[In this essay, Gelfand uses the work of Michel Foucault on the eighteenth-century rethinking of the prison system to show how Roland's relationship to her audience, in addition to her observations on prison life and the justice system, reflects the model of crime and punishment in place after the Revolution.]

The social consciousness of the eighteenth-century philosophers, and in particular Rousseau's idea of any crime as an offense against society, accelerated changes in the function of prisons later adopted by post-industrial France. In extraordinary detail, Michel Foucault documents the following general shifts as occurring in the eighteenth century: 1) imprisonment, formerly punitive in purpose, became corrective and normative; 2) the relationship between the punisher and the punished changed with the movement towards individualized rehabilitation in conformity with social models; 3) the truth of the prisoner's innocence or guilt no longer resided solely in confession and punishment, but also in the empirical findings of criminologists, psychologists, etc.¹

Manon Phlipon, called Madame Roland, was imprisoned in 1793 for complicity with her husband as a “corrupter of the public spirit.”² During two months of her incarceration she produced her Mémoires particuliers;³ the Mémoires, along with the previous Notices historiques, make Roland the only French woman besides Albertine Sarrazin to have written both in and out of prison. The fact that the paucity of women prison writers—grossly underrepresentative of the number of women actually imprisoned—reflects the overall small proportion of women writers is beyond the scope of this article. However, Roland's Mémoires can be viewed in relation to the circumstances of her imprisonment, which were essentially similar for men and women.

The purpose of this brief discussion is exploratory. It suggests that the Mémoires particuliers de Madame Roland, though not likely the result of esthetic reflection, sprang from a prison system that was purely punitive, whose identification with the ruling powers and the public was visible, and which assumed that justice was concomitant with condemnation. Roland's preoccupations with her self-image, the time fabric of her life, and the inauthenticity of the official viewpoint reflect, respectively, these conditions of her imprisonment.

An essentially punitive system exerts control over the act of the criminal rather than over his or her life, which is today presumed reformable. Thus, at Roland's time, punishment was generalized, not individualized; the Terror under which she lived her final years practiced uniform sentencing to its grotesque utmost. Roland was not surprised at receiving the death penalty, in later times rarely given to women, but rather outraged that the jurors could have ignored her individuality. Her Mémoires serve to correct this historical insensitivity in two ways: first, by elevating to the rank of hero all who were in prison with her (p. 69); second, by consistently affirming her own intellectual and perceptual superiority. Such “healthy egotism,” as Gita May describes the source of Roland's self-justification,⁴ is a frequent method by which prisoners preserve their selves; in Dostoevski's House of the Dead it becomes the tone of the entire prison camp. But for Roland, making known her identity through her Mémoires is equivalent to a rectification of the false judgment passed upon her. Le Moniteur Universel, at the time of Roland's condemnation, said of her that “aucun sujet douloureux ne l'occupait”⁵ (she was devoid of any grief). It is not surprising that in her Mémoires she responds to such negative observations by insisting that her life has been faithful to her heart and senses.

It is interesting that by her praise of the senses and by her self-aggrandizing, Roland has been linked, justifiably, with Rousseau, whom she held in great affection, and with the Chateaubriand of Mémoires d'outre tombe, who himself had read her. Yet Roland's assertions of the primacy of feelings are more a response to accusations that she was “denatured” and “defeminized” by her intellectual and political activities than the espousal of an esthetic. She claims that her foremost duties outside the prison were pleasing and helping others (p. 33)⁶ and defends here lifetime commitment to wife-and mother-hood (p. 105). What is more, she states the prevailing view that women lost more than they gained by writing, using the public's reprobation of her having written much of her husband's work as a case in point. However, she points to herself not in order to verify that women who wrote were humiliated because they were weak, but, on the contrary, to show that they, like her, were part of a courageous minority. Were all women educated, she says elsewhere (p. 187), both sexes would be improved.

We are also aware in the Mémoires of the secrecy surrounding Roland's imprisonment. Foucault describes the entire “instruction” process of the time (accusation, charges, deposition, and evidence) as depersonalized to the point that the accused often had no idea of his or her status.⁷ Roland does not know the length of her imprisonment; when her prison, Sainte-Pélagie, is visited by the “Commis du ministère de l'intérieur chargé de la surveillance des prisons,” she writes him asking the reason for his visit and demanding justification and a trial for her case.⁸ The purpose of such impersonal punishment was to reinforce the power of those who ruled. Therefore, if the prisoner was anonymous, the ruling power was not. Roland wrote, but never sent, a letter of defiance and inquiry to Robespierre.⁹ With the increased individualization of the prisoner in subsequent times, the punisher, on the contrary, became more and more anonymous. Roland mentions many of the responsible highly-placed individuals in her Mémoires, presuming they were too insensitive to deserve direct solicitation from her.

Integral to the punishment system of the eighteenth century was the ritualized role of the public. As with preceding monarchs, whose own personal vengeance was most strongly vested in punishment, the public added its share of vengeance as well. The Revolution's execution “spectacles” are well-known. It is no wonder that a condemned person of the time would assume that the public was as deaf as the rulers. Finding herself in a total communicative void, Roland was obliged to create, through writing, a dialogue that would forestall self-pity and mental paralysis.

