by Moore, Lucy
Her education and composure granted her access (albeit limited) to the nobility’s exalted world at the same time as encouraging her to hope for its downfall. The ancients taught the young Manon to admire self-discipline, civic responsibility and virtue, and cast a critical light on the feckless aristocrats with whom she came into contact. Stories of courageous Roman matrons like Cornelia and Agrippina encouraged her to hope that she might one day be worthy of similar tales. ‘I thought of my own duty and the part I could play in the future,’ wrote Manon, revealing how far her ambition to play a role in history blinded her to the reality of her situation – for at fourteen what part could she have conceived of playing, other than wife and mother? ‘If souls were pre-existent to bodies and permitted to choose those they would inhabit,’ she told a friend in 1768, ‘I assure you that mine would not have adopted a weak and inept sex which often remains useless.’
After a pious girlhood, during which she hoped at one stage to become a nun, Manon’s reading led her to Voltaire. His belief in an aristocracy of intellect appealed to her, as did his profound scepticism. While she retained her faith in God, the Catholic Church became for her from her late teens nothing more than a hypocritical and often harmful institution–‘a scene where feeble-minded people…worship a piece of bread’. ‘I cannot digest, among other things, the idea that all those who do not think like me will be damned for all eternity,’ wrote Manon, ‘that so many people will be cast into the eternal flames because they have never heard of a Roman pontiff who preaches a severe morality which he does not often practise.’ Like Voltaire, however, she believed organized religion played an essential social role, the poor’s only consolation for the deprivation of their lives. The Church, like the Social Circle, had its place; but she, Manon Roland, had no need of it.
Manon discovered Rousseau when she was twenty-one. His impact on her was as profound as Plutarch’s had been when she was eight, putting into words feelings and ideas she had sensed before reading him but had never articulated herself. Looking outward, Rousseau’s books validated her anger at the social injustice she saw around her, and allowed her to imagine challenging the accepted order of things; turning inward, with his exaltation of romantic and maternal love, he showed her ‘the possibility of domestic happiness and the delights that were available to me if I sought them’.
So great was her devotion to Rousseau’s principles that, like many other women of her generation, Manon accepted unquestioningly his belief that women should never venture outside domestic life. She would have agreed with the words of Germaine de Staël, another devotee of Rousseau’s: ‘it is right to exclude women from public affairs. Nothing is more opposed to their natural vocation than a relationship of rivalry with men, and personal celebrity will always bring the ruin of their happiness.’ When someone predicted a future for Manon as a writer, she replied that she would chew her fingers off before publishing her work and pursuing renown. ‘I am avid for happiness and I find it most in the good which I can do,’ she wrote, much later. ‘I have no need for fame. Nothing suits me better than acting as a sort of Providence in the background.’
While Manon argued that women should avoid public lives, her desire to play God, even from the background, belied her protestations. The paradoxical nature of Rousseau’s philosophy fed Manon’s conviction that intense sensibility was the mark of greatness. Her egotism, critical nature, moodiness and tendency to introspection were for her the necessary price of attributes she prized: spontaneity, candour and passion. As she wrote to Roland before their marriage, when she read a novel, she never played the secondary role: ‘I have not read of a single act of courage or virtue without daring to believe myself capable of performing it myself.’ ‘Life was to her a drama in which she had been destined to play the main part,’ comments a modern biographer. ‘That this part was to turn out to be that of a tragic heroine she could not, at first, suspect, but when the time came to play that role, she would almost welcome the opportunity.’
The inescapable burden under which the young Manon laboured was her knowledge that despite her superiority to everyone she saw around her – in her intelligence, her good looks, her energy and discipline – nothing would change her fate as a woman of the middling ranks. ‘I knew that I was worth more,’ she wrote. Like Rousseau, she felt keenly the ‘unbearable contrast between the grandeur of my soul and the meanness of my fortune’. Her only chance to shape her destiny lay in her choice of husband.
