French Revolution: Radicals (part 6): The Secret Female Journalist

Vulgar History Podcast

French Revolution: Radicals (Part 6): The Secret Female Journalist

May 21, 2025

Ann Foster:
Hello, and welcome to Vulgar History, a feminist women’s history comedy podcast. My name is Ann Foster, and this is part six of our miniseries about radical women of the French Revolution. Today’s topic is Manon Roland, who’s sometimes known as Madame Roland, which, if you’ve ever come across her name, it might have been as Madame Roland. That’s how she’s often written about by people from that time and people writing about that time. And we’re going to be touching on some topics we’ve looked at in, I think, every episode so far in this miniseries about the radical women of the French Revolution, because these are women who were all living through the same events, and the same events were massively impactful to so many people. And today’s story, she’s on the other side from a lot of the women we’ve looked at so far. 

Just to super briefly recap, in the French Revolution, and we’ll get into this in the episode as well, how it kind of coalesced, like, first, just everybody’s angry. Everybody’s angry for various reasons; there was a bad yield of grains, so there’s not enough bread, so everybody’s hungry, they’re hangry. People are mad that the royal family and the aristocracy, and the nobles are all living this 1 percent, 0.1 percent, life off in Versailles, while other people are starving because of the no bread. Things are primed and ready for a big revolution to kick off. At first, everyone has all their different motivations, and they coalesce together to be like, “Let’s just change society.” And then as that change happened, the different factions sort of coalesced around each other until there was really two main groups. 

There’s the Jacobins; their whole deal was they wanted to get rid of the royal family entirely and just have a republic like America did, because this is, well it all kicked off in 1789, about 10 years after the American Revolution started so people in France were thinking, “Let’s be like them, philosophically. Let’s have a democracy like in ancient Rome.” Everybody was obsessed with ancient Rome and ancient Greece at this time. That’s the Jacobins. The other main faction that’s developed is the Girondins, and their thing is, “Let’s keep the monarch. Let’s still have a king, but let’s also have an elected representative government,” sort of like what England did at that time and still does now, where you have a monarch, but you also have elected representatives. These are kind of the two groups of people. And I can’t overestimate or overemphasize how much that was really important to the people living through this in their time, although now, myself and I would presume other people looking back are just like, “Yeah, fuck yeah! French Revolution! Power to the people,” whatever. It’s like, ugh, it’s more complicated than that. Wouldst that it were simpler. But that’s why we’re in part, I think, seven of the series about the radical women of the French Revolution, which is a small portion of a larger series about the decades of revolution happening in France and other places as well. It was a complicated situation, as it turns out. 

My two main sources for today’s episode about Manon Roland was an essay from the ever-useful reference work, Women and World History. The essay was written by Abel A. Alves. And then also a book, Liberty: The Lives and Times of Six Women in Revolutionary France by Lucy Moore, as well as the Wikipedia entry for Manon Roland. Like an episode we did last year about Madame Tussaud, who became famous under that name, which was, again, her married name because Madame means “Mrs.” in French. Manon Roland was not born Manon Roland; she was, in fact, born Marie-Jeanne Phlipon, and this is, like some other people in this series, her name was technically Marie. Like, seemingly 99 percent of everyone in France was, but she was known as Manon, was her nickname, thank goodness, because there’s too many Maries in the story already. Although if you are following along on the Vulgar History Bingo card, which you can get for free on my Patreon, you can cross off the square, “Someone is called Marie.” 

So, Marie-Jeanne Phlipon was born in Paris on March 17, 1754. Her father, Pierre Gatien Phlipon, was a skilled engraver who employed a number of apprentices and sold intricately detailed snuff boxes. Snuff boxes are the little, beautiful sort of jewelled cases that you keep your snuff in, which is like, tobacco that you put up your nose or in your mouth. You might have seen that in Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story, it must have been there, because Queen Charlotte, the real Queen Charlotte, was a real fiend. She loved her snuff. Her father, Pierre, was also selling frames, I guess picture frames, as well as watch cases to wealthy members of the French royal court. So, they’re of this merchant class, but he’s got connections to the French royal court because he’s selling these beautiful things that they wanted. This is sort of, like, in the two weeks ago episode when we talked about Pauline Léon, her family were chocolatiers, which again, were merchants, but they were selling luxury goods to the wealthy people, so you got to interact with them in that context. Manon’s mother was Marguerite Bimont, the daughter of a haberdasher. And if you’re thinking, “What is a haberdasher?” other than a fun name for a job, it’s somebody who sells men’s clothes. So, she’s solidly from this mercantile class of people. So, she’s not on the streets with the market ladies selling fruit; she’s growing up in, kind of, a higher working-class sort of level. 

But she was born in 1754, so this is decades before the French Revolution kicked off, although, as we all now know, from the newest Hunger Games book, Sunrise on the Reaping, a revolution, a rebellion doesn’t just happen. It takes decades of work, decades of people just having their lives screwed over and being mad about it for things to finally erupt. So, although she’s growing up pre-Revolution, those vibes are still very much around. 

So, her mother, Marguerite, was the wife of a master artisan, that’s how Pierre is described. And so, wives of master artisans, Marguerite, the mom, divided her time between household duties, like running the house, et cetera, making sure there’s food on the table and cleaning things, as well as helping her husband in the shop. Manon was their only child who survived infancy because before we had lots of the medical knowledge we have now, there was a lot more child death than there used to be, because they didn’t have stuff like vaccines and fluoride in the water, and things we’re very lucky to have now. Anyway, so Manon had six siblings who had died in infancy or in childhood; she’s the only one who survived. I’ve mentioned this on the podcast before, but in terms of when you look at places where medical knowledge is not great, people are starving, things are challenging, if there’s like a lot of child death, girls tend to survive more than boys do. That’s just a medical fact for you to know. 

So, the Phlipon family lived in a comfortable environment on the Quai de l’Horloge in Paris, which means something about clocks, so maybe that’s kind of like, clockmaker neighbourhood because he was a master artisan. Although for the first two years of her life, because her mother was busy helping to run the household and be in the shop, she couldn’t be there breastfeeding her so Manon grew up the first two years of her life with a wet nurse in Arpajon, a small town southeast of Paris. And if you’re new to this podcast, I’ve come to really like to mention the names of villages and cities where people were, because so often, I hear from somebody who has lived in one of these places or has visited one of these places, and they’re excited to hear the name. So, shout out to everyone in Arpajon, the small town southeast of Paris. 

Manon was a smart little kid. She was taught to read when she was not quite four years old, and she took to books with a passion. She was a really… I think I’ve known kids like this for sure. I, myself, I don’t think I was a kid like this, but I know that both of my older sisters were, and I have some nieces who are like this as well, who are just really into learning facts and figures. This is what we’re going to see throughout her life; Manon is just a real book nerd. She loves learning things, and she loves telling people the things that she’s learned. So, her parents, that wasn’t their vibe. They weren’t super into reading and talking about the facts they learned, but they supported her interest. They supplied her with tutors to help her learn new and interesting things and to really lean into the clear interest she had in reading and her curiosity about scholarly things. And tutors came to the house because this is in an era before there was school available for people. So, this also kind of shows how wealthy the family was; you’d have to pay for these tutors to come in. So, they came into the family home, and she learned subjects including calligraphy, history, geography and music. Her father, again, the master artisan, so he’s obviously got quite a lot of artistic skill, he taught her drawing and art history. They had an uncle who was a priest who gave her some Latin lessons, and her grandmother, who had been a governess before, took care of spelling and grammar. So, I do appreciate this. They brought in tutors for some things, but they cut costs by having family members teach her things that they happened to know. 

She also, growing up, her mother, if you’re wondering “Where’s Marguerite in all of this?” Manon learned how to run a household because this is a time and a place where that’s all anyone would have ever expected her to do. And so, they wanted to prepare her for what life had in store for her, which was, she was going to marry somebody, have some children and run a household. So, she was being taught those skills as well. Practical, because that’s what everyone expected every girl in her position to grow up and do. 

So, while her dad, the master artisan Pierre, was selling his snuff boxes and stuff to the elite, he is coming into contact with them. So, there might have been, this is like people writing about Manon extrapolating, but this feels true to me, like, why wouldn’t they have thought this? So, her parents might have hoped that the more refined she is, the more educated she is, she might attract a husband higher than above her station, like somebody wealthier, especially because her dad was interacting with these wealthy elites as well. And that was a good plan, because in this era, having a brilliant wife was an asset; that’s what people who were trying to find a partner, what men were looking for. This was seen, if you had a brilliant scholarly wife, that was an asset to a socially and politically active man, which a lot of these elite men were. So, Manon was really being prepared not just to be eventually a wife and to run a household, but also to be the sort of person that a man like this would want to marry. So, she was trained in singing, viola, and guitar so that she could better entertain when she inevitably married some guy, was running a household, and was called upon to clearly not just prepare and host dinner parties, but to be the entertainment at those parties herself as well. And she was up to the challenge. She was skilled at everything. 

As she was growing up… So, I mentioned that her father was wealthy enough to have apprentices who he was teaching how to make snuff boxes and things. Her father’s workshop was attached to the family home, and his adolescent apprentices were part of the household, they were around all the time. So, they would have seen her as she was a young girl growing into a teenager; she would have interacted with them, like, they were adjacent to the house in which she was growing up. A lot of what we know about Manon is that she did in fact write her memoirs—and I’ll explain to you much later the context in which she wrote these memoirs—but she did write, and we believe women, that she was sexually harassed by one of these apprentices who tried to make her fondle him. She told her mother about the incident, and you know what? Marguerite believed her daughter. Always nice to see. And from that point forward, Manon and the apprentices, they were more closely watched; she was never left alone with them again. Which, honestly, for a person in this olden times era is good, is surprisingly helpful and kind and correct behaviour by way of her mother. And in today’s world, that’s also good, kind and correct behaviour that you don’t always see. So, like, these are good parents. Again, if you’re a new listener, I’m emphasizing this because we don’t come across a lot of supportive, kind parents on this podcast/in history in general. So, good job, Pierre and Marguerite, given the constructs that you’re living within. 

So, her mother, Marguerite, was very devoutly Catholic, and so Manon was raised this way as well. Under her mother’s influence, and also because she was this real bookworm, she liked to read everything around her and the only books that she had access to— And this is a time where books were really expensive and really valuable and really rare so there wouldn’t have been the local public library to go and get the latest bestsellers or whatever. She was just reading the books that were in her house or that she could acquire, and these were the Bible, and books about the Bible, Christian-themed books, which is great because that was her interest, and that’s what she read. When she was just 7 years old, she apparently astounded the parish priest with her knowledge of theological detail as she prepared for her first communion. Like she’s… I’ve known little kids like this, especially little girls sometimes, who just really are so smart and when they’re little enough, they just like to explain to you what they know, and I find it so charming and so lovely. But also like, are we looking at a spectrum, an autism spectrum-type situation, some sort of neuro-spiciness around Manon? Perhaps. And I find it really charming that her parents were supporting this, and everyone was impressed with her, this little know-it-all kid. 

So, when she was 9 years old, and again, like her whole life is in terms of her education, this really self-guided. She reminds me of those kids you read about sometimes, who were like, “This kid is 12 years old and just got admitted to Harvard!” She’s super-speeding through an educational arc that usually takes people a couple of decades, but she’s just 9 years old at this point. So, when she was 9 years old, she ran across a French translation of Plutarch’s Lives. And Plutarch, just to remind myself and all of you, not just Plutarch Heavensbee from The Hunger Games series, Plutarch was the Greek philosopher and historian. He lived an incredibly long time ago, and he was a philosopher, and she was just like, “Oh my god, Greek philosophy!” All she’d been reading was theology. And she’s like, “[gasps] A new topic, how exciting!” And so, this began her interest in philosophy, aged 9. 

