Pauline Roland

Marie Désirée Pauline Roland (born June 7, 1805 , Falaise , Normandy , † December 16, 1852 , France ) was a French journalist , feminist and socialist .

Live and act

At the request of her mother, a widowed postmaster, Pauline Roland and her sister Irma, who was two years younger, received a good education, which was not common for girls at the time. In their early twenties, both of them also received private lessons from teacher M. Desprez, who conveyed the ideas of French socialism by Henri de Saint-Simon to the sisters , in which the liberation of women played a major role. Pauline Roland then became a supporter of this philosophy and an active member of the Saint-Simonists.

In 1832 she moved to Paris alone and earned her living by writing and researching . She co-wrote the Encyclopédie Nouvelle , wrote historical treatises and also began writing for early feminist magazines. From 1841 she wrote for the socialist revue Indépendante directed by George Sand and Pierre Leroux .

In 1833 she had the son Jean-François from Adolphe Guérolt . Before she was born, she entered into a relationship with Jean Aicard , with whom she lived in "free association" until 1845. She had two other children with him (Marie and Moïse, * 1844). Pauline Roland insisted that all her children should have their surnames and that she should bear sole responsibility for them, including financial responsibility. When her friend Flora Tristan died in 1844, she also looked after her daughter Aline (who later became a mother with Paul Gauguin ). In the sense of Saint-Simonism , Roland never married.

Financially very weak, Roland was accepted into the Leroux community in Boussac in 1847 , where she took over the management of the school and a newspaper ( l'Eclaireur de l'Indre ). In 1848 Boussac was closed and Roland returned to Paris. Their feminist and socialist activities intensified. She published in the feminist magazine Voix des Femmes . With Jeanne Deroin and Gustave Lefrançais , she founded the first seamstresses and teachers' association with a focus on equal training for women and men and on the betterment of women in the world of work. In 1850 these associations were banned by the government and Roland was serving a six-month prison sentence along with many other people for "unlawful association".

On February 6, 1852, Roland was arrested for resisting the coup and imprisoned in the Paris Saint-Lazare prison. The following March she was sentenced to be deported to Algeria . She left Le Havre in June and was taken to the El Biar monastery prison. In July, she was alleged to be a suspect prisoner and transferred to a prison in Annaba . She was pardoned at the end of October 1852, but due to the poor conditions of detention, she was in poor health. In addition, exhausted from the sea voyage back to France, she died on December 16, 1852 of pleurisy.

Roland was a companion and supporter of the socialists and feminists of the time, such as B. Flora Tristan , Jeanne Deroin , Suzanne Voilquin , George Sand , Pierre Leroux and Charles Fourier .

literature

• Benoîte Groult : Pauline Roland ou Comment la liberté vint aux femmes. 1991
  • German edition: How freedom came to women. The life of Pauline Roland. Translated from the French by Kirsten Ruhland-Stephan. Droemer Knaur, Munich 1992, ISBN 3-426-61473-1 .

Web links

• Literature by and about Pauline Roland in the SUDOC catalog (Association of French University Libraries)