à la constance. L'air ouvertement voluptueux de Mme Benoît était tout nouveau pour moi; j'avais vu dans les promenades ces prêtresses du plaisir dont l'indécence annonce la profession d'une manière choquante; il y avait ici une autre nuance. Je ne fus pas moins frappée de l'encens poëtique qui lui était prodigué et des expressions de sage Benoît, chaste Benoît, plusieurs fois répetées dans ces vers, qui lui faisaient porter de temps en temps devant ses yeux un modeste éventail, tandis que quelques hommes applaudissaient avec transport à des éloges qu'ils trouvaient sans doute bien appliqués. Je me rappelai ce que mes lectures m'avaient mis à portée de juger de la galanterie, ce que les moeurs du siècle et les désordres de la cour devaient y ajouter de corruption du coeur, de faussêté de l'esprit; je voyais les hommes efféminés prodiguer leur admiration à des vers legers, à des talents futiles, à la passion de les séduire tous, sans les aimer sans doute, car quiconque se dévoue au bonheur d'un objet préféré ne se prodigue point aux regards de la foule.²²

This passage is an important one for what it reveals about the links in Mme Roland's mind between overt eroticism (she has great difficulty in distinguishing between Mme Benoît and genuine prostitutes), emotional falsity, corruption, court ‘disorder’, male effeminacy, and the undermining of privacy. An absolute polarity is revealed between the Good, meaning female chastity and the veiling of the erotic, the private, and the ordered, on the one hand, and on the other, the exposure of the female body, the undermining of manhood, the weakening of royal authority, and the corruption of public order associated with giving too much away to the eyes of ‘la foule’.

So far, however, we have simply noted Mme Roland reproducing the prejudices of her age. But also at work in the passage about Mme Benoît is a considerable degree of erotic response to the other woman's frank display of her charms, a response which Mme Roland attempts to hide by the use of language of extreme coyness (‘cette petite rose …’), but which none the less vibrates through her writing even while it is ostensibly concerned with the rejection of unchastity. This point leads us on to the observation, which at first sight contradicts much of what we have said so far, that in her Mémoires Mme Roland displays a considerable concern with establishing for the reader her own physical self-portrait, and does so in a way which reveals a degree of appreciation of her own erotic charms. Rejecting, in highly moral vein, the sensuality of other women, Mme Roland yet seems eager and ready to claim it for herself. Again, a long extract will reveal more than many pages of detailed explication:

C'est peut-être ici le lieu de faire mon portrait. … À quatorze ans, comme aujourd'hui, j'avais environ cinq pieds, ma taille avait acquis toute sa croissance; la jambe bien faite, le pied bien posé, les hanches très relevées, la poitrine large et superbement meublée, les épaules effacées, l'attitude ferme et gracieuse, la marche rapide et légère, voilà pour le premier coup d'oeil. Ma figure n'avait rien de frappant qu'une grande fraîcheur, beaucoup de douceur et d'expression; à detailer chacun des traits, on peut se demander où donc en est la beauté? aucun n'est régulier, tous plaisent. La bouche est un peu grande, on en voit mille de plus jolies, pas une n'a le sourire plus tendre et plus séducteur. L'oeil, au contraire, n'est pas fort grand, son iris est d'un gris châtain; mais placé à fleur de tête, le regard ouvert, franc, vif et doux, couronné d'un sourcil brun comme les cheveux et bien dessiné, il varie dans son expression comme l'âme affectueuse dont il peint les mouvements; sérieux et fier, il étonne quelque fois, mais il caresse bien davantage et réveille toujours. Le nez me faisait quelque peine, je le trouvais un peu gros par le bout; cependant considéré dans l'ensemble, et surtout du profil, il ne gâtait rien au reste. Le front large, un peu couvert à cet âge, soutenu par l'orbite très élèvé de l'oeil, et sur le milieu duquel des veines en y s'épanouissaient à l'émotion la plus lègére, était loin de l'insignificance qu'on lui trouve sur tant de visages. Quant au menton, assez retroussé, il a précisément les caractères que les physiognomistes indiquent pour ceux de la volupté. Lorsque je les rapproche de tout ce qui m'est particulier, je doute que jamais personne fût plus faite pour elle et l'ait moins goûtée. Le teint, vif plutôt que très blanc, des couleurs éclatantes, fréquemment renforcées de la subite rougeur d'un sang bouillant excité par les nerfs les plus sensibles; la peau douce, le bras arrondi, la main agréable, sans être petite, parce que ses doigts allongés et minces annoncent l'adresse et conservent de la grâce, des dents saines et bien rangées, l'embonpoint d'une santé parfaite, tels sont les trésors que la bonne nature m'avait donnés.²³

Mme Roland can hardly tear herself away from the prolonged and minutely detailed evocation of her own physical charms.

At first sight, this is a puzzling passage to encounter in the work of a woman who was so energetically to condemn such displays by other women. And more is at work here than merely the consistent human foible of condemning in others what one commends in oneself. Mme Roland is in fact trying in this passage, through its length, and its insistent evocation of detail, to overcome precisely the continuing contradiction contained in its closing lines, of being a person made for physical desire and pleasure, and yet never experiencing it. This is still precisely the split between appearance and reality, between chastity and unchastity, contained in the episode of her father's apprentice. We may perhaps be able to resolve many of these problems by treating the self-portrait not merely as a literal, almost narcissistic, description of her physical appearance, but even more as the description which Mme Roland creates, following widely available literary models, of herself as a ‘heroine’. In the description, Mme Roland is seeking to overcome the ambiguities in her relationship with her physical self, ambiguities which were not to be lessened by marriage and motherhood, by externalizing her physicality and casting herself in the role of the virginal, and yet voluptuous, besieged and yet always chaste, heroine who abounded in the contemporary novel.²⁴

There are several arguments in favour of this view. Gita May has recently emphasized the importance to Mme Roland of writing as a bulwark against painful and confusing discrepancies: ‘… d'affirmer la consistence de sa personnalité et la constance de ses principles et ceci malgré des événements qui semblent en détruire toute cohérence’. Through the novel, Mme Roland could come to terms with herself. As she wrote of the Nouvelle Héloïse: ‘Il me rend content de moi, et m'apprend à me tolérer en me donnant toujours l'envie d'être meilleure et l'espérance de le devenir’.²⁵

The extent to which Mme Roland in her ‘self-portrait’ reproduces the commonplaces of the conventional evocation of the body of the heroine is striking. Pierre Fauchéry has described its emphasis upon the erotic potential of the eyes, the hands, and the posture of the body, which form a

sémantique gestuelle, au jeu de laquelle participent divers phénomènes vasculaires (rougeurs, paleurs), musculaires (action des mains, de la tête, agenouillements, convulsions etc). … L'inventaire et la mobilisation, la ‘mise en service’ romanesque de cette rhétorique du geste constitue à n'en plus douter une des acquisitions progressives du roman; elle contribue fortement à enrichir le monde de signes, utilisables en des circonstances quotidiennes dont la littérature fait don à la vie.²⁶