So, in her memoirs, Manon reminisced that this introduction to Plutarch made her a believer in the Republican form of government through the examples of ancient Athens and the Roman Republics that Plutarch wrote about, which is also… On the one hand, this is Manon’s memoir, so what better source do we have than her? But also, she might be… Is she remembering correctly her 9-year-old self being like, “Oh my god, I’m now a believer in the Republican form of government.”? Everything we know about her, I kind of do believe it, but it does seem implausible, which makes it seem almost more true in some way. Anyway, so she’s 9 years old. She was born in what? 1754. So, this is like, just in the 1760s, it’s still 25 years before the French Revolution or so. But already she was just like, yeah, I think we should have a Republican form of government, which is what the Jacobins and Girondins talk about much, much later. So, she’s just this little kid, and she’s got it all figured out. The vibes are a bit like Natalie Portman as Padmé Amidala in the Star Wars prequels, just a little girl, but it’s like, “You know what? Let’s put her in charge.” 

So, at age 11, she begged her parents to allow her to enter a convent for the salvation of her soul. So, although she had discovered Greek philosophy, she was still very, very, very Catholic and religious and concerned about the salvation of her soul, which… I read Jinger Duggar’s book a few years ago, her first book, where she was talking about how she was a little kid—she’s Jinger Duggar from, like, the Duggar family from TLC fame—and she talked about the way that religion was described to her. She was a really anxious little kid because she just felt like, if you do anything wrong, you’re going to go to hell. You’re going to disappoint everybody, and it really exacerbated just her being kind of a nervous, anxious kid to begin with. And then the religious stuff just made it all worse for her. And I think Manon might be having a similar thing here where she’s so smart and she’s so interested and she’s so curious and she’s reading all this religious theology at age 11, it was kind of making her panic thinking like, “I’m going to go to hell.” It was exacerbating maybe some tendencies she might already have towards anxiety. 

So, her parents were still trying to be supportive of their daughter. They’re like, “Okay?” Like, they’ve been raising her to eventually become a housewife. But they’re like, “If you want to be a nun, you know what? You do you, we support you.” And again, parents of the year on this podcast. So, they agreed that you go to a convent, but on the condition that you try being a student there for one year before making a final decision, which is similar to in White Lotus Season 3, where Victoria told Piper, “Oh, you want to join this Buddhist monk order? Spend one night there and get back to me.” Although here it was, like, “Spend one year there and come back to us.” 

And so, May 7, 1765, Manon Phlipon entered Paris’ convent of the Ladies of the Congregation. She was so advanced beyond that of other girls at the school, so they quickly placed her in the older girls’ classes. And well, which would be, she’s 11, so the older girls would be teenagers. And she made two friends there who were her friends for the rest of her life, 18-year-old Henriette Cannet and her sister, 14-year-old Sophie Cannet. These were the daughters of a fairly comfortable provincial family of lesser nobles from Amiens. Again, she’s interacting with people who are kind of a station higher than what her situation was, and they all got along. I guess they were all just nerds together. After one year, she returned from the convent and was like, “Actually, you’re right.” Like Piper on White Lotus Season 3, she’s like, “Okay, yeah, that wasn’t for me.” But she decided to leave the convent, and she got not much tutoring after that because her parents had provided— Well, honestly, she probably had as much education as anyone in her life was available to give her. She had learned all the things any adults knew around her. So, she didn’t receive much formal education beyond this, age 12, but she embarked on a self-guided educational journey. 

She read, she was able to, I guess she’s made some friends with the local bookshop or librarian or something, she found more books to read. She read books on every subject she could find, history, mathematics, agriculture, law, and she continued with her passion for the classics. She loved, again, Plutarch; he wrote a book with biographies of famous Greeks and Romans, and she loved reading about them. And part of what we know about her life at this point was the letters that she wrote to the Cannet sisters, Henriette and Sophie. At this point, she was telling them, based on what she was reading, the more that she interacted with different kinds of literature, the more she started having doubts about both Christianity as a religion and also French society in general. And this is why people now in the year 2025 are like, “Let’s not let children read diverse books. Let’s not let them learn things because then they might come to conclusions on their own that are opposite of what society wants them to think.” She was doing this back in the 1700s. 

So, at around the same time, so she’s, like, 12, 13 years old, her grandmother, grand-mère Phlipon, her father’s elderly mother, who remembers she was a governess before, she decided to take Manon on a visit to visit Madame de Boismorel, a wealthy noblewoman who grand-mère used to work for as a governess. So, she’d been a servant in this household, but they were still kind of friends afterwards. So, Manon and grand-mère went to the court of Versailles, which is where Madame de Boismorel was hanging out. And this was Manon’s first, although her father interacted with these elites and Manon was friends with Henriette and Sophie, she had not witnessed what it was like to be in these elite spaces before. So, she was shocked when they went in to meet her and the noblewoman had grand-mère sit on a low stool while Madame de Boismorel and her lap dog sat on a sofa. Manon was just like, “That’s my elderly grand-mère, and this woman’s making her sit on a low stool. This is fucked up. This is not right. I don’t like this social structure.” So, she was developing, just seeing this really stuck out in her memory. She wrote about it in her memoirs. She just had this aversion to the traditions of a French society built on rank, privilege, and limited opportunities, which is what a lot of people are raging against in the eventual French Revolution. And she’s just like, “Wow, this is fucked up! What’s going on in the world? I need to find answers, which I will find in philosophy.” And god help us all, she turned to the works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. 

We’ve discussed Rousseau in past episodes of this miniseries. To quickly summarize his point of view and my thoughts on him: Rousseau had ideas that people should spend more time in nature, and everything should be more natural, and also that what is more natural than women being subservient to men? And the highest, most wonderful thing any woman could do is to marry a man and have babies and breastfeed them and raise the next generation of French children. That’s a lot of what I’ve taken out of the writings of Rousseau, which were so popular, he was really the Joe Rogan of his time; people were really into what he was throwing down. He also had democratic ideas, and those ideas of his strongly influenced Manon and influenced her thinking about politics and social justice and also, in all the readings she had done, because this was the 1760s, getting into the 1770s, she had not yet encountered anything challenging the concept that what women should do is get married and have babies. That is the consensus of everybody… Just everybody who is thinking about society, this is what they’re all thinking about; women shouldn’t do anything. 

So again, it’s just this really interesting situation that we find Manon in where she’s so clever and she’s so curious and she’s reading so widely and she is a girl, she’s a teenage girl, and she knows that all of society, nothing that she’s read discounts the fact to her that the highest calling that she as a girl, as a woman, has is to run a household and raise children. I do want to clarify, no shade at all to people who are running households and raising children. I think that if that’s someone’s choice and if that’s something that brings you fulfillment and joy, and that’s your calling, it’s wonderful. And I think anyone, women, any gender, everybody should be able to choose what they want to do. 

So, Manon, who is this person who in another 100 years from now, 100 years from when she’s living, if she was living today, if she’s living even in, like, the 1800s, the 1900s, like, she could have gone to university, she could have become an academic, she could have written books. But there is no example of that for her to see that that was a possibility. Even a couple of decades from this point, Mary Wollstonecraft, Olympe de Gouges, they were publishing really important books about how women should have rights too. But that stuff hadn’t come out yet. And so, Manon was just developing her own worldview and her own understanding based on what she was reading, which was a bunch of things by people like Rousseau and Plutarch, and it’s just a really fascinating situation to find yourself in. And I kind of think, like, I sympathize with what— Or I empathize. I try to understand what would it have been like if I had been raised having, like a lot of people are still raised now, with an understanding that all girls should be present as feminine and should marry men and should have children? There’s lots of cultures like that still today in 2025. I’m just glad I didn’t grow up in any of those cultures, because frankly, my house is incredibly messy, I don’t have children, I never wanted to have children. I am happily living here with my cat and doing a podcast, and I’m glad that not very many people are judging me for that. 

So, anyway, Manon is doing what she can to what do you call it? It’s like, trying to square the circle, trying to circle the square? Just trying to make everything make sense. It’s like, she’s so close to getting to a point where she’s like, “Oh, women should be able to do more stuff,” but she never… She doesn’t reach that point because if you don’t see someone doing something, someone like you doing something, then you just don’t know someone like you can do something. If you want to listen back to an older episode of this podcast I did with my friend Gina Berry, when we were talking about Hatshepsut, who in part of that conversation we were talking about how Hatshepsut saw her mother and her aunts and other women deriving power and being respected. And she saw, “Oh, this is possible. This is a possible route that I could do as a woman. I could become Pharaoh.” And what my friend Gina said was that she didn’t see that it was possible, she saw that it was inevitable. Once you see somebody succeeding like that, you’re like, “Oh, that can be me too.” Anyway, Manon didn’t have women role models to look up to, and so she’s just figuring it all out by herself. She’s a real, her energy is a bit like… It’s a bit “not like other girls” is her energy, but she was still friends with Henriette and Sophie, so she was friends with some girls. 

So, by age 14, she’s reached the point that some people reach by age 35, doing their doctoral thesis. 14-year-old Manon is, she went to circulating libraries. So, there were libraries! Okay. So, I guess before she was just reading the books in her house, now she’s able to go to libraries, I guess because she’s basically graduated school. And she’s reading works of the Enlightenment, such as the Encyclopedia edited by Denis Diderot. So, this Encyclopedia was highly critical of miracles, magic, and religion, religious dogma. It was also highly laudatory. And by laudatory, I mean like it was complimentary, it said like, “These things are important,” and the things it said were important were practical, profitable, and beneficial activities of artisans like her dad. So, this encyclopedia talked about the importance and the expertise required to do things to make cloth, to make gunpowder, and just saying how these things were more important than religion, for instance. And Manon was like, “Oh, interesting! Yeah, I want to learn about how things work.” So, this is where she’s, like, doing an engineering degree for herself, so she taught herself algebra, geometry, physics, and natural history to understand the technological innovations that were happening around her in the world. She did also continue to attend church throughout her life. So, although she was questioning religious dogma, she was still Christian, she was still religious. And the benefit that she saw of religion, like Christianity, was as a means of “Promoting morality and order among the mass of ordinary people.” 

So, this is where I need to explain to you that Manon is also a real snob. She was raised in this artisan class with her father, who was an artisan, and her mother was the daughter of haberdashers, and she saw herself as being morally superior to a lot of other people. We’ll see this throughout her life. And she was clearly smarter than almost anybody, but she also thought that she was more morally upright than other people. So, she just saw the people of Paris where she was growing up, like the market ladies and other people we’ve talked about in other podcasts, she just saw them as unruly and unintelligent, and they needed guidance and they needed someone like her to tell them what to do, but because she was a girl, she couldn’t tell them what to do. So, she’s like, “They should go to church and then church will tell them what to do.” Because she thought they don’t have reason, they’re not smart enough to figure out for themselves that they should have morality. So, church is what she thought was a good prescription for the poverty-stricken, marginalized people of Paris. 

