{"id":92063,"date":"2015-11-17T16:47:54","date_gmt":"2015-11-17T21:47:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=92063"},"modified":"2015-11-17T17:17:04","modified_gmt":"2015-11-17T22:17:04","slug":"unseen-even-of-herself","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2015\/11\/17\/unseen-even-of-herself\/","title":{"rendered":"Unseen, Even of Herself"},"content":{"rendered":"

Before she was guillotined, the inscrutable Madame Roland wrote a remarkable memoir.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

A portait of Madame Roland from Coiffure 1er Republique<\/i>, a compendium of historical French hairstyles<\/p><\/div>\n

Max Nelson is writing a series<\/a> on prison literature. Read the previous entry, on\u00a0Abdellatif La\u00e2bi\u2019s poems<\/em><\/a><\/em>, here<\/a><\/em>.<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

It could be said that the men with the greatest influence on Marie-Jean Phlipon\u2019s life and legacy were two she never met. She rarely let herself depend too heavily on the male figures she knew: her husband, whom she respected and discretely controlled; the lawyer Fran\u00e7ois Buzot, whom she came to love; and the many men of power whose authority she defied. It was Rousseau who provided \u201cexactly the nourishment I needed,\u201d she wrote, having read his La Nouvelle H\u00e9lo\u00efse<\/i> in the wake of her mother\u2019s death. \u201cHe showed me the possibility of domestic happiness and the delights that were available to me if I sought them.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Phlipon\u2014a well-read engraver\u2019s daughter who went on to become a martyr of the French Revolution\u2014defined \u201cdomestic happiness\u201d differently than most. Two years after Rousseau\u2019s death, she married Jean-Marie Roland de la Plati\u00e8re, whose political rise and fall she explores in the thrilling Memoirs<\/a> <\/em>she wrote from Paris\u2019s Saint-P\u00e9lagie prison in the months leading up to her execution. Thomas Carlyle, the second man who shaped her reputation, was born two years after her death. When he gave his account of her in his 1837 history of the Revolution<\/a>, it was left to others to decide whether he \u201cinterpreted feelings\u201d that she had had herself:\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Radiant with enthusiasm are those dark eyes, is that strong Minerva-face, looking dignity and earnest joy; joyfullest she where all are joyful. It is Roland de la Plati\u00e8re\u2019s wife! \u2026 Reader, mark that queenlike burgher-woman: beautiful, Amazonian-graceful to the eye; more so to the mind. Unconscious of her worth (as all worth is), of her greatness, of her crystal clearness; genuine, the creature of Sincerity and Nature, in an age of Artificiality, Pollution and Cant; there, in her still completeness, in her still invincibility, she<\/em>, if thou knew it, is the noblest of all living French-women,\u2014and she will be seen, one day. O blessed rather while un<\/em>seen, even of herself! For the present she gazes, nothing doubting, into this grand theatricality; and thinks her young dreams are to be fulfilled.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The Madame Roland that Carlyle invented bears practically no relation to the complicated, shrewd, observant, impassioned woman who emerges from her prison memoirs. The Madame Roland we encounter on the page is in no way \u201cunconscious of her worth.\u201d Much of what generates energy in the Memoirs <\/em>is the uncanny confidence, determination, and self-assurance of her voice. \u201cI get no pleasure from pricking bubbles or killing flies,\u201d she writes near the start of the book\u2019s second section. \u201cBut I do believe in upholding justice with plain truths and I am capable of enunciating such truths with terrible intensity in the presence of those involved, regardless of the effect on them, while remaining entirely detached myself.\u201d<\/p>\n

She brings equal detachment to the work of enunciating her own virtues, including her range of sensitivities (\u201cI am not yet forty, but I reckon by the depth of my feelings I must say mine has been a prodigiously full life\u201d) and the rigor of her convictions (\u201cMy experiments have always been made in good faith, because I have never been tempted to change my beliefs in order to relax my moral principles\u201d). It\u2019s revealing to compare Carlyle\u2019s account of her physical presence with her own description of her teenage self:<\/p>\n

