Roland, Pauline (1805–1852)

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Roland, Pauline (1805–1852)

French socialist journalist and activist whose agitated, tragic life reflected typical features of the Romantic movement. Pronunciation: paw-LEEN ro-LAH. Born Marie-Désirée-Pauline Roland on June 6, 1805, at Falaise (Calvados); died at Lyons of pneumonia and exhaustion on December 16, 1852, and was buried there; daughter of Joseph-Jouachine Roland (d. 1806, a postmaster) and Françoise-Marie-Adélaide Lesne (d. 1833); educated at a boarding school and tutored by Desprèz (1827–31); never married; children: (with Adolphe Guéroult) son, Jean-François Roland (b. 1835); (with Jean-François Aicard) Maria (1837–1839); Moïse (1839–c. 1852); Irma (c. 1841–1923).

Went to Paris to join Enfantin's Saint-Simonians (1832); liaison with Jean-François Aicard (1834–47); published histories of France and England (1835, 1838, 1844); wrote for Saint-Simonian gazettes (mid-1830s); wrote for Pierre Leroux's journals (1841–48); lived at Leroux's commune at Boussac (1847–48); founded a teachers' association and, with Jeanne Deroin, a union of associations (1849); arrested, tried, and imprisoned (1850–51); arrested and deported to Algeria (1852).

Writings:

Histoire de France abrégé pour l'enseignement des deux sexes, depuis les temps les plus reculés jusqu'à nos jours (Paris: Lecomte & Pougen, 1835); Histoire d'Angleterre, depuis les temps les plus reculés jusqu'à nos jours (2 vols., Paris: Desessart, 1838); Précis d'Histoire d'Angleterre, d'Écosse et d'Irlande, ou Histoire du Royaume-Uni, depuis les temps les plus reculés jusqu'à nos jours (Paris: Didot, 1844); (with G. Lefrançais and Perot) Aux Instituteurs: l'Association des Instituteurs, Institutrices et Professeurs socialistes (Paris: Imprimerie Schneider, 1849); idem., Association fraternelle des Instituteurs, Institutrices et Professeurs socialistes: programme d'éducation (Paris: au siège de l'Association, 1849).

When Pauline Roland, aged 27, set off on November 17, 1832, from her native town of Falaise (Calvados) in Normandy, she was not, like most provincials then and now, seeking her fortune. Rather, as a convert, she was anticipating spiritual

fulfillment among the devotees of a new secular religion, Saint-Simonianism. Unfortunately for her hopes, this cult, founded by Louis-Claude de Rouvroy, Comte de Saint-Simon (1760–1825), and then headed by Barthélémy-Prosper Enfantin (1796–1864), was in decline as a result of Enfantin's trial (July 1832) and imprisonment (December 15, 1832–August 1, 1833) for public immorality. Upon his release, he and most of his leading disciples went off to Egypt for three years to await the Female Messiah, who would confirm Enfantin's teachings. The movement never recovered from the Egyptian episode. Enfantin, an engineer by training, became a railway promoter who helped form the Paris-Lyons-Marseille (PLM), France's largest system. Roland knew the Saint-Simonians were in difficulty when she set out, but she would have had no suspicion that the cult was doomed, for she was a true believer and remained so long after most followers had given up.

Pauline and her younger sister Irma Roland (1806–1839) were the children of Joseph Roland, postmaster of Falaise, and Françoise Lesne Roland . When Joseph died in 1806, Françoise obtained his job. (After 1848 women would be forbidden to hold such posts.) Françoise provided Pauline and Irma a good education at a local boarding school, but Pauline left at age 11½ due to illness, Irma later. Because girls were not admitted to the high school (collège), Françoise finally secured them a tutor named Desprèz, an instructor at the school who was married and seven years Pauline's senior. Desprèz was virtually the sole local Saint-Simonian, a subscriber to Le Globe, the sect's paper, and friend of Michel Chevalier, a leading Saint-Simonian and later a notable economist and government adviser. Roland had been extremely pious in her childhood but had given up Catholicism. Under the tutelage of Desprèz, she became enthralled by Saint-Simonianism—and by Desprèz, a pale, thin, romantic-looking man trapped in an unhappy marriage. They shared a passionate platonic love from 1827 to 1831.