She also felt that the Christian religion provided these people with comfort because of all the social problems that were plaguing them, like underemployment, price inflation, homelessness, increased taxation. And to be fair, a sense of community and going to church can bring people that sort of comfort, so she’s not wrong. She’s just also, I need to be clear, an asshole. But I don’t hold that against her. Throughout all of this, she is bucking up against, there’s only so much that she can do as a young woman. So, she wrote to her friends, the Cannet sisters, that she was frustrated. She wished that she could be living in ancient Roman times, where women had more opportunities to do more stuff. And we’re going to have some episodes coming up later, spoiler, about what it was like for women in Roman times. And I have to say, it was better than this. Women in ancient Roman times… Things weren’t great, things weren’t perfect, but they had a lot more opportunity than what Manon was dealing with in her world at this time. 

She also started, because her father had this snuff box business where her mother worked too, and she would work the counter in the store sometimes, so she would meet the clients, these sort of upper-class men who needed their snuff boxes and whatever. A lot of them were scholars and so she would chat with them and just try and learn from them as well. And she started having sort of pen pal relationships with some of them, like, she started writing letters back and forth with these men who were sort of her mentors, sort of her intellectual mentors. Not in a creepy way, I want to emphasize, but these guys were just like, “Woah, this kid! This little Doogie Howser kid… Sure, we will answer her questions about philosophy and republicanism.” 

And so, years go by. She’s by now 20 years old, which was, at this point, for somebody of her social rank, unusual that she was not engaged or married yet, but that’s not because of lack of interest. She had received at least 10 marriage proposals from men, and she rejected all of them. She had a brief romance with a writer named Pahin de la Blancherie, who was… I told you before that she had these intellectual mentors, and they weren’t creepy, this one was. So, she was 20 and he was a 56-year-old widower, and they corresponded about philosophy, and he, Pahin de la Blancherie, asked her to come and live with him on his estate so they could study philosophy together. And she was like, “Well, you know, I might consider marrying you, but just in a platonic way so we can be scholars together.” But he, I think, ghosted her, and then this wounded her greatly. So actually, maybe it wasn’t creepy. I don’t know how creepy Pahin de la Blancherie was if he was legitimately just like, “Hey, come hang with me in my house and we’ll talk about philosophy,” or if she took it the wrong way. But anyway, that did not work out. 

So, now she’s 21. Her mother, Marguerite, suddenly died of, I didn’t write down, and I don’t know, but let’s assume tuberculosis, something like that. And so, Manon, like so many people, had to pivot from doing what she wanted to do, which was scholarly pursuits, into helping manage this household because that was her mother’s unpaid job. Now Manon had to take on these tasks because her father’s fortunes, although he had this, like, seemingly prosperous snuff box business, he had made poor investments and what is described here as “An overzealous dedication to lotteries,” which is just gambling problems. So, she needed to help out in the shop more, around the house, because the family was in need of money. And spending more time in the shop, she met more of his customers who were impressed with her wit and her intellect. So, I will say like, yes, was she a know-it-all, snob, asshole? Yes. But she was also charming and witty. So, she got to meet some more people and learn some more, like hang out with more intellectuals working in the shop. And then in the one hour a day where she wasn’t running the household or working in the shop, she used her leisure time to continue her own studies and just, you know, lifelong learning. 

In 1776, she was doing her doctoral thesis, like, this would be the topic. She began an in-depth and extensive reading of Rousseau, everything he’d ever written; his fiction, his philosophy, his essays. She really just dedicated herself to really becoming a Rousseau-ologist. So, another, like, part of what drew her to him as well was he emphasized that civilization and the arts— I told you that Rousseau’s whole thing was like, “We should all just be natural. We should live like how our ancestors were, natural.” So, he said, “Civilization and the arts had hurt humanity by diverting natural instincts, which provided for human survival in the wild.” Like, he was advocating for what seems to me is, sort of, paleo diet, barefoot running, like, don’t take medication type vibe. Anyway, but she was just like, “I fuck with this guy. I like what this guy has to say.” Even though he said women were second-class people, that they should only ever have babies, and that was it, but she found a lot in his writing that she found attractive. Again, I’m going to learn more about Rousseau in a month or two because I’m going to do a special episode, So This Asshole: Rousseau, and maybe I will come to like some things about him as well. But as far as I’ve come across so far in this series, don’t care for him. 

What she also got out of Rousseau’s works was what’s described as a “nonbiblical religious sensibility.” So, she also started worshiping nature, kind of like, who is God if you divorce it from the Bible? It’s kind of like “The universe is sending me a sign,” like, that kind of religion. So, rather than believing the teachings of any single book, like the Bible, she felt that people should just feel the divine presence in the beauty and order of nature. Rousseau also wrote about how “social ranks based on birth were human contrivances.” So, he was against those, and she was like, yes, because she was very much against, like, after seeing grand-mère made to sit in that low stool. So, Rousseau was also kind of against stratified social classes. She and he thought that instead of having a hierarchy based on how much money do you have, it should be based on talent and intellect, which, of course someone like Manon would think because she was really, really smart, and this would be a pyramid that she would be on the top of. So, she wrote in a letter to her friend, Sophie Cannet, “Rousseau lifted a veil from her tired eyes so she was finally able to see the magnificent scene of the universe.” 

At this time, there’s various contests by different… essay contests. People could just write their own philosophy papers into these contests. And she decided to enter one of these contests, anonymously, because she knew that as a woman, maybe they wouldn’t take her entry seriously. So, she entered this essay contest sponsored by the Academy of Besançon. And maybe this is why she chose this contest, because what you had to do is write an essay on the topic of “Would the education of women make men better citizens?” In her entry, she argued that women should be educated, but that was on their own merits, not just because that would improve men being better citizens. And for some reason, the sources I read didn’t know why, the Academy decided not to name a winner that year, which maybe there was a tie or maybe they didn’t think any of them were good, but her anonymous entry received high praise from the jury. 

That same year, while in her father’s shop selling sniff boxes, she met 42-year-old Jean-Marie Roland de la Platière. So, she was 22, he was 42. His job was the Inspector de Manufacturers in Picardy, which meant he was in charge of quality control of the products of local manufacturers and craftsmen. She had been reading about how manufacturing crafts and tools are more important than religion and other things, so I’m sure she found that job interesting. He was intelligent, well-read, and well-travelled, but he was also known as being, “A difficult human being, reluctant to take into consideration any opinions but his own and easily irritated.” So, an asshole. Because of this, although he had some good ideas about economic reforms, people didn’t take on his ideas because he was really annoying about it. Do you see where this is headed? Because she fell for this guy. 

His family, the Rolands, had once belonged to the lower nobility, but no longer had a title. So, although they didn’t have a title, he was a step above her family, the Phlipon family of artisans and shopkeepers. He proposed marriage to her in 1778, and she refused because she said no because of our social class differences. But I guess he stuck at it, and a year later, she did accept. The wedding plans were initially kept secret because he expected that her family would object because the marriage was considered inappropriate socially due to the large difference in social status between him and her, in the sense that he was so much higher socially than she was. But they did eventually get married, February 1780, and they lived in Paris, where they met, where they were in the first place, they just moved in together, I guess. 

Jean-Marie worked at the Ministry of the Interior doing his manufacturing inspections job, and Manon stepped up. Just like her mother had helped her father, just like she had helped her father, she was like, “I’m going to help you out with your job.” So, she worked more or less as his secretary, while in her spare time, she attended lectures on natural history in the Jardin des Plantes, which means Garden of Plants, the botanical garden of Paris. While she was there attending these lectures, she met Louis-Augustin Bosc d’Antic, a natural historian who became a close friend and was a close friend for the rest of her life. She also, at around this time, made friends with a parliamentarian named François Xavier Lanthenas. I’m saying a lot of these names just because I enjoy saying French names, but some of them will come up later. 

After a year in Paris, Manon and Jean-Marie moved to Amiens, the provincial capital of Picardy. Because remember, he was in charge of the manufacturers in Picardy. On October 4, 1781, she had a child. She gave birth to their daughter, whose name was Eudora. And against the doctor’s orders and the social customs of her class, and at the time she decided to breastfeed her daughter herself, rather than sending her out to a wet nurse. Remember, she herself had been raised for the first two years of her life with a wet nurse in that town outside of Paris. And this is because of Rousseau; I keep mentioning Rousseau and breastfeeding, but this was important to Rousseau. He saw breastfeeding as central to the development of human bonds. And Manon, just like nerds today who have children, she read all she could about nursing and medical dictionaries and in the encyclopedia, and just tried to learn everything she could from books about how to raise a child. She hired a maid named Marguerite Fleury, who also remained her friend for the rest of her life. So, as much as she is a snob and an asshole, when you became a friend with her, it was for life. She was a real ride or die type vibe of person. So, Marguerite Fleury came in to help with childcare and housekeeping, which gave Manon time for her intellectual and business activities. 

When she later wrote her memoirs, again, I’ll tell you why she wrote her memoirs and when it actually happens. But in those memoirs, she included candid information about the childbirth and problems she had with breastfeeding, which made her one of the first women of this time to write openly about such matters. And if you listened to the episode from a few months ago about the painter Adélaïde Labille-Guiard, one of her paintings that gained a lot of attention was showing an upper-class woman breastfeeding her child. This is kind of like, breastfeeding was a real… To have an upper-class woman performing the act of breastfeeding was controversial at this time, but it was something that Rousseau was advocating, and people loved Rousseau, so I guess more people were doing it. 

At this time, the couple lived a very quiet life in Amiens and had few social contacts. So, I guess she’s just reading her books, raising this child. Manon assisted her husband with his writing and research. In her memoirs, she looks back on the situation with some resentment, where she was not able to pursue her own activities because she was helping him out so much with his job. She also didn’t love being a mother because she had thought Eudora would be like herself, a clone, and they could be, sort of like, intellectual friends or something, but Eudora was not interested in books and learning. So, Manon was kind of like, “Well, then I’m not interested in her.” And so, her daughter was mostly raised by the maid, Marguerite, it seems. 

Anyway, she helped her husband with his business more and more. So, not just like I’d said before, she was doing secretarial-type tasks, and that turned into she started to edit and modify his texts, and eventually she wrote major sections of his writings herself. Initially, her husband, Jean-Marie, did not realize that she was writing this. He just saw things like, “Wow, I wrote a good thing. Huh, I don’t remember writing that.” Like, he didn’t realize that she had written it and not him. Within a few years of working together, she was the better writer, which he eventually noticed and acknowledged. In the end, he fully accepted her as his intellectual equal, and there was an equal partnership, although he got credit for all the things that he wrote because she was a woman. 

In 1784, so remember how he was from his noble family, but they didn’t have a title? So, she was like, “It would be cool if he got a title again.” So, she went to Paris to try to get a peerage, which means, effectively, a title, for him, because if he got a title, that comes with money. And so that would allow him to give up his job as an inspector so he could focus entirely on the writing and research that he wanted to do and that she wanted to do. While in Paris to try to get this paperwork through, she discovered that she was talented at lobbying and negotiating because of her intelligence and her wit and her, one might say, asshole ways, she was quite convincing. She could wear people down until they agreed with her. Although she did not get the peerage because her husband was even more of an asshole and so many people remembered him being an asshole, they were just like, “You’re great. He sucks. Sorry.” But what she did manage to get for him was an appointment in Lyon, which was less demanding than his post in Amiens and better paid. She also negotiated for him an excellent salary and retirement benefits. This has given me a little Kris Jenner vibe of just someone who has a natural ability to negotiate and do contract things and just uses that to help their own family. 

