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 Platière 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 newly-wed 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