Bourgeois Parisians arranged marriages for their children as assiduously as aristocrats at Versailles, and with as little reference to those children’s feelings. Manon, the pretty only daughter of respectable, prosperous parents, was an attractive prospect. When she reached her teens, men began writing to her father requesting the chance to make her acquaintance, but none of them appealed. M. Phlipon was concerned only about setting Manon up with someone rich and well established; Manon had a more stringent list of requirements. Despite her background, she refused to consider tradesmen, because she saw commerce as avaricious: ‘having concerned myself since childhood with the relationships of men in society, having been nourished on the purest morality and steeped in the ideas of Plutarch and the philosophers, how could I possibly marry a merchant who would not think or feel like me about anything?’
Manon Phlipon did not meet the serious, intellectual Jean-Marie Roland de la Platiére until she was twenty-two, by which time her mother had died, she herself had rejected a string of suitors and her father had gone through most of her dowry. Roland, the youngest of five sons from an ancient Beaujolais family which had claims to nobility (but no actual patent), was attracted to Manon but found her background and connections distasteful; it took him four years to propose.
The unflattering thought that Roland’s love had taken so long to conquer his scruples was not lost on Manon, but, at twenty-six, few romantic illusions remained to her. She accepted Roland because she respected his morals and intellect; because the fact that he had overcome what she called ‘the external disadvantages of an alliance with me’ showed her that she could be sure of his esteem, once won; and because she could see no other role for herself than that of wife and mother. Just as Rousseau’s heroine Julie had accepted her older suitor, Wolmar, Manon ‘married in a spirit of solemn rationalism, without reservation, and devoted myself completely to the role’.
High-minded and cerebral, Manon was entirely innocent when she married. Her wedding night, she said later, disproved her theory that she could endure great suffering ‘without crying out…though it must be said that surprise played a large part in that’. Roland did not awaken her sensuality and the desire to be a virtuous wife led her to suppress it. ‘But of course, that does not protect one from the agony of a real passion,’ she wrote, long afterwards. ‘In fact, it may simply store up fuel for it!’
In her memoirs Manon would describe in bald detail her first sexual experience, at twelve years old, when one of her father’s apprentices clumsily tried to seduce her – grabbing her hand and putting it into his trousers, pulling her down on to his lap. After the first incident, she wrote, ‘the world began to seem a strange place’, and she was curious. The second time, fear outweighed inquisitiveness and she confessed everything to her mother. Mme Phlipon ‘skilfully exploited the repugnance which my youth and bashfulness had already made me feel’, making the naïve, ignorant Manon feel she was ‘the greatest sinner in the universe’. ‘I did not dare to be passionate,’ she wrote of her girlhood self.
Determined to find happiness in her domestic life even if it did not include romantic love or physical satisfaction, the young Mme Roland threw herself into her relationship with the husband she thought of as having ‘no sex’. She honoured and cherished him ‘as an affectionate daughter loves a virtuous father’ and found, when his younger friends made advances to her, a ‘voluptuous charm in remaining virtuous’.
The newlywed Rolands moved to Amiens, where Roland was the local Inspector of Manufactures. In 1784,
Manon spent some months in Paris trying to acquire for him the patent of nobility which his family claimed but had never purchased. It was typical of the way things were done under the ancien régime that Manon, rather than her husband, was entrusted with this responsibility. While she resented having to go to Versailles to solicit an honour for which she considered Roland’s experience and knowledge more than qualified him, Manon pursued her objective with characteristic drive. The experience only confirmed to her the despicable nature of the system in which they lived: when she heard his suit had been rejected, she wrote to Roland, ‘in truth, we are people too honourable to succeed!’
Although she did not achieve her original aim, Manon did manage to get Roland transferred to Lyon, near his family home, Le Clos. From 1784 they lived with his mother near Villefranche for most of the year, spending the winter months in Lyon. Manon acted as Roland’s housekeeper, secretary, copyist and proof-reader; she ran the household and saw to the education of their daughter Eudora, born in 1781. The Rousseauian doctrine that governed this stage of her life was neatly summed up on the other side of France by the young Maximilien Robespierre in 1784: ‘virtue produces happiness as the sun produces light’.