So, before they moved to Lyon, they went for a quick trip to England, where Manon was able to attend a debate in the House of Commons between legendary political opponents, William Pitt the Younger and Charles James Fox. If you know who they are, that’s a little fun fact for you, English history fans. So, for the next five years, they lived in Lyon and nearby Villefranche-sur-Saône, which is, again, as their daughter Eudora grew older, Manon was, this is where she’s like, “Oh, she’s a dud.” When I say that, Eudora was far more interested in playing than in reading, like I would say, most children, like I would say, myself. But Manon just had high expectations and she’s like, “Augh, my daughter isn’t learning how to like write a doctoral thesis at age 3? No thanks, what a disappointment.” So, in the following years, she would write to her friends, and also she later wrote in her memoir, she called her daughter “slow” and lamented that Eudora had such bad taste. I don’t know if Eudora had learning difficulties or if she was, you know, learning differences, like dyslexia or whatever, but I feel like Eudora was just an average child, and that was just disgusting to Manon because she found that very boring. But her maid was raising the daughter, and she was able to spend her time working on working with her husband to write an encyclopedia of trade and industry. And then she really wanted to go to Switzerland to visit some sites that had played a role in Rousseau’s life, and she convinced her husband to go with her in 1787, and they went to Switzerland and just like had a nice time, probably Eudora not with them. And then, the French Revolution happened. 

So, at this time, and this is where this story is different from the others we’ve looked at so far in this Radical Women of the French Revolution miniseries, is because Manon and Jean-Marie were not poor. Like, she had started off in this mercantile class, he was higher up. So, they were representative of the revolutionary elite because they had obtained their social position through work, not through birth, although he had been born into this nobility, he didn’t have a title, he still didn’t have a title, but he got this good job because of her lobbying and through his reputation of doing work. So, they resented the court in Versailles because the people who were there, who were really wealthy, was that was because of who their father was and how rich they were when they were born, and they felt it was really corrupt. Like, remember Manon had that thing about “The poor people need us to guide them so they’re not disasters”? She felt that way about the rich people as well. She felt that she was the best, most moral, ethical person, and everyone should just listen to her and do what she said. So, she felt that the people in Versailles were so corrupt, which they were, to be fair. 

She and Jean-Marie lived this, I feel like this is her more than Jean-Marie, like as much as he was a nightmare asshole, I think she was like, “Here’s how our household is going to run.” And he’s like, “Okay, I’m tired of fighting with you, fine.” So, they lived this quasi-Puritan lifestyle. For instance, instead of drinking alcohol and or serving alcohol at her party, she drank and offered water with sugar in it. And in their defence, they also advocated for relief for the poor and to get rid of some other regulations, old regulations of the class structures of French society. 

In 1789… So, this episode is focusing on her and her life, but she coincides with some political things that I’m going to have to mention, even though I don’t entirely understand them myself, because this is not a political history podcast. But the French Estates General were convened in 1789; that’s where they called the people from the three estates to all come together to kind of make a new constitution for France. And the Rolands were involved in drawing up a document. So, that was happening in Paris, the Rolands, they’re in Lyon, remember. But they made a document in which the citizens of Lyon could express their grievances about the political and economic system. She had not been super interested in politics up to this point, as evidenced by what she wrote about in her memoirs and the letters she wrote, but she became more and more fascinated by politics after the Estates General were convened. She got, one might say, a hyper-fixation in this new topic that she had not read about before. 

So, July 14, 1789, the storming of the Bastille. That was when people, revolutionary-minded people in Paris, they descended upon the Bastille, which was one of the only buildings in Paris that was associated or affiliated with the monarchy because the monarchy lived outside of Paris in Versailles. So, they attacked the Bastille to get the weapons from there, and also to free the, like, seven prisoners who happened to be there. And that is what most people agree it was, like, the beginning of the French Revolution era. When that happened, her thinking radicalized quickly. When you look at the tone and content of her letters, she kind of, you can see right away, she decides on her point of view and she sticks to it. So, before she’d written, sort of, hypothetically about societal reform. Now, she was writing about like, “Fuck yes! Revolution, yes! Let’s burn it all down.” She was just on board with the revolutionary vibe because she had hated the social structure of the ancien régime of France. She hated what it meant for her as a woman, what it meant for her in her social class. Like, she’s just like, “Yes, let’s make something newer and better. Let’s destroy the old institutions.” So, she was like, “A completely new form of government has to be developed, let’s just use the, like, looking at Rousseau and Plutarch and the example of the ancient Greeks and Romans. Let’s build something beautiful. Let’s build a republic.” 

So, this was seen at the time as radical, although in the French Revolution, more people, other groups will become more radical, but this was seen as radical, especially for a woman to be thinking like this. And in her usual way, as this, as my notes describe, she was not inclined to compromise on anything, nor had she ever been. I relate to her in that way. She was just like, “We want to achieve this revolution, and we should do whatever it takes. The use of force? Sure. Civil war? Bring it on. We want to get this revolution so we can implement a republic and have this beautiful intellectual society like ancient Greece and Rome had.” 

So, the French Revolution started, again, with the Bastille, and over the next 18 months, the Rolands were still, like, they were in Lyon, but she was writing about it, she was cheering it on. They lived in Villefranche part of the time, although they’re in Lyon. And she started to worry about a counterrevolution. So, like the Revolution is people who want to get rid of the old ways, bring in a new thing. Counterrevolution would be people who wanted to defeat the Revolution to keep the old ways, to keep the king, to keep the social structures and everything. She started being worried about the counterrevolutionaries; she was trying to get her friends to mobilize, and she spread rumours. This is just, it feels very 2025 to me. She’s your mom on Facebook who sees some AI thing and is just like, “Oh my god! Do you see what’s happening?” Like, every rumour she believed is true, and she’s telling her friends, like “We need to stop these counterrevolutionaries!” And it’s like, “Manon, QAnon is not real.” She’s just like all in, like this is what she wants to think about right now and she was never a subtle bitch. 

It had become common knowledge in Lyon that she and her husband sympathized with the revolutionaries; they supported the establishment of the radical political clubs that we’ve talked about in other episodes. And so, people in Lyon from the elite hated them because they were on the side of the Revolution, and that side inherently was against the elites. So, people knew that she felt this way, but she did not publicly take part in political discussions because she’s like, “I’m a woman, so I’m not going to be part of this political discussion. I’ll just write ferocious letters to my friends and tell my husband what to say, and he’ll take part of the political discussions.” So, she’s behind the scenes, very involved, and this is how she managed to gain some political influence during this period. She’s just writing letters, which again is just like someone sending emails to everybody. I think she’d be really busy on, again, I don’t know why Facebook is the social media I picture her using, but that’s where I feel, she’s just writing long Facebook posts, leaving long comments on Fox News posts or whatever. 

So, she was writing letters, which is not to say that they asked her to write the letters or that they wanted to read the letters or that they did read the letters, but to people, to publicists and politicians just being, “My name is Manon and here’s what I think…” blah-blah-blah. One of the people who she wrote to was the Parisian journalist Jacques Pierre Brissot, future leader of the Girondins faction. And in her letters, she described and analyzed what was happening in Lyon to let them know, like, kind of what was going on there. At least on five occasions, Brissot published excerpts from her letters as articles in his newspaper, La Patriote Française. So, her opinions were discussed outside Lyon; people read this stuff, but they didn’t necessarily know that she was the one who was writing it. Another newspaper, Le Courier de Lyon, which is published by Luc-Antoine de Champagneux, also published some of her letters in his newspaper, which made her, interestingly, one of the first female journalists, correspondents, in history, I think, because she was writing these letters and they were being published and she was keeping people apprised of what was up, what was happening in Lyon. But her contributions were not published under her own name, but anonymously, either fully anonymously or as “a woman from the south of France.” So, it’s impossible to determine how, like, historians have figured out some of the ones that she wrote, but there could have been others. We don’t know how many articles she wrote that appeared in the press because her name wasn’t on them, because she was a woman. 

In 1790, a year after the Storming of the Bastille, Jean-Marie was elected in the city council of Lyon, which is interesting, like, the elites of Lyon were not super cool with them, but I guess the people of Lyon were cool with it, and he was elected into this role. So, they were living in Lyon, but in order to get money to do the revolutionary reforms they wanted to do in Lyon, they went to Paris in 1791 for a short stay to just try and find some benefactors, some funders so they could help improve things in Lyon or make it more revolutionary there. But as soon as they showed up, guess what? Manon became a sensation. She became a well-known figure in political circles in Paris, especially thanks to Brissot, the newspaper guy, who had published her articles. He introduced her everywhere. He’s like, “This is the woman who was writing those articles. This is Manon. Have you ever met somebody so smart and clever?” And her husband was there with her too. It’s like, “This is Manon. Oh, also her husband.” It’s a real, “and Peggy,” it’s like, “Jean-Marie was there as well.” 

She also always working alongside her husband. Like, he was the one who was able to go and make talk to people, but she was telling him what to say, sort of thing. And because she was busy with political stuff, they hired an assistant named Sophie Grandchamp, who would do the routine copying and editing work because she was too busy and important to do that anymore. Manon, however, wrote most of her husband’s official letters, and she wished that she could go to the National Assembly herself to explain to them why Lyon needed funds. She couldn’t do that because women were only admitted to the public gallery, they weren’t allowed to speak there. So, she observed the debates, and while there, she wrote about what she thought, and it annoyed her that the conservatives are so much better and more eloquent in the debates than the revolutionaries. And here, conservatives means the people who want to stop the Revolution; revolutionaries means people who are, like, into the Revolution. So, she’s like, “Oh, the revolutionaries aren’t as well spoken as, for instance, I would be if I was allowed to talk.” Oh well, she did not put on a male disguise, wouldst that she did. But she did not. 

Anyway, so she wasn’t able to speak in the Assembly, but she was active as a lobbyist outside the Assembly, just trying to get her point of view across to other people and to get other people to support what she wanted. She was also a regular visitor with her husband to the Jacobins Club, which is where that faction would meet. Women were only allowed access to the public gallery there as well, so she would just kind of watch. This is sort of her, I mean, in the sort of journalist way, like, a lot of what we know about these people and about this time from the French Revolution comes from her and what she said and what she saw, and because she wasn’t interacting with people, she could just see what was happening. So, she’s kind of a fly on the wall there, although she wished she could have been more involved, obviously. 

They came to Paris just to try and get some funds for Lyon, but they’d kind of decided to stay. So, April 1791, she started hosting a salon in her home several times a week. We’ve talked in this podcast before about salons run by women in France and sometimes in England. And these are… We’re going to talk about some other women who ran salons in Paris during the French Revolution, but this was really what women could do. This was the most political a woman could be at this time in this echelon of society. But remember, her mother had trained her on how to host parties, she could play all these instruments. So, she would host intellectuals and thinkers into her home so they could all talk to each other. Her home, the salon of Madame Roland, became known as a place that people could really go and have these political conversations. People who attended included Robespierre, and an American revolutionary named Thomas Paine was there. Manon, however, did not interact with these people because she is a woman, and she was like, “Well, women can’t be involved in these things.” So, she just listens and learned. She was always seen sitting at a table by the window, reading, writing letters, or doing needlework/just, like, eavesdropping on everybody. She never involved herself in the conversations, but listened carefully. 

So, she had political influence, but it was all through her letters and through personal conversations, not through being in a room with a bunch of people and persuading people that way. It was a quieter, softer sort of political power. She was known for her sharp political analysis, and she was recognized as one of the most important people in this group, the Jacobins group— Or sorry, not the Jacobins group, but the group like Brissot, her newspaper friend. In that clique, she was seen as one of the most important people, and people came to her one-on-one to ask advice on political strategy, and she contributed to lots of people who were writing letters, parliamentary bills and speeches. So, behind the scenes, she was so influential. She was described by people from this time as “a charming woman and a brilliant conversationalist.” 