By the late eighteenth century, there were, too, further advantages in playing oneself into the heroine's role, advantages which related very specifically to the dilemmas over the repression or enjoyment of physicality faced by women in real life; dilemmas which were lifelong, and concerned other events than the loss of virginity. Firstly, from Richardson onwards, the female's struggle to preserve her virtue had been placed at centre stage in novels which had both male and female authorship and readership. Secondly, from Rousseau onwards, the heroine did not even have to preserve her virtue throughout the novel in order to remain at centre stage; indeed, her struggle over her sensuality, rather than her chastity, became the central motor of action, for instead of there being only one physical event to justify the heroine's role, that of the conflict over virginity, the whole of her bodily history became the matrix of plot. As Fauchéry has put it: ‘C'est Rousseau, qui, le premier, brouille les cartes du roman virginal, en concédant à son héroine une sensualité agissante; il n'est plus question, pour les imitatrices de Julie, de rester à l'écart de l'événement dont leur corps est le théâtre’.²⁷

It is in fact impossible to overstress the importance of certain novels in the formation of Mme Roland's self-image. Her very Christian name, as she once commented, was that of a novel's leading character—and not a particularly virtuous one. We know from the correspondence and Mémoires that Mme Roland was deeply affected by four novels in particular, Mme de Lafayette's La Princesse de Clèves, Samuel Richardson's Pamela and Clarissa, and above all, by Rousseau's Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse, as well as by the epic poem, Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered.²⁸ There are many points of contact between these works. All of them, with the possible exception of the Tasso epic, centre on women's choices in the disposal of their bodies. All the novels, with the exception of La Princesse de Clèves, are written in the form of exchanges of letters. That by Rousseau, as well as that by Mme de Lafayette, places great stress on an episode in which a young wife confesses to her older husband her love for another man. The plots of both foreshadow Mme Roland's own confession to her husband of her unconsummated passion for the conventionnel Buzot, which was followed shortly by her death, just as Julie's avowal to her husband, Wolmar, of her love for Saint-Preux, is shortly followed by her fatal boating accident.

Mme Roland's relationship with Buzot was more like an epistolary novel than a real-life, realistic passion. Her refusal to consummate the relationship, her almost sadistic insistence on revealing it to the unsuspecting and politically beleaguered Roland (in the name of marital loyalty), her refusal to leave Roland, while continuing the relationship with Buzot by letter even during her own imprisonment and his flight from Paris after the Jacobin coup of 31 May 1793, all point to the extent to which she succeeded in turning, through the medium of models provided by her favourite reading, what should have been an event of physical commitment into a series of episodes conducted through highly organized words, whether addressed to Roland or to Buzot. In doing so, by substituting the verbal for the physical, she could overcome the contradiction between the unchastity of her desires and the self-portrait she cherished, as chaste wife, and could also keep to herself the heroine's role in her domestic drama.

Nor is this series of parallels between Mme Roland's life and her novel-reading entirely the work of coincidence. It was the result of a willed internalization of these novels, in particular the Nouvelle Héloïse, until each became part of the very fabric of her being. As she wrote to Roland, apropos of Rousseau's novel:

Je viens de dévorer Julie, comme si ce n'était pas pour la quatrième ou la cinquième fois. Mon ami, j'aimerai toujours ce livre-là, et si jamais je deviens dévôte, c'est là seulement que l'on en prendrai l'envie; il me semble que nous aurions bien vécu avec tous ces personnages et qu'ils nous auraient trouvés de leur goût, autant qu'ils sont du nôtre.²⁹

Such a continuous work of identification had great effects on Mme Roland's self-perception. As she confessed to Roland before they married, it enabled her to see herself as a perpetual heroine: ‘Je l'avoue à toi, qu'en lisant un roman ou un drâme, je n'ai jamais été éprise du deuxième rôle; je n'ai pas lu le récit d'un seul acte de courage ou de vertu que je n'aie osé me croire capable d'imiter cet acte dans l'occasion’.³⁰

It is not surprising that under these conditions words became important elements in, and indeed substitutes for, physical experience. We need not go as far as to make a total equation between erotic acts and the act of writing or reading, as some modern literary critics have done, to realize the extent to which, for Mme Roland and for others like her, the novel broke down barriers between intellect and sensibility, affect and action, and became imbued with physical messages and responses.³¹ Mme Roland herself gives us many indications of the extent to which this happened in her own case. It was not only that through the medium of models provided by her reading she was able to turn a potentially threatening physical outcome, such as that in the relationship with Buzot, into a verbal performance. It was also the way in which, given the continuum between the novel, the heroine-role, and the resolution of real-life conflicts centring on the physical disposal of the body, such reading became charged with the erotic. As Mme Roland recalled of her adolescence:

Quelques fois je lisais haut, à la demande de ma mère … mais j'aurais plutôt avalé ma langue que de lire ainsi l'épisode de l'île de Calypso et nombre de passages du Tasse. Ma respiration s'élevant, je sentais un feu subit couvrir mon visage, et ma voix altérée eût trahi mes agitations. J'étais Euchris pour Télémaque, et Herminie pour Tancrède; cependant toute transformée en elles, je ne songeais pas encore à être moi-même quelque chose pour personne; je ne faisais point de retour sur moi, je ne cherchais rien autour de moi; j'étais elles et je ne voyais que les objets qui existaient pour elles: c'était une rêve sans réveil.³²

This was something which remained with Mme Roland till the end: the inventory of the Rolands' flat, taken after their deaths in 1793, included, in a library otherwise entirely composed of non-fiction works, not only an edition of Tasso of 1783, but also the best-selling risqué novel by Mme Roland's friend, the conventionnel Louvet de Couvray, Les Aventures du chevalier de Faublas.³³

In many ways, Mme Roland's relationship with the printed and written word, which was so strongly influenced by her response to her own physicality, was not unique. It has often been remarked that the eighteenth-century cult of sensibility, and the immense up-swing in the vogue of the novel from the 1740s onward, coinciding with the publication of Richardson's Pamela, permitted to readers of both sexes an emotional exaltation which broke down the barriers between affect and response, emotion and reason. It has also often been remarked that the patterns of behaviour which both male and female readers discovered in the novel were deeply internalized, and re-emerged intact in autobiography of the period.³⁴ Without necessarily taking on board Eagleton's argument that the novel, almost always preoccupied (in Patricia Spacks's words) with ‘the trial of a young woman on the grounds of her virginity’, produced a ‘feminization’ of public discourse in the eighteenth century, we can say that this discourse and this set of responses, which were unique to the eighteenth century, co-existed very uneasily with the far older discourse of Stoicism. The novel in fact did not constitute a new public realm; rather it conflicted with it. The eighteenth century saw, for both men and women, a conflict between the Romantic, sentimental response on the one hand, and control and containment on the other, a conflict increasingly carried on through the medium of a literature which itself increasingly insisted on the link between public order and the female body. This rather contradicts Elias's position that this period saw the increasing triumph, especially for the middle classes, of the ethos of physical containment. The Stoic ethos was to win out only precariously during the period of the Revolution itself; then it was swamped under the wave of Romanticism, to surface again in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries as an ethos of self-control, efficiency and the power of the will which underlay many of the ideologies of the Fascist period. It is, rather, the case, that the eighteenth-century novel, particularly after Rousseau, implied all the Revolution's obsessive connection between the history of the heroines' bodies and the nature of the public order itself.³⁵

Thus we should not be surprised to find that Mme Roland, at the same time as proclaiming her devotion to the Rousseau of the Nouvelle Héloïse, was also strongly influenced by the Rousseau of Emile and by the reading of the classic texts of Stoicism and Roman republican history.³⁶ But we have still to wonder at the special problems which such Stoic role-modelling might present to a woman. In terms of marriage and family life, as Mme Roland herself made explicitly clear, such an ethos of dignified containment could easily crumble, and crumble through the impact of the different physical histories, expectations, and constitutions, of men and women. On her marriage to Roland, she discovered that what might be conquest for the one was invasion for the other:

