SOURCE: Macarthur, Elizabeth. “Between the Republic of Virtue and the Republic of Letters: Marie-Jeanne Roland Practices Rousseau.” Yale French Studies no. 92 (1997): 184-203.

In this essay, Macarthur explores the relations between republicanism and liberalism in Revolutionary France, using the life and work of Roland as an example.

… that she asked for paper, a pen and ink at the foot of the scaffold, … that's impossible, that's petty, that's puerile. … [I]n order to confess her faith in virtue, didn't she have enough ink in her blood, in the blood that she was about to shed?

—Sainte-Beuve

On 8 November 1793, Marie-Jeanne Roland was sentenced to death and guillotined by the Jacobin-controlled Convention. For the crime of participating in public life, her punishment was death, permanent removal from the body politic. As a long-time reader of Rousseau, she had tried to put his writings into practice in friendship, marriage, childrearing; only her entry...