The dialogue developed in the Mémoires is between Roland and her interlocutor, for whom she has great respect. The listener/reader is, of necessity, someone of a future generation from whose corrective judgment Roland expects to benefit. Roland hopes to be redeemed not only by those who recognize the lies surrounding her present persecution (p. 118), but perhaps by those who will make use of her writing:

… peut-être un jour mes récits ingénus charmeront les instants de quelque infortunée captive, qui oubliera son sort en s'attendrissant sur le mien; peut-être les philosophes, qui veulent peindre le cœur humain dans la suite d'un roman ou l'action d'un drame, trouveront-ils à l'étudier dans mon histoire.

(p. 71)

As either another prisoner in her own dignified image or a philosopher of human truths, the reader/redeemer is ennobled, thereby reflecting Roland's belief that her individual pain was ultimately the pain of a civilization.

The substance of the Mémoires is Roland's past, at least insofar as the political situation at the time of writing did not intrude into her retracing of her early life:

Je me propose d'employer les loisirs de ma captivité à retracer ce qui m'est personnel depuis ma tendre enfance jusqu'à ce moment. …

(p. 32)

But more important to her than the reconstitution of events themselves is the evocation of the happiness and tranquility of her past. Roland wishes to move her interlocutor by describing peace and herself at peace. Her present situation in prison, in contrast to her former tranquility, is called self-control or controlled weakness, and resembles Dostoevski's resigned “philosophic calm.”¹⁰ Such terms as “control” and “weakness” designate as central the power relationship between Roland and her punisher. The modern case of Albertine Sarrazin's Journal de prison illustrates the opposite effect of anonymous and total institutionalization: Sarrazin elevates herself above her coprisoners and in so doing establishes her identity in relation to the prison context itself, not her punishers.

Roland's preoccupation with time is essentially one in which her past experiences are gathered and projected into the future, as only the past and future seemed to contain a sensitive human audience. So aware is Roland of her chosen interlocutor's attentiveness that she self-consciously avoids anachronisms or anticipation in her narration. So eager is she to minimize the intrusion of the present into her Mémoires that she writes them in just three long, almost uninterrupted entries. If we consider Claudine Herrmann's idea that, because time has traditionally been woman's enemy, few women writers have used it as a positive, enriching element,¹¹ we must conclude that Roland's attachment to it reflects her extraordinary circumstances—imprisonment. She fled the immediate to construct a dialectical link between past and future.

Roland was fleeing what she considered to be social disorder and judicial travesty. The travesty lay in what Foucault calls the relationship between truth and political power, the fact that any crime wronged those who ruled and that punishment was the implied proof of guilt.¹² If truth was automatically on the side of power, any action by the prisoner, repentance or defiance, could only reinforce that truth. Confession permitted the prisoner her or his only active role in the truth-producing ritual. Whereas modern judicial systems consider social and psychological factors which make for individualized “truths” concerning guilt and punishment (whence differential punishment for the same crime and revised sentencing for the same individual), Roland's captors focused on the fait accompli alone.

For Roland, her judges' “truth” was pure lie. She wrote the Mémoires in search of “frankness” (p. 32); they were to stand as documented truth. Certainly confession, as understood by her imprisoners, was absurd, but confessional writing, such as her Mémoires, was her only means of assuring future corrective judgment. Confessional writing, as practiced by Roland (and Rousseau), in no way implied the admission of previously with-held secrets. For her, it meant “vivre une second fois” (p. 32—live once again), by presenting in accurate detail the constants of her character by which she had lived until the time of writing. Thus, Roland saw herself as an historian, but one who had always “thought with her heart” (p. 86), unlike her unfeeling condemners.

Manon Phlipon's choice of a memoir, as opposed to a journal, reflects the tragic uncertainty of her last months. If the actual prison conditions were not intolerable to her,¹³ the secrecy concerning the date of her execution was. A journal would have required that she look at and thereby recognize her unjust imprisonment. Memoirs allowed her to preserve from oblivion what she knew to be her true historical personage. No modern prisoner, to my knowledge, has so self-consciously reconstructed his or her past in writing, and few have been so directly self-justifying. We therefore should look to aspects of the imprisonment itself to understand the well-springs of Roland's Mémoires.

Notes

1. Michel Foucault, Surveiller et punir (Paris: NRF-Gallimard, 1975).

2. Madame Roland, “Derniers écrits,” Bibliothèque des mémoires relatifs à l'histoire de France pendant le 18^mesiècle, VIII (Paris: Firmin Didot, 1847), 428.

3. “Mémoires particuliers de Madame Roland” in Bibliothèque des mémoires, pp. 31-201. Future page references to this edition will appear in the text.

4. Madame Roland and the Age of Revolution (New York: Columbia University, 1970), p. 268.

5. Cited in Benoîte Groult, Ainsi soit-elle (Paris: Grasset, 1975), p. 46.

6. For development of the theme of “taking care” in writings by women, see Patricia Meyer Spacks, “Taking Care: Some Women Novelists,” Novel, VI (Fall 1972), 36-51.

7. Surveiller et punir, p. 39.

8. Letter reproduced in “Derniers écrits,” pp. 424-26.

9. Letter reproduced in “Derniers écrits,” pp. 427-31.

10. “The House of the Dead,” extract reproduced in Law and the Lawless, ed. Gresham M. Sykes and Thomas E. Drabek (New York: Random House, 1969), pp. 354-59.

11. Les Voleuses de langue (Paris: Ed. des femmes, 1976), p. 155.

12. Surveiller, pp. 45 ff (“un supplice bien réussi justifie la justice”).

13. Letter from Roland to her lover, Buzot, cited in May, Madame Roland, p. 264.