Lorsque je suivis les anciennes sectes de philosophes, je donnai la palme aux stoïciens, je m'essayai comme eux à soutenir que la douleur n'était point un mal, et cette folie ne pouvant durer, je m'obstinai du moins à ne jamais me laisser vaincre par elle; mes petites expériences me persuadèrent que je pourrais endurer les plus grandes souffrances sans crier. Une première nuit de mariage renversa mes prétentions que j'avais gardées jusque-là; il est vrai que la surprise y fut pour quelque chose et qu'une novice stoïcienne doit être plus forte contre le mal prévu que contre celui qui frappe à l'improviste lorsqu'elle attend tout le contraire.³⁷

In entering marriage and the life of the family Mme Roland in fact had abandoned the potential for self-defence and self-command to be found in Stoicism, and instead entered an arena where ideologies and expectations ground against each other with maximum force. This is a point worth stressing, because of the degree to which modern histories of the eighteenth-century family have pictured the rise of the warm, caring, nuclear family, as if that family were itself an effective solvent of all contradiction.³⁸ The new family of the eighteenth century in fact demanded those involved in it, and especially the mother, to play out roles at maximum variance with each other. The century saw a new definition of childhood as dependent and in need of physical nurturing which women were ‘naturally’ suited to provide, in practices such as breast-feeding, instead of relying on the wet-nurse, and in the direct involvement of the mother in the rearing of her children while small, rather than leaving the task to servants. This was demanded in virtue of women's ‘natural’ physical abilities to bear young and to feed them from their own bodies. It was also demanded in virtue of an increasing identification of women with emotional warmth, intimacy, private life and domesticity, and conversely of men with rigour, hardness, and the external public world. However, the simultaneous rise of a new ethos of companionate marriage also demanded of women that they be helpmates to their husbands, sharing in their enterprises in so far as their other domestic duties allowed.

This dual role of wife and mother—of wife defined largely in intellectual terms, and of mother described largely in physical and emotional ones—in fact typified a split between mind and body. Mme Roland lived out this split in precise terms. After the birth of her only child, her daughter Eudore, on 4 October 1781, she carried on working on Roland's great project of an Encyclopaedia of Manufactures. She described herself to Roland as writing with one hand, while with the other she supported the perpetually suckling baby on her knee:

Tu trouveras ceci bien griffonnée, je n'ai qu'une main de libre, et je n'y regarde que de côté, ma petite est sur mes genoux, où il faut la garder la moîtié du jour. Elle tient le sien deux heures de suite en faisant de petits sommeils qu'elle interrompt pour suçer. Si on l'ôte, elle pleure et mange ses poings.³⁹

The conflicts within sexuality for Mme Roland—the desire to remain intact, and the desire to experience sensual pleasure—were doubled by the conflict between the roles of wife and mother, between the head and body. But there were other conflicts as well. The eighteenth-century family, so often presented in recent literature as a haven of emotional warmth, was in fact experienced by its inmates, as much in Mme Roland's Mémoires makes clear, as a coercive institution which insisted as much, if not more than, on the attainment of drive-control as on the production of emotional warmth. We may here endorse Elias's argument, produced long before the emergence of ‘family history’ as a distinct sub-discipline, that the late eighteenth century was a time when the middle-class family finally took over the roles of cultural enforcement, of drive- and affect-control, which had belonged to ‘court society’ in previous centuries.⁴⁰ For mothers and small children, families became institutions where children were not simply nurtured; they were also heavily controlled, through the acquisition of body-management.

Yet, simultaneously, a new, almost utopian rhetoric became available to disguise and obscure these conflicts. Often experienced as coercion and contradiction, the family was described in terms of pastoral. Hence the importance in family life of books, linguistic creations, which emerged with an impact not previously experienced in the eighteenth century. Previous eras had seen the writing of many books of parental advice to children, and guides to manners and morals composed for them. But the family of the late eighteenth century was the first to compile manuals of actual care of the infant and small child which went into minute detail about the direction of its physical existence. And such books not only gave mothers detailed advice; they also offered a view of the family as an innocent idyll which was yet the basis of society, and by combining these two aspects managed to reconcile the contradictions between them. Mme Roland, of course, as an admirer of Rousseau, was a keen student of Émile; but in the infancy of her daughter, she also placed great reliance on books which were much closer to modern ‘baby books’.⁴¹ Just as, in other words, she had used the written word to create her own self-image, and to take the place of physical events in her own life, so she did also to reconcile the contradictions in her roles as wife and mother.

Mme Roland's relationship with her daughter repays close study, because it shows so well the eighteenth-century family's uneasy swings between pastoral and coercion, between idyll and body-management. In spite of this, very few of Mme Roland's innumerable biographers have paid much attention to the years between 1781 and 1788 when Mme Roland was almost wholly preoccupied with her care of Eudore and her duties to Roland.⁴² Many of these biographers have then announced themselves puzzled that the preoccupied wife and mother of those years, whose letters betray few if any ‘political’ concerns, should suddenly have metamorphosed into the political hostess of 1791-3. But in fact this problem is an unnecessary result of the assumption, itself an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century product, that family life and public life have nothing to do with each other. If we discard the rhetoric of utopian warmth which surrounds the family and look, as Elias recommends us to do, at the functions the family actually performs for its members, we find that the family was the matrix of the new emphasis on control of the affects and physical responses which was the prerequisite for political personification in the Revolutionary era. It is also the case that the conflicts experienced by women in playing out the role which was demanded of them as mothers produced a need for the reconciling devices of the public realm, its rhetoric and its physical manifestation, no less pressing than that experienced by male public figures.

Mme Roland's relationship with her small daughter was minutely chronicled in her letters, in her Mémoires, and in her own ‘Avis à ma fille’. In them, she provides a detailed description of Eudore's birth, its impact on her own health and physical confidence, and the course she followed during Eudore's early infancy. Mme Roland decided to feed Eudore herself, as a good follower of Rousseau, and it was on this decision that most of her relationship with the child was based. At first easy, the breast-feeding became increasingly difficult when Mme Roland became ill a few weeks after the birth, and she was forced to send Eudore out to a wet-nurse. During her convalescence, she made strenuous efforts to regain her supply of milk, completely altering her diet and daily routine, and hiring women from the village of Clos, near Roland's country residence, to suck at her breasts in order to re-start the flow. Having, against all expectation, succeeded in this, she continued to feed Eudore herself until the child was weaned at around two years.

