SOURCE: Gelfand, Elissa. “A Response to the Void: Madame Roland's ‘Mémoires Particuliers’ and Her Imprisonment.” Romance Notes XX (fall 1979): 75-80.

In this essay, Gelfand uses the work of Michel Foucault on the eighteenth-century rethinking of the prison system to show how Roland's relationship to her audience, in addition to her observations on prison life and the justice system, reflects the model of crime and punishment in place after the Revolution.

The social consciousness of the eighteenth-century philosophers, and in particular Rousseau's idea of any crime as an offense against society, accelerated changes in the function of prisons later adopted by post-industrial France. In extraordinary detail, Michel Foucault documents the following general shifts as occurring in the eighteenth century: 1) imprisonment, formerly punitive in purpose, became corrective and normative; 2) the relationship between the punisher and the punished changed with the movement towards individualized rehabilitation in conformity with social models...