Jeanne Marie Philipon, better known as Manon Roland or Madame Roland (1754 – 1793) is a figure of the French Revolution, who played a major role in the Girondin party.
A convent education
The only survivor of the seven children of Marguerite Bimont and Gatien Philipon, Jeanne Marie Philipon was born on March 17, 1754 in Paris , in a wealthy family. Lively and intelligent, she shows herself gifted for studies and reads a lot, notably Plutarch, Voltaire, Montesquieu. At the age of eleven, she was sent to the convent and there became friends with Sophie and Henriette Canet, with whom she remained in contact thereafter.
Marguerite Bimont died when her daughter was in her twenties and Manon, leaving the convent, devoted herself to her father's studies and home. She has suitors, but rejects all marriage proposals. In 1776, her friends Sophie and Henriette introduced her to Jean-Marie Roland de La Platière, a Picardy factory inspector and renowned economist, twenty years her senior. They married in 1780 and their daughter, Eudora, was born a year later.
The French Revolution
The couple settled in Amiens where Manon Roland, interested in botany, collected and inventoried the plants of the canals around the city. Three years later, Manon pushed her husband to obtain the position of factory inspector in Lyon and the couple settled nearby. Cultivated, intelligent and convinced by the ideas of the Enlightenment, she wrote political articles for the Courrier de Lyon. Despite everything, her married life bores her.
In 1791, in the midst of the French Revolution, the couple moved to Paris and Manon entered politics. She created a salon which regularly hosted political figures such as Brissot, Pétion or Robespierre and herself became influential within the Girondin party. There she notably met Buzot, with whom she had a shared passion.
Thanks to her connections, her husband became Minister of the Interior in March 1792 and Manon played a very important role by his side. After the September Massacres, for which she holds him partly responsible, Manon attacks Danton and her husband and she becomes the target of the Montagnards. Tired of these attacks, the couple retired from public political life in January 1793, without giving up politics altogether.
“O Liberty, what crimes are committed in your name! »
On May 31, 1793, during the fall of the Gironde, many Girondins were arrested; her husband fled, and Manon Roland allowed herself to be arrested the next day at her home. She was released on June 24 but immediately arrested again and transferred to the Conciergerie where she remained for five months. In prison, she writes Memoirs , which remain an exceptional testimony to the history of the Gironde. She was tried on November 8, 1793 and sentenced to death for participating in the conspiracy against the Republic; the sentence is carried out the same day. His last words would have been:“O Liberty, what crimes are committed in your name! »
She leaves many letters and precious memories.