Liberty: The Lives and Times of Six Women in Revolutionary France (14 page)

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 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 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’.