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Sweet and Consoling Virtue: The Memoirs of Madame Roland

In June of 1793, as the French Revolution radicalized and the Jacobins consolidated their political power, Marie-Jeanne Roland, along with other Girondin sympathizers, was arrested and incarcerated. From prison, she wrote what we now know as the Memoires de Madame Roland, edited and published by LouisAugustin-Guillaume Bosc, after her death, in 1795. Rather than culling Madame Roland's autobiographical project for its informative, historical details, as the work of Gita May and Guy Chaussinand-Nogaret have so ably done, I will examine the cultural work performed by the Memoires.2 Madame Roland's text is divided into two parts. One half tells the disillusioned tale of a Revolution gone wrong, of innocent victims unjustly persecuted, and of virtue shamelessly defiled. The other recounts her girlhood, which she figures as an idyllic time of domestic tranquillity where the presence of her mother guaranteed her happiness. A narrative of feminine virtue, which is dependent on maternal sacrifice, unites the two halves. Read together, they produce a portrait of exemplary feminine virtue that, by means of sympathetic identification, sought to move and shape Madame Roland's posterity.