SOURCE: Szymanek, Brigitte. “French Women's Revolutionary Writings: Madame Roland or the Pleasure of the Mask.” Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 15, no. 1 (spring 1996): 99-122.

In this essay, Szymanek looks at the conflicting accounts of appropriate feminine behavior Roland presents in her memoirs and letters.

Quoi! ce héros fut donc vraiment une femme?”

(What! This hero was really a woman then?)¹

On November 8, 1793, the members of the Revolutionary Tribunal ordered the execution of Marie-Jeanne Phlipon Roland, the wife of former Girondist Minister of the Interior, Jean-Marie Roland de la Platière. She was accused of conspiring with her husband to propagate “antirevolutionary” ideas through a so-called “Office of Public Opinion,” a patriotic educational program initiated by Roland and the Girondists while he was in power.² Madame Roland's execution furthered the effort by the Mountain, the more radical revolutionary faction, to annihilate the more moderate Gironde. It was also part...