\n

The mouth is rather large; one may see hundreds prettier but none with a sweeter or more winning smile. The eyes, on the other hand, are smallish and prominent. The irises are tinged with chestnut and grey. The impression they convey is of openness, vivacity and sympathy, reflecting the various changes of mood of an affectionate nature. Well-moulded eyebrows of auburn, the same colour as the hair, complete the picture. It is on the whole a proud and serious face that\u00a0sometimes causes surprise but more often inspires confidence and interest. I was always a bit worried about my nose; it seemed to me too big at the tip. On the other hand, seen in its setting, and especially in profile, it did not damage the general effect. The broad forehead, issuing from a high brow and covered by a fringe, was unusually expressive of the most fleeting emotions and the firm, rounded chin suggested a natural sensuality. No one so obviously made for voluptuous pleasure has enjoyed so little of it.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Madame Roland\u2019s generations of readers have puzzled that a writer capable of paragraphs like this seems also to have had little trouble reconciling herself to a rather traditional picture of \u201cdomestic happiness.\u201d How could someone blessed with such largeness of spirit, such incisive detachment, have adhered to a code of feminine virtue visibly too small for her? And yet if she stayed committed to that code in principle, it\u2019s unclear to what extent\u2014and with how much ambivalence\u2014she stuck to it in practice.<\/p>\n

\"\"

A Japanese print shows Carlyle watching his manuscript burn.<\/p><\/div>\n

Carlyle allegedly rewrote the first volume of his from scratch after John Stuart Mill\u2019s maid used the original manuscript as kindling paper. Madame Roland\u2019s Memoirs<\/em> are likewise haunted by destruction. The manuscript she testifies to having spent \u201cthe first half of my captivity\u201d writing was, she says, a \u201cdetailed comment \u2026 on all the events and all the personalities connected with public life that my position had enabled me to know.\u201d It was to be her \u201cmoral and political testament.\u201d She entrusted the manuscript to her friend Luc-Antoine de Champagneux; when \u201cthe storm broke suddenly over his head,\u201d as she put it, a member of his household threw the papers on the fire. (Some pages, it emerged after Madame Roland\u2019s death, were spared.) Devastated, she rewrote much of the material piecemeal\u2014\u201cjotting down, in no particular order, whatever comes into my head.\u201d When she started writing the memoirs of her girlhood and youth that make up the second half of her literary testament, it was because she thought it might \u201chelp to distract me, at a time when I am particularly distressed, if I talk a little about myself.\u201d<\/p>\n

Born in 1754, she grew up in a France where inherited privilege was still entrenched and the clergy\u2019s word still had weight. As a young girl, her voracious reading and her increasing wariness about sex\u2014at about ten, she had to rebuff two aggressive advances from one of her father\u2019s fifteen-year-old apprentices\u2014drew her closer to the church. \u201cI spent the first years of my adolescence,\u201d she would write after having lost her faith, \u201cin a sort of divine frenzy.\u201d She passed the year of her first Communion in a convent, where she met one of her lifelong friends and basked in a pre-Revolutionary tranquility she\u2019d later lament: \u201cHow shall I describe, from the depths of this prison and in the thick of the turmoil ravaging my country and destroying everything I hold most dear, the deep calm and rapture of those days?\u201d<\/p>\n

Rueful passages like this alternate in the\u00a0Memoirs<\/em> with acid recollections of the ancien r\u00e9gime: the young woman at Versailles who moves through the palace\u2019s inner chambers convinced that anyone who questions her \u201cshould be able to recognize six hundred years of proven noblesse<\/em> in her grotesque visage\u201d; the pretentious noblewomen who invite Marie-Jean and her mother to dinner, then instruct them to eat below stairs. Madame Roland was ambivalent about the worth of organized religion, the place of women in public life, and the possibility of a popular, democratic government for France. And yet she rarely comes off as ambivalent about people. The character sketches she compiled of the figures she and Jean-Marie Roland met during their period at the center of French Revolutionary political life are either rousing defenses of her Girondist allies or scathing denunciations of the Jacobins who turned against them. The Rolands came to Paris from Lyons, where Jean-Marie was a government functionary. Dissatisfied with the old aristocratic order and full of republican feeling, they drifted into Jacobin circles that then included both their future supporters and the more radical deputies they\u2019d come to denounce. Madame Roland held a salon each week where, she later insisted, Robespierre \u201cspoke little\u201d and \u201csneered a great deal.\u201d<\/p>\n