Saint-Simonianism, a product of the Enlightenment, was a socialist religion ("utopian," according to Marx) emphasizing technology and work. Humans should conquer nature, not each other. Useful work is what is truly fulfilling, and it should be employed to end the suffering of "the most numerous and poorest class." It would free workers but also women, for men and women are equal. Roland found this sexual equality one of Saint-Simonianism's strongest attractions; as she wrote, "I feel myself almost equal to the best [of men] and much superior to the ordinary."

It was Enfantin, Saint-Simon's successor, who developed Saint-Simonianism into a fullblown cult, with a rigid hierarchical organization, rituals, and costumes. Until November 1831, he and Saint-Armand Bazard were cohigh priests, but at that point Bazard broke away because of Enfantin's increasingly strange theories on sex and women. Saint-Simonianism preached the liberation of both mind and body. With Enfantin, the religion became more emotional and sensual. He advocated free love, rehabilitating the flesh by satisfying the natural sex drive. He was probably sincere; certainly he was the leading beneficiary of this doctrine. Enfantin was, indeed, an amazing specimen: brilliant, physically magnificent, and (in Chevalier's words) "one of the great magnetizers who exist or have ever existed." Men and women alike gravitated to him, the latter notably so when he decided that the final confirmation of the doctrine would come from the Female Messiah, a kind of perfect woman who would soon appear. Not a few women hoped they would prove to be the predestined One. It seems likely that Pauline Roland harbored some such hope for a time.

She had not rushed into Saint-Simonianism and certainly had serious doubts about Enfantin's sexual ideas, which seemed to her to be a thinly disguised condoning of adultery. Yet, his version of Saint-Simonianism chimed with her extreme sensibility. At Desprèz's urging, she began a long, passionate correspondence, overflowing with questions, confidences, and romantic agonizings, with Aglaé Saint-Hilaire , a woman painter charged by Enfantin with indoctrinating female converts. In 1831, Pauline's mother forbade her and Irma to have any more contact with Desprèz, but the three vowed to keep the faith even to martyrdom. (When Desprèz kissed Pauline's hand at their parting, it was their first physical contact.) Pauline finally accepted Enfantin's sex doctrine. In a May 13, 1832, letter to Aglaé she said she now believed Enfantin's was the voice of God. She then vowed to refrain from destroying Despréz's marriage; in her mind, this sacrifice legitimized her later sexual conduct. From early childhood, she had identified sacrifice with virtue, a theme that would remain powerful throughout her life.

When Françoise told her daughters in 1832 that she could no longer support them, Pauline gladly fled Falaise for Paris to join the disciples of the soon-to-be imprisoned Enfantin. She found poorly paying places as a teacher of geography, history, French, English, and Italian in private schools. The little money she had, from the sale of her diamonds, she gave to Aglaé to help Enfantin. On the eve of his imprisonment, she finally met him in person, but he was cool, probably having been put on his guard by the jealous Aglaé, who was tiring of Roland's effusions and suspecting she was aspiring to be recognized as the predestined One. To Aglaé, Pauline in fact had once candidly admitted to "a bit of a romantic tinge in ideas and too much exaltation." When Enfantin was released in August 1833, Roland begged to spend some time with him, but she received no reply. Meanwhile, Roland's relationship with Aglaé having faded (it would end in September 1835), Enfantin had made Charles Lambert, a mining engineer, her father-confessor. She entered a platonic love affair with him and badly wanted to accompany him and Enfantin to Egypt. Unable to go, she continued to correspond with him.

Lambert left her in charge of the spiritual welfare of a group of young men, including Adolphe Guéroult, a brilliant young journalist at Le Globe and Le Temps. After very serious thought, she decided to put into practice Saint-Simon's doctrine of saving both spirit and flesh by flesh and spirit. She had vowed she would never marry unless society changed the imbalance between the sexes, and she now steeled herself to raise as their sole parent any children she might bear, accepting no obligatory support from any father. A virgin in her 29th year, she concluded that sexuality could be used as a means of indoctrinating converts. She thus embarked on "carnal moralization," becoming a kind of holy prostitute in order to convert and save the men in her circle. Her literal application of Enfantin's most radical ideas made her perhaps unique among his followers; certainly it scandalized many. Fundamental to Pauline Roland throughout her life, however, was making her acts conform to her ideals.

