SOURCE: Walker, Lesley H. “Sweet and Consoling Virtue: The Memoirs of Madame Roland.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 34, no. 3 (2001): 403-19.

In this essay, Walker argues that Roland depicts herself in the character of a virtuous young woman familiar to readers of such eighteenth-century novels as Samuel Richardson's Clarissa and Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Julie.

Her great soul, superior to all events, turned inward and found the force to suppress not only the natural horror of death, but also to taste, if possible, the pleasure of this last sacrifice for her country.¹

Luc-Antoine Champagneux, Oeuvres de J. M. Ph. Roland

In June of 1793, as the French Revolution radicalized and the Jacobins consolidated their political power, Marie-Jeanne Roland, along with other Girondin sympathizers, was arrested and incarcerated. From prison, she wrote what we now know as the Mémoires de Madame Roland, edited and published by Louis-Augustin-Guillaume Bosc, after her death, in 1795. Rather than culling...