They moved in and out of favor. Jean-Marie\u2019s unexpected nomination to the King\u2019s ministry earned him suspicion from some republicans as a collaborationist. The famous letter of protest that got him fired\u2014and which his wife, it\u2019s always been widely believed, wrote\u2014won the couple a temporary reprieve from the National Assembly\u2019s furthest-left deputies, but the tide of popular opinion in Paris was shifting dramatically away from the Girondists\u2019 more cerebral, idealistic breed of republicanism. In the Memoirs<\/em>, Madame Roland vigorously defends the Bureau de l\u2019Esprit public<\/em>, her husband\u2019s initiative to spread printed journals and pamphlets across the country, which she insists was meant to unite provincial authorities under the banner of the Revolution. Her opponents, especially Danton and Marat, condemned it as a reactionary propaganda machine. By the time of the events she recounts in the first pages of her memoirs, the Girondists had come under heavy attack. In 1793, twenty-two of their deputies were put under arrest. Those who didn\u2019t flee were imprisoned (Madame Roland\u2019s friends on the inside did their best to keep her comfortable), summarily tried and, in late autumn, executed.<\/p>\n

The Memoirs<\/em> are both an extravagant apology for Madame Roland\u2019s discredited political movement and a performance of what, for her, it meant for a woman to live a moral life. These latter sections make you wonder why, exactly, she insists as strenuously as she does on her own feminine virtue. Whenever she makes a point of her \u201caversion to any solitary or animal pleasure,\u201d it\u2019s largely on account of her attraction to the challenging feats of discipline and self-control that such an aversion required. \u201cI remained mistress of my imagination by constantly curbing it,\u201d she wrote of her early attempts to stave off sensual thoughts, \u201cand when I found myself in a dangerous situation \u2026 I was able to find a voluptuous charm in remaining virtuous.\u201d When she developed a mutual passion for Buzot, one of her fellow Girondists, she had more still to curb. \u201cWith such a philosophy,\u201d she\u2019d remarked about her habits of self-protection, \u201cit is hard to slip up and impossible to disgrace oneself. But of course that does not protect one from the agony of a real passion; in fact, it may simply store up fuel for it. We shall see!\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Roland writing her memoirs in prison. Illustration from John S. C. Abbott\u2019s Makers of History: Madame Roland<\/i>, 1904.<\/p><\/div>

\"\"<\/a>

Roland at the guillotine, from Makers of History<\/i>.<\/p><\/div><\/p>\n

It\u2019s unclear whether Madame Roland believed that a woman\u2019s moral worth stood and fell together with her sexual purity, or whether she was simply ambitious enough to want to avoid disgrace at all costs. Either way, one of her surprising rhetorical moves was to depict her submission to a stifling standard of feminine virtue as a source of its own \u201cvoluptuous charm.\u201d In the same way, she can argue that \u201cthe study of the fine arts, considered as part of a girl\u2019s education,\u201d should inspire \u201ca taste for hard work \u2026 enlarging the range of her interests,\u201d because \u201cthat is the way to escape boredom \u2026 preserve oneself from the perils of sin and\u2014worse still\u2014of temptation.\u201d Madame Roland rarely distinguishes between the hard work it took for a girl in eighteenth-century France to cultivate a sensibility or widen the scope of her authority and the hard work it took for her to preserve her maidenhood. It\u2019s as if she was more comfortable arguing for the former if she could extol the latter in the same breath.<\/p>\n