Described as "tall" (at 5'3"), with a broad brow, oval face, chestnut hair, brown eyes, and a somewhat large nose and mouth, Roland possessed charm and even beauty. She found she enjoyed sex: "Glory to God, it was good," she wrote. Although she probably gave herself to many, she fell in love with Guéroult, who, she wrote, had never been loved by a woman and whose wounded heart only a woman could cure. "I was his mother in love," she wrote to Lambert. Wrote Guéroult: "We loved each other without promises, without any vows. It was love in all its freedom and at the same time full of confidence and loyalty." Enfantin's "ideas were strongly at work here." Roland soon put his faith to the test. She became pregnant and then, on June 20, 1834, had sex with Jean-François Aicard while Guéroult was out of town. She immediately informed him, and on his return a long conversation ensued. He showed himself "noble and religious," as she put it; they remained friends but no longer lovers. When she gave birth to a son on January 13, 1835, she named him after Aicard; the son learned that Guéroult was his father only after her death.

Roland began a liaison with Aicard that would last until 1847. He had come to Paris from Toulon in 1830 to study law and had fallen in with Saint-Simonianism, from which, however, he became estranged in 1832 because of Enfantin's sexual theories. He was a voluble, hot-blooded southerner, handsome, athletic, proud, and easily offended. Pauline met him when he was disillusioned and despairing. He took pity on her poverty, while she wanted only to be loved and to "save" him and make him happy again. Roland would have three children with Aicard: Maria (1837–1839), Moïse (1839–c. 1852), and Irma (c. 1841–1923). In addition, of course, she raised Jean-François, and in the latter 1840s she took in Aline-Marie Chazal , daughter of the deceased social reformer Flora Tristan (1803–1844) and later mother of the painter Paul Gauguin. Roland took sole responsibility for her children, asserting that "woman alone is the family."

George Sand">
Pauline Roland, this generous fanatic who had the illusions of a child and the character of a hero! This crazy woman, this martyr, this saint.
—George Sand

She and Aicard lived off the money from his meager legal work and their writings for struggling left-wing publications. Through Aicard, she met Pierre Leroux (1797–1871), a dissident Saint-Simonian working out his own version of socialism. Leroux gradually replaced Enfantin as Roland's "father," although she never became as mystically attached to him as to Enfantin. While pregnant with her first child, she began writing (up to 14 hours a day) for Leroux's Encyclopédie nouvelle, intended to be the successor to the great 18th-century work. The pay was poor, and the project died in 1841. She also produced a textbook short history of France (1835). In 1838, she published a similar history of England; a revised version for adults, an original historical comparison of England, Scotland, and Wales, appeared in 1844. Notably, she stressed social and cultural matters at the expense of traditional political and military affairs.

Roland also contributed occasional articles and reviews to periodicals. Since items often appeared anonymously or under pseudonyms or first names, it is impossible to establish a firm bibliography. She probably wrote for La Femme libre (c. 1832) and certainly its successor, the first French feminist review (and written only by women), Suzanne Voilquin 's La Femme nouvelle/La Tribune des femmes, followed in its turn by Le Journal des femmes—all short-lived Saint-Simonian gazettes of the mid-1830s. She also wrote for Leroux's Revue encyclopédique and for Le Temps, thanks to Guéroult, as well as Eugénie Niboyet 's Conseiller des femmes (Lyons). In the 1840s, she contributed to Leroux's and George Sand 's Revue indépendant (from 1841), Leroux's La Revue sociale (from 1845) and the weekly L'Éclaireur de l'Indre (from 1843); in 1847, Leroux named her, Luc Desages, and Grégoire Champseix joint directors of L'Éclaireur. Her subjects were exceptionally varied: history and geography; biographical essays on English figures; women's concerns, especially labor conditions; peasant life and issues—and so forth.

Roland and Aicard's liaison was predictably stormy, with episodes worthy of Balzac, their contemporary. Briefly, they lived in Paris until around 1838, when Aicard returned to Toulon for two years to deal with his parents' affairs. There he fell in love with a Saint-Simonian friend's ravishing 17-year-old bride, Victoire, who reciprocated. Aicard then, amazingly, persuaded his friend to treat Victoire henceforth only as a sister or daughter. But one day Aicard discovered them violating the "contract" and told Roland everything. She choked down her hurt while sticking by her Saint-Simonian tenets. At his request, she moved to Toulon to fortify him against further temptation. In 1839, Pauline's sister died as did her daughter Maria (deeply distressing events for her), and she gave birth to Moïse. With Aicard, she moved back to Paris, where Irma was born around 1841. But Aicard, a weak man, still loved Victoire. In 1845, when he had to go to Toulon again, he discovered she felt likewise. Roland refused to accept the renewal of what she acidly called "a petty love affair [amourette] without import and without dignity." In April 1847, abandoned in Paris, in debt, and desperately wanting to keep her brilliant eldest son in boarding school, she begged Aicard for 17,500 of the 35,000 francs she had loaned him from her sister's bequest and her own earnings over 12 years. Having spent it, he sent her 2,000 from his father's account—a Balzackian ending to this sad tale.

