Some of them, like Manon's husband Jean-Marie Roland de la Platière, had tenuous links with the lower rungs of the nobility but had been largely excluded from the social and political advantages peers enjoyed before 1789. At fifty-seven, Jean-Marie Roland was distinguished among their friends by his age. He was a tall, stiff, spare man habitually dressed in a threadbare brown or black suit, with no wig covering his thinning hair above a mild face. Before 1791 he had worked as an inspector of manufactures, earning the respect of his colleagues through his diligence, energy and integrity.
His wife, twenty years his junior, was animated and immaculate in her plain amazone, her rich brown hair cut simply but modishly ‘en jockei’, and ‘an expression of uncommon sweetness’ (according to her friend Helen Maria Williams) in her full hazel eyes. Everything about Manon proclaimed her ‘most ardent attachment to liberty’: her self-control, her warmth, her penetration, her obvious virtue and modesty.
Even before they arrived in Paris Manon had been central to a set of men who shared her passionate commitment to reform, and who would form the core of the Brissotin (later known as Girondin) group coalescing at her salon in 1791. Bosc d'Antic and François Lanthenas had been friends with Manon and her husband for years; in their letters the quartet called each other brother and sister, a quiet statement of the ideals by which they hoped to live. Since 1787, Manon had been corresponding with Jacques-Pierre Brissot (from whom their loosely affiliated group, the Brissotins, would derive one of its names), and contributing anonymously to his Patriote Français under the byline, ‘Letters from a Roman Lady’.
Brissot, who before 1789 styled himself, with an aristocratic flourish, ‘de Warville’, was the son of a cook from Chartres. Before the revolution he had been a jobbing pamphleteer, selling information to the police when times were hard and, when that expedient failed, spending time in a debtors' prison and in the Bastille. The man Manon called ‘generous Brutus’ had been agitating for change throughout the 1780s, campaigning for the abolition of the slave trade and forming a Society of the Friends of the Negroes.
Brissot exposed the Rolands to an international network of liberal reformers. The English republican historian Catherine Macaulay had given him a letter of introduction to George Washington when he visited the United States in 1788, recommending him as a ‘warm friend to liberty’. Brissot's Travels in the United States was intended to hold up the American example as a model to Frenchmen. He called Americans ‘the true heroes of humanity’ because they had discovered the secret of preserving individual liberty by correlating their private morality with their public responsibility. But despite her respect for Brissot and for the way his private life reflected his ideals, Manon recognized that his political weaknesses were too much easy charm and too naïve a faith in mankind's goodness. His quiet wife ‘admired his devotion to the cause’ but was harder-headed: ‘she thought France unworthy of liberty and that anyone who attempted to promote it was wasting his time’.
It was Brissot who introduced the Rolands to three deputies of the National Assembly who were in 1791 the focus of progressive hopes: the cheerful, vain lawyer Jérôme Pétion, who had escorted Théroigne de Méricourt back to her lodgings in Versailles on the day of the women's march in October 1789; another lawyer, Maximilien Robespierre, whose sneering watchfulness did not yet excite Manon's distrust; and the passionate, principled François Buzot. They were regular frequenters of the Jacobin Club which was fast becoming a political elite to whom, in the words of Camille Desmoulins, Robespierre's schoolfriend, ‘only the witness of their conscience is necessary’. Manon nicknamed them the ‘Incorruptibles’; and another left-wing wife, in the classical vocabulary of the day, called them the ‘bons et précieux Triumvirs’. All three were soon frequent visitors to the rue Guénégaud.
A few others added their voices to the radical chorus in Manon's salon, but she was sparing in her approval and favoured those who shared her morals as well as her opinions. Mme Roland admired Tom Paine, author of Common Sense, more for his bold, original political principles than for his ability to realize them; she and the radical aristocrat Condorcet, Germaine's friend, respected one another's views and intelligence, but she was contemptuous of his crippling timidity.
Given Manon's continued adherence to Rousseau's disapproval of women involving themselves in public life, it was hardly surprising that no other women were invited to these meetings. She respected Brissot's wife and liked Pétion's; hers was one of the few houses at which Manon deigned to call. Buzot's older, less attractive wife she considered unworthy of him.
‘I knew the proper role of my sex and never exceeded it,’ Manon wrote later, describing how she sat at a separate table from the men, silently sewing or writing letters as they discussed the events of the day. Listening submissively to visitors who thought their every word a revelation to her and considered her capable of no more than stitching a shirt gave her a secret thrill. But although she insisted she had accepted her ‘proper role’, she still had to bite her lip to stop herself speaking out of turn. While she admired her guests' honourable intentions, powers of reasoning and personal enlightenment, she admitted she sometimes longed to box their ears when she heard them wasting ‘their time in pure cleverness and wit’ and failing either to reach conclusions or to establish objectives.
Although her guests were often as frustrating as they were inspirational, Manon thrived. ‘I loved political life, its talk, its intrigues,’ she wrote. ‘I do not mean the petty intrigues of a court or the sterile controversies of gossip and fools, but the true art of politics, the art of ruling men and organising their happiness in society.’
Having observed the events of the revolution from afar for so long, when she arrived in Paris Manon was hungry to witness for herself the new machinery of power. ‘I went to all the meetings,’ she remembered, watching among others ‘the powerful Mirabeau…[and] the astute Lameth’ at the National Assembly. She was unimpressed by what she saw. The Assembly, she wrote in March 1791, less than a month after her arrival, was divided, weak and corrupt, the government was ‘detestable’ and the Jacobins, among whom she counted her husband and their friends, neglected their responsibility to serve the cause of liberty. Worst of all, the interests of the old regime profited from these divisions to inhibit the revolution's progress.
Acquainting herself with the political climate also meant attending a session of the Social Circle in the library of the Jacobin Club. Manon was ‘very well satisfied with the meeting’, she told a friend that March. ‘I listened to the greatest principles of liberty outlined with force, warmth and clarity; I saw them applauded with delight.’ Her detached tone—she did not applaud herself but, rather, was pleased that others were applauding—suggests that she, like the aristocratic salonnières Germaine de Staël and Félicité de Genlis, viewed the Social Circle as more useful for other women than for herself; she had no need of it. Even though her writing did appear in the Mercure National (anonymously, as in the Patriote Français) edited by François and Louise Robert, organizers of the Social Circle, Manon attended meetings only rarely. Her own coterie was infinitely more engrossing.
Manon Roland did not see herself as part of a feminist movement like the one Pauline Léon was trying to initiate; instead she saw herself as a personal inspiration to individual patriots and republicans. Her relationship to the inner workings of politics convinced her, like Germaine de Staëlin 1789, that she could accomplish more through her private influence on the men who were shaping policy than through speaking or writing publicly as women like Pauline Léon and Théroigne de Méricourt, less well connected than her, were obliged to do. Their double handicap, of class as well as gender, forced them to act radically; Manon, whose friends were becoming among the most influential men in the nation, had no need to draw attention to herself in order to make her voice heard.
Five