Talk:Madame Roland

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[edit] Political Spectrum

What was madame roland's place on the political spectrum? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 12.217.57.20 (talk • contribs) 28 Oct 2005.

She was a Girondist. The balls were definitely considered to be on the left when they first emerged, though in the course of the next few years there came to be a more radical left. In particular, the people who consolidated around Robespierre and became known as The Mountain, had slightly different politics than the Gironde in 1791 but the differences would not be easy to describe in left/right terms. The Mountain, were largely responsible for the Reign of Terror, which is generally considered a move to the hard left. It was certainly a move away from liberalism. Also, during the same period, among the sans coulottes the first real popular mass-based politics emerged, generally counted as being to the left even of the Mountain. (Of this last group, Jacques Hébert was about as far left as you could go. Like Mme. Roland, he was also executed for political reasons, considered by Robespierre to be an enemy on his left as the Girondists were considered enemies on their right.

So, in short, initially she would have been perceived as very far left, but politics farther to the left emerged over the few remaining years of her lifetime. -- Jmabel | Talk 05:35, 29 October 2005 (UTC)

[edit] As her mind matured?

I changed this statement to be more NPOV. The sentence is correlating that by not entering a convent, it was a marked sign of intellectual maturity which definently contains an inherent bias. I approached it also to maybe indicate that the decision at first to enter the convent was one made of fancy and not true mature commitment but I cannot find any sources that could counter this or give more depth to the timeline of her studies and POV's. I feel the new sentence accurately explains the reasoning for her change since her cirriculum contained the works of many French liberals and secularists that opposed the Catholic Church and its institutions (eg. clergy.) On another note, I have the word "studies" twice in there and couldn't find an accurate synonym to change it to. Anyone want to give this a shot? --Unreal128 6 June 2006, 05:33 (UTC)