Her salon, it was different from other salons that other women were doing. For instance, hardly any food or drink was served because she and her husband were these, kind of, extreme Puritans. The salons that other people were hosting were kind of more social, and hers were entirely political, like, specifically, strictly only political. She would host her salon in the few hours between the end of the debates at the National Assembly and the beginning of the meetings in the Jacobins Club. So, it’s really sort of like after-school care for the revolutionaries. There were no women present except for herself, but she was like, “I’m just over here doing my needlework. Totally don’t mind me. It’s not like having a woman present. Just pretend I’m not even there.” And this was different from events hosted by other women we’re going to talk about in other episodes, like Germaine de Staël and Sophie de Condorcet. Those other women’s salons are kind of more similar to the aristocratic salons of the ancien régime of the pre-revolutionary time, where men and women could hang out and have fun and eat food and drink. Manon wanted to make hers be like, “No confusion. This has nothing to do with how things were before. This is a specific, new revolutionary thing. I don’t want anyone to mistake this for what it was like in the ancien regime.” 

So, I mentioned that these meetings were between the National Assembly and the Jacobins club meetings. And that’s because originally Manon and her husband were part of the Jacobin movement, which was a broader movement initially, but as the Revolution progressed, the Jacobins became dominated by radical Parisian leaders, like Georges Danton, who is on your bingo cards if you’re doing the Vulgar History bingo; this might be his first appearance, certainly not his last in the upcoming episodes. Georges Danton was one of the leaders of the radical Jacobins, and so was Jean-Paul Marat, the one who was later killed in his bathtub by Charlotte Corday. So, the Jacobins were becoming more radical. Manon and her husband were like, “We prefer the Girondins.” Also, a lot of the Girondins politicians came from outside the capital. The Jacobins were focused in Paris, and it was Parisian people, but Manon and her husband had lived in Lyon. They knew what mattered to people outside of Paris, and that’s what the Girondins were more about. 

So, her ideas on women and the rights, again, followed the ideas articulated by Rousseau. So, she was, just in terms of this time period, like 1791, other women we’ve talked about on this podcast, like Olympe de Gouges, was talking, she had feminist arguments about equal rights of people. Manon was like, that’s not for her. She believed in the existence of natural divisions between men and women. She felt that women were the moral centre of the home, which again, she felt like she was so moral, and she knew what was best; people should do what she said. And so, the sort of quiet influence she was doing is what she felt was natural for women versus what Olympe de Gouges or someone like Etta Palm d’Aelders was doing, where they were standing up and giving speeches and circulating pamphlets, like Manon just felt that was gross, that was unnatural; women should be quiet and in the corners and secretly, secretly affecting everything. 

So, she came to Paris, she and her husband, and she’s like, “Okay, I guess we’re here for a while. Let’s start this salon.” That was in April. So then, by June 1791, after she’d been in Paris for a few months, that is when Louis XVI, the king, Marie Antoinette, the whole family, attempted to flee the country and was caught and the Revolution gained momentum from that because that was a moment that really stoked the flames, when he tried to flee and was brought back. So, at this point, Manon was like, “Okay, time for us to step things up. Let’s get our republic of intellectuals going.” So, she was lobbying to all of the influential other politicians, being like, “Hey, here’s what we should do.” She also became a member of a political club under her own name for the first time, not just, like, Jean-Marie and wife, despite her conviction that women should not have a role in public life. I’m not sure which club she joined, but this is an interesting step for her as well. One of the reasons she did this was that after the royal family tried to leave and couldn’t, she felt that there was so much at stake, like, everything had reached this, like the stakes were so high. Right? [Hepburn meows] This is my cat Hepburn, and she’s just like, yeah, things are getting pretty extreme. And she’s like, “No one can sit back on this, like men, women, everybody has to step up and, like, fight to save France, to turn it into this Republic.” 

More brutal things happened. So, in June, the king tried to flee. In July, there was a demonstration on the Champs de Mars that led to a massacre where the National Guard opened fire on demonstrators, killing as many as 50 people. Many prominent revolutionaries feared for their lives and fled. At this point, the Rolands provided a temporary hiding place for some of their friends during this time, but they were not going to leave Paris. She was not going to leave Paris, like, she’s in this. This is where, just, the whole revolutionary government really starts, like the factions, it all starts really breaking down. So, a big point of contention was, should France start a war against Prussia and Austria? The Girondins and the Rolands felt that they should do this, but Robespierre, who was leading the Jacobins at this time, wanted to focus on internal affairs rather than going to wars. So, the political situation was so divided between these two factions that it was impossible to form a stable government, just because the two groups would never get along with each other. But to run a government, you needed, like, ministers of different portfolios, and nobody would agree on a person to take the job because of the two factions. 

So, at this point, Louis XVI, who was still around, he asked the Girondins to appoint three ministers. So, March 1792, so about a year after they had gone to Paris for “a short time,” still in Paris, Manon’s husband, Jean-Marie, was appointed Minister of the Interior. In fact, this appointment came so unexpectedly that at first, they both thought that it was a joke. But with this job, they moved into the Hôtel Pontchartran, the official residence of the minister. But they also kept their small apartment in the city, “just in case.” This job was difficult. The workload was extremely heavy. So, the Minister of the Interior was responsible for elections, education, agriculture, industry, commerce, roads, public order, poor relief, and the working of the government in the midst of the French Revolution. And Jean-Marie, again, you know, he’s doing what he can, but Manon was really the person doing everything. She was the driving force behind her husband’s work. She was doing everything, and he was just a public face of this job. She commented on all the documents. She wrote his letters and memos. She had a major say in who he appointed to what job. She was very firm in her opinions and felt that she was always right. 

April 1792, the war broke out against Austria and Prussia. Madame Roland was like, the Girondins wanted this, so she’s like, “Okay, good.” Robespierre was mad about it. So, she wrote a letter to Robespierre being like, “Robespierre, come on. How dare you not support this?” Like, don’t antagonize Robespierre, Manon. But she’s just so self-righteous, like she can’t… It just feels like such a contemporary social media cluelessness. It’s like, you don’t need to respond to every comment, Manon. But this letter that she wrote, he used to go to her salon. But after this, this led to the end of the friendly relations between Robespierre, Manon, and her husband. And eventually, he would come to be her enemy. So, stay tuned for how that goes for her. 

So, she was able to convince her husband and the other ministers, because again, like, she just believed all the rumours, all the rumours are true. She had heard that the king was trying to restore the ancien régime. And so, she convinced her husband and the other ministers that the king was doing this. Was he? I don’t know. But it was her idea to establish an army camp near Paris with 20,000 soldiers from all over France who would be there ready, like, on-call to intervene in case there was a counterrevolution in Paris. Louis XVI hesitated to sign this into law. But Jean-Marie, actually Manon actually writing this letter, sent him a protest letter and published it before the king could respond. In her memoirs, Manon is vague as to whether she was involved in editing the letter or whether she wrote it. Most biographers assume she wrote it because she wrote all of the letters that Jean-Marie did. In any case, it was definitely her idea to publish the letter to try to get more support from the population to get this army camp established. 

June 10, 1792, Louis XVI fired Jean-Marie and two other Girondins ministers. And this led, eventually, to the end of the monarchy on August 10th, at which point Jean-Marie was then reappointed as minister. Everything’s just messy and pretty weird, and that’s what’s happening. So, when the king stopped being king, this was the start of the Terror, which is the period in which Robespierre oversaw great bloodshed, where he went out and arrested and had executed all of his enemies. And the Rolands got caught up in this because Jean-Marie had served as minister under Louis XVI, so it was seen as he was, like, collaborating with the king, and so that made them seem suspicious to the Jacobins. 

Manon, ever true to herself, she had no sympathy for hooligans like the Jacobins, the same way that she felt like poor people should go to church because they’re too unintelligent to decide their own lives themselves. She felt that, although earlier on she had advocated the use of violence early in the Revolution, she had a greater aversion to uncivilized behaviour. She didn’t like the revolutionaries not behaving the way that she imagined the intellectual people did in the days of ancient Greece and Rome. She specifically resented this guy, Georges Danton, who was the Jacobin foreman. And if you look at pictures of Danton, he looks like what if a pit bull was turned into a human being, is what he looked like, which is an interesting way to look. So, she did not like Danton, and he tried to reach out to her to like, “Let’s cooperate, let’s team up. I know you have all this political influence.” And she was just like, “No!” Because once her mind is made up, she would not change her mind, which, in some situations, is an admirable quality, and in her situation, in the French Revolution, in the Terror, is maybe not the best quality to have. Some historians argue that her refusal to ally with Danton ultimately contributed to the fall of the Girondins, which maybe it did, because she was so influential. 

On September 6th and 7th, hundreds of prisoners were massacred in Parisian prisons because they were suspected of anti-revolutionary sympathies, this was part of the Terror. Manon wrote to a friend she was beginning to feel ashamed of the Revolution, determining who was responsible for this massacre became another point of contention between the factions, like it happened, and clearly, one of the other factions had been behind it, but it was unpopular with the people so they were both just kind of blaming each other, which again, feels very 2025. So, Manon and the Girondins were like, “You know who was behind it? Jean-Paul Marat, Georges Danton, and Robespierre. That’s who was behind it.” But their opponents pointed out that the Ministry of the Interior, which Jean-Marie was again in charge of, was responsible for the prisons, and they had taken very little action to prevent or stop the violence. So, it’s like, whose fault was it? Everyone’s trying to use it to get power against the other, against their opposition. 

So, Jean-Marie, this was his second term as Minister of the Interior, and Manon was again just the power behind the scenes. It was common knowledge that she wrote everything, all of the letters and everything that he wrote actually was her, that he fully relied on her judgment and ideas. Both Danton and Marat mocked him for this publicly. She even, at this point, had her own office in the Ministry and directed the work of the Public Opinion Office, which aimed to spread the revolutionary ideals among the population, which, given that she couldn’t really read a room is not the best choice, but she felt like her instincts were always right so that’s where she wanted to be. So, their enemies, of which there were an increasing amount, accused them of using this public relations office to issue state propaganda in support of the Girondins’ cause. And there’s also rumours that they had been appropriating public money for their own ends, which it’s, like, would they have? She’s so morally upright, like she drank water with sugar in it, would she have been, like, money laundering? I don’t know, but these were rumours spread about them by their enemies. Behind closed doors— Oh actually, I want to say the Ministry had secret agents working for them, and at least one of them reported directly to Madame Roland. Was that person Etta Palm d’Aelders, spy, triple agent of the French Revolution, who we talked about last week? I like to think so. 

While this is all happening, as if there’s not enough going on in her life/the world, she had fallen in love with someone new. So, she fell in love with a Girondin deputy named François Buzot. She had first met him as a visitor to her salon, and they fell in love, but she described it as a platonic romance. And she fell for him, and then she’s like, “Okay, WW Rousseau do? What would Rousseau do? He would be honest about this.” So, she told her husband Jean-Marie, like, “Guess what? I’m in love with this guy, François Buzot, but I’m not going to leave you, Jean-Marie, because I admire your intellect and I know you need my support in your job.” And at this point, the revolutionary government had introduced legal, no-fault divorce in France. So, she could have divorced him, but she was like, “Guess what? I’m going to stay married to you, but I’m in love with this other guy, and let’s just move on, and you’ll just know that I’m making this great sacrifice for myself.” Anyway, Rousseau called for truth at all times, and so she was doing that, but Jean-Marie, I will say, his feelings were hurt by this. And she was just kind of like, “I’m just living the Rousseauian ideals. Sorry about it.” 

