Category Archives: Women’s history

Books History Women's history

Getting ahead in the Sun King’s France

December 26, 2008 – 11:50 am

There’s no doubt about the top position that a woman could reach in France in the time of Louis XIV, at least by her own efforts. That supreme goal was to be the king’s official maitresse en titre, the king’s official mistress. Louis in his long reign had just three. It is the middle of these, Athenais, or to give her proper due, the Marquise de Montespan, about whom Lisa Hilton has chosen to write a biography, titled The Real Queen of France: Athenais and Louis XIV.

As that title suggests, Hilton admires Athenais; she’s more than a little seduced by this powerful character, but then given all of the assassination that the marquise’s character has endured – in her lifetime and afterwards – perhaps as a corrective that’s no bad thing. We can do with positive, approving accounts of powerful women – particularly those who’ve started from practically nowhere and risen, determinedly and creatively, to the very top.

But that’s not a view of her generally shared by either contemporaries or later historians. The famous letter writer Madam de Sevigne called her “the Torrent”, or “Circe”, and her character’s been blackened by her alleged involvement in the “The Affair of the Poisons” – a murky, widespread case of alleged sorcery, witchcraft and poisoning that stretched through all of French society, from the bottom to the centre of Versailles itself. (Hilton convincingly acquits Athenais of serious involvement in the case – she might indeed have used love potions on the king, but wild claims of black masses and poisoning attempts don’t, she says, hold up to any sort of scrutiny, and can be traced to political machinations behind the investigation.)

That’s not to say, however, that Athenais didn’t have contemporary admirers – not to mention those seeking to ride on the skirt-tails of her success – they called her La Grande Sultane, or La Maitress Regnante. And that hints at what Hilton sees as her greatest success – and contribution to France – her place at the very creative heart of the cultural heartland that Versailles became.
Hilton is very good at setting the scene of Versailles – the way Louis – his childhood scarred by conflict between his regent mother and the aristocracy – sought to enfold and trap France’s entire ruling class within this gilded prison, and the way in which its excessive luxury was, she says, a driving force for France’s industrial development, and growth of France as the defining luxury brand – a position that to large degree it still holds today.

The biographer follows a direct, simple and linear path through Athenais’s life, beginning with her childhood in a family of the bluest of blue blood, although seeing her prospects of a glorious marriage (by which was meant not one of love but of fine family alliance to money, power and more blue blood) reduced by her father’s extravagance and the cost of the dowry of her elder sister. So, Hilton explains, it was at the advanced age of 22 that Athenais was to be tied to the decent, good-lucking and moderately solvent Marquis de Noirmoutiers. Had that come off, Hilton doesn’t speculate, although the reader surely must, there might not have been this “Real Queen” – her career might have followed a more conventional path.

But this young man got tangled in a messy case of aristocratic honour – an early morning duel that left three men dead and him fleeing into exile, Curiously, only weeks later, Athenais found herself marrying the Marquis de Montespan, brother of one of the dead man, in the closest thing to a love match the 17th century was likely to see among the aristocracy. He should have been marrying money, so really should she, but he additionally had no connection to power or influence, and a strong reputation for gambling and extravagance – which he was soon to be living up to, and how, as well as proving his inability to succeed at anything he tried his hand at – notably military matters.

So it became essential that she secure for herself a good court post – which she duly did, becoming lady in waiting to the poor dim and dumpy Spanish Queen – that was no fun in itself, but it put Athenais at the centre of the court – in its masques and ballets, its spectacles, and very near to the king himself, and to her fellow lady in waiting, Louise de la Valliere, the king’s first, and still installed official mistress. Hilton is rather hard on Louise – she surely can’t have been quite so dull as the writer suggests – but it seems clear that once Athenais put her mind – and her body – to it, Louis couldn’t but be dazzled, and seduced from his sworn mistress. (Not that, Hilton reports, it was hard to seduce Louis – practically any woman in the right place at the right time could do it – often several of them in one day – but usually it was more than a moment of divertisement.)

There’s plenty of detail and background colour, but you never really feel as a reader that you, or Hilton, has got truly close to Athenais, has understood not just her ambition, but the person beneath it. I’m not sure, however, that you can blame the biographer for this. As Hilton explains, the Versailles that Athenais played a big part in creating was Europe’s perfect model of the baroque – “the expression of classical idea of life lived as spectacle, in which men conduct themselves as ‘actors’ before God and every public gesture becomes ceremonial.” Louis himself acted the king so much, Hilton suggests, there may not have been anything left of the original man underneath. (Helped in the early years of relationship she suggests by the arrogantly confident Athenais – who always trusted that her fine breeding would see her through.)

One minor irritation in the book is that popular poetry, ditties and jokes are scattered through the text, but translated only in the endnotes. My reading French can just about stumble through them – although almost certainly missing some of the puns, but why not make these – in a text very much meant for popular consumption – immediately available on the relevant page.

