French Royal Women during the Restoration and July Monarchy: Redefining Women and Power (Queenship and Power) 3030597539, 9783030597535

Citation preview

French Royal Women during the Restoration and July Monarchy Redefi ning Women and Power

Heta Aali

Queenship and Power Series Editors Charles E. Beem University of North Carolina Pembroke, NC, USA Carole Levin University of Nebraska Lincoln, NE, USA

This series focuses on works specializing in gender analysis, women’s studies, literary interpretation, and cultural, political, constitutional, and diplomatic history. It aims to broaden our understanding of the strategies that queens—both consorts and regnants, as well as female regents— pursued in order to wield political power within the structures of male-­ dominant societies. The works describe queenship in Europe as well as many other parts of the world, including East Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and Islamic civilization. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14523

Heta Aali

French Royal Women during the Restoration and July Monarchy Redefining Women and Power

Heta Aali University of Turku Turku, Finland

Queenship and Power ISSN 2730-938X     ISSN 2730-9398 (electronic) ISBN 978-3-030-59753-5    ISBN 978-3-030-59754-2 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59754-2 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: The Picture Art Collection / Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

This book is a continuation of my Ph.D. thesis, which focused on the early nineteenth-century French historiography. Without the thesis, this book would not have been realized, and therefore, I wish to extend my gratitude to all those who helped complete my thesis. I am especially grateful to my colleagues at the Department of Cultural History for supporting me, commenting on the manuscript, and helping with various applications: Marjo Kaartinen, Reima Välimäki, Anni Hella, Marika Räsänen, Teemu Immonen, Thomas Devaney, Annastiina Mäkilä, Juha Isotalo, and many others. I particularly wish to thank Deborah Simonton for helping with the publication proposal. I wish to present my gratitude to all members of our research project “The Ancient Finnish Kings”: PI Reima Välimäki, Mila Oiva, Harri Hihnala, and Anna Ristilä. Within the project, I have been able to research all types of medievalism. I would also like to thank Kathleen Cusack for the language revision. I would also like to thank the participants at the “Kings & Queens 7” (2018), “Kings & Queens 9” (2020), and “Monarchy & Modernity since 1500” (2019) conferences for their excellent comments and discussions on my research. Particularly, I am grateful to Cathleen Sarti for introducing the Queenship and Power series to me in 2014 and for her excellent comments on the volume. Ever since that time, I hoped I could one day publish my research in the series. I wish to thank the University of Turku Foundation for making it possible for me to visit the French National Library in Paris to examine documents not available online. It was a pleasure to visit the Bibliothèque v

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nationale de France, where I received excellent help to track down all the documents I needed. I would also like to thank the representatives of Palgrave Macmillan and the series Queenship and Power. Last but not least, I would like to thank my family for all the support and practical help that made it possible for me to travel to France and take part in conferences, thus making this book a reality.

Contents

1 Introduction  1 1.1 Using National Memory  4 1.2 The Four Royal Women  7 1.3 Publications and Biographies 10 1.4 Structure of the Volume 12 2 The Return of the Bourbon Family (1814–1819) 19 2.1 Marie-Thérèse de France, Acting Queen of France 19 2.2 Marie-Caroline, Young Mother and a Wife 36 3 The Last Bourbon Moment (1820–1830) 51 3.1 Duchesse de Berry, Mother of the Bourbon Hope 51 3.2 Duchesse d’Angoulême, the Dauphine 68 3.3 The Rising Star of the Orléans Family 86 4 New Dynasty, Old History (1830–1839)109 4.1 Saintly Queen Marie-Amélie109 4.2 Adélaïde d’Orléans, Power Behind the Throne124 4.3 Duchesse de Berry and the Crisis of the Bourbons139 4.4 Exiled Madame Royale158

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5 Dying Royal Power (1840–1848)185 5.1 Marie-Amélie and the Catholic Revival185 5.2 No More Revolutions for Adélaïde d’Orléans199 5.3 Remembering the Exiled Bourbon Women208 6 Conclusion231 Annex 1237 Bibliography239 Index255

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Historical narratives can be powerful political weapons. Medieval and early modern history offered, and still offers today, a gold mine of narratives and examples for historians, politicians, and authors to draw on in order to either denounce or eulogize members of a royal family. A royal woman could be portrayed as  loyal and as fierce as Joan of Arc or virtuous as Blanche of Castile. Another, less popular, royal woman could be represented as unnatural as the Merovingian queen Fredegund or as immoral as Lucrezia Borgia. The use of historical references in a political context was common during the Restoration period (1814/1815–1830) and the July Monarchy (1830–1848) as polemical parties debated over the legitimate ruler of France. In 1814, the French monarchy had not been able to assume the sacred position it had had prior to the 1789 Revolution, and it had to find new means to justify its existence.1 History was the most popular source of (de-)legitimation used by all political sides. This volume will analyse the ways in which historical characters were capitalized on in public discourse in order to define, promote, or defame the four most prominent royal women of the French monarchy during its dying decades. These four women were the duchesse de Berry, MarieCaroline de Bourbon-Siciles (1798–1870, daughter-in-law of the King Charles X), the duchesse d’Angoulême, Marie-­ Thérèse de France (1778–1851, only surviving child of Marie-Antoinette and Louis XVI, daughter-in-law of the King Charles X), the Queen of the French, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 H. Aali, French Royal Women during the Restoration and July Monarchy, Queenship and Power, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59754-2_1