And they were getting more and more enemies. So, radical newspapers and pamphlets spread more and more rumours that the anti-revolutionary conspiracies had come up with at their home. Like, these boring-ass parties she hosted where she sat in the corner doing embroidery and there was no food or drink, and all that anyone was allowed to talk about was politics, were being described in the pamphlets as like, orgies, decadent orgies where people are conspiring against the Revolution. Jean-Paul Marat and another man who published newspapers, Camille Desmoulins, depicted Manon as this manipulative, like, whooore who was manipulating Jean-Marie. They compared her to very widely hated figures at the time, widely hated sexualized people at the time, Madame du Barry and Marie Antoinette. Although I will say, to their very slight credit, Danton and Robespierre also criticized Manon, but never in a sexualized way, always just as a “She’s a dangerous political opponent” sort of way. 

In December 1792, Manon was ordered to appear before the National Convention, which the Legislative Assembly was now called the National Convention, to answer to charges that she had been corresponding with aristocrats who had fled to England. This was the time where many aristocrats had fled to England because they’re like, “I don’t want to be murdered, so I’m going to go to England.” And they were called the émigrés, and they were very much looked down upon. So, they’re saying like, “Were you were you pen pals with these people?” She defended herself so well that the deputies applauded her defence. And you know what? She’d just been dying for the ability to speak in this room, because women couldn’t speak, so she finally got to and she just got to… She would have been a good lawyer, I think. The deputies applauded, but the public gallery, like, the audience of just regular everyday people who come to watch, did not applaud because these pamphlets had so ruined her reputation among the people of Paris, they hated her. There were fears that somebody might try to assassinate her. In fact, for her own safety, she no longer went outside because she was so widely hated. She, at this point in time, slept with a loaded gun, like, within arm’s reach of her. In case of an attack, she wanted to be able to kill herself so that she wouldn’t be taken alive by her enemies. And yet, you know, admirably or… Is it admirably? She stuck to her point of view throughout all of this; she could have fled, she could have gone anywhere, but she’s just like, no. She was sticking to her convictions here. 

So, the king was put on trial and found guilty, and there was disagreements about how he should be punished. So, the Girondins voted against executing him, and Manon was, she was not a voting member because she was a woman, but she was also against executing the king. But that wasn’t enough to stop it. The Jacobins and Robespierre were like, “Yeah, we’re going to execute the king.” So, he was taken to the guillotine, January 21, 1793. At this point, Jean-Marie resigned as Minister of the Interior, possibly as a protest against the execution, but possibly because, like, that job had a lot in it, possibly because the ongoing attacks against him and Manon were getting to him, and maybe, possibly part of it was the fact that Manon was being open with him, that she was in love with another man. He was just like, “I’m done.” So, as soon as he retired, an investigation was started into his actions as the minister. And so, the Rolands were forbidden to leave Paris, which is pretty ominous. 

In April, Robespierre accused the Girondins in general of betraying the Revolution, and a few weeks later, a revolutionary committee made an attempt to arrest Jean-Marie, who managed to escape. He went into hiding with their friend, do you remember the guy she met at the Garden of Gardens? The Monsieur Bosc d’Antic. So, Jean-Marie went and hid with him, and then he fled to Amiens and from there to Rouen. Manon, still in Paris. She refused to flee or to go into hiding. She even went to the convention personally, herself. One thing I read hinted indicated she went there in her nightgown, like, she went right there to personally protest against the attempted arrest of her husband. We see this again today, there’s a point where you can’t use logic to change someone’s mind when they’re just really in on what they’re doing and they’re going to keep doing what they’re doing and you can’t use logic to change their mind from doing what they’re going to do. But she’s, like, such an intellectual, she’s like, “I’m going to use logic and reason and my intellectual skills to appeal to them, and we can still start a democratic republic like ancient Rome.” 

So, in her memoirs, she does not fully explain why she acted this way at this time. I mean, she was under a lot of stress and not doing well and sleeping with a gun next to her, and her husband had just fled for his life. But also, I do think that she just, like, felt morally correct, and she had to do what she felt was right to do. She also is pretty sure there was no legal basis to arrest her, which, yeah, in regular times there wouldn’t have been, Manon, but like during the Terror, like, anyone can arrest anyone. That’s kind of what society is like at this time. And in fact, early morning of June 1, 1793, she was arrested at her home and transferred to the prison in the Abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. The radical anti-feminist newspaper La Père Duchesne falsely claimed that she had confessed to counterrevolutionary activities, although she had not. In her writings, she kind of clapped back at this anti-feminist newspaper and just kind of said, like, she criticized the style of writing of this newspaper. Here’s what she wrote, translated. “I was not only transformed into a counter-revolutionary, but into a toothless old hag, and they finished by making me cry about my sins while expecting me to expiate them on the guillotine.” She was the first prominent Girondin to be thrown in jail at this time. But after this, a wave of arrests followed. A number of Girondins politicians managed to escape from Paris during this time, but she was in jail. And it was at this time she started to write her memoirs, in secret. 

She was allowed during this time to receive visitors, such as her assistant Sophie Grandchamp, who came every other day; her gardening friend, Bosc d’Antic, brought her flowers from the botanical garden on his regular visits, and they smuggled out her letters to her lover, Buzot, and presumably also letters to her husband, and pages of her memoir that she was writing, they smuggled them out. And while she was there, somehow, she got books, and she even was allowed to have a piano in her cell so she could, like, practice her piano skills. So, in terms of jail, there are worse ones… but it was still pretty bad, obviously. It was jail in the French Revolution during the Terror. So, it was crowded there, and she was not physically tortured, but she was yelled at all the time, and she was not used to being treated like this. In the outside world, the Jacobins newspapers published, like, too many to count articles, again, about these alleged orgies that she had overseen at her salon, and just, really, these newspapers and Jacobins and Robespierre were just trying to really make everybody hate her as much as possible, so when they executed her, no one would be mad about it. 

On June 24th, she was unexpectedly released because the legal basis for her arrest had been flawed, but then she was re-arrested right away. She left jail, went to her home, and just when she was about to enter her home, they arrested her again right away. So, she was released for not even a day. She was re-arrested with the paperwork all in order now, and this time she was sent to the harsher prison of Sainte Pelagie, where she continued to write her secret memoirs. She was very concerned about her lover, Buzot, much more than about her husband, Jean-Marie. She was hurt and angry when she heard that her husband was writing his memoirs, in which he was going to hold Buzot responsible for breaking up their marriage. Somehow, through letters, because she’s so good at lobbying, she convinced her husband to destroy his manuscript and not publish this book. She also, at this point, knew that she would eventually be put to death, but refused when Jean-Marie tried to organize, like, an Ocean’s Eleven prison escape. Jean-Marie’s plan was with her friend Henriette Cannet, who had also been coming to visit her sometimes. The plan was that Henriette Cannet would come and visit, and then she and Manon would switch clothes, and then Manon could leave, but Henriette would stay. And the reason why Manon refused to do this was because it was too risky for Henriette. 

Outside of Paris in the summer of 1793… So, remember, Paris is where the French Revolution stuff is all happening. The whole rest of France is like, “What the fuck is going on?” This is… Because remember, they’re from Lyon, and Lyon was the place where there was so much textile manufacturing, silk manufacturing, and then because people had stopped buying so much fabric, they were really poor as well. So, there was resistance growing outside of Paris about the French Revolution. A revolt broke out in Lyon. There were centres of resistance, also in Brittany and in Normandy. In the provinces, some Girondins were arguing to… They were arguing to be like, “Let’s just make Paris be its own thing, and let’s let the rest of France be its own republic. Let’s separate,” was what was being discussed at this point. Manon knew that these revolts were breaking out, and so she wrote letters to her friends like, “Don’t put yourself at risk.” She especially wrote that to Buzot, her platonic lover. And apparently, Buzot reportedly always had a miniature of Manon with him that contained a lock of her hair. And he was involved in attempts to organize the revolt in, where? Caen, C-A-E-N, the place where Charlotte Corday was from that we talked about before. 

Speaking of Charlotte Corday, so that was the… In the Charlotte Corday episode, remember the Girondins in Caen were coming up with this plan to try to bring down Robespierre, and that’s part of why Charlotte Corday came to Paris and killed Jean-Paul Marat. She did that, and that sealed the fate of the imprisoned Girondins, like Manon, because Charlotte Corday was a Girondin sympathizer, and now this gave Robespierre an excuse to just execute all the Girondins. Manon learned that Buzot was in danger of being arrested, and she tried to end her own life because she was so despondent about this. She stopped eating the food that was given to her, but her friends Sophie Grandchamp and Bosc d’Antic convinced her that it would be better to stay alive so she could stand trial, because that way she would be able to answer the accusations and save her reputation, and after all, she loved speaking in public. 

On October 31, 1793, 21 Girondins politicians were executed after a short trial. Most of these were her friends, including her friend Brissot, the newspaper guy who had published her journalism. One day later, November 1, she was transferred to the Conciergerie, which we’ve talked about. This is the prison known as the last stop on the way to the guillotine. Upon arrival, she was questioned for two days by the prosecutor. She defended herself in her usual self-assured, snobby way. She argued in her defence, “I’m only a woman, I’m just a wife, therefore I can’t be responsible for the political actions of her husband,” even though she had orchestrated those actions. According to eyewitnesses, she remained calm and courageous during this time, and she continued to write her memoirs. 

On November 8, she appeared before the Revolutionary Tribunal. She knew by now, and she had known for a while, that she was going to be sentenced to death, and so that day she got dressed for her execution. She dressed in her toilette de mort, her outfit of death, so a simple dress of white-yellow muslin with a black belt. She took the stand. She had planned a speech in defence of the Girondins and of her husband’s service as Minister of the Interior, but the judges intervened, and they wouldn’t let her give her speech. They said it was not permitted to sing the praises of known traitors. So, she appealed to the assembled audience, but the Jacobins’ press had been so relentless against her for so long, the crowd booed and hissed, and they denounced her as a traitor. So, it was a short trial, at the end of which she was found guilty of conspiracy against the Revolution, and the death sentence was pronounced. And one day later, she was taken to the guillotine, November 9, 1793. So, her assistant Sophie Grandchamp saw her pass by on her way to the scaffold and reported that Manon appeared very calm. 

There are two versions of what she might have said, like her final words when she was at the guillotine. One of them, and these are both translated to English, “Oh, freedom, what crimes are committed in your name,” or she might have said, “Oh, freedom, they have made a mockery of you.” A newspaper called Le Moniteur Universel wrote disapprovingly that like Marie Antoinette and Olympe de Gouges, she had been put to death because she had crossed the “boundaries of female virtue.” A few days later, Jean-Marie, who was hiding in Rouen, he heard that Manon had been executed, and he took his own life. Buzot, her lover, lived as a fugitive for several months and then also ended his own life. Of all the people in this story, the only person left really is her daughter Eudora, who’s now an orphan, and she came under the guardianship of the gardening friend, Bosc d’Antic. 

And so, yet again, like the video game or Run Lola Run, if you know that movie, that this whole time period really was, yet another one of the main characters on this podcast did not survive past the end of 1793. Will anyone ever? Somehow, the French community did continue on to live today; someone must have lived past 1793, and perhaps we will talk about them next week. But there’s more to say about Manon Roland; just because she died, her story did not, because there’s still people around who knew her story, who wanted people to know, who wanted to share who she was and to make sure she wasn’t forgotten. 