Roland still held to Saint-Simonianism even though by the latter 1830s the cult itself had dissolved. But she had learned that free love was not for her and now conceded that marriage had much to recommend it.

Pierre Leroux came to her rescue. In late 1847, she joined his socialist community at Boussac (Creuse), where he had her found a school. His socialism became hers. He had excised the authoritarian, elitist, and cultic features of Saint-Simonianism while retaining its emphasis on a moral transformation of humanity, mystical exaltation, pacifism, female equality, and rejection of all exploitation of man by man. Boussac, founded in 1844, was slowly failing, but the year at the commune, where everyone received the same wage and all profits were put into agriculture, was the happiest of Roland's life. She began applying educational ideas she later spelled out in her teachers' association.

The Revolution of 1848, begun in February with the overthrow of Louis-Philippe (r. 1830–1848) and the proclamation of the Second Republic (1848–52), ultimately ended the Boussac experiment. Contrary to many accounts, Roland did not go to Paris until December 1848, after Boussac had failed, and did not participate in the women's club scene; in 1852, she wrote she had "too much intelligence and seriousness for that." She was not inactive, however. She drew notice when she tried to vote in the municipal elections of February 27 and lodged an official protest (denied in April) when she was refused. She probably contributed an article to Niboyet and Jeanne Deroin 's La Voix des femmes (The Women's Voice), and at L'Éclaireur she supported Leroux's candidacy for the National Assembly, arguing that workers and peasants, not the rich, should be chosen. Leroux won a by-election on June 8; L'Éclaireur folded, however, after the June Days insurrection.

From Boussac, Roland sent three open letters to Leroux, published in Le Peuple (The People, November 27, December 11 and 18), setting forth her socialist credo. While individual rights must be respected, humans can act usefully only in association. Private capital should disappear, with the state alone owning the instruments of production. Individual property should be permitted only to meet the ordinary needs of life; there should be neither rich nor poor. An elected council should direct all operations of production, distribution, and consumption by communities, with women enjoying full rights to vote and hold office. In a striking departure from her previous views, she endorsed marriage, which should be a union between legal equals based on love and faithfulness; divorce, while allowed, should result in the children being given to others to raise.

As Boussac shut down, she considered taking to the road (à la Flora Tristan) to proclaim "the new religion," but she finally decided to go to Paris. There Roland soon became involved in the associationist movement—workers' cooperatives—and journalism. She worked at L'Opinion des femmes (run by Deroin and Désirée Gay), which treated women's issues, and as an anonymous editor at La Tribune des Peuples, which promoted the liberation of subject nationalities, e.g., the Poles and Italians. Later, between January 1850 and January 1851, Roland published four fine articles in La République examining workers' cooperatives.

On February 6, 1849, she answered a call from a teacher, Perot, to meet to start a teachers' association. In April, internal debates led Deroin, Roland, and seven others to withdraw from this and form an association of socialist teachers. At length, on September 30, Roland, Perot, and Gustave Lefrançais, as a provisional executive committee of the Association of Schoolmasters, Schoolmistresses, and Professors, launched a general appeal to teachers.

A co-author, Roland heavily influenced the ambitious program contained in the appeal. It was a typical '48ist scheme, at once sensible and naive. Its core concept was the education of all individuals—male and female—to their full potential. (To Roland, equal education would by itself solve the problems of poverty and the inequality between husbands and wives.) Individual aptitude alone, not family background, should govern placement and progress. By age 18, all should be capable to some degree in "the three" modes of knowledge—manual, scientific, and artistic. The scheme proposed six three-year stages, each with age-specific goals. The most radical idea was the compulsory enrollment of children from birth to three in nurseries and from three to six in daycare facilities staffed by professionals. Roland wanted women free to work: maternity is "a duty of the woman, a sacred duty, even rigorous; but at no time should it be considered her only duty." If a woman did not wish to leave her child, she would be trained to join the staff.