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Marie-Amélie de Bourbon-Siciles (1782–1866), and Madame Adélaïde d’Orléans (1777–1847), King Louis-Philippe’s sister (see also Annex 1). As this volume shows, the history of England also had a high profile in France during the Restoration and the July Monarchy era. The legitimists, as the supporters of the Bourbon dynasty were called after 1830, saw a parallel between the Bourbon and the Stuart families as both had known regicide and misfortune.2 The supporters of the duchesse de Berry, for example, compared her to Marie Stuart (also known as Mary, Queen of Scots, 1542–1587) and to Jeanne d’Albret (1528–1572), the Queen of Navarre, and mother of Henri IV (1553–1610), the first Bourbon king of France.3 The nineteenth-century authors, historians, and politicians constantly reused and formed interpretations of well-known historical characters. This, in turn, reduced the historical characters such as Henri IV, Marie Stuart, or the Merovingian King Clovis I (died in 511) to narrow representations and stock characters.4 Moreover, each shift in power, dynasty, and governance affected the use of historical imagery. Starting from the 1814 Restoration of the Bourbon monarchy, this volume traces how each shift of regime influenced, and was visible, in the historical imagery relating to the most important royal women of the Bourbon and Orléans families. Royal women are at the heart of this volume, because in the level of representations, they have often played a crucial part in the popularity, or lack thereof, of dynasties and monarchies. For example, during the late eighteenth-century revolutionary years, Queen Marie-Antoinette was represented as the evil queen of the French monarchy. Publications such as Antoinette d’Autriche ou Dialogue entre Catherine de Médicis et Frédégonde, reines de France, aux enfers […] (1789) drew parallels between the three “evil” queens of France, Marie-Antoinette, Catherine de’ Medici (1519–1589), and Fredegund (died in 597) to emphasize the long history of injustices the nation had had to endure at the hands of brutal queens.5 Similar historical references to the Merovingian queens and the Medicis were made during Marie-Antoinette’s trial in 1793, where she was accused, among other things, of incest and scheming with her Austrian family.6 Catherine de’ Medici, Marie de’ Medici (1575–1642), Anne of Austria (1601–1666), and Marie-Antoinette were all represented as “evil foreign queens” with the help of history and particularly Merovingian history, as historian Katherine Crawford has convincingly demonstrated.7 The use, and abuse, of history was an essential part of these representations and the use of history in this manner only increased in the nineteenth century. French Royal Women during the Restoration and July Monarchy – Redefining Women and Power serves three principal purposes. Firstly, it

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brings to the spotlight four royal women from a lesser-known period and analyses the way they were represented both by their supporters and their adversaries. Two of the women in particular, Queen Marie-Amélie and Madame Adélaïde, have not received the scholarly attention they deserve. Historian Munro Price has described Madame Adélaïde as the most powerful French woman of the nineteenth century, and yet the most recent biography of her was published in 1908. Price has also called LouisPhilippe’s reign as a political partnership with Adélaïde, but she was not a popular person either during her lifetime or in later literature.8 This volume addresses this gap and analyses the reception and reactions to the four women’s different ways of using (indirect) political power. This is the first time the four women are examined side by side, and the historical imagery is comprehensively analysed. Secondly, the volume offers new interpretations of the ways the supporters and opponents of the Restoration regime and the July Monarchy employed historical imagery to either advocate or criticize the regime’s right to rule. Even though there is a significant number of political histories about the Restoration and the July Monarchy, there are very few studies on the way historical imagery relating to royal women was used to legitimize or undermine each regime. It is a topic that is mentioned in many political histories about the first half of the nineteenth century, but no scholar has consistently examined the changes and continuities in historical representations relating to royal woman. Moreover, these representations require a systematic analysis to comprehend the interplay between gender, power, and history at this time. Gender, in particular, is a key concept, as these royal women were, first and foremost, defined by their gender. It was only women, at this time, who were imagined as having a gender and by this reasoning, the means to surpass its constraints. As we will see, the four royal women were often depicted as typical women on the one hand, and extraordinary, even nearly as good as men, on the other. History was used to reproduce representations emphasizing the “repellent” nature of the “public woman”, a woman interested in politics or “la vie extérieure”.9 Thirdly, the volume sheds light on the uses of medieval and early modern history as sources of legitimation and on the way these uses changed during the last thirty years of the French monarchy. The representations and uses of the 1789 Revolution in early nineteenth-century political discourse have been examined thoroughly in previous research. However, the uses of medieval and early modern history have been largely ignored.10 In fact, no studies have consistently analysed the way medieval and early modern characters were used as sources of legitimation, especially

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concerning royal women.11 Even though the volume will not focus on the representations of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, it is impossible to ignore the role of the Revolution when examining the Restoration and July Monarchy period. This is because all medieval and early modern history was reflected through the prism of the Revolution and the deaths of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette. For example, in the 1820s, the English revolution became increasingly popular due to its perceived similarities with the French Revolution.12 This popularity contributed to the Stuart dynasty’s visibility in political literature in the 1820s, 1830s, and 1840s. Redefining Women and Power draws together extensive source material to bring forth a comprehensive picture of the ways historical imagery and royal women were tied together in public political discourse to legitimize or de-­legitimize the French monarchy.