There are several points to make about this story. Firstly, Mme Roland's decision to breast-feed was by no means a foregone conclusion even by 1781. The practice remained in question even after the publication of Émile, and in fact during Eudore's early days of life, in Amiens where Roland's work as inspector of manufactures had taken him, Mme Roland was daily confronted by the carefree existence of her nearest neighbour, Mme d'Eu, who also became a mother at around the time of Eudore's birth, and had immediately handed over her child to a rural wet-nurse. Even in the sentimental novels of the time, as Fauchéry has pointed out, breast-feeding was a rarity; the roles of heroine and breast-feeding mother were, it was realized, difficult to combine.⁴³ This did not prevent Mme Roland, searching as ever for the heroine's role, from playing out her struggle to breast-feed Eudore as a drama of heroic proportions, with herself, rather than the baby, in the leading role. Rather than dismiss the whole matter, as had her frivolous neighbour Mme D'Eu, as a tiresome problem of early infancy, easily solved by entrusting the child to another woman, Mme Roland preferred to turn it into a drama of control which she presented as a moral epic, and described in minute detail in her letters to Roland. While the feeding was going well, initially, she was easily able to joke about Eudore's unrestrained appetite: ‘Elle prend étonnement et elle en rend bien la moîtié; j'ai conclu que la fable d'Ève n'était pas si bête, et que la gourmandise était véritablement un péché original’.⁴⁴

But once the feeding had begun to go wrong, yet other aspects of the maternal role, and very coercive ones, began to appear. Forced to give the increasingly suffering Eudore over to a wet-nurse, Mme Roland suffered agonies which focused on the issue not of Eudore's welfare, but on that of her future emotional leverage over the child:

… je me suis chargée de l'enfant; a peine à-t-il été dans mes bras, qu'il s'est mis à crier en me fixant; il m'a semblé qu'il me cherchait après sa bonne; j'en ai conclu qu'il se déplaisait avec moi, et ce soupçon m'a désesperée. … Il ne faut pas se le dissimuler, elle aura l'enfant plus que moi dans ces premiers temps; surtout durant cette malheureuse convalescence où je suis privée de mes forces; elle aura aussi ses souris; et moi, qui aurai plus de douleurs, je ne serai pas dédommagée par ses premières caresses qui m'auraient fait tout oublier … mon enfant ne connaîtra pas mon sein; il ne s'y jettera plus avec cet empressement si touchant tous les mères. Pourquoi n'ai-je plus de lait? Voilà ce que tant de gens ne sentent pas, quand ils convient me consoler entièrement en m'assurant que mon enfant vivra.⁴⁵

The last sentence makes it clear how secondary, in Mme Roland's drama of heroic motherhood, was Eudore's welfare, compared to her obtaining power over the infant through the ‘bonding’ which breast-feeding was assumed to produce, an exercise of power which also extends to Mme Roland's social inferiors, such as the wet-nurse herself. If the breast-feeding were going well, Mme Roland would not be dependent on the services of servants. Mme Roland's attitude to breast-feeding, as an instrument of emotional domination, rather than a means to her baby's welfare, in fact comes very close to what Freud was later to describe in his theory of anal eroticism as the manipulation of body products for the control of others. Through the tissue of the body, products may emerge to dominate or cajole, gifts which are also weapons, artfully wrought communications than which nothing, after all, could be more ‘natural’: this was how breast-feeding had been vaunted by Rousseau, and countless other contemporary apologists for the practice.⁴⁶ Mme Roland's use of it in her relationship with her daughter might well lead us to ask, was this not the point in time at which, over a far wider span of conflict, the ‘natural’ became the coercive? So much was this so, that the definitely non-natural ethos of Stoicism, which constrains only the individual who practices it, begins to look positively libertarian by contrast.

We can see very fully how this could be worked out in Mme Roland's ‘Avis à ma fille en âge et dans le cas de devenir mère’, first published in 1799 but written shortly after Eudore's birth. Ostensibly a paean to the joy and glory of motherhood, it is in fact a minute description of the physical horrors of childbirth and its aftermath, with a full account of the whole breast-feeding epic. The ‘enfant chéri qui m'a coûté tant de douleurs’, reading such a message from its parent, would not have seen it as a proclamation that motherhood is worth such sufferings, but rather, felt guilt at the pain which its entry into the world had produced. Mme Roland details her post-partum experiences of mastitis, dysentery, dysuria, broken sleep, severe constipation, before even beginning on the struggle to regain her lost flow of milk.⁴⁷ Her comments on this make it even clearer that the struggle to breast-feed was a struggle not for Eudore's benefit, but for her own self-validation, and self-justification. The repeated personal pronoun in the following passage from the ‘Avis’ emphasizes the point:

Quand même enfin mes efforts eussent dû être sans succès, un besoin de me rendre dans tous les temps le témoignage d'avoir tenté pour mon enfant tout se qui était dans les possibles, m'en faisait un devoir; et si la nature devait me refuser de nourrir, il fallait que le tort fut entièrement de son côté.

[italics mine]⁴⁸

As the last phrase implies, the breast-feeding saga did function thereafter in her relations with Eudore as moral alibi. Having battled to feed the infant, it must remain forever attached to her, whatever her subsequent actions in relation to it. By suffering as a mother, in the body, Mme Roland purchased moral immunity and emotional power. Motherhood became an arena of control where ‘l'oeil des mères doit surveiller tout ce qui les entoure’.⁴⁹

Nothing, therefore, could have been more surprising, or more reprehensible on the part of the child—or so the mother felt—than the increasing difficulty of their relationship once early infancy had passed. After leaving her child for three months (March-May 1784) to lobby for a brevet of nobility for her husband, Mme Roland was amazed to find that her daughter rejected her on her return. Efforts to teach the child to read, or to enjoy classic authors, by the age of six were uphill work, enforced by an increasingly grim and distant Mme Roland as her moral due. By 1789, mentions of Eudore virtually cease in the correspondence, and when, in March 1789, Mme Roland accompanied her husband to Paris when he led a municipal delegation from Lyons to the National Assembly, Eudore was not even allowed to share her parents' Paris flat, but was put out to board with the Froissard family, friends of the Protestant pastor and Assembly member, Rabaut Saint-Etienne. Mme Roland's attempts to act out the maternal role had clearly been acknowledged as a failure—but, of course, through Eudore's fault rather than her own.⁵⁰

Her actions thereafter, however, during her husband Roland's two periods as Minister of the Interior in 1792-3, were hardly less ridden with frustration and conflict. We have now returned to our point of departure: the problems faced by Revolutionary political culture in its attitude to female participation. Mme Roland certainly did not escape the ‘Catch-22’ situation of women; respect could be bought only at the price of inaction, non-participation. To try to bridge this gap, Mme Roland offered her husband's associates a forum in which others, men, could speak, whilst herself remaining silent, and hence respected. Few more frustrating ways of becoming one of the best-known figures of the Revolution can be imagined:

Je savais quel role convenait à mon sexe et je ne le quittai jamais. Les conférences se tenaient en ma présence sans que j'y prisse aucun part; placée hors du cercle et près d'une table, je travaillais des mains, ou faisais les lettres, tandis qu'on déliberait … je ne perdit pas un mot de ce qui se débitait et il m'arrivait de me mordre les lèvres pour ne pas dire le mien. …

Se taire quand on est seule n'est pas chose merveilleuse; mais garder constamment le silence au milieu des gens qui parlent des objets auxquels on s'intéresse, réprimer les saillies du sentiment qui vous opprime lors d'une contradiction, arrêter les idées intermédiaires qui échappent aux raisonneurs, et faute desquelles ils confluent mal ou ne sont pas entendus, mesurer ainsi la logique de chacun en se commandant toujours soi-même, est un grand moyen d'acquérir de la pénétration, de la rectitude, de perfectionner son intelligence et d'augmenter la force de son âme.