Meanwhile, Deroin, an ex-Saint-Simonian with whom Roland worked in complete harmony, asked her to be a (symbolic) candidate in the May 13–14 elections to the national Legislative Assembly. Mistrustful of politics, Roland declined, and Deroin herself ran instead. Acting on a plan first envisaged by Flora Tristan, Deroin went on to found an umbrella organization of the cooperatives, the Union of Fraternal Associations of Workers. Roland, representing the teachers, joined the Executive Committee and took charge of administration. After a preliminary convention (August 23), delegates from 104 associations formally established the Union (October 5). It promoted an ambitious project to unite production and consumption among the associations so that individuals could be self-sufficient and not have to resort to public markets. The plan's leitmotif was not equal pay per se but the assurance of fair distribution to all according to their needs.

Predictably, the conservative government took a dim view of socialist organizations, despite the teachers' and Union's efforts to stay strictly within the law. Police pressure mounted from March 1850. On May 29, they arrested 38 men and 9 women (including Deroin) at a general assembly. Roland was arrested shortly afterward during searches of dwellings. They were charged with plotting to overthrow the government. Roland's indictment described her as an unwed mother, a communist socialist, and "an enemy of marriage." The Associations Affair trial, held before packed galleries on November 12–14, silenced the women's movement in France for the next 20 years. Roland, Deroin, and Louise Nadaud received six months in prison (much lighter sentences than the men's); when their appeals failed, they were incarcerated from January 2 to July 2, 1851, at Saint-Lazare, under the fairly liberal rules of political confinement.

Roland read Plato and the New Testament while in prison, and, said Deroin, worked among the thieves and prostitutes "with a noble persistence" to restore their self-respect. She moved toward a religious socialism: "The democratic and social Republic is what Jesus of Nazareth called the Kingdom of God." She continued to write even though she found her contacts drying up. On April 25, the Feuille du Peuple (The People's Page) printed her article "Does a Woman Have a Right to Liberty?"; and La Liberté de Pensée (The Freedom of Thought) published in its 43rd and 45th issues long articles on ideals and morality, the first one dedicated to her eldest son. She (with Deroin) also appealed to American feminists for solidarity; in reply, the Second National Women's Rights Convention named Lucretia Mott to correspond with the French movement.

Upon her release, Roland was destitute. She had received word in prison that an uncle had left her 12,000 francs, which she dreamed of using to pay her debts and help the teachers' association to found a socialist commune. But the bequest became tied up in the courts. Friends had cared for her children while she was imprisoned; she could not support them now by herself. To keep them and herself alive and rescue her failing teachers' association, she begged money from (mostly poor) friends—Lambert turned her down—and imagined publishing ventures, e.g., almanacs and cheap editions of the classics. She could have fled to Belgium or (like Deroin and Leroux) to England, but she stayed fast: "I await my fate," she wrote on January 16, 1852. "Whatever happens, I shall suffer it in conformity with my principles."

She did not have long to wait. After Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte (the future Napoleon III) seized power on December 2, 1851, resistance flickered and a crackdown followed. Roland, contrary to legend, did not participate in the uprising. She did bravely visit prisoners and intercede for them. The authorities, who thought she had fled, finally woke up and arrested her on February 6, 1852, for insurrection, belonging to secret organizations, and posting placards calling for resistance. She appeared before the judge on February 10. To his questions, she defiantly replied, "Actively, I took no part in the insurrection, but in my heart I took an active part." She was sentenced on March 24 to deportation to Algeria for life, for having participated in charity lotteries for prisoners' families (false), for belonging to women's clubs (false), and for being a notorious socialist propagandist, which she was. As she remarked, she was really condemned for her opinions, friends, and participating in the 1848 revolution.

Algerian exile had three categories: 1) imprisonment, 2) confinement to a town and forbidden self-employment, and 3) the same but allowed self-employment. Roland received "Algeria minus" (2). Because her son Moïse was too ill to accompany Roland, friends cared for him until he died soon after she left. They also supported Jean-François and Irma at schools. Throughout her remaining ordeal, the separation from her children tormented her, especially when she felt dutybound to refuse to appeal or accept any conditional release. While waiting at Saint-Lazare to be transported, she wrote (April 15) in bitterness and idealistic fervor (and in faithfulness to Leroux's doctrine of poverty) that she hoped they would always be poor because rising in this world can only come at the expense of others.

