ROLAND, PAULINE

ROLAND, PAULINE (1805–1852), French feminist and socialist.

Pauline Roland was born in Falaise, in northern France. Her widowed mother, the town's postmistress, worked hard to give her two daughters a good education. Introduced to Saint-Simonian socialism by her tutor at the age of twenty-two, Roland embraced its dedication to "the largest and poorest class." She also welcomed its belief in women's "liberty" and its controversial claim that "the flesh" was sacred, not sinful. Roland moved to Paris in November 1832 to join the Saint-Simonian movement. She wrote for its Tribune des femmes (Women's tribune), the first newspaper produced by working-class women.

The Saint-Simonians' call for "the rehabilitation of the flesh" divided the organization and saw its leaders prosecuted for immorality. But Roland embraced the belief that women could use their sexuality to heal and moralize men. The two men who benefited from her ministrations fathered her four children, born between 1835 and 1845. Roland assumed sole responsibility for her children, asserting her independence despite her precarious finances. She wrote articles on history and geography for the Encyclopédie nouvelle (New encyclopedia) and the Revue indépendante (Independent review) and reported on women and children in the coal mines (1842). She also published histories of France and England and a series of articles on the history of women in France (1846–1847).

In 1847 Roland joined Pierre Leroux's socialist community at Boussac, where she ran the school and wrote for Leroux's Revue sociale (Social review). Absent from Paris in February 1848, she was not involved in the revolution or its feminist activities. But she attempted (unsuccessfully) to vote in the Boussac municipal elections. Returning to Paris in December 1848 she helped organize an association of republican schoolteachers. She was then involved in Jeanne Deroin's "organization of workers' associations," which aimed to reorganize the economy along cooperative lines. The government prosecuted the organization for conspiracy and for promoting dangerous ideas like female equality. Roland served six months in jail in 1851, publishing a defense of women's personal liberty from her prison cell.

Five months after Roland was released, a coup d'état effectively ended the Second Republic (2 December 1851). Although not involved in resistance to the coup, Roland was arrested on 6 February 1852. She admitted sympathizing with the resisters and was convicted and deported to Algeria. She was treated as a recalcitrant prisoner because she refused to admit guilt or plead for mercy. Her case received much publicity and she was released in November 1852. But her six-day sea voyage to Marseilles, exposed to winter weather on the open deck, proved fatal. She died at Lyons on her way back to Paris, on 15 December.

Woman is a free being, equal to man whose sister she is. Like him she must fulfil duties towards her self by maintaining her personal dignity beyond all reproach, by developing in virtue, by making her life, not from the work or love or intelligence of another but from her own work…. Like the man she must fulfil family duties which are the sweetest recompense of other labours, but which cannot completely absorb her…. Finally, woman is a citizen by right, if not in fact, and as such she needs to become involved in life outside the home, in social life, which will not be a healthy one until the whole family is represented there.

Letter from Pauline Roland to Emile de Girardin, April 1851, in Felicia Gordon and Máire Cross, Early French Feminisms, 1830–1940: A Passion for Liberty (Brookfield, Vt., 1996), p. 90.

Roland's life epitomized the radical currents of her age. Her idealism reflected its romantic spirit. Like many of her contemporaries, her socialism was imbued with religiosity and a commitment to women's rights. Roland's life also revealed a fundamental dilemma facing nineteenth-century women: legal marriage meant subordination to a husband, but motherhood without marriage presented major economic and moral difficulties. Roland came to believe that her choice of single motherhood was a mistake. But she never abandoned the view that one should put one's beliefs into practice and accept the consequences.

See alsoDeroin, Jeanne; Feminism; Revolutions of 1848; Saint-Simon, Henri de; Socialism.

bibliography

Primary Sources

Bell, Susan Groag, and Karen M. Offen, eds. Women, the Family and Freedom: The Debate in Documents. 2 vols. Stanford, Calif., 1983. Major collection of documents in English by women, including the Saint-Simonians.

Gordon, Felicia, and Máire Cross. Early French Feminisms, 1830–1940: A Passion for Liberty. Brookfield, Vt., 1996. Letters and articles in English by Pauline Roland and other nineteenth-century feminists, with contextual essays.

Moses, Claire Goldberg, and Lesley Wahl Rabine, eds. Feminism, Socialism, and French Romanticism. Bloomington and Indianapolis, Ind., 1993. Documents in English by Pauline Roland and other Saint-Simonian women, with contextual essays.

Secondary Sources

Barry, David. Women and Political Insurgency: France in the Mid-Nineteenth Century. Houndmills, U.K., and New York, 1996.

Berenson, Edward. Populist Religion and Left-Wing Politics in France, 1830–1852. Princeton, N.J., 1984.

Carlisle, Robert B. The Proffered Crown: Saint-Simonianism and the Doctrine of Hope. Baltimore and London, 1987.

Foley, Susan Kathleen. Women in France since 1789: The Meanings of Difference. Houndmills, U.K., 2004.

Grogan, Susan Kathleen. French Socialism and Sexual Difference: Women in the New Society, 1803–1844. Houndmills, U.K., and New York, 1992.

Moses, Claire Goldberg. French Feminism in the 19th Century. Albany, N.Y., 1984.

Offen, Karen M. European Feminisms 1700–1950: A Political History. Stanford, Calif., 2000.

Strumingher, Laura S. "Women of 1848 and the Revolutionary Heritage of 1789." In Women and Politics in the Age of the Democratic Revolutions, edited by Harriet S. Apple-white and Darline S. Levy. Ann Arbor, Mich., 1989.

Thibert, Marguerite. Le Féminisme dans le socialisme français de 1830 à 1850. Paris, 1926. This study remains invaluable on the relations between feminism and socialism.

Thomas, Edith. Pauline Roland: Socialisme et féminisme au XIXe siècle. Paris, 1956. The essential study of Roland's life.

Susan K. Foley