Mme Roland's continual emphasis in her Mémoires on her private, domestic, solitary life, even during Roland's two ministries, comes straight out of her efficient internalization of the idea that women can only have a public existence in as much as they wield corrupt power: ‘… on n'avait cherché à me voir que dans l'idée qu'il pouvait en être dans l'ancien régime, où l'on engageait les femmes à solliciter leurs maris’. When she was finally arrested and imprisoned in Sainte-Pélagie, she found with a degree of shock explicable only on these lines, that the authorities had taken little care to segregate her from the ladies of easy virtue (revealing phrase) also held within its walls: ‘Voilà donc le séjour qui était réservé à la digne épouse d'un homme de bien. Si c'est la prix de la vertu sur la terre, qu'on ne s'étonne donc plus de mon mépris pour la vie’.⁵¹

In entering prison, however, Mme Roland was able for the first time, apart from these brief encounters with other prisoners, to escape the world of contradiction and confusion. For the first time her physical being and her sanctioned role-playing could come together in ways which formed an uncontroverted whole. Thus, it is not surprising that her immediate reaction on entry into her cell was not the abject lethargy or glazed shock of many male prisoners, such as Riouffe, but was devoted to an easy, almost cheerful adaptation of physical regime to her present circumstances:

Je n'aime point à en faire une grande [dépense] pour ma personne, et j'ai quelque plaisir à exercer mes forces dans les privations. L'envie m'a pris de faire une expérience et de voir jusqu' où la volonté humaine peut réduire les besoins; mais il faut procéder par gradations, c'est la seule manière d'aller loin. J'ai commencé, au bout de quatre jours, par retrancher les déjeuners, et substituer au café, au chocolat, du pain et de l'eau. … Si je reste ici six mois, je veux en sortir grasse et fraîche, n'ayant plus besoin que de soupe et de pain, et ayant mérité quelques bénédictions incognito.⁵²

In fact, what she was doing was putting away the difficult female body for the Stoic body which she had had to abandon at marriage, a body deliberately chosen, invaded by no extraneous desires or appetites, and not subject to the uses of others. Later on in the Mémoires, she was to make this point explicitly, again in relation to the physical regime she chose to adopt in prison, and makes an equivalence between her moral and physical regimes:

La fermeté ne consiste pas seulement à s'élever au-dessus des circonstances par l'effort de sa volonté, mais à s'y maintenir par un régime et des soins convenables. La sagesse se compose de tous les actes utiles à sa conservation et à son exercise. Lorsque des événements fâcheux ou irritants viennent me surprendre, je ne me borne pas à me rappeler les maximes de la philosophie pour soutenir mon courage; je ménage à mon esprit des distractions agréables, et je néglige point les précepts de l'hygiène pour me conserver dans un juste équilibre.⁵³

But if Mme Roland's first reaction to prison was to begin the Stoic role-playing, through body-management, already so familiar to us, she was also more explicitly aware than many of those we have so far encountered, of the function of the whole prison experience as a retreat, almost as escapist as the powerlessness induced by illness. Comparing imprisonment with illness, she remarks:

Du moment où je me mets au lit, il me semble que tout devoir cesse, et qu'aucune sollicitude n'a de prise sur moi; je ne suis plus tenue qu'à être là et à y demeurer avec résignation, ce que je fais de fort bonne grâce. Je donne carrière à mon imagination; j'appelle les impressions douces, les souvenirs agréables, les sentiments heureux: plus d'efforts, plus de calculs, plus de raison; toute à la nature, et paisible comme elle, je souffre sans impatience, ou me repose ou m'égaye. Je trouve que la prison produit sur moi à peu près le même effet que la maladie: je ne suis tenue aussi qu'à être là, et qu'est ce que cela me coûte?⁵⁴

It is also important to remember that a very large part of Mme Roland's time in prison was devoted to the production of verbal images of her physical history and reactions, such as the one immediately above, and indeed, the majority of the passages cited in this chapter. The entire two volumes of her Mémoires, over 500 printed pages, were written between June and November 1793. Prison in fact became a central ground for the reconstitution, through the written word, of a physical history divorced from the role of motherhood which dominates to the virtual exclusion of all else in the two other major works written before her imprisonment: the correspondence, and of course in the ‘Avis’. Prison was the place where Mme Roland felt able for the first time to write for herself and to reconstitute her physical history, not as it concerned other living beings, Eudore and Roland, but as it had concerned herself. In the Mémoires she could write of episodes which she had never revealed to Roland, such as that with her father's apprentice. As she wrote from prison to her friend the geographer Edmé Mentelle, ‘Je dirai tout, absolument tout’.⁵⁵ Imprisonment also enabled her to write not only the autobiography she could never otherwise have produced, but also to write the letters she could not otherwise have countenanced in her role as the chaste ‘digne épouse d'un homme de bien’. It enabled her, with complete self-approbation, to continue the passionate relations with Buzot which she had renounced in their physical reality. Through imprisonment, the ultimate reconciliation could be performed, as ‘virtue’ was preserved, yet passion satisfied. Both the Mémoires and the letters such as those to Buzot, written in prison, are fine examples of Lacan's famous ‘mirror-stage’, in which literary creations reflect back to their author an image of idealized self-unity.⁵⁶

We have already seen in a previous chapter that the pinnacle of the self-unity which was Stoicism was the act of heroic suicide. It thus seems quite logical that Mme Roland should seriously, during October 1793, have contemplated committing such an act during her imprisonment.⁵⁷ Deciding to starve herself to death, by 14 October her condition was serious enough for her to be moved to the infirmary at Sainte-Pélagie. She was, however, dissuaded by another friend, the naturalist Louis-Guillaume Bosc, from persisting in her plan. Viewing her death as inevitable, he persuaded her that it was her duty to go through with the actual execution as an example to the rest of the nation of political rectitude. In any case, death was certain whichever option was chosen. And in either case, a role, and an uncontroverted one at that, could be made out of it.

Our focus here should not be on the fact that Mme Roland chose execution rather than suicide, but that she proceeded along the path to suicide, and then was persuaded to reject it. The rejection of suicide itself was nothing unusual for a woman, as we have seen in a previous chapter; but it was Mme Roland's approach to suicide, and her achievement of execution instead, which points up her capacity to use more than one register of a heroic role, and to amalgamate in herself the totality of those potential roles, just as she could amalgamate within herself both chastity and unchastity. In reconciling the disparate elements of her physical self-consciousness, Mme Roland succeeded in becoming a heroine at last. It is this capacity which gave her, precisely through her confusions and conflicts, her capacity in the nineteenth century and since, to attract a mythology and historical attention out of all proportion to her actual influence on events. Such figures must either emerge from an extreme of simplicity, as in the case of Charlotte Corday, or an extreme of confusion between warring elements of self-image, as in the case of Mme Roland.

It is valuable to study Mme Roland's career for what it tells us about the use of fictions and role-playing in the Revolution. We make the point, that it seems useless to proceed on the assumption of two separate repertoires of roles for men and for women. The arguments recently put forward by some literary critics that the eighteenth-century novel, with its concentration on feminine fates, and its avid readership of both sexes, somehow ‘feminized’ the public cultural zone, is obviously too extreme. But it is true that after Rousseau and Richardson, as never before, for both sexes fiction offered a way into the adoption of a political role. Many were those men, such as the Comte de Vaublanc with his Télémaque tucked into his coat pocket, who read themselves into their roles, as surely as Mme Roland read herself into hers, with a mixture of classical Stoic texts, Clarissa, La Princesse de Clèves and the Nouvelle Héloïse. Nor do the similarities stop there. Just as death, firmness under physical trial, and the preservation of physical intactness, validated the Stoic role-player, so did they the female heroine. As Nancy K. Miller has remarked, ‘Clarissa must, like Julie, die to be restored to the self of her exemplarity’.⁵⁸ And, unlike the heroes of the classical world or medieval romance, whose heroic status is not solely constituted by their deaths, but by their deeds while living, death was practically the only guarantee for the men and women of the French Revolution of heroic status. Death, by 1789, had become part of the cultural ‘plot’, in Margaret Mead's sense,⁵⁹ of French culture, and one of extreme importance because it was one of the few elements which could reconcile all the confused and worrying aspects which that culture presented.