She left for Algeria on June 23 with 10 women and 210 men, sailing from Le Havre to Mers-el-Kabir. After being held at grim Fort Saint-Grégoire near Oran, she was sent by boat on July 10–11 with 13 women to the Convent of the Good Shepherd at El-Bier, near Algiers, a facility mostly for prostitutes and ruled by a strict Bavarian baroness. Many of the women converted or requested pardon, but not Roland. The baroness recommended she be sent to Sétif. Roland took ship to Bougie on July 28 and from there rode to Sétif by mule for several days across the Kabylie in a blazing heat. At Sétif, she worked in a small hotel as a laundress and cook for two francs a day plus the government's one-franc subsidy—not enough to send anything to her children.

Meanwhile, George Sand, the poet Béranger, and others tried in vain to get her released. By autumn, however, the government, concerned about public reaction to the deaths of female deportees, offered to release them if they would repent and swear allegiance. Many women accepted these terms, but Roland still held firm. The government's anxiety grew when Jean-François won first place in a national Latin examination. Fearing he would interrupt the prize ceremony with a political appeal, it increased the pressure on Roland, transferring her to the kasbah (native quarter) at Bône and even threatening her with the "dry guillotine" in Cayenne (Devil's Island). Anguished, she refused all conditions. Exasperated, the government in late October remitted her sentence.

The return of the now-famous exile became an agony. She arrived at Philippeville exhausted and took ship for Marseille. Clad only in a thin robe and canvas shoes, she endured a storm-ridden six-day passage, lying on deck, chilled to the bone and desperately seasick. In late November, she left Marseille for Paris and her children, but at Lyons she halted, sick and utterly worn. Jean-François sped to her bedside, but he arrived too late for her to recognize him. She died at 10 pm on December 16, 1852. Enfantin, who had just settled in Lyons as a railway official, dryly noted in his diary, "Death of Pauline Roland." Police agents watched her burial closely. It is not known if he was one of the five brave souls who showed up.

Both Jean-François and Irma eventually became professors, she in England. To Aicard's credit, he watched over them, and after his death Victoire did the same.

Pauline Roland became an icon of the Left in Europe. Victor Hugo, France's greatest Romantic writer, enshrined her with a poem in Les Châtiments (The Punishments), his savage indictment of the regime of "Napoléon le Petit." She indeed typified the Romantic age (c. 1780–1850) in its passion for both individual liberty and human solidarity. She took liberty to the farthest reaches when she called for women to bear children outside the bonds of the male-dominated institution of marriage. Yet at the same time she affirmed a total responsibility for the children and for all those who are, in Saint-Simon's phrase, society's "most numerous and poorest."

Gentle, strong, compassionate, and fearless, Roland was no publicity-seeker and humbly admitted her faults. She was self-sacrificing to the verge of masochism, could be preachy, and lacked intellectual originality. She was also a naïf, and for that she paid a terrible price. From Saint-Lazare in 1851, she confessed to Lefrançais that "setting out twenty years ago under the influence of this false theory that the mother alone is the family, having recognized its error, I see myself condemned to live this life in all its rigor." She modified her ideas, it is true. But, as Edith Thomas observed, few persons in any age have demonstrated such a thirst to make one's life conform to one's highest thoughts and words. It was a thirst which brought her, fittingly, to a romantic end: a victory wrapped in tragedy.

sources:

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Bidelman, Patrick Kay. Pariahs Stand Up! The Founding of the Liberal Feminist Movement in France, 1858–1889. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1982.

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Dictionnaire biographique du mouvement ouvrier français. Dir. Jean Maitron. Paris: Éditions Ouvrières, 1969—.

Elwitt, Sanford. "Leroux, Pierre," in Historical Dictionary of France from the 1815 Restoration to the Second Empire. 2 vols. Ed. by Edgar Leon Newman. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1987.

Groult, Benoîte. Pauline Roland, ou comment la liberté vint aux femmes. Paris: Robert Laffont, 1991.

Michaud, Stéphane. "Deux approches du changement social: Flora Tristan et Pauline Roland au miroir de leur correspondance," in Flora Tristan, George Sand, Pauline Roland: Les Femmes et l'invention d'une nouvelle morale, 1830–1848. Paris: Éditions Créaphis, 1994.

Moses, Claire Goldberg. French Feminism in the Nineteenth Century. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1984.

Thibert, Marguerite. "Une Apôtre socialiste de 1848: Pauline Roland," in La Révolution de 1848. Vol. 22, 1925–26, pp. 478–502, 524–540.

Thomas, Edith. Pauline Roland: Socialisme et féminisme au XIX^esiècle. Paris: Marcel Rivière, 1956 (contains a bibliography of Roland's journalism and correspondence).