1.1   Using National Memory This volume approaches the uses of history through the concept of memory. It is seen as a dynamic cultural practice, “which in itself forms and negotiates” social and political relations, as historian Natalie Scholz has argued.13 The historical representations used in political discourses relating to the four royal women were dynamic and continuously under negotiation. Again, in Scholz’s words, this is because the process of constructing references to the past is about “remembering, forgetting, appropriating and redefining”.14 The remembering occurs through re-interpretation in which the depictions allude to the cultural values of the point in time when they were created.15 While detecting changes in the uses of historical representations is important, it is equally significant to highlight the continuities. Indeed, specific historical imagery was reused by multiple regimes, such as representations relating to national saints like Saint Clotilde (died in 545) and Saint Louis IX of France (died in 1270), and foreign dynasties such as the Stuarts. The Stuarts were linked to national memory through their ostensibly similar fate with the (older branch of the) Bourbons. When writing about French history and memory, one has to acknowledge the concept of lieu de mémoire. French historian Alain Boureau drew on this concept in his analysis of the institution of French kingship. Even though lieu de mémoire, a concept first made famous by Pierre Nora, mainly refers to physical sites of remembrance, Boureau applied it to the very fluid concept of king. This volume does not examine the

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nineteenth-­century concepts of kingship or queenship as such, but rather the mechanisms that Boureau presents in his analysis. According to Boureau, there are three mechanisms at work when (past) royal characters are evoked: representation, projection, and identification.16 He adds that “[t]he collective memory concerning kings has elaborated a veritable family romance with stock characters and situations […]”.17 Boureau gives several examples such as “unworthy wives” like Marie-Antoinette or Isabeau of Bavaria, and “scheming mistresses” such as Agnès Sorel.18 Like the king, these stock characters are not stable representations, but constantly negotiated and redefined within the parameters of collective memory. Competing political blocs adapted these figures to suit fluid political circumstances. History, and especially national history, was extremely popular in different formats throughout the nineteenth century.19 History could be a political weapon, and there were constant debates in the press for and against the charter, where both sides used history to advance their arguments.20 Education became more widespread and the growth in literacy served to increase the number of potential consumers as history evolved into an academic discipline. Many politicians and authors were historians during the Restoration and July Monarchy. Two well-known historians, François Guizot and Adolphe Thiers, both served as Prime Ministers during the July Monarchy. Political debates thus extended to the pages of history books,21 and historiography became a political act for men like Thiers, as art historian Petra ten-Doesschate Chu has argued.22 History and historiography were both gendered: a man was seen as the historical neutral and the woman was the exception. As this volume will illustrate, historical women were assigned the same roles as those bestowed upon nineteenthcentury women in an effort to create a precedent. Early medieval queens, for example, could be portrayed as politically powerless in historiography, so that there was some justification for continuing to prevent nineteenthcentury women from taking a more active role.23 As we will see in each chapter, the aforementioned historical stock characters corresponded to each period’s anxieties and (social, cultural, and political) needs. Be it in academic or popular publications, contemporaries recognised the political dimension of history. According to French historian Paule Petitier, history was, at the beginning of the Restoration, a means to create a positive image of royalty. The past enabled the reconciliation between the people and kingship because it underlined their long union. Furthermore, the positive royal figures of collective memory such as Henri IV and Saint Louis were objects of intense propaganda.24 We encounter

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Henri IV and Louis IX multiple times in early nineteenth-century texts about the four royal women. The first Bourbon king and the only saint King of France became, together with characters such as Louis XIV and Clovis I, nearly obligatory symbols of legitimate power which were used by all political sides supporting the monarchy.25 Louis XVI considered Henri IV as a role model and worried he might have the same destiny as Charles I of England.26 The 1820s marked the beginning of the liberal historiography that led to new interpretations of the history of France. At this time, history was not so much about the past, but rather it was about the present. Guizot and his contemporaries made it possible for larger audiences to learn French history, even events that had occurred long ago. The 1820s brought about multiple readings of French history and these were all visible in the narratives relating to the contemporary royal women.27 These narratives illustrate the various uses, and abuses, of medieval and early modern history. This analysis of the gendered uses of historical narratives in public discourse in the era of the constitutional monarchy draws on the concept of the king’s third body.28 The king’s first body was the physical body, the second one was the state, and the third body can be considered public opinion.29 The third body was only partially in the control of the monarch himself. Already in early nineteenth-century France, despite the monarchs’ best efforts, the press grew increasingly influential. From 1814 to 1848, the monarchy needed constant re-enforcement and was, at times, heavily attacked from several fronts within French society. Politicians and historians used the newspapers and various forms of publications to show their support or dissatisfaction towards the governing monarch. A royal woman also had a third body: public opinion. In a similar manner, public opinion was shaped by the contemporary cultural and political field. The queen’s second body was the maternal body, as her most important duty was to produce an heir.30 As we will see, especially in the case of Marie-Thérèse, physical motherhood could be replaced with symbolic motherhood in which the royal woman became the mother of the French.

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1.2   The Four Royal Women The duchesse de Berry, Marie-Thérèse de France, Queen Marie-Amélie, and Madame Adélaïde are at the centre of this volume because they were closest figures to the last three kings to rule France. This proximity made them prone to politically motivated criticism. Each of the women could, and did, wield indirect power through their male family members, though this use of power was often concealed in their public representations. According to French historian Jean-Clément Martin, several early nineteenth-­century royal French women held considerable discreet power as intermediaries of times and traditions.31 After 1814, women were excluded from the throne of France, the same way they had been excluded before 1789. The exclusion from the line of inheritance was re-enforced during the Restoration and July Monarchy, first in the charter of 1814 and again in 1830. Women’s exclusion from the throne or public power did not change in France until the cataclysm of the Second World War.32 Yet, as we will see throughout the volume, the Revolution and Napoléon’s reign resulted in drastic redefinition of the French queenship. The 1789 Revolution had driven most members of the Bourbon and Orléans families (see Annex 1) to exile either to England or to continental kingdoms. King Louis XVI was executed in January 1793, and Queen MarieAntoinette in October of the same year. These events were annually commemorated during the Restoration. The sister of Louis XVI, Madame Élisabeth, was executed in 1794, and Marie-Antoinette and Louis XVI’s only son, named by the exiled royalists as Louis XVII after his father’s death, died while imprisoned in the Temple in 1795. Louis XVI’s younger brothers had both left France before Louis’ execution: the comte de Provence (the future King Louis XVIII, 1814/1815–1824) in 1791, and the comte d’Artois (future King Charles X, 1824–1830) already in 1789.33 The comte de Provence, uncle of the young Louis XVII, proclaimed himself as King Louis XVIII in 1795. That same year Marie-Thérèse de France, Madame Royale, the only surviving child of Queen Marie-Antoinette and King Louis XVI, was sent into exile in Austria and into the care of her maternal family. While in exile, Marie-Thérèse married her cousin the duc d’Angoulême, son of the comte d’Artois.34 When the Bourbons returned to France in 1814, most of them had been in exile for over 20 years. They had been gone from France for so long that the younger generation had almost forgotten them.35 Neither Louis XVIII nor the duc and duchesse d’Angoulême had any children. Marie-Caroline, the duchesse de Berry was the youngest of the four women. She married the duc de Berry, youngest son of the comte d’Artois,

