Manon's upbringing was middle-class: while her mother did not work, she ran the household, and little Manon was often sent out to market in her linen smock to fetch a bunch of parsley or a head of lettuce that had been forgotten. She knew how to make an omelette and shell peas, to mend sheets and polish the silver. Although the adult Manon was proud of her bourgeois housekeeping skills, it is hard to escape the feeling that she considered them beneath her: when she described how capable she was of making her own supper she could not resist adding, ‘yet no one who looked at me would have thought of burdening me with such a menial task’.
This sense of being somehow better than the circumstances into which she had been born was stimulated by her education. Unusually for a girl of the middling sort—probably because she was an only child—her parents indulged her obvious intelligence and aptitude for learning. As well as going to a parish catechism class on Sundays and receiving Latin lessons from her uncle, a priest, the young Manon was taught writing, geography, music and dancing by tutors in the family's first-floor apartment on the quai de l'Horloge, on the Île de la Cité, and her father taught her drawing and engraving. She was allowed to read anything she chose. Like Rousseau, she had absorbed the republicanism of Plutarch's Lives before she was ten; she wept to think that she had not been born in another time. ‘I should have been born a Spartan or Roman woman, or at least a French man,’ she lamented at twenty-two.
Manon's indomitable spirit and strong sense of self-righteousness were evident from an early age. If she was beaten unjustly by her father, she would bite his thigh. On one occasion, aged about seven, she refused to take some medicine; her father beat the hysterical child three times for refusing it, and still she would not give in. Finally a sort of ‘stiffness’ came over her, ‘a new strength flowed through my veins’. Manon tucked up her chemise and again offered her back to her father's blows. Her terrified mother, seeing the little girl's extraordinary, stubborn stoicism, persuaded her father to leave the room and put Manon to bed. Two hours later, with tears in her eyes, she persuaded Manon to take the medicine for her sake. The child finally swallowed it, but instantly threw it up and lapsed into a much more serious fever than the one the medicine had warranted in the first place. Her father never dared beat her again.
This story, as she tells it, is revealing on several counts. First, its triumphant conclusion shows Manon's confidence in her own judgement; even thirty years later, and a mother herself, she did not doubt her right to have refused the hated medicine. Second, the importance she placed on the experiences of her childhood self and her highly intimate tone, with the narrator playing the role of the innocent victim of injustice, are directly derived from Rousseau's Confessions. Finally, the context in which she remembered the incident—while she waited in prison to be tried by the Revolutionary Tribunal, knowing her probable fate would be the scaffold—is vital. Calling to mind her youthful conviction and courage gave her strength to face the future, whatever it held. ‘They can kill me,’ she concluded, ‘but they shall not conquer me!’
Manon's memories of the web of social relationships that dominated her childhood demonstrate the rigidity of ancien régime France, and her resentment of the invisible barriers that restricted her. She was never able to forget her place in society, describing in icy detail the humiliation she suffered when she was invited to dinner by a noble family only to be sent to the kitchen to eat their left-overs, and the fury she felt when, calling on an aristocratic connection of her grandmother's, she heard her beloved grandmother condescendingly addressed by her maiden name. When she visited Versailles she could not wait to leave: she resented seeing all that wealth and energy expended on ‘individuals who were already too powerful and whose personal qualities were so unmemorable’. She knew if she spent any longer there she would ‘detest these people so much that I shall not know what to do with my hatred…[it is] all so unfair and so absurd’.
Reading between the lines, though, a certain social fluidity is evident alongside the strict stratification. Manon was the daughter of an engraver, but her parents had such high hopes for her that they sent her to be educated at a convent, like the aristocratic Thérésia Cabarrus, and had her taught accomplishments like dancing and guitar-playing. She did meet rich, influential people, some of whom encouraged her intellectual pretensions. Manon may have resented not being the star of the literary salons and concerts to which she was taken, but she was taken to them. Compared to the childhood of someone like Théroigne de Méricourt, her perspective was far from enclosed; and it was from exactly this type of background that one of the most celebrated and powerful women of the ancien régime, Mme de Pompadour—Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson, daughter of a steward—had sprung. But for the young Manon, to whom virtue was as important as happiness, her station in life was as much an obstacle to her ambitions as her sex.
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