Like many men and women of their background who saw themselves as excluded from influence and privilege simply by virtue of their birth, and who chafed against the inequalities of the old system, during the 1780s the Rolands considered emigrating to the United States. The American War of Independence had inflamed them with the same sense of highly emotional anticipation as the liberal aristocrats who rushed to serve under Washington. It seemed to herald a momentous era of change: as Tom Paine wrote, ‘the birthday of a new world is at hand’.
Early America, seen through European eyes, was stylized into a paradigm of revolutionary ideals, from pastoralism to the fashion for the antique. Brissot wrote with misty romanticism that he would have liked to have been born ‘under the simple and rustic roof of an American husbandman’. It was said that the creators of the American nation had gathered in a peaceful wood, and on a grassy bank had chosen Washington as their leader. Washington’s own rejection of an American crown was seen as surpassing the virtuous republicanism even of the Greeks and Romans. Brissot thought the Americans ‘greatly superior to these ancients’, and expressed the hope that Frenchmen would ‘be capable of surpassing their ancestors when the circumstances are favourable’.
Even the American attitude to women was admired by French radicals in the 1780s. Their austere, masculine republic had no time for boudoir politics, despite Abigail Adams’s vain plea to her husband John:
I desire you would Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands [she wrote in 1776]. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention is not paid to the Ladies we are determined to ferment a Rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have not voice or Representation.
But events conspired to direct Brissot’s and the Rolands’ attention homewards. As Manon Roland told Brissot in 1790, ‘We regret this promised land less now that we have hopes for our own country.’
A few months in Paris were enough to convince Manon of the fragility of her hopes. In May 1791, three months after her arrival, she expressed the revulsion she felt when she attended sessions of the National Assembly – a revulsion caused by the intensity of seeing her sublime expectations disappointed. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed in one of the great early studies of the revolution, ‘disgust with the revolution and attachment to its results were almost contemporary with its birth’. ‘We must make another insurrection, or we will lose happiness and liberty; but I doubt that there will be enough vigour in the people for this rising, and I see things are given over to the hazard of events,’ Manon wrote bitterly to a friend in London. ‘Adversity forms nations like individuals, and even civil war, as horrible as it is, brings the regeneration of our character and our morals.’ More sacrifices were needed; more blood must flow. Behind her railing against the mediocrity of the revolutionaries, who cared more for ‘their little glory than the great interests of their country’, sounds relentlessly her own frustrated desire to act. ‘It is not spirit they lack, but soul!’ she exclaimed, sure that she possessed the soul required.
Manon’s initial willingness to grasp the necessity of violence to the revolution was echoed by the radical journalist Jean-Paul Marat in his popular newspaper, L’Ami du Peuple. In the same month as Manon’s tirade, he wrote that in 1790 ‘500 heads would have sufficed [to complete the revolution]; today 50,000 would be necessary; perhaps 500,000 will fall before the end of the year’. Even before the Reign of Terror the relationship between blood and liberty was direct and intimate: blood would make France free. As Simon Schama writes, violence ‘was not just an unfortunate side effect’ of the revolution, but its ‘source of collective energy. It was what made the Revolution revolutionary.’ Manon Roland was as aware of this brutal truth as was Marat himself.
On the afternoon of 21 June, the Rolands, Robespierre, Brissot and François Buzot were at Pétion’s house when they heard news of the king and queen’s flight from the Tuileries, where the royal family had been living in virtual house arrest since the autumn of 1789, increasingly horrified by the direction the revolution was taking and their powerlessness to halt it. According to Helen Williams, in 1790 when the king called Marie-Antoinette, in jest, Mme Capet (the French dynasty’s family name–republicans would soon refer to him as Louis Capet), she replied wearily, addressing him as M. Capot–the word used at picquet, when the game is lost.