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in 1816. The duc was assassinated in February 1820 and in September the duchesse gave birth to a son.36 As the mother of the heir to the French throne, Marie-Caroline enjoyed a significant degree of popularity, and she travelled widely in France during the 1820s. At the same time, the king oversaw the education and upbringing of the royal children. As a young and beautiful widow, she featured in many popular publications. According to the pro-Bourbon legitimists, Marie-Caroline’s son was the only true heir to the French throne following the abdication of Charles X in 1830, which made the duchesse a potential regent. In 1832, however, she was imprisoned after a failed coup.37 While in prison, the duchesse de Berry gave birth to a child whose father was allegedly an Italian nobleman whom she had secretly married. This marriage destroyed any hope she or the legitimists might have had for her to become a regent for her son. After her release, the duchesse de Berry left France and settled in Italy and later Austria, where her children from her union with the duc de Berry lived. On her father’s side, she was niece to the Queen of the French, MarieAmélie de Bourbon-Sicile. Marie-Thérèse de France, Madame Royale, was married to Louis-­ Antoine, the duc d’Angoulême, the oldest son of Charles X, who was a widower like his older brother Louis XVIII. Marie-Thérèse had a significant role in the Bourbon Restoration since she was a constant reminder of the regicide that had occurred as well as the link of legitimation between her father, Louis XVI, and her uncles, Louis XVIII and Charles X. The conflict between remembering, forgetting, and pardon haunted the two Restorations.38 During the (second) Restoration, she assumed the role of a queen in many situations and supported the conservative and religious politics of Charles X in the late 1820s.39 Her marriage to the duc d’Angoulême bore no children, which made the son of the duchesse de Berry even more crucial to the continuation of the (older branch of the) Bourbon dynasty. In 1830, Marie-­Thérèse was exiled along with the rest of Charles X’s close family, first to England and Scotland, and later to Austria where she spent the rest of her days.40 Queen of the French Marie-Amélie, whose husband rose to the throne following the July Revolution, is the third royal woman. The daughter of Ferdinand I, King of the Two Sicilies, married Louis-Philippe the duc d’Orléans in 1809, and over the next fifteen years, she gave birth to ten children. The Orléans were a younger branch of the Bourbon family and descended from the younger brother of Louis XIV. Louis-Philippe had left France in 1793 after he had served in the French army. Marie-Amélie

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was both the niece of Queen Marie-Antoinette and the aunt of MarieCaroline de Bourbon-Siciles. In contrast to the role of the Bourbon queens prior to the 1789 Revolution, she devoted herself to private family life (her children), religious activities, charity, and refrained from public political comments.41 Marie-Amélie assumed the role of an ideal bourgeois queen as the spouse of the bourgeois citizen king. This, however, did not mean that she did not influence her husband’s political decisions. In fact, her apolitical public image was a conscious construction, designed to emphasise that the role of a queen was simply to be the king’s spouse. Following the 1848 Revolution, she was exiled to England with her family. Madame Adélaïde d’Orléans, the sister-in-law of Marie-Amélie, is the fourth prominent royal woman. Adélaïde left France in 1792 with her governess, the famous Madame de Genlis. Though she remained unmarried, Madame Adelaide was actively involved in politics. She assumed the role of a confident and political advisor to her brother Louis-Philippe, especially during the July Monarchy, and actively corresponded with politicians in her network. She was perhaps the most politically powerful woman at that time, a fact which did not go unnoticed by the political adversaries of Louis-Philippe and July Monarchy.42 Adélaïde and LouisPhilippe were the children of the unpopular Philippe Égalité who had not only supported the Revolution, but also voted for the death of King Louis XVI before he himself was guillotined in 1793. Philippe Égalité’s role in the downfall of Louis XVI intensified the chasm between the Bourbon and Orléans dynasties during the Restoration and resulted in a deep sense of mistrust between the two families. Madame Adélaïde died in December 1847. The roles, positions, expectations, and possibilities to use power for royal women were frequently redefined between 1814 and 1848, not only by those in the political field, but also by the women themselves. Since the monarchy was not the same in 1814 as it had been before 1789, the positions these women held also changed. Despite women being excluded from inheriting the French throne, there was a continual debate on the role royal women should and could assume within the French monarchy. The discussion revolved around the extent to which and the manner in which royal women should and could influence politics as well as how public their role should be. A popular way to criticize and de-legitimize a dynasty was to defame its women. The question was often not even about the royal women themselves, but about politics, where they were so often used as instruments of criticism.

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Each of these four women could be used as an instrument of legitimation or criticism for their respective royal family: A young and beautiful mother of an heir, the only surviving daughter of a guillotined king, a religious bourgeois queen, and a politically active unmarried sister of a king. Equally instrumental were the references and remembrances of past kings and queens as well as princes, and princesses that penetrated discussions on the monarchy’s legitimacy during these tumultuous and eventful decades. The  debaters employed different reference  points and sought legitimacy from different moments of French and European history.