It is, however, perfectly possible to argue that it was made much more difficult for women to achieve personification than it was for men, in so far as that personification was based on the successful display of physicality. It was certainly the case that physicality operated as a reservoir of authority for men, but of potential humiliation and certain restriction for women. The roles allotted to women in virtue of their physical attributes were, moreover, different from male roles and incompatible with many aspects of the Stoic persona. As mothers and wives, women played roles which involved them in orienting both the shape of their lives and the use of their bodies outwards, on to the needs and demands of others, rather than inwards, on to the self. Marriage and motherhood also involved them in roles which were defined by physical processes, rather than the resolutely fixed heroic image of Stoic calm. Women thus faced great difficulties in becoming the heroines of their own real, lived, lives.

The way out of these problems was through identification with the heroines of fiction, heroines of novels which had greater currency, and more power and vigour, than in any preceding century. Certain novels enabled both women and men, but especially women, to verbalize their own desired identity. These novels became virtually part of their physical being, in the same way as food eaten. Mme Roland, for example, repeatedly speaks of ‘devouring’ the Nouvelle Héloïse.⁶⁰ The cultural practice of such an intense identification with heroines of novels must surely be seen as an important contributory factor in the central feature of Revolutionary political discourse, which is the personification of representative virtue. The breakdown of distinctions between the self and the characters of the novel rapidly turns into the converse process of turning the real self into a heroic fiction. There was not much distance between ‘devouring’ Julie and dying as Cato.

Mme Roland's enduring appeal for the historians and myth-makers comes not from her importance as a political actor, which was virtually nil, but precisely from her ability, throughout her life, to maximize the number of roles she played, demonstrating the fluidity of the boundary between men's and women's cultures which feminist historians try so hard to separate. In order to create that identity Mme Roland produced a body which existed as much as a verbal creation as a lived physical experience. If cultural expectations in the late eighteenth century pressed heavily on the physical self-perceptions of individuals, those individuals could still re-shape their physical self-consciousness by verbal means. Physicality was always mediated, for individuals, by words. Accordingly, such descriptions could take place on many levels, with many restraining conventions.

When Mme Roland declared that she wished to ‘say everything’ in her Mémoires, she was not simply stating a desire to achieve a frankness comparable to that of the Rousseau of the Confessions. She was also opening up her account of herself to invasion by many different and conflicting conventions of what a woman's physicality might symbolize in the public and private worlds. Such were the conflicts between those conventions, and hence between her images of herself, that they may well have rendered her, as the royalist journalist Mallet du Pin was so devastatingly to charge, ‘incapable d'écrire avec fidelité’. She could not write in a trustworthy way because there was no means by which she could have achieved an undivided vision of herself, and hence of her surroundings. The self-confidence necessary to such a task was lost in her perpetual conflicts between chastity and desire, intellect and body, conflicts which were just as strong in her domestic life as they were in her relations with the political world which she briefly entered in 1792.

Above all, Mme Roland was undermined by the Revolution's strong wish to remove, with women, ‘l'intrusion du désir dans la vie intellectuelle ou politique’, as Aline Rousselle has termed it.⁶¹ The Revolution found both its energy and its fragility in this urge to create polarity, to define by exclusion. In the struggle between Cato and Circe, the former won, with results that affect our politics, and our domestic lives, today.

Notes

1. Hébert, quoted in Baron Marc de Villiers, Histoire des clubs des femmes et des légions d'Amazones, 1793-1848-1871 (Paris, 1910), 256; Mallet du Pin from his Mercure britannique, in C.A. Sainte-Beuve, Nouveaux Lundis VIII (Paris, 1867), 222.

2. The literature on this topic concentrates on working-class women, and on the women organized into political clubs. Older literature also emphasizes the efforts of organized women to back the war effort of 1792-4. There is little enquiry into the reactions of middle-class women such as Mme Roland, or non-activists. See de Villiers, Histoire des Clubs; Camille Bloch, ‘Les femmes d'Orléans pendant la Révolution’, La Révolution française 43 (1902), 49-67; Marie Cerati, Le Club des citoyennes républicaines révolutionnaires (Paris, 1966); Mary Durham, ‘Citizenesses of the Year II of the French Revolution’, Proceedings of the Consortium on Revolutionary Europe 1 (1972-4), 87-109; Léon Hennet, ‘Une femme-soldat: Anne-Françoise-Pélagie Dulierre’, Annales révolutionnaires 1 (1908), 610-21; Olwen Hufton, ‘Women in Revolution, 1789-1796’, in Douglas Johnson, ed., French Society and the Revolution (Cambridge, 1976), 148-64; D. G. Levy, H. B. Applewhite and M. Durham Johnson, eds., Women in Revolutionary Paris, 1789-1795: Selected Documents Translated with Notes and Commentary (Chicago, Urbana, Ill., and London, 1979); Albert Mathiez, ‘Les femmes et la Révolution’, Annales révolutionnaires 1 (1908), 303-5; Albert Soboul, ‘Sur l'activité militante des femmes dans les sections parisiennes en l’an II’, Bulletin de l'histoire économique et sociale de la Révolution française 2 (1979), 15-26. Some of the historiographical roots of this literature are explored in L. Devance, ‘Le Féminisme pendant la Révolution française’, Annales historiques de la Révolution française 49 (1977), 341-76. D. Outram, ‘Le Langage mâle de la vertu: Women, Politics and Public Language in the French Revolution’, in R. S. Porter and P. Burke, eds., The Social History of Language (Cambridge, 1987), 120-35, critically examines attempts made to link organized female groups in the Revolution with modern feminist movements.

3. See [Henri] Wallon, Histoire du tribunal révolutionnaire [Paris 1880-2], I: 296-350, for the trial record of Marie-Antoinette.

4. [François] Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution [Paris, 1978], 66.

5. Quoted in Levy, Applewhite and Johnson, Women in Revolutionary Paris, 93, from Olympe de Gouges, Les Droits de la femme (Paris, 1791).

6. For the contemporary image of Brutus, publicized in, for example, the painting by Jacques-Louis David, see [R. L.] Herbert, David, Voltaire, ‘Brutus’, and the French Revolution [London, 1972].

7. See Outram, ‘Le Langage mâle’, for further development of this theme.

8. E.g., speech by the public prosecutor Chaumette to the Paris Commune, 27 brumaire an II, quoted in Levy, Applewhite and Johnson, Women in Revolutionary Paris, 219.

9. Journal de la république française, no. 92 (3 Jan 1793), quoted in Alfred Chuquet, ‘Buzot et Mme Roland’, Annales révolutionnaires 1 (1908), 93.

10. Devance, ‘Le Féminisme pendant la Révolution’, 347.

11. This is the approach of Levy, Apple-white and Johnson, Women in Revolutionary Paris. An attempt at rectification is contained in Outram, ‘Le Langage mâle’.