Across Paris on the same day, Pauline Léon, her mother and a friend, probably their neighbour Constance Évrard, were near the Palais Royal loudly protesting against the king’s ‘infamous treason’. She reported that they were ‘almost assassinated’ by Lafayette’s ‘mouchards’, or spies, and were saved by sans-culottes who succeeded in snatching them ‘from the hands of these monsters’, as she called the National Guardsmen.
Like Léon, Manon Roland despised kings and queens in general and the weak-willed Louis and his shallow wife in particular. The news that they had abandoned their pretence of accepting the revolution’s changes electrified her and her friends: at last, the king had undone himself. The coterie at Pétion’s on the 21st was convinced that the king’s true attitude towards the revolution and the constitution had now been revealed to the people, and that advantage should be taken of this moment to prepare the ground for a republic. Robespierre, described by Manon as biting his nails at the thought that the king would only have dared escape if he had left orders for every patriot in Paris to be murdered, sneered at the others and ‘asked what was meant by a republic’.
The result of that afternoon’s discussion was the publication of a short-lived journal, The Republican, produced in association with Condorcet and Tom Paine as well as Manon’s group. It proposed in its first issue, in July 1791, that the king’s flight had released the nation from its loyalty to him. The king had abandoned his people; the people consequently owed him nothing. At the end of June, another member of this loose affiliation of republicans and a former soldier in the United States’ War of Independence, Achille Duchastellet (former marquis du Chastellet), declared that the monarch was a ‘superfluity’. Manon agreed: ‘keeping the king on the throne is an ineptitude, an absurdity, if not a horror’. In the National Assembly, the king was declared hors de cause – irrelevant. Although no motion was passed against him, when the topic was debated ‘three times the entire Assembly was lifted to its feet, arms lifted, hats in the air, with an indescribable enthusiasm’. Finally it was decided that the king’s flight must be presented as an abduction, staged in order to re-establish his authority.
Jérôme Pétion was one of the two official representatives of the Assembly sent to Varennes to escort the royal family back to Paris. Louis was still king, but the mystique of royalty was gone for ever. P
étion and Antoine Barnave climbed into the coach and sat down between the king and queen without asking their permission. Barnave cast infatuated glances at the queen, and invited the dauphin to show him how well he could read by spelling out the revolutionary slogan ‘Live free or die’ on his buttons. A sign posted across Paris forbad onlookers from either applauding or insulting the king when he arrived back in the city, but the Jacobins recommended Parisians keep their hats on when he passed to demonstrate their disapproval of his attempt at escape.
On 24 June, a thousand people gathered between the faubourg Saint-Antoine and the Tuileries, where a sign had been hung reading, ‘Maison à louer’ (To Let). The demonstration had the air of a festival: men carrying pikes, the traditional weapon of the common man, mingled with women singing the ‘Ça Ira’ and shouting out their desire to send the king and all aristocrats to the devil. Manon was impressed by the crude energy of the scene, and regretted the fact that instead of using it to their advantage ‘the Jacobins [her friends] passed their time in pitiful discussions’. She described to her friend Henri Bancal, in London, the celebratory atmosphere on the streets, the chaotic sessions at the National Assembly, the Jacobins in the weeks following the flight to Varennes and the king’s chastened return: ‘one lives here ten years in twenty-four hours’. Twice in less than ten days she used the phrase ‘sea of blood’ when describing to Bancal the obstacles that needed to be surmounted before liberty could be achieved.
At the Jacobins’ on the 22nd, the members cried, ‘Live free or die!’ as Robespierre took the floor. Manon’s account of him at Pétion’s, sneering and craven, was written later, with the benefit of hindsight; now, in June 1791, she described him as full of energy, courage and virtue, his noble heart oppressed by the vacillations and corruption of the Assembly. Their political styles and convictions at this time were similar: both Maximilien and Manon were tenacious, sentimental, fastidious and driven; both were suspicious of moderates and of the Church and detested the monarchy. By contrast Manon was concerned that Brissot, whose lightness of character she considered ‘incompatible with liberty’, would not prove worthy of the times.