1.3   Publications and Biographies Redefining Women and Power focuses on public discourse relating to four royal women. Given that most public debaters were men of a particular social standing and background, there is a limit in regards to whose voice will and can be heard. Therefore, the volume is mainly about early nineteenth-century men, imagining royal women, both contemporary and historical. The four royal women had a voice of their own, but the public voice often belonged to men. No doubt, the four royal women could and would influence their public image, but they did not often publish articles, letters, or books where they would refer to themselves in historical terms. This volume includes opposing political views, but it is not possible to cover a discussion spanning all levels of French society. There are, however, three principal groups of sources analysed: magazines, biographies, and short treatises.43 The first group of sources includes magazines published between 1814 and 1848, notably La Mode and the Journal des débats politiques et littéraires. The first one was a well-known legitimist magazine, especially in the 1830s and 1840s. The  second one was, according to French historian Benoît Yvert, the most influential newspaper in the 1820s and mostly supportive of the government.44 The number of magazines, and issues available, increases towards the end of the period, which does slightly distort the samples’s  representativeness. However, since there are many magazines available representing various  political opinions, it is possible to develop a comprehensive picture of the uses of historical imagery relating to royal women of the Restoration and July Monarchy era. Art historian Andrew Carrington Shelton has classified a significant number of the July Monarchy era publications based on their political views on each regime.45 This categorization serves as a valuable point of departure for this volume. According to it, La Mode, for example, was politically to the Right during

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the July Monarchy whereas the Journal des Débats and Le Constitutionnel were supportive of the July Monarchy. However, the aim is not to reduce the used historical imagery to simple opinions but to examine the way the references were used to advocate certain political views. This volume also sheds light on historical references used across different publications and those limited to a particular time and place. The second group of sources contains individual and collective biographies such as Alfred Nettement’s Vie de Marie-Thérèse de France, fille de Louis XVI (1843), an anonymously penned Histoire scandaleuse, politique, anecdotique et bigote des duchesses d’Angoulême et de Berry (1830), and Notice biographique de Madame Adélaïde, princesse d’Orléans, soeur de S. M. LouisPhilippe, roi des Français, née à Paris le 23 avril 1777 (1832) by Léon Pillet. These biographies mostly focus on anecdotes relating to the central figure and often recycle the same narratives from one biography to another and from one decade to another. Only rarely did the biographies, or memoires in some cases, venture to discuss political events in a thorough way. However, the benefits of including publications such as these lie in the fact that they represent a wide array of political views, both for and against a regime, as well as their use of historical references.46 The third group of sources includes miscellaneous treatises that concern the royal families such as E. Pascallet’s Notice biographique sur sa majesté la reine des français (1847) and Annales historiques de la maison de France47 (1815) by Claude-Philbert Simien Despréaux. These treatises expressed explicit political opinions, and the authors actively took part in discussions on the legitimacy of each regime. Moreover, as Yvert has argued, the Restoration was a golden age for political literature, visible in the large number of various pamphlets published during the period.48 The treatises, similar to biographies, often described the life of the royal families in detail. The treatises varied in length: some contained less than twenty pages, some included multiple volumes. They could include images but not always, and in many cases, they were published to mark a special event such as coronation or birthday. The sources span from 1814 to 1848, and cover all sides in terms of debates on the dynasty’s legitimacy and even the entire monarchy. The majority of the writings were openly political because it would simply not have occurred to anyone to hide their political opinions, as French historian Emmanuel de Waresquiel has stated.49 Due to varying degrees of censorship imposed at different points in time, there is less vocal criticism in some of the publications. Even though it is difficult to estimate how widely each publication was diffused and read, they are useful for analysing the uses of

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historical references. The period also saw a significant number of historical themes on  the stage, both theatre and opera, but the analysis of performance art falls out of this volume’s scope. The focus is on textual imagery which is why art and images are only discussed in relation to textual sources. According to the sources, the power and positions of the four royal women examined in this volume were tied to the status of the men close to them. Marie-Thérèse’s central role in legitimizing the restored monarchy was due to her father and uncles, whereas duchesse de Berry’s position was linked to her husband, son, and father-in-law. Marie-Amélie and Madame Adélaïde, on the other hand, owed their positions to Louis-Philippe. Contemporary and historical kings and male members of French royal families had more independent visibility than royal women, who were often represented within the family sphere in public. However, this state of affairs in no way diminishes the value of analysing historical imagery relating to royal women. On the contrary, it is an opportunity to deconstruct these representation and write a new narrative of royal women.

1.4   Structure of the Volume The volume has a chronological structure, allowing for a systematic analysis of the historical references. The first chapter investigates the way Marie-­ Thérèse’s position was defined in terms of national history and her ancestry, and Marie-Caroline as a young wife and mother(-to-be). The grand paradox of the Restoration and Bourbon family was their desire to forget the entire Revolution, while at the same time celebrating its martyrs and saints. Marie-Amélie and Adélaïde spent most of the 1810s outside France. They  had very little visibility in France, which is why the first chapter will only focus on Marie-Thérèse and Marie-Caroline. The second chapter examines the period following the murder of the duc de Berry in February 1820, which was a defining point in the lives of the four royal women. During this decade, Marie-Amélie and Adélaïde entered the public spotlight as the spouse and sister of the duc d’Orléans who supported the liberal politicians and whose wealth equaled that of the king. The third chapter analyses representations after the July Revolution. After Charles X had been forced into exile and Louis-Philippe had risen to power, several publications favoured the Orléans dynasty. They attacked the previous regime by vilifying the royal women, notably the duchesse de Berry and the duchesse d’Angoulême.50 Simultaneously, legitimist magazines fiercely campaigned for the Bourbons’ right to the French throne. The chapter examines whether Marie-Amélie and Adélaïde were used to

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legitimize the new dynasty and whether the Orléans dynasty and its supporters used the same type of medieval and saint-like imagery the Bourbons had used in the 1820s.51 The final chapter focuses on the last decade of the French monarchy. After imposing new censorship laws and forming a stronger association with the Catholic Church in the 1840s, the Orléans dynasty started to reflect the late 1820s Bourbon dynasty in various ways.52 Marie-Caroline and Marie-Thérèse were exiled, but they were not forgotten in France, and their memory was kept alive through historical references.

