Daughter of the Seine

Illustrated with about fifteen photographs and reproductions of old engravings, and with a map of old Paris forming the end paper and colored jacket.

The most dramatic period in history to many is the whole scene of the French Revolution. Colorful, picturesque, tragic, stirring imagination and emotions, it makes the background for the life of this vivid picture of one of its greatest figures, Marie-Jeanne Philipon, later Madame Roland. The story moves with her from her childhood, a perfect picture of the life of almost any child of the middle classes in Paris of those days, up to her tragic death, the victim of her greatness and of the machine to which she gave birth.

A romantic, moving human document and scholarly presentation of that period of history.

—from the dust jacket 

This is a fictionalized biography of the French Revolutionary patriot and writer Jeanne Manon Roland de la Platiere (1754-1793), who became known simply by Madame Roland. She was the daughter of a Paris engraver who encouraged his daughter's interest in music, painting, and literature. As a young girl, she told her grand-mother: "I'll call myself daughter of the Seine," and as an adult she often said that the river was part of her soul. As a young woman she became interested in the radical ideas of Jean Jacques Rousseau and the movement for equality. She shared these enthusiasms with her husband, whom she married in 1780. After the outbreak of the Revolution, she formed a salon of followers, who late became known as the Girondists. Under the constitutional monarchy, her husband became minister of the interior, a post he held after the monarchy was overthrown. Madame Roland both directed her husband's career and influenced the important politicians of the period.