But overall it is a rollicking, entertaining, even inspiring, spin through a life lived to the full. Hilton does a decent job of helping the reader keep track of multi- titled aristocracy and their complicated genealogy. And you’ll emerge also with a clear sense of Versailles in its best days (the accounts of the undergardeners sprinting frantically from fountain to fountain to ensure they “played” as the king walked past will certainly stay with me whenever I think of those endless vistas, which still survive today. And if all of this is tinted for the modern reader with the knowledge of what comes next – the Revolution and all of that – Hilton has sensibly chosen to avoid that – putting Athenais in her own flawed but glorious time, and letting the future take care of itself. (Except to note, for those who care about such things, that through her daughter to Louis, Mlle de Blois, Duchesse d’Orleans, that her great-great-great grandson became King of France (the nation’s only constitutional monarch). And by way of his 10 children, Athenais came to be related to the royal houses of Spain, Portugal, Belgium, Bulgaria, Italy and Luxembourg.

And as I sit writing this, in Burgundy, France, there’s an almost local connection – for Athenais died in 1717 (almost forgotten) in the spa at Bourbon Lancy – just 100km or so down the road. She’d gone there seeking a cure – as she’d regularly done in her glory days – and of her journey there in May 1676 Hilton provides a detailed account.

“Athenais was accompanied by her niece and her sister, Mme de Thianges, and they travelled in typical style, in a barouche drawn by six splendid horses.Behind followed a coach containing six maids, two wagons, sic pack mules, Athenais’s bodyguards and a dozen outriders. In total, the party number forty-five. Mme de Sevigne was following the same route as the royal mistress…
Athenais paised at Nevers, where she was given an official welcome at the chateau …. the cure at Bourbon lasted 30 days, and consisted of drinking the waters, therapeutic thermal baths, ‘medicines’ such as bleeding and purges, and bed rest. Mme de Sevigny was enthusiastic about the results, although her modesty was rather tried by the outdoor baths, and she did not venture into the mud pits. She comments on the excellent mix of Vichy and Bourbon water on offer…
From Bourbon, Athenais and her party set off for Moulin aboard a magnificent barge, painted and gilded and furnished, as the indefatigable de Sevigne reports, “in red damask… with quantities of devices and streamers in the colours and France and Navarre… Athenais had obtained this magnificent equipage from Gilbert Bourdier de Roche, the intendant of the baths, who considered himself amply recompensed for the enormous expense by the letter Athenais reported she had written to the King, full of praise for his attentiveness.” (p. 180-181).

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Books Women's history

Maria Antoinette – a solid account of a woman who never really got a grip on reality

December 26, 2008 – 11:47 am

There are few subjects that divide historians as much as Marie Antoinette. Those of the anti-monarchical, pro-Revolutionary, or just plain misogynist school, are convinced that she was a nymphomaniac, traitorous bad mother with no redeeming qualities whatsoever. Those of the royalist school by contrast, along with the odd feminist who’s tired of reading the same slurs again and again about powerful women, tend to defend her as purer than the driven snow, well-meaning, if, they have to admit, a little out of touch with the realities of France.

Evelyne Lever, a prominent French historian, with the benefit of some papers and facts only relatively recently available, has trawled through the archives, reasonably weighed the facts (it seems – she has fewer obvious angles than most writers I’ve read on this subject), and, perhaps unsurprisingly, come down somewhere in the middle. No, Marie Antoinette almost certainly wasn’t faithful to the king (although this will probably never be proved with complete certainty); no, she never sacrificed the interests of her native Austria to the land into which she’d (so unhappily) married into; no, she never developed any realistic political sense. But there were entirely understandable, if not defensible, reasons for all of those failings.

First, Antonia, as she was known in her birth family, was not properly brought up for the royal duties she was almost certain to perform. Her mother, Empress Maria Theresa, might have been an early “Superwoman”, almost singlehandedly running an empire while giving birth to a dozen children and seeing nine (exceptionally for the time) growing into adulthood, and she might have ensured her daughter learnt courtly manners, but she didn’t see to her education in politics, ethics or simply how to get along with people when more than a winning smile was needed.

When the 14-year-old bride arrived at the political bearpit of Versailles, and met her strange, slow-witted and socially paralysed husband, she had none of the tools she needed to manage. That she was frivolous, spendthrift, unwise in her choice of friends was Maria Antoinette’s fault, but even had she been a more sober character, this would have been a tough challenge.

Second, there’s no doubt she was intellectually limited – but she was continually given what was, for her own interests, bad advice. Her mother and brothers and sisters, and their advisers – who Maria Antoinette was carefully not told were acting for her mother – kept advising, even bullying, her to advance the interests of Austria – even when their goals were clearly achievable within the realpolitik of Europe.

