The Virtues of Childhood Sexual Abuse and Marital Infidelity in Marie-Jeanne Roland’s Mémoires particuliers (1795)

I finally married at the age of twenty-five, and . . . with much instruction in many subjects, I had so well avoided increasing my knowledge in the one area in which I had begun so prematurely, that the events of the first night of my marriage were as surprising to me as they were disagreeable.

—Marie-Jeanne Roland, Mémoires particuliers

Marie-Jeanne Roland is considered the first French woman autobiographer in the modern sense, a distinction earned by the unusual openness to sexual revelation exhibited in her Mémoires particuliers (Private memoirs), written in the prisons of the Terror during the French Revolution and left unfinished when its author was guillotined on 8 November 1793.¹ Born in 1754, Marie-Jeanne Phlipon had enjoyed a bourgeois existence as an only child in Paris. Her father was a skilled engraver, and her parents provided her with an excellent education that included private tutors. While her marriage to the intellectually gifted Jean-Marie Roland gave her access to the company of a number of fascinating if minor figures of the French Enlightenment, it was the upheaval of the Revolution that made Roland herself a public figure. Her work behind the scenes as a speech and letter writer and overall advisor for her husband’s Girondin Party became a source of scandal in the revolutionary press when the Girondin delegates to the National Assembly were attacked for attempting to foil the will of the people by avoiding a vote on the execution of King Louis XVI in the National Assembly. Once associated with Robespierre and considered representatives of the far left wing of the Revolution, the Girondins were recast as royalist anti-Republicans, enemies of the very Revolution they had so passionately embraced. Roland was ordered arrested along with her husband and his Girondin colleagues, but, unlike her husband, she did not flee Paris. This decision proved fatal.

In the initial period of her incarceration, however, Roland was convinced that she would soon be released and began work on a number of projects, including political sketches and musings on the course of the Revolution as well as her best-known work, the Mémoires particuliers. The publication of the first six books of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions in 1782 had inaugurated an entirely new genre of life writing to which the neologism “autobiography” would be applied. In particular, Rousseau had set a new standard for intimate disclosure by analyzing his complicated relationship to sexuality. Roland’s willingness to follow Rousseau’s lead first becomes evident in the Mémoires particuliers in her account of an episode of abuse that occurred when she was only ten. The incident took place in her father’s Parisian workshop, attached to the family house overlooking the Seine. Her father employed a number of apprentices, and, as she told the story, one of these young men cornered her on two occasions. He first showed her his erect penis and offered to reveal to her what her parents did when alone; then, during the second, more serious incident, he pressed himself against her from behind after lifting up her skirts and, as she struggled to free herself, brought himself to orgasm. This latter episode, she explained, precipitated a period of intense religious devotion during which she successfully begged her parents to send her to a convent school, where she would be free of the presence of men.

Previous commentators have read the workshop passage as evidence of Roland’s decided lack of taste and judgment as a woman writer, accused her of exaggerating the incident for effect, or, most recently, diagnosed a lingering, profoundly traumatic sense of guilt evident even in the adult autobiographer.² Yet any attempt at analyzing Roland’s account of this incident and its aftermath must be firmly grounded in the context of eighteenth-century theories of sexual development in combination with her particular autobiographical goals. There were many compelling reasons for Roland to have left out this episode, including the ongoing attacks on...