Notes 1. Jean-Paul Clément (2015). Charles X, Le dernier Bourbon, Paris: Perrin, passim 234–252. 2. See Hélène Becquet (2012). Marie-Thérèse de France. L’orpheline du Temple, Paris: Perrin, 262. See also Nicole Cadène (2014). “Marie Stuart trois fois martyre? Relégitimations posthumes de la reine d’Écosse au XIXe siècle français,” in Paul Chopelin and Sylvène Edouard (eds.), Le sang des princes. Cultes et mémoires des souverains suppliciés (XVIe-XXIe siècle), Rennes: Presse Universitaires de Rennes. 3. The duchesse de Berry as Jeanne d’Albret, see, for example, La Mode 1.10.1831, 10. In this volume, early modern refers to a period ending with the death of Louis XIV in 1715. 4. About royal stock characters, see Alain Boureau (2001). “The King,” in Mary Trouille, Pierre Nora and David P. Jordan (eds.), Rethinking France. Les lieux de mémoire, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 213. Especially about Clovis in the 1820s France, see Christian Amalvi (2011). Les Héros des français. Controverses autour de la mémoire nationale, Paris: Larousse, 22. 5. Fredegund was an early medieval Merovingian queen who was immortalized by her contemporary bishop Gregory of Tours as a personification of a barbarian, unchristian, and cruel queen. See Heta Aali (2017). Merovingian Queenship in Early Nineteenth-Century French Historiography, Turku: Annales Universitatis Turkuensis. 6. Lynn Hunt (1992). The Family Romance of the French Revolution, Berkeley: University of California Press, 92–93. 7. Katherine Crawford (2007). “Constructing Evil Foreign Queens,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies (vol. 37, no. 2), 393–418. 8. Munro Price (2007). The Perilous Crown. France between Revolutions, 1814–1848, London: Macmillan, 6. 9. About the representations of “public women”, see Michèle Riot-Sarcey (2015). Histoire du féminisme, Paris: La Découverte, 23–24.

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10. For an overview of the early nineteenth-century historiography on the Revolution, see, for example, Jean-Numa Ducange (2014). La Révolution française et l’histoire du monde: Deux siècles de débats historiques et politiques 1815–1991, Paris: Armand Colin. 11. On the uses of Middle Ages in the nineteenth century, see Simone BernardGriffiths & al. (eds. 2006). La fabrique du Moyen Age au XIXème siècle. Représentations du Moyen Age dans la culture et la littérature f­ rançaises du XIXème siècle, Paris: Honoré Champion. About early modern and romantic medievalism, see Mike Rodman Jones (2016). “Early modern medievalism,” in Louise D’Arcens (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Medievalism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 89–102. Clare A Simmons (2016). “Romantic medievalism,” in Louise D’Arcens (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Medievalism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 103–118. Richard Utz (2016). “Academic medievalism and nationalism,” in Louise D’Arcens (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Medievalism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 119–134. 12. Benoît Yvert (2013). La Restauration. Les idées et les hommes, Paris: CNRS Editions, 17. 13. Natalie Scholz (2010). “Past and Pathos: Symbolic Practices of Reconciliation during the French Restoration,” History and Memory (vol. 22, no. 1), 51–52. See also Natalie Scholz (2007). “La monarchie sentimentale: un remède aux crises politiques de la Restauration?,” in Natalie Scholz and Christina Schröer (eds.), Représentation et pouvoir. La politique symbolique en France (1789–1830), Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 185–198. Cultural memory, see Jan Assman (2011). Cultural Memory and Early Civilization. Writing, Remembrance, and Political Imagination, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1–141. See also Astrid Erll (2011). Memory in Culture, Basingstoke and New  York: Palgrave Macmillan. 14. Scholz (2010). “Past and Pathos”, 51. 15. Estelle Paranque (2019). “Introduction: Remembering, Forgetting, and the Power of Memory,” in Estelle Paranque (ed.), Remembering Queens and Kings of Early Modern England and France. Reputation, Reinterpretation, and Reincarnation, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 5. 16. Boureau (2001). “The King”, 200. Boureau wrote about projection “If they [subjects] perceived him [king] as too close or too similar to them or else too distant and inaccessible, the projection was obstructed. For example, according to Tocqueville, it was Louis-Philippe’s excessive familiarity and openness toward his subjects that caused the failure of the July Monarchy: ‘Even though the prince was descended from the noblest blood of France and despite the fact that, in his heart of hearts, he secretly harboured a hereditary arrogance, he nevertheless possessed most characteris-