12. Hufton, ‘Women in Revolution’, 148, 159.

13. Mme Roland was born Marie—Jeanne (Manon) Phlipon in Paris in 1754. Her father was a master engraver and dealer in gem-stones. After being educated in a convent in Normandy, she met Jean-Marie Roland de la Platière, an inspector of manufactures, in 1776, and married him in 1780. Their only child, Eudore, was born on 4 Oct 1781, in Amiens. Between 1784 and 1789, they lived either at Lyons or on Roland's family property at Clos, near Villefranche. In 1791 Mme Roland accompanied her husband to Paris as part of a municipal delegation from Lyons to the National Assembly. They returned to Paris in December 1791 and Roland became Minister of the Interior from 23 Mar 1792 to 13 June 1792, and again from 10 Aug 1792 to 23 Jan 1793. In January 1793 Mme Roland confessed to Roland her love for the deputy Buzot. On 31 May, Roland was proscribed by the Convention, and on 10 Nov 1793 killed himself while in hiding in Normandy. Meanwhile Mme Roland was arrested and spent 1-24 June 1793 in the Abbaye prison; she was rearrested on 24 June and imprisoned in Sainte-Pélagie prison until 31 Oct, when she was transferred to the Conciergerie. She was guillotined on 8 Nov 1793.

14. Mme Roland: Lettres [Paris, 1900-1] and Mémoires [Paris, 1905], both ed. [Claude] Perroud; Oeuvres de J. M. Ph. Roland, femme de l'ex-ministre de l'Intérieur, ed. L.-A. Champagneux, 3 vols. (Paris, an VIII/1799-1800); ‘Avis à ma fille en âge et dans le cas de devenir mère’, in ibid., I: 301-44, written during Eudore's infancy.

15. The capacity of Mme Roland to act as one of the major reference-figures in the nineteenth-century image of the Revolution is attested by the number of editions of her writings prior to Perroud's:

    Letters: Lettres autographes, adressées à Bancal des Issarts (Paris, 1835); Lettres inédites de Mlle Phlipon adressées aux Demoiselles Cannet, de 1772 à 1780, 2 vols. (Paris, 1841): Charles-Aimé Dauban, Étude sur Mme Roland et son temps, suivie des lettres de Mme Roland à Buzot et d'autres documents inédits (Paris, 1864); Lettres en partie inédites de Mme Roland aux Demoiselles Cannet suivies de lettres de Mme Roland à Bosc, Servan, Lanthenas, Robespierre, etc., 2 vols. (Paris, 1867); Lettres choisies de Mme Roland (Paris, 1867); A. Join-Lambert, Le Mariage de Mme Roland, trois années de correspondance amoureuse, 1777-1780 (Paris, 1896); C. Perroud, Roland et Marie Phlipon, lettres d'amour, 1777 à 1780 (Paris, 1909).

    Memoirs and other writings: Appel à l'impartiale postérité, par la citoyenne Roland, femme du ministre de l'Intérieur, ou Recueil des écrits qu'elle a rédigés pendant sa détention aux prisons de l'Abbaye et de Sainte-Pélagie, imprimé au profit de sa fille unique, privée de la fortune de ses père et mère, dont les biens sont toujours séquestrés, ed. L.-A.-G. Bosc (Paris, 1795), tr. as An Appeal to Impartial Posterity, etc. 12 vols. (London, 1796); Oeuvres de J. M. Phlipon Roland, introd. L. A. Champagneux, 3 vols. (Paris, an VIII/1800), tr. as Works of J. M. Phlipon Roland, 3 vols. (London, 1803); Mémoires de Mme Roland avec une notice sur sa vie, 2 vols. (Paris, 1820), in MM Berville and Barrière, Mémoires relatifs à la Révolution française (2nd edn., 1826; 3rd edn., 1827); Mémoires de Mme Roland, preceded by a short biography [signed M. Roger], 2 vols. (Paris, 1823); Mémoires de Mme Roland, ed. J. Ravenel, 2 vols. (Paris, 1840); Mémoires particuliers de Mme Roland, ed. M. Fs. Barrière (Paris, 1855), vol. VIII in Bibliothèque des Mémoires relatifs à l'histoire de France pendant le dixhuitième siècle; Mémoires de Mme Roland, ed. C.-A. Dauban (Paris, 1864); Mémoires de Mme Roland écrits durant sa captivité, ed. M. P. Faugère, 2 vols. (Paris, 1864); Mémoires de Mme Roland, with a preface by Jules Claretie, 2 vols. (Paris, 1884), in Bibliothèque des Dames; Mme Roland, sa détention à l'Abbaye et à Sainte-Pélagie, 1793, racontée par elle-même dans ses Mémoires (Paris, 1886). For a study of the MS of the Mémoires, and a critical estimate of the earlier editions, see Perroud's introduction to his own edition, I: liv-xc, xc-cxxvii.

16. Gita May: De Jean-Jacques Rousseau à Mme Roland: Essai sur la sensibilité préromantique et révolutionnaire (Geneva, 1964), and Mme Roland and the Age of Revolution (New York and London, 1970). Mme Roland does not appear, for example, in Levy, Applewhite and Johnson, Women in Revolutionary Paris.

17. Edith Bernardin, Jean-Marie Roland et le ministère de l'Intérieur, 1792-1793 (Paris, 1964), 19. This was a view canonized by the influential nineteenth-century critic, Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, in Portraits des femmes, nouv. édn. (Paris, 1852), 160-86, 187-206. The essay in question was originally published in 1835. Mme Roland makes a number of different statements about her involvement in the letter of resignation, which veer from womanly denials of authorship to proud claims to have been its originator; see Mémoires, I: 240-4: ‘… j'avais esquissé la lettre … je fis la fameuse lettre … nous arrêtames entre nous deux la fameuse lettre’ [italics mine].

18. Sydenham, Girondins [London, 1961]. The image of Mme Roland as a Girondin ‘leader’, however, lives on in Chaumié, ‘Les Girondins’ [In Actes du Colloque Girondins et Montagnards, ed. Albert Soboul (Paris, 1980)], 49-55.

19. Marie-France Morel, ‘Mme Roland, sa fille, et les médecins: prime éducation et médicalisation à l'époque des lumières’, Annales de Bretagne 86 (1979), 211-19. This article also sees Mme Roland as a Girondin ‘leader’.

20. Mme Roland, Mémoires, II: 36, 101-2.

21. Ibid., 29.

22. Ibid., 148-9. Parts of this passage were expurgated by editors up to and including Dauban (see n. 15).

23. Ibid., 97-9. Mme Roland's interest in perpetuating descriptions of her own appearance also found expression in her commissioning numerous portraits, especially during her imprisonment: Claude Perroud ‘Le portrait de Mme Roland aux Archives Nationales’, La Révolution française 40 (1901), 153-67. Persistent themes in her verbal self-portrait, such as her image of herself as ‘legère comme un oiseau’, are discussed in Françoise Kermina's intelligent popular account, Mme Roland ou la passion révolutionnaire (Paris, 1976).

24. Other women who adopted roles of high public visibility also tried the same tactic. One example is the famous portrait painter Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, whose Souvenirs are examined from this point of view in Jean Owens Schaefer, ‘The Souvenirs of Mme Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun: The Self-Imagining of the Artist and the Woman’, International Journal of Women's Studies 4 (1980), 35-49. Nor was this a phenomenon confined to France; see Patricia Meyer Spacks, Imagining a Self: Autobiography and Novel in Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge, Mass., 1976).

25. May, De Rousseau à Mme Roland, 146, 235; Mme Roland, Lettres, II: 48. May, however, fails to turn aside from her analysis of Mme Roland's style to enquire into the significance of the sheer quantity of writing which Mme Roland produced.