She is no less evasive in her replies to \u201cthose who think that any credit given to me must be at the expense of my husband.\u201d It was widely assumed as early as her own time that Madame Roland was her husband\u2019s strategist, ghost writer, and prime mover. About \u201cthe true art of politics,\u201d she remarked coyly that \u201cI do not often talk about it, because \u2026 women who pronounce on affairs of state always sound to me like yesterday\u2019s newspaper.\u201d Instead, she continued, \u201cI let the men do the talking\u2014I particularly enjoy listening to old men who imagine that every word they say is a revelation to the listener and who think that all I am capable of is stitching a shirt and adding up figures.\u201d Just as she called it a heroic challenge to keep herself virtuous, so she considered it a devious pleasure to play the part of the quiet domestic. The full subtlety and strangeness of the character she created for herself\u2014at once dotingly submissive and prodigiously accomplished\u2014comes out in her telling of how she and her husband worked:<\/p>\n

\n

My husband lost nothing by being interpreted through me. There was nothing I could express, in point of justice or reason, that he was not capable of realizing and sustaining by his character and conduct. I could give a fairer picture than he could of his achievements and intentions. Roland without me would have been no less good an administrator; his energy and his experience are all his own, as is his probity. But with me he has made more mark, because I have been able to inject into his writings a combination of strength and gentleness, reason and sentiment such as perhaps only a woman can provide whose sensitive soul is matched with a practical mind \u2026 Carpers are welcome to regard this confession as an impertinence; those who know me will see it as typical of my sincerity.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Madame Roland was too canny about her self-presentation to count as the \u201ccreature of Sincerity\u201d Carlyle named her, however much she might have welcomed that title. But she can always be trusted to weave nimbly between dogmatisms, endorsing and condemning them in parts without absorbing them in full. She \u201cinterpreted\u201d her husband meekly but with almost providential power; she rejected the church but clung to a vaguer kind of spiritualism that gave her trouble to articulate. Her individual judgments are unambiguous and often brutal, but the book in which they\u2019re collected is a kind of trick pattern. From one angle, it\u2019s a celebration of wifely discretion; from another, it\u2019s a stirring performance of self-possession and authority. The definitive picture of Madame Roland might after all be, in Carlyle\u2019s words, \u201cunseen\u201d\u2014to everyone, that is, except herself.<\/p>\n

Max Nelson\u2019s\u00a0writings\u00a0on film and literature\u00a0have appeared in <\/em>The Threepenny Review,\u00a0<\/em>n+1, <\/em>Film Comment, and <\/em>The Boston Review, among other publications.\u00a0He lives in New York.<\/em>\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Max Nelson is writing a series<\/a> on prison literature. Read the previous entry, on\u00a0Abdellatif La\u00e2bi\u2019s poems<\/em><\/a><\/em>, here<\/a><\/em>.<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Before she was guillotined, the inscrutable Madame Roland wrote a remarkable memoir. Max Nelson is writing a series on prison literature. Read the previous entry, on\u00a0Abdellatif La\u00e2bi\u2019s poems, here. It could be said that the men with the greatest influence on Marie-Jean Phlipon\u2019s life and legacy were two she never met. She rarely let herself […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":851,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19434],"tags":[5820,17247,20246,1102,20240,20245,19436,20238,14307,20243,20244,20239,12856,270,8902,19435,1786,20242,20241,6004],"class_list":["post-92063","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-prison-lit","tag-beauty","tag-domestic-life","tag-duty","tag-feminism","tag-francois-buzot","tag-girondists","tag-incarceration","tag-jacobins","tag-jail","tag-jean-jacques-rosseau","tag-luc-antoine-de-champagneux","tag-marie-jean-phlipon","tag-morality","tag-paris","tag-prison","tag-prison-literature","tag-religion","tag-robespierre","tag-the-french-revolution","tag-thomas-carlyle"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe Inscrutable Madame Roland\u2019s Remarkable Prison Memoir<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Before she was guillotined, Madame Roland told of her life and philosophy in marvelous, strange memoir. 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