So, before her execution, she entrusted the manuscript of her memoirs to a person who I think I mentioned once as one of the newspaper people who shared her articles, Luc-Antoine de Champagneux, who she knew from Lyon. When he was also in danger of being arrested for his Girondin leanings, he burned the document to prevent it from falling into the wrong hands. So, she wrote this memoir, she smuggled it out, she entrusted it to him, and then he had to burn it. Devastating, but we all know that it exists because I’ve been telling you lots of facts from her memoir. And the way that happened was in the final months of her imprisonment, she wrote the memoirs all over again. Can you imagine? Like, this is a higher-stakes, more purge-like version of… I know this has happened to all of us, you know, you’re writing a document on your computer and you forget to hit save, or your computer crashes and you lose it and, like, all your work, it’s a school paper or you’re writing a book or an essay and it just, you have to start from scratch, like, the devastation of it all. Anyway, but you know what? She did it because if there’s something we know about Manon that we can all agree on, it’s that she was single-minded and she was going to see through any project to completion. 

So, this second manuscript was smuggled out of prison in small packages to her visitors, to the various people who came to see her. This manuscript was hidden by her gardening friend/her daughter’s new guardian, Bosc d’Antic, during the Terror. And this manuscript itself is now in the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris. You could go and see it! If you’re there, go see it! If you ever go there and go see it, take a picture of it for me, if you’re allowed to, please. She wanted this to be published after her death. She wanted people to know her story. She wrote in it that she regretted she would not live long enough to write the complete history of the French Revolution, given that she was killed early on in it. 

So, 1795, two years after her death, the memoirs appeared in print for the first time. At least 12,000 copies were sold at that point. The first edition was edited by Bosc d’Antic, which, part of what he did, and it’s kind of like what happened when Anne Frank’s diary was first published by her dad, and he kind of edited it to, I don’t know, just to preserve some of the privacy. So, Bosc d’Antic “cleansed” references to her love for Buzo and also her ideas for, like, anti-Christian beliefs, just to kind of make it more palatable to people. He had reasons for doing that, and I think one of them was that before she died, and part of the reason that she was executed is because of all these rumours that she was such a sexually dangerous person. And he just kind of wanted to show like, “No, pay attention to what she’s really like. She was this snobby asshole, clever, witty, complex, interesting person. And she did have a platonic lover, and she was not Christian, but like, let’s focus on the other stuff.” And you know, that’s why he did that. So, for a while, that was all that was available, the cleansed version of her memoirs. 

The Scottish historian Thomas Carlyle, always happy to hear from a Scottish historian, published a book called The French Revolution: A History. And he paid lots of attention to Manon, who hadn’t, to that point, really been included in works about the French Revolution, which more focused on, like, Robespierre, Danton and Marat. He, Thomas Carlyle, called Manon “the bravest of French women.” In 1847, a man called Alphonse de Lamartine also praised her in his book, Histoire des Girondins. And then later on in the 19th century, the first biographies of Manon Roland were published. These followed the example of those two previous historians I just said, and they wrote admiringly about her. These were based on the censored versions of her memoirs, which is all that anyone had access to at that point. These later biographers emphasized her intelligence, “her feminine charm,” and her high morals. So, at that point, you know, her like, “Let’s drink sugar water and not have food at our parties,” like, that whole vibe. And they depicted her primarily as a tragic heroine in the struggle for freedom and equality. 

In 1864, guess what? The part that Bosc had cleansed were discovered, as well as five letters from Manon to her lover, Buzot. So, at this point, it’s like, guess what? Missing scenes! So, it was like, release the director’s cut of Manon’s memoirs. So, at this point, it became known in 1864, like, who her lover had been and what the relationship was like. What’s it called? What’s that thing? The Snyder Cut. The Snyder Cut of Manon’s memoirs came up. And then in 1905, the complete uncensored text was published for the first time, scandalous. The American writer, Jeanette Eaton, because guess what? By 1929 and before then, women were allowed to write books. So, the American writer, Jeanette Eaton, wrote a prize-winning biography about Manon Roland for children, titled A Daughter of the Seine, in 1929. That’s bananas. I don’t know if any of you out there have read it, but I can’t… You know, the sort of children, like, just writing this as a story for children, would that be interesting to children? But the sort of children who would be interested are children like Manon Roland herself, like little academic nerd children. So, maybe that’s who liked that book. 

Many of her letters to friends, relatives, and other revolutionaries survived because she sent them to those people, and they kept those letters, and these have been published. So, along with the memoirs, these are a rich source of information about historical events and people, as well as just about daily life during this time period. She was prolific. There are about a thousand letters dating from 1767 to 1793. Her main correspondents were her friend, Sophie Cannet, along with her husband, Jean-Marie, and her gardening friend, Bosc d’Antic. What’s unique about her memoirs and also her letters is that they show the French Revolution from her perspective and her perspective is very, it’s very unique. Like, she was a very intelligent woman, and she was actively involved in the heart of what was going on. The other revolutionary women we’ve talked about were, they were never in these inside room discussions. Olympe de Gouges was never allowed to be involved in the actual Revolution itself. The others, like, they were just outsiders really, but Manon was right there so she could say, like… In the room where it happened, that was her thing. She was literally there, you know, listening and learning, embroidering, pretending to not be eavesdropping, but she was there in that room. 

As interest in women’s history developed towards the end of the 20th century, there was an increase of interest in her. And so, there was more books published about her life and about her writings, and these are what I drew from to make this podcast episode to try and show a more nuanced, multifaceted portrayal of what she was like, rather than just like, “Look at this heroic person.” So, some of these later 20th century, like, feminist viewings or biographies of Manon, were engaging with, sort of, the contrast between her being this really strong, opinionated, intelligent woman who believed that women shouldn’t be involved in politics, but she was involved in politics. 

The contrast between those two things is fascinating. She never spoke out for women’s rights like Olympe de Gouges did, like Claire Lacombe, like Théroigne de Méricourt, other women we looked at in this mini-series. So, it’s like, she was involved in this stuff because she felt that she was smart and had something to contribute, but she’s like, “But that’s not because I’m a woman and other women shouldn’t do this. Just me, it’s okay because I’m not like other girls, hashtag.” So, she stated that “the time was not yet right for women to openly participate in public debate. It was the role of women to inspire and support the men behind the scenes,” which to her what that meant was, like, to literally beat the puppet master of her husband and tell him what to say and do. She believed “Only when all French men were politically and socially free could women also claim their place in public life.” So, she wanted equality for French men, and then once that was settled, then women could maybe emerge? Which doesn’t make sense to me, but apparently, this is what Rousseau said, and she was a big Rousseau follower. His whole thing was women should be supportive and subservient. So, her beliefs are not at all… Like, they’re maybe slightly overlapping in Venn diagrams, but not very much with like Olympe de Gouges and Etta Palm d’Aelders, other feminist writers we’ve looked at in this series. 

And what I do at the end of these podcast episodes, if this is your first time here, is just to kind of wrap things up and to sort of put everybody in conversation with each other. I have the Fredegund Memorial Scandaliciousness Scale, where I score everybody in four categories. And those categories are Scandaliciousness; how scandalous was this person perceived by the people in the time and place where they lived? Because that can vary; someone could be doing something that to us would be, like, “Herman, my pills!” But in like time and place, it’s like, “Nnhh, yeah, that’s fine.” The second category is Schemieness; how much this person have come up with schemes and plans, whether they were successful or not. Was this person always sort of flexible and able to, like, roll with the punches and figure out a way to thrive despite challenging circumstances? The Significance of the person is the third category; what is their significance to overall history or to the time period in which they lived? And then the final category is what I call the Sexism Bonus, which is how much more could this person have achieved if they hadn’t had to spend so much of their life just convincing people that it’s okay for a woman to do stuff?

In terms of the first category, Manon Roland is a funny person to be thinking of in this way as scandalous because she would not consider herself scandalous. She was like, “I am like Rousseau says. I am a subservient wife to my husband.” I don’t think she was. People portrayed her as scandalous, talking about her parties were, like, orgies and stuff. And she was on the side of the Revolution, but you had to be on some side of the Revolution, and she was… I don’t know. I don’t think she was a scandalous person, I don’t think she would want me to call her a scandalous person. I’m going to give her a low score on this because it’s, like, the stuff that she did was unusual for a woman of that time and place, but she was not herself trying to be scandalous. She didn’t see herself as scandalous. She was always trying to be like, “I’m a wife and I’m behind the scenes and I’m just doing this behind-the-scenes work.” I’m going to give her, like, a 2 for Scandaliciousness because I just don’t think that was her vibe. That’s not how she would want to be remembered. 

Schemieness, I think is much higher because she was behind so much of, like, getting her husband to try to get him a peerage, and when that wouldn’t work, then she got him this job in Lyon, and then she was running the Ministry of the Interior herself, basically. Just he was the man who was kind of pretending to be doing it. Like she was always here with a scheme. Were they good? Not always. The scheme is often predicated on everyone doing what she said because she thought she was right? Yeah! But she was a schemey bitch, and I respect that and I’m going to give her a 7 out of 10 for Schemieness. 

Her Significance, as I was saying just in this last sort of section about how she was remembered in biographies and stuff, at first, it’s like, “Oh, look at this heroine of the Revolution,” and then it’s kind of like, “Oh, she’s kind of a messy bitch,” but isn’t that more interesting? The salon of Madame Roland is quasi-famous to people who study the French Revolution because a lot of important men were there. She was the one who invited them there, and she gave them the opportunity to do all the scheming. I think she’s up there in terms of significant people of the French Revolution. She’s certainly up there in terms of significant women during the French Revolution. In terms of her actual importance, the stuff that her husband did, there was that one part where Danton wanted to have a détente (“A Détente with Danton” would be a good episode name), and she said no because once her opinion of somebody was fixed, she would never change it. Had she not been so stubborn, if she had made an alliance with him, maybe things would have gone differently. That’s quite significant actually. I’m going to say… 8 for significance. 

The Sexism Bonus is interesting because this is where it’s like, how much more could she have done if she was a man? I feel like sexism certainly affected her life. She wasn’t able to go and get as much education as she wanted, a formal education. She wasn’t able to go and become an academic scholar or philosopher like maybe she would have wanted, but she didn’t want that. She wanted to fulfill these Rousseauian ideals. She found ways to have an enormous amount of power considering who she was and where she was. She was from the merchant class, and she was a woman, but she ended up being the power, like this Lady Macbeth figure for her husband. I don’t think sexism held her back. I mean, it certainly did a bit, but she kind of morphed her way around that and was still able to do most of the stuff she wanted to do. I don’t know because I don’t think she would say it held her back, because I don’t think she thought that. I’m going to say a straight-up 5 for Sexism because had that not been a factor in her story, I think she would have just gone off and written books and just been this weird academic nerd, but she didn’t, and she did achieve and accomplish a lot. Even that stuff about being the first female war correspondent, I guess it would go in Significance more than this. 

Let’s add this all up. 22 is her total. I’m just going to enter that here on the Scandaliciousness Hall of Fame. I’m going to say that is not a high score, it’s towards the bottom. In fact, let me see, one, two, three, four… She’s in the bottom 10 of all time of Scandaliciousness scores and I think that is where she would want to be. I think she saw herself as a non-scandalous person, and this is how she would want to be remembered. 