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tics and faults of the subordinate ranks of society,’ Tocqueville maintained.”, 207. 17. Boureau (2001). “The King”, 213. 18. Boureau (2001). “The King”, 213. 19. See, for example, Bertrand Goujon (2012). Monarchies postrévolutionnaires 1814–1848, Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 178–182. 20. See Emmanuel de Waresquiel (2015). C’est la Révolution qui continue! La Restauration 1814–1830, Paris: Tallandier, 317. 21. I examined in my Ph.D. thesis the way politics affected the representations of early medieval Merovingian queens in historiography published during the Restoration and July Monarchy. For example, many Catholic, royalist historians saw Saint Clotilde more significant person in French history than liberal historians. See Aali (2017). Merovingian Queenship. 22. Petra ten-Doesschate Chu (1994). “Pop Culture in the Making: The Romantic Craze for History,” in Petra ten-Doesschate Chu and Gabriel P. Weisberg (eds.), The Popularization of Images. Visual Culture under the July Monarchy, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 166–169. 23. The discussion of gender in this volume has been strongly influenced by the classics of the field such as Bonnie G.  Smith (1998). The Gender of History. Men, Women, and Historical Practice, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press; Joan Wallach Scott (1996). Only Paradoxes to Offer. French Feminists and the Rights of Man. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; and Karen Offen (2017). The Woman Question in France, 1400–1870, New York: Cambridge University Press. 24. Paule Petitier (2019). “Introduction,” Nineteenth-Century French Studies (vol. 47, no. 3 & 4), 184. About Louis-Philippe and Louis XIV, see Sylvain Cordier (2014). “Louis XIV et le décor louis-quatorzien à la cour de LouisPhilippe: enjeux et perspectives d’une filiation historique et esthétique,” in Mathieu Da Vinha, Alexandre Maral et Nicolas Milovanovic (eds.), Louis XIV, l’image et le mythe, Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, Centre de recherche du château de Versailles; Claire Constans (2014). “Portraits peints de Louis XIV et de Louis-Philippe au musée de Versailles: appropriations et comparaisons,” in op.cit.; Alexandre Maral (2014). “Louis XIV et LouisPhilippe. La place de Louis XIV dans le musée historique de Versailles: le cas des sculptures,” in op. cit. 25. About Clovis, see Colette Beaune (1985). Naissance de la nation France, Paris: Gallimard, 62. 26. Aurore Chéry (2014). “Louis XVI et l’ombre portée de Charles Ier d’Angleterre dans la France du xviiie siècle,” in Paul Chopelin and Sylvène Edouard (eds.), Le sang des princes, Rennes: Presse Universitaires de Rennes, 93–103.

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27. For example, in January 1824, influential pro-government magazine the Journal des débats politiques et littéraires published a long review article about the first volume of François Guizot’s, then a professor of history at the Académie de Paris, Collection des Mémoires rélatifs à l’Histoire de France. The collection included translated sources from history of France prior to the thirteenth century. The first volume focused on the early medieval Merovingian period including the chronicle of Bishop Gregory of Tours from the late sixth century, which is the most important source about Clovis I, Saint Clotilde, and Fredegund. The review discussed the Collection’s ­bearing since it was the first work that enabled larger audiences to acquaint themselves with the early Middle Ages. The review emphasized the importance of knowing the early Middle Ages because it was considered the cradle of the French monarchy and it was essential to understand how much the French civilization had advanced since that time. Furthermore, to read the old chronicles was not only to learn about the past centuries but to learn about the present – to learn to appreciate how far France had come and how there are no longer Gauls and Franks but only French people. For example the Journal des débats 28.11.1824; 28.10.1829. On Thierry’s critique, see, for example, Augustin Thierry (1827). Lettres sur l’histoire de France, pour servir d’introduction à l’étude de cette histoire, Paris: Sautelet, Lettre IV. Journal des débats 6.1.1824. 28. John Dunn. “The King’s Three Bodies: Person, State and Public Opinion,” Monarchy & Modernity since 1500, University of Cambridge, January 8, 2019. 29. See about the kings’ and queens’ bodies, Stanis Perez (2019). Le Corps de la reine, Paris: Perrin, 9–13. 30. About queen’s second body, see, for example, Jo Burr Margadant (1997). “The Duchesse de Berry and Royalist Political Culture in Postrevolutionary France,” History Workshop Journal (no. 43), 23–52. 31. Jean-Clément Martin (2009). “Permanence de la royauté?” in Hélène Becquet and Bettina Frederking (eds.), La Dignité du roi. Regards sur la royauté en France au premier XIXe siècle, Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 195. 32. Aali (2017). Merovingian Queenship, 50. 33. Clément (2015). Charles X, 514. 34. Becquet (2012). Marie-Thérèse de France, 398–400. Clément (2015). Charles X, 517. 35. Clément (2015). Charles X, 125. 36. Jean-Joël Brégeon (2009). La duchesse de Berry, Paris: Tallandier, 80–84. 37. About the duchesse de Berry, see, for example, Margadant (1997). “The Duchesse de Berry”, 23–52.

