I should need a Madame Roland as my reader.
—Stendhal
That unpunished vice, reading.
—Valéry Larbaud
If anyone helps to overturn conventional notions about the role of women in politics in eighteenth-century France it is Marie-Jeanne (Manon) Phlipon, later Mme Roland (1754–1793). It was not simply the French Revolution of 1789 that inspired her concern with history, society, and the art of government. That interest was of long standing in a deeply studious young woman who loved reading, even works by the most difficult thinkers, and who read widely for self-instruction and self-knowledge as well as pleasure. Much cherished by her parents as the sole survivor of seven children, she was endowed with a strong sense of her own worth and capabilities.
In 1776, Manon, daughter of a well-established master engraver, tried to call on the celebrated recluse, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. She failed to get past Thérèse Levasseur, Rousseau’s long-suffering mistress, who by then was his wife. As for Manon’s letter, Rousseau in his reply thought, or affected to think, that it was written by a man. What this adventure took in the way of enterprise, daring, and energy for a modest young woman of the day, careful of public opinion (as indeed Rousseau himself advised in Emile), may readily be supposed.
Disappointed but not disillusioned, she wrote to Sophie Cannet, her friend of convent school days, “His genius has warmed my soul; I have felt it set me aflame, uplift me and