Which brings me to something else that I wanted to tell you about, which is that friend of the podcast, Karyn Moynihan, who is a graphic designer and was a guest on our episodes about Peg Plunkett, the iconic Irish brothel owner. So, I worked with Karen Moynihan to design new merchandise for Vulgar History and a design that I’ve recently just released is… It’s the names of several women from the French Revolution. You know that the sorts of shirts that just say, like, “George and Ringo and Paul and John,” or whatever, but this is the name of the women, feminist, radical women of the French Revolution and the names are Olympe and Théroigne and Claire and Pauline and Etta; those are the five women we talked about most recently on this podcast. And I was thinking about doing that shirt, and then I was like, oh, but should I include Manon? And I asked another friend of the podcast, Leah Redmond Chang, who is really the guardian angel of this whole French Revolution season because she knows so much about it and is very gracious in answering my questions, and I was like, “Should I put Manon on the shirt?” And she was like, “I think Manon would hate to be associated with these other women,” because she hated violent revolutionaries. She hated women who spoke up politically. She hated people who she saw as unintelligent, and I think that’s how she’d see all those women. So, Manon, not on the shirt. Those other five, on the shirt. 

So, there’s two different places where you can get Vulgar History merchandise, both that design as well as there’s also the new design inspired by the Girl Scouts of America, which is a beautiful, vintage image inspired by vintage Girl Scouts merch, I guess, that is just, like, several people’s faces in this beautiful sort of clover shape, and then it says “Tits Out Brigade,” which is the name of the listeners of this podcast. It’s so cute! That’s also designed by Karyn Moynihan. You can get that on a T-shirt, or sticker, mug, or whatever. And then also leaning into that theme of the Girl Scouts, there’s four merit badges. And so, you can get the merit badges. They’re not, I want to say embroidered badges. They’re merit badge-inspired designs. So, you can get these as stickers or as magnets individually or all four as a beautiful sort of like, image of them all together. And there are four categories of people on this podcast, people we’ve profiled on this podcast, I celebrate them for these achievements, and they are Stitchery, it says “stitch bitch,” there’s a merit badge for poisoning, there’s one for stabbing, and there’s one that’s just called “365 Party Girl,” which are four types of women that Manon Roland was not. She would not earn any of— Actually maybe stitch bitch, but she’d be like, “Bitch? Bitch. Herman, my pills!” Like, she would just be, “I’m just going to go drink some water with sugar in it. How dare you?” 

But anyway, you can get the Vulgar History merchandise, all those things, the one with all the names of the revolutionary women, the Girl Scouts theme stuff. If you’re in America, your best option is to go to VulgarHistory.com/Store, which takes you to our Dashery store, which is where you can just choose which design you want, what colour, and on what product. And if you’re international anywhere except for America, I recommend going to our Redbubble store, which is VulgarHistory.Redbubble.com. And the same thing, you just choose the design you like, say do you want it on a sticker, on a T-shirt, choose what colour background you want and Bob’s your uncle. Everything’s all good. 

And I have two very important announcements to make. I’m going to do them… They’re both exciting, so I don’t know, I was going to say less to more exciting, but they’re equally exciting to me. The first thing is that I did some, I’ve had some in-person meetups for Vulgar History listeners over the last little while, which basically coincide with, like, I happen to be in a city at a time, and I happen to be going to Toronto in July. So, if you’re in or near Toronto in July, I don’t know what date it’s going to be exactly yet, and I don’t know where it’s going to be exactly yet. But if you want to get updates about Tits Out Brigade Takes Toronto, an in-person meetup for listeners of this podcast in Toronto, and I think there might be even some authors who I’ve interviewed might be coming to this as well, so it’ll be like a huge event. By huge, I mean maybe there’ll be, like, 15 people there. To me, that’s huge. Anyway, if you want to get updates on that, go to VulgarHistory.com/Meetup and just leave me your email address so I can give you updates as I figure stuff out, like when I’m going there and where we’ll meet up. But also, how many people are coming will affect where we meet and that sort of thing. So, anyway, VulgarHistory.com/Meetup is where you can RSVP if you want to hang out with me in Toronto in July. 

The other news is that I’m writing a book. That may not be news to you; I’ve talked about it a lot on here and on the Patreon, but my book Rebel of the Regency: The Scandalous Saga of Caroline of Brunswick, Britain’s Uncrowned Queen, title official now, is available now for pre-order. So, it’s coming out in February of 2026. That is, like, nine months from now, but you can pre-order it now, and I’m going to be talking about it incessantly from now until then. And I’m really excited if you go on to… This is hashtag, not hashtag, asterisk. People in Canada, people in America, that’s who I’m talking to about this. People in Canada and America can go to your local bookstore. If you have a bookstore around the corner, if you’re lucky enough to have an independent bookstore nearby or wherever you buy your books online, look up Rebel of the Regency by Ann Foster, and it will be there, and you can pre-order it. It’s so exciting to me to see it there. If you use Goodreads or StoryGraph, you can add it there as a book you want to read and every single one of you indicating your interest by pre-ordering it, adding it on Goodreads or StoryGraph, that lets the publisher know that there’s enthusiasm about it, and then that helps, hopefully, them to promote it more and market it more. And the more they’re excited about it, the more copies of it will sell, and then maybe I’ll get to write another book. 

And also, you get it when you pre-order the book. People in Canada and America, like asterisk, rest of the world, hang on, I’ll tell you what to do in a second. Canadians, Americans: when you make your pre-order, if you pre-order it from your local independent bookstore or from an online site, what you need to do next is go to RebelOfTheRegency.com, which is a website domain that I purchased. And then from there, there’s a link to upload a picture of your receipt. That will go to me. And then once I get that, I will give you treats, pre-order incentives, they are called. You can choose one of three different things. One of them is a digital paper doll of Caroline of Brunswick designed by my friend, friend of the podcast, Siobhán Gallagher, who’s done some merch for us before. And it’s incredibly cute. It’s so cute. It’s Caroline of Brunswick, and it’s some of her outfits. There’s, like, Easter eggs of some of the accessories that she has with her. One of the things is a pumpkin that you could put on her head that she wears like a hat, which is a thing she did, and you’ll read about that in the book. So, what you do, RebelOfTheRegency.com, click on the link to share your receipt with me. And then you say, which of these three things do you want? And you could choose all three things. Do you want the digital paper doll? Do you want to get one-year free membership to my Substack? Do you want to get one-year free membership to my Patreon? You say what you want to get and then I will get that message, and then I will bestow these treats upon you as a thank you for pre-ordering my book. And so, RebelOfTheRegency.com, just like, that’s where you go, that’s where you can … Well, I guess first go to a bookstore, then go to RebelOfTheRegency.com. And that’s what you need to do. 

People in the rest of the world, hold tight. Because we’re trying to, and by we, I mean my publisher, my editor, my agent, the whole squad, we’re trying to figure out how best, how we’re going to be able to have this book published in the UK, Australia, New Zealand, other places! We’re just waiting to see if a publisher from one of those places is going to pick it up or not, and whether they do or not, that will affect how you’ll get it. So, I will keep you apprised, like, keep listening to this podcast, keep following me for updates, and I will let you other countries know when this book will be available for you to pre-order as well. And don’t worry, I’m not going to run out of pre-order incentives. The book comes out in nine months. If you’re able to order it three months from now, six months from now, like, you can still get these treats. So, I know you’ve got enthusiasm, but just hold tight, rest of world. Canada and the US, you’re up, not Europe, you are up. And yeah, pre-order that book y’all! I’m really excited about it. 

There’s a bookstore in my hometown of Halifax, Nova Scotia, called Bookmark, which is a fantastic bookstore. And when my mother went in to place her pre-order, they’re like, “Oh, you’re the fifth person to order it.” And I was like, I’m pretty sure I knew who those other four are, and in fact, it was four of my other friends. So, bookstores are hearing about it. I’m going to talk about this a gazillion times over the next nine months, but when you pre-order the book, then the bookstore knows that there’s interest in it, and that means they’ll maybe buy some more copies of it. And then if there’s more copies of it in the bookstore, then more people will buy it, and it all just like, it’s a beautiful, beautiful journée. And you know, Manon Roland was not able to publish books under her name. I am, and that’s a thing that I am proud of, and maybe Manon Roland would be proud of me too for that. I don’t know. 

So, other things that I want to tell/remind you about. So, I mentioned that when you pre-order my book, one of the things that you can sign up for is to get a free membership to my Substack. So, I want to say my Substack is called “Vulgar History à la Carte,” and I post essays, funny essays, about women from history on there. Some of them are free, and some of them are just for paid members. So, you can become a paid member, please, please, I would love it. If you buy my book and you ask for the membership, what I give you is the equivalent of the paid membership. So, anyway, go to VulgarHistory.Substack.com and that’s where you can subscribe to that to get my writings. And if you want to just get a one-stop shop updates from me about live in-person events, like, updates about the book and where you can pre-order it and stuff, then you can subscribe to my other newsletter. Substack is sort of like, that’s like a magazine I publish. It’s like, “Hey, here’s an entertaining thing for you to read.” The newsletter is like, “Hi, it’s me, Ann. Here’s some information for you to know about what I’m doing.” So, the newsletter, go to VulgarHistory.com/News, and that is where you can sign up to get those updates from me. 

I also have a Patreon where you can follow me at Patreon.com/AnnFosterWriter. And so, for $1 a month, you get early, ad-free access to all episodes of Vulgar History. If you pledge $6 or more a month, you get access to also bonus episodes. Also, you get access to our Discord server, which I call the Vulgar History Salon, which is I promise more fun than Manon Roland’s salon. But I also want to mention that if you pre-order the book, one of the incentives you can choose is a one-year membership to the Patreon, and that’s at the $6 a month level. So, that’s my treat for you. 

And then also we work with our gorgeous brand partner, Common Era Jewelry, who make beautiful jewelry inspired by women from history, as well as you know why Manon Roland would love this jewelry? Because a lot of it’s inspired by ancient Greece and Rome. Although she would be like, I don’t want a woman on my necklace, I want to have a picture of, like, Rousseau or Plutarch. But tragically, there’s not pictures of men on this jewelry, it’s pictures of women. And as well, there’s a beautiful Zodiac collection that they’re doing too. If you want to get some pieces from Common Era Jewelry, their pieces are available in solid gold as well as in more affordable gold vermeil. If you want to get 15 percent off that order, Vulgar History listeners can always get 15 percent off all items from Common Era by going to CommonEra.com/Vulgar or using code ‘VULGAR’ at checkout. 

If you want to get in touch with me, you can go to VulgarHistory.com, and there’s a little form there where you can email me. I’m also posting updates on Bluesky, Instagram, and Threads @VulgarHistoryPod. On Instagram, my DMs are open, so you can also contact me that way. 

Next week, we’re staying on our French Revolution shit with an interesting sidestep. We’re going to be talking about somebody who was in town during the French Revolution with a connection to America, and what he thought about what was going on. And it might surprise you how many sex scandals are involved. So, that’s what’s coming up next week on the podcast. Until then, everybody, go to RebelOfTheRegency.com— Well, actually, order my book, go to RebelOfTheRegency.com, register that you ordered my book, and then I’ll send you some treats. And also, Manon Roland would be horrified to hear me say, to keep your pants on and your tits out. 

Vulgar History is hosted, written, and researched by Ann Foster, that’s me! The editor is Cristina Lumague. Theme music is by the Severn Duo. The Vulgar History show image is by Deborah Wong. Transcripts are written by Aveline Malek. Find transcripts of recent episodes at VulgarHistory.com.

References:

Preorder info for my book, Rebel of the Regency!

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Get 15% off all the gorgeous jewellery and accessories at common.era.com/vulgar or go to commonera.com and use code VULGAR at checkout

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Get Vulgar History merch at vulgarhistory.com/store (best for US shipping) and vulgarhistory.redbubble.com (better for international shipping)

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