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38. About the question of regicide during the two Restorations, see Bettina Frederking (2014). “La condamnation des régicides en France sous la Restauration, entre culpabilité collective et conflit mémoriel,” in Paul Chopelin and Sylvène Edouard (eds.), Le sang des princes, Rennes: Presse Universitaires de Rennes, 115–127. 39. See Hélène Becquet (2009). “Une royauté sans reine: les princesses de la Restauration,” in Hélène Becquet and Bettina Frederking (eds.), La Dignité du roi, Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 137. 40. On Marie-Thérèse, see especially Becquet (2012). Marie-Thérèse de France. 41. On Marie-Amélie as a  bourgeois queen, see, for example, Jo Burr Margadant (2006). “Representing Queen Marie-Amélie in a ‘Bourgeois’ Monarchy,” Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques (vol. 32, no. 2), 421–451. See also Jo Burr Margadant (1999). “Gender, Vice, and the Political Imaginary in Postrevolutionary France: Reinterpreting the Failure of the July Monarchy, 1830–1848,” The American Historical Review (vol. 104, no. 5), 1461–1496. 42. On Madame Adélaïde, see especially Price (2007). The Perilous Crown. See also Munro Price (2009). “Adélaïde d’Orléans et la Monarchie de Juillet,” in Hélène Becquet and Bettina Frederking (eds.), La Dignité du roi, Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 153–172. 43. I have excluded all private sources such as letters. 44. Yvert (2013). La Restauration, 84. See also about the Journal des débats and July Monarchy, Grégoire Franconie (2019). “Une écriture militante: La critique littéraire et la royauté dans le Journal des débats (1830–48),” Nineteenth-Century French Studies (vol. 47, no. 3 & 4), 277–289. 45. Andrew Carrington Shelton (2001). “Art, Politics, and the Politics of Art: Ingres’s Saint Symphorien at the 1834 Salon,” The Art Bulletin (vol. 83, no. 4), 733. 46. On memoirs  and their apolitical nature, see Waresquiel (2015). C’est la Révolution qui continue!, 306. 47. Annales historiques de la maison de France contenant les traits les plus remarquables de la vie de Louis XVIII, des princes et princesses de sa famille et du sang royal, depuis la Révolution jusqu’à l’époque du rétablissement des Bourbons, et suivies de quelques réflexions sur la conduite des alliés dans la guerre qui vient de se terminer. 48. Yvert (2013). La Restauration, 12. 49. Waresquiel (2015). C’est la Révolution qui continue!, 318. 50. Such as Anon (1830). Histoire scandaleuse, politique, anecdotique et bigote des duchesses d’Angoulême et de Berry, Paris: Chez les marchans de Nouveautés.

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51. About Marie-Amélie, see, for example, Pierre-François Tissot (s.a.). Notice biographique sur S.M. Marie-Amélie, reine des Français, Paris: Imprimerie de Béthune et Plon. 52. About the Catholic revival, see, for example, Michael Paul Driskel (1992). Representing Belief. Religion, Art, and Society in Nineteenth-­ Century France, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University, 19–36.

CHAPTER 2

The Return of the Bourbon Family (1814–1819)

2.1   Marie-Thérèse de France, Acting Queen of France Marie-Thérèse de France, the duchesse d’Angoulême, was the only surviving child of Marie-Antoinette and Louis XVI.  In the  royal hierarchy, Marie-Thérèse came before her husband Louis-Antoine, the duc d’Angoulême, as she was the daughter of a king, whereas her father-in-law comte d’Artois (Monsieur, the brother of Louis XVI and Louis XVIII) was not a king until 1824. Until 1816 and the duc de Berry’s marriage, MarieThérèse was the only woman in the royal Bourbon family. She was the link between the old and new regime, between history and present.1 In spring 1814, political winds had turned and Napoléon was defeated. The Emperor abdicated and was exiled to the island of Elbe. However, it was not self-evident that the Bourbons should rule in France again. Since 1807, the Bourbons had had very little hope of reclaiming the throne without other European rulers’ help.2 Louis XVIII would not have been able to claim the throne of France had not the allied powers that had defeated Napoléon called him back to rule France. Therefore, the King of France owed his throne to kingdoms such as England and Russia. France and the French had not called the king back, which resulted in the king’s position to be uncertain even though the royalist propaganda presented the position as unchallenged.3 In April 1814, the comte d’Artois, the © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 H. Aali, French Royal Women during the Restoration and July Monarchy, Queenship and Power, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59754-2_2

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king’s brother, returned to Paris. One month later, Louis XVIII made his grand return to Paris, followed by the royal family including Marie-­ Thérèse. The Orléans family were also able to return to France, first the duc d’Orléans, and later the same year the duchesse d’Orléans with their children. A blow for the Bourbon family was that many of those supporting the king in 1814 did not hesitate to side with Napoléon when he returned in 1815. Most famous person for this was Marshal Ney (Michel Ney, 1769–1815), who was a hero in Napoléon’s army but had pledged loyalty to King Louis XVIII in 1814.4 The Hundred Days (from 20 March to 8 July 1815) further undermined the already  weak position of the Bourbon king.5 This chapter will analyse the historical narratives employed to emphasize Marie-Thérèse’s importance in reasserting the Bourbon monarchy’s authority in a very disorderly time. The political uncertainty reflected in the works where Marie-Thérèse was portrayed and in the way she was represented. The need to consolidate the royal family and monarchy’s position is tangible in a large number of works. This need reveals the popularity of Napoléon’s reign and the relative weakness of the Bourbon rule in 1814.6 It is equally important to investigate how critics used history to undermine the Bourbons’ newly restored authority in 1814 and again after 1815. Advocates of all sides knew their historical and cultural references and knew how to use them to influence readers. In the representations, Marie-Thérèse was in one end a saintly and suffering royal martyr, and in the other end, an abnormal woman only desiring power and revenge. Both extremes were political and cultural constructions, only briefly reflecting the actual royal woman the representations claimed to portray. There were no neutral descriptions of the daughter of Marie-Antoinette, for she was not a neutral person—her power was within the values she symbolized. The negative imagery related to royal women could be very powerful and hostile. The imagery of unnatural women, who would not respect the boundaries of their sex and would not stay away from politics, was not limited to Marie-Thérèse and had its roots in the sixteenth century as Katherine Crawford has argued.7 This specific imagery was a cultural and literary construction weaponized against political opponents. Henri IV, the early seventeenth-century ancestor of the Bourbons and the Orléans, and an idealized warrior king, a stock character par excellence, was repeatedly used as a reference for both the Bourbon and Orléans families all through the Restoration and July Monarchy period. Importantly, not only the royal men were associated with the “