26. Pierre Fauchéry, La Destinée féminine dans le roman européen du dix-huitième siècle, 1713-1807: Essai de gynécomythie romanesque (Paris, 1972), 179-86, 196-7.

27. Ibid., 320-1. For Richardson, see [Terry] Eagleton, Rape of Clarissa [Oxford, 1982].

28. May, De Rousseau à Mme Roland, 146 and passim; Mme Roland, Lettres, II: 8: ‘Oui, Manon, c'est ainsi qu'on m'appelait; j'en suis fâchée pour les amateurs du roman, ce nom n'est pas noble, il ne sied point à une héroine du grand genre; mais enfin c'était le mien et c'est une histoire que j'écris’.

29. Ibid., I: 662; cp. Mémoires, II: 185.

30. Mme Roland, Lettres, I: 159 (to Roland, 20 Jan 1782).

31. E.g., Eagleton, Rape of Clarissa, 13ff; Rita Goldberg, Sex and Enlightenment: Women in Richardson and Diderot (Cambridge, 1984).

32. Mme Roland, Mémoires, II: 22.

33. Kermina, Mme Roland ou la passion révolutionnaire, 403. In the same way, Mme Roland records how she fell in love with Roland, not through personal contact with him, but by reading his written works: Mémoires, II: 423; the mingling of the erotic and the written could hardly have produced a longer-lasting historical effect.

34. Darnton, ‘Readers Respond to Rousseau’ [In The Great Cat Massacre and other Episodes in French Cultural History, (London, 1984]; Trahard, La Sensibilité révolutionnaire [Paris, 1934], 31.

35. This connection is examined in Tony Tanner, ‘Julie and “La Maison Paternelle”’, in J. B. Elshtain, ed., The Family in Political Thought (Amherst, Mass., 1982), 96-124. Fauchéry, La Destinée feminine, 414-16, notes the novel's portrayal of marital bliss for the heroine as magically entailing the creation of an entire pastoral social order.

36. Most recently examined in K. A. Kadane, ‘The Real Difference Between Manon Phlipon and Mme Roland’, French Historical Studies 3, no. 4 (1963-4), 542-9.

37. Mme Roland, Mémoires, II: 101-2. More than once, Mme Roland describes her sexual experiences inside marriage as ‘aussi surprenantes que désagréables’: ibid., 36, 101-2.

38. See B. H. E. Niestroj: ‘Die Mutterkind Beziehung im Kontinuum von Neuzeit und Moderne, Zwischen Vernunft und Zürtlichkeit’, in J. H. Campe, Über die früheste Bildung Junger Kinderseelen (1785), ed. Niestroj (Berlin and Frankfurt-on-Main, 1985), 7-73, and ‘Affective Individualism: zwischen Nähe und Dist anz: eine bürgerliche-humanistische Revolution? Zür genealogie der Intimität’, Asthetik und Kommunikation 15 (1985), 14-37; Karl-Heinz Osterloh, ‘The Making of Western Industrial Society and the Revolution of Forms of Interaction’, Archiv für Kulturgeschichte 58 (1976), 87-131; Adrian Wilson, ‘The Infancy of the History of Childhood: An Appraisal of Philippe Ariès’, History and Theory 19 (1980), 137-53; Philippe Ariès, Centuries of Childhood (New York, 1965).

39. Mme Roland, Lettres, I: 57 (18 Nov 1781).

40. Elias, Court Society [tr. E. Jephcott (Oxford, 1983], 137. Historians such as Edward Shorter who link the rise of the modern ‘affectionate’ family in the middle class with the lessening in risks to women's health through pregnancy and childbirth, fail to realize that such a utopian vision could only apply from a male viewpoint.

41. See Morel, ‘Mme Roland, sa fille, et les médecins’, for a discussion of these works.

42. This preoccupation is almost or completely passed over in most biographies of Mme Roland: May, Mme Roland and the Age of Revolution; Kadane, ‘The Real Difference …’; Kermina, Mme Roland ou la passion révolutionnaire; Una Birch, Mme Roland, A Study in Revolution (London, 1917); Ida Ashworth Taylor, Life of Mme Roland (London, 1911); Ida M. Tarbell, Mme Roland: A Biographical Study (London, 1896); Catherine Young, A Lady Who Loved Herself: Mme Roland (New York, 1930); Madeleine Clémenceau-Jacquemaire, The Life of Mme Roland (London, New York and Toronto, 1930).

43. Fauchéry, La Destinée féminine, 403.

44. Mme Roland, Lettres, I: 57 (18 Nov 1781).

45. Ibid., I: 85 (26 Dec 1781).

46. The growing enforcement of breast-feeding by the biological mother rather than by a wet-nurse, almost always drawn from a lower social class, can of course be interpreted in many other ways: (1) as a drawing of higher boundary lines around the middle class, by the abolition of a practice which linked mother, and particularly child, to the lower-class wet-nurse's own children; (2) as a drawing of increasingly severe boundaries around the physical outline of the middle-class woman, as was also happening to middle-class men, in a different way; mothers no longer shared the products of their bodies (babies and milk) with other women.

47. Mme Roland, ‘Avis’, in Oeuvres, I: 301, 306-20.

48. Ibid., 328-9.

49. Ibid., 320.

50. Perroud, ‘Le Roman d'un Girondin’ [ch. 6, n. 46], 57-77, 232-57, 348-67.

51. Mme Roland, Mémoires, I: 63-4, 201, 185, 295-6. I have placed these passages against a more general discussion of Revolutionary public discourse in Outram, ‘Le Langage mâle’.

52. Mme Roland, Mémoires, I: 46-7. It is tempting to speculate on the links between Mme Roland's cheerful asceticism in prison, and in particular the reduction in her intake of food, and the efforts made by many female saints to achieve religious sanction by fasting. See, recently, Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1987); R. M. Bell, Holy Anorexia (Chicago and London, 1985).

53. Mme Roland, Mémoires, I: 292-3.

54. Ibid., I: 39.

55. Mme Roland, Lettres, II: 396 (October 1793).

56. J. Lacan, ‘The Mirror-Stage’, Ecrits: a selection, tr,. Alan Sheridan (London, 1977). This is probably the significance of the persistent myth, ably analysed in Kermina, Mme Roland ou la passion révolutionnaire, 389, that Mme Roland continued to write her impressions even at the foot of the scaffold itself.

57. Discussed in greater detail by Perroud in Mme Roland, Mémoires, I: lxxvii-lxxx. Literary models for suicide by women are discussed by Gita May, De Rousseau à Mme Roland, 213 (n. 16), and by Ruth P. Thomas, ‘The Death of an Ideal: Female Suicides in the Eighteenth-Century French Novel’, in S. I. Spencer, ed., French Women and the Age of Enlightenment (Bloomington, Ind., 1984), 203-28.

58. Nancy K. Miller, The Heroine's Text: Readings in the French and English Novel, 1722-1782 (New York, 1980), 95.

59. [Margaret] Mead, ‘On the Concept of Plot in Culture’ [in Anthropology: A Human Science: Selected Papers, 1939-1960. Princeton, 1964].

60. E.g., Mme Roland, Lettres, I: 662. She goes so far as to put aside her child, Eudore, the product of physical acts of generation and birth, as her hold on the future, and ascribe instead solely to her writings her hope of posterity. With these, she wrote, ‘j' aurai quelque existence dans la génération future’: Mémoires, II: 141. She speaks explicitly of writing as a physical function like digestion, from early on in her marriage: see ibid., 189.

61. Roussell, Porneia [Paris, 1983], 10.