Third, she was almost certainly unfaithful with the handsome Swedish solider Count Axel Fersen (although probably not, Lever concludes, with other men with whom she flirted – and as for the claims of lesbian affairs, there appears to be no evidence of that at all). Lever has looked closely at his papers – and at the details of the way various palace chambers were remodelled. But although for a Queen this was certainly a very serious business, it isn’t hard to see how, with her sexually dysfunctional and difficult husband, she might feel badly in need of comfort. Thanks to the report of her blunt but perceptive brother, the Emperor Joseph, Lever is able to report exactly what was wrong with their sexual relationship – in terms that even a modern newspaper agony aunt might find to be a bit too much information.

You can’t accuse Lever of holding back, and she’s ensured that this account is as entertaining and readable as you might expect of one of the great tragic tales of French history. No doubt those seeking academic tomes will look in other directions, but general readers seeking a balanced historical account, in a solid framework, that will help them understand the woman and her time, should find this entirely satisfactory.

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Books Environmental politics Women's history

Two novels of climate change

December 14, 2008 – 9:58 am

I’ve read two great novels of the Age of Mutually Assured Destruction. There was Neville Shute’s On the Beach, which I consumed in a single sitting as a terrified 12-year-old with the old “torch under the blankets when I was supposed to be asleep”, finishing at about 4am, when the Australian suburbs were deathly, terrifyingly quietly. John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids I read about the same time, but what I remember was being shown the film at school. In retrospect it was a laughably amateurish piece of you-can-see-the-strings Fifties sci-fi, but being film-naive I found it terrifying.

Neither of these tales is, perhaps, great literature, but they deserve, I would argue, the label of great for their ability to capture the fears of an age in a manner that spoke to the common man, woman and child.

So what will be the “great” books of the Age of Climate Change? Its too early to tell for sure, of course, but I’ve been reading two of the serious candidates: Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, and Sarah Hall’s The Carhullan Army.

And oddly, they can be seen in parallel with the earlier world destruction novels. The Road is the story of a man and a boy alone in this hostile, dangerous environment raw in every tooth and claw, as Wyndham follows a couple through a similar collapsed world. The Carhullan Army meanwhile is a “community” novel; as Shute followed an Australia left alone and isolated as the last continent waiting for the wave of radiation to reach it, so Hall follows a feminist commune that’s trying to stand up alone against a desperate Britain reduced to something like 1984 without oil and with climate turbulence.

That is not to say that in style these two novels have much in common. “Spare” is the adjective that attaches itself irresistibly to The Road, (winner of the 2007 Pullitzer) and it is a text with serious literary pretentions, beautifully structured in illustrative flashback, its characters speaking in elaborately simple monosyllables, as one well might at the end of the world.

The Carhullen Army is a more traditionally structured novel, with traces of thriller in its largely linear structure. It is also an explicitly feminist novel, which means you can pretty well rule out any major popular success, but it might perhaps one day be a manifesto, an inspiration, for a holdout of a route on the way to McCarthy’s absolute hell.

In another way these novels too run in structural parallel – McCarthy posits one sudden, overwhelming disaster, never explained, in the old tradition of the nuclear novel. Hall more closely follows the path down to near-destruction that a scientist today might well posit.

Their purposes are also different: McCarthy is painting a picture, making a psychological exploration – there is a kind of hope here, but it is very much placed in the interior of the human race. Hall by contrast is intensely political – her hope lies in the creation of a new, separatist feminist structure, in which every participant has been wiped clean by past suffering and is starting again in what is still a highly realistic society for an age that has lost hope in utopia.

Yet despite their differences, these are two novels that we need as a world to read — as we will need many more: for while scientists can tell us and tell us the dangers, we live in the West in a world that believes in continuity, safety, certainty, its people incapable of imagining themselves as desperate refugees. That this is a real danger is something novelists are uniquely equipped to bring home to us, as these two novels, in their own powerful ways, certainly do.

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Politics Women's history

Miscellaneous reading

December 8, 2008 – 2:15 am

First some fun – the archaeologists are checking out the Greenham Women’s Camp… “helped to rediscover a forgotten outpost of the protest. This was the previously unrecorded Emerald Gate camp, where a few women directly monitored Gama – the Ground-launched missiles Alert and Maintenance Area – the other side of the base’s famous fence. The carefully hidden nook, with fragments of “bender” shelters and a fire pit, are compared in the survey to a long tradition of spying points in communities studied by archaeologists.”

And scientists, after poo-pooing it for years – have rediscovered something about dogs any owner could have told them – they feel jealousy. “Psychologists previously believed most animals lack the “sense of self” needed to experience so-called secondary emotions such as jealousy, embarrassment, empathy or guilt. These emotions are more complex than feelings associated with instant reaction – such as anger, lust or joy.” One more claim for primate exceptionalism falls…

Then the “why am I not surprised” category – pigs in Ireland at the centre of the current food scare were fed waste bread still in its plastic bags. Which can’t have been healthy for them… (although if the dioxins actually come from the plastic – well hope you’ve been easting home-baked bread!) A “return to organics” anyone?

