ROLAND [ROLAND DE LA PLATIERE] , JEAN MARIE French statesman, was born at Thizy on Feb. 18, 1734. Intending to seek his fortune abroad, he went on foot to Nantes, but illness obliged him to give up his project. After work ing as a clerk, he joined a relative who was inspector of manufac tures at Amiens, and himself rose to the position of inspector.
In 178o he married Manon Jeanne Phlipon famous in history as Madame Roland. She was the daughter of Gratien Phlipon, a Paris engraver. About the year 1785 the Ro lands moved to Lyons. A correspondence sprang up with Brissot and other friends of the Revolution in Paris, and in 1791 the Rolands settled there.
Jean Roland became a member of the Jacobin Club. Madame Roland's salon soon became the rendezvous of Brissot, Petion, Robespierre and other leaders of the popular movement, above all of Buzot, whom she loved with platonic enthusiasm. In person Madame Roland was attractive though not beautiful ; her ideas were clear and far-reaching, her manner calm, and her power of observation extremely acute.
On March 23, 1792, Roland was appointed minister of the interior. As a minister of the crown Roland exhibited a bourgeois brusqueness of manner and a remarkable combination of political prejudice with administrative ability. The decrees against the emigrants and the non-juring clergy still remained under the veto of the king. A letter was penned by Madame Roland and addressed by her husband to Louis. It remained unanswered. Thereupon, in full council and in the king's presence, Roland read his letter aloud. It contained many and terrible truths as to the royal refusal to sanction the decrees and as to the king's position in the State ; but it was inconsistent with a minister's position, disrespectful if not insolent in tone. Roland's dismissal followed. He then read the letter to the Assembly ; it was ordered to be printed, became the manifestq of disaffection, and was cir culated everywhere.
After the insurrection of Aug. so, Roland was recalled to power, one of his colleagues being Danton, but he was dismayed by the progress of the Revolution. He was above all a provincial, and was soon in opposition to the party of the Mountain. He was hostile to the insurrectional commune of Paris, and proposed transferring the Government to Blois ; he attacked Robespierre and his friends. His neglect to seal the iron chest discovered in the Tuileries, which contained the proofs of Louis XVI.'s relations with the enemies of France, led to the accusation that he had destroyed a part of these documents. Finally, in the trial of the king he demanded, with the Girondists, that the sentence should be pronounced by a vote of the whole people, and not simply by the Convention. He resigned office on Jan. 23, 1793, two days
after the king's execution.
The Rolands remained in Paris. Once Madame Roland ap peared personally in the Assembly to repel the falsehoods of an accuser, and secured acquittal. But violence succeeded violence, and early on the morning of June 1, she was arrested and im prisoned in the Abbaye. Roland himself escaped secretly to Rouen. Released for an hour from the Abbaye, Madame Roland was again arrested and thrown among the horrors of Sainte Pelagie. Finally, she was transferred to the Conciergerie. In prison she won the affections of the guards, and was allowed the privilege of writing materials and the occasional visits of devoted friends.
She there wrote her Appel a l'impartiale posterite, those memoirs which display a strange alternation between self-laudation and patriotism, between the trivial and the sublime. On Nov. 8, 1793, she was guillotined. Before her execution, she bowed before the clay statue of Liberty erected in the Place de la Revolution, uttering her famous apostrophe—"O Liberty! what crimes are committed in thy name!" When Roland heard of his wife's con demnation, he wandered some miles from his refuge in Rouen; maddened by despair and grief, he wrote a few words expressive of his horror at those massacres which could only be inspired by the enemies of France, protesting that "from the moment when I learned that they had murdered my wife I would no longer remain in a world stained with enemies." He affixed the paper to his breast, and unsheathing a sword-stick fell upon the weapon, which pierced his heart, on Nov. Io, 1793.
Madame Roland's Memoires, first printed in 1820, have been edited among others by P. Faugere (1864) , by C. A. Dauban (1864) , by J. Claretie (1884), and by C. Perroud (1905). Some of her Lettres inedites have been published by C. A. Dauban (1867) ; C. Perroud published a critical edition of her Lettres (1900-02), and a new series (1767-80) in 1913-15. See also C. A. Dauban, Etude sur Madame Roland et son temps (1864) ; V. Lamy, Deux femmes celebres, Madame Roland et Charlotte Corday (1884) ; C. Bader, Madame Roland, d'apres des lettres et des manuscrits inedits (1892) ; A. J. Lambert, Le manage de Madame Roland, trois annees de correspondance amoureuse (1896) ; Austin Dobson, Four Frenchwomen (1890) ; articles by C. Perroud in the review La Revolution francaise (1896-99) ; U. Birch, Madame Roland, a Study in Revolution (1917).