The Private Memoirs of Madame Roland

This 1901 work is itself a reissue of an English translation published two years after Manon Roland fell victim to the guillotine. Her memoirs, justificatory of her own and other Girondists’ roles in the French Revolution, were written in prison and smuggled out to a friend, the botanist Louis Augustin Bosc, who published them in 1795 as the Terror abated; the English version appeared in the same year. Born Marie-Jeanne Phlippon in 1754, she married the businessman and radical philosopher Jean-Marie Roland (1734-93), assisted him in his writings, and developed an influential salon attended by the subsequent leaders of the revolution. However, their relatively moderate views led them to abandon the Jacobins, and Madame Roland was arrested in 1793, charged with treason, and executed on 8 November. This remarkable work by the most influential woman of the revolution reflects a life lived at the centre of turbulent events.