And a sad tale of the individual pain (and probably cross-generation health damage) caused by the huge leap in unemployment in the US. Of course in America, with your job comes your health care – and maternity care. So one mother had her labour induced early in time to still be covered – but it all went medically wrong, and the insurance company says it won’t pay anyway. A great example of how the American medical system warps care.

But good news from Manchester, where the local community is fiercely resisting the intrusion of that system and its corporations into the NHS. (As indeed, I’m pleased to say, the community in Camden.)

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Books Women's history

An artist and a monarchist

November 28, 2008 – 11:58 pm

There’s much to admire about Elisabeth Vigee Le Brun, and not just that she deserves to be placed high indeed in the ranks of the painters of history. Some of them I’ve learnt from reading Gita May’s biography, subtitled The Odyssey of an Artist in the Age of Revolution.

Unlike many women of the early modern period, she didn’t immediately try to disassociate herself from other prominent female artists. When asked to contribute ta self-portrait for the Grand Ducal Gallery at the Uffizi, she was expecially pleased that among the contemporary self-portrats in the collection was one by Angelica Kauffmann, who she greatly admired as “one of the glories of our sex”. (And she would go out of her way to vsit Angelica soon after she arrived in Rome.) p. 81

And I entirely sympathise with her approach to the sites… “She preferred going by herself to the churches, galleries, and palaces where artworks were to be seen so as to avoid having her enjoyment spoiled by idle conversation.” (p. 85)

And she was a fan of Catherine the Great of Russia, taking “obvious pleasure in stressing the fact that Catherine’s accomplishments as a great monarch were on a par with those of the most notable rulers”. (p. 135)

Yet, somehow, its hard to really warm to her. Perhaps it is because she was a fervent and unwavering monarchist who was never able to understand why anyone would want a revolution; in part perhaps it is because most of her art swings far too far in the direction of sentimentality for our taste, although her portriat of Hubert Robert shows her true potential when that inclination is suppressed.

As a biography this seems flat, but then I’ve had several goes at Vigee Le Brun and she always seems a little so… It raises the question: does a great artist have to be a great character? Maybe not, but it certainly helps in promulgating their fame.


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Books Early modern history Women's history

Don’t believe the conduct books

November 23, 2008 – 10:37 pm

A weekend of escape to France gave me the chance to read the entertaining and informative The Verneys: A True Story of Love, War and Madness in 17th-century England by Adrian Tinniswood. (Don’t worry about the title – that’s just the publisher going a bit OTT.)

To quote: “It wasn’t just Molly, the heiress who eloped and married for love, who broke with convention; or Pen Stewkeley, the spinster who slept with and then married her sister’s unsuitable boyfriend. There was Aunt Eure, the widow who scandalised the Verney’s entire social circle by marrying a Roman Catholic; Sir Ralph’s sister Susan, who started her married life in Fleet Prison; Peg Elmes, who decided to separate from her violent husband , and Pen Denton, who according to the family broke her heart for joy when hers died. Mall became pregnant by a servant and eventually married him. Betty ran away with a poor clergyman. Even Cary, the ultra-genteel Cary, contrived to flout orthodoxy in her own small way by insisting on retaining her first husband’s name when she married her second… It was only Sir Ralph’s wife and mother who didn’t rebel. And they didn’t need to; both women were in successful and intimate relationships with head of the family – and both were in positions of power as a result of those relationships.
…driven variously by love, passion, courage, stubbornness and a fear on spinsterhood, they simply refused to do what they were told but .. they demonstrate that no matter what commentators said about the submissive position of women in 17th-cenury England, the reality of individual experience was at once more complicated and more compelling. (p. 478)

And there’s also news that the US today isn’t quite so bad at murders as was the England of the period…
Historical homicide rates are notoriously unreliable, but recent estimates suggest that in Restoration England they stood at around six per 100,000 of the population – more than four times the current rate in the United Kingdom in the first years of the 21st century, and about 10 per cent higher than current rates in the United States.(p. 406)

And a Google search doesn’t throw up anything on her, but it sounds like there’s a great story behind this career woman:
There was only one place to stay in Florence if you were an Englishman in the 1650s- Signora Anna’s house, close by Brunelleschi’s Santa Spirito on the south bank of the Arno. Anna, who only took English travellers, was a Florentine institution: Dr Kirton recommended Sir Ralph go straight to the lodgings … when he arrived in the city; the author of Sir Ralph’s “Directions for travel” agreed, saying that she ‘entertains her countrymen like princes, both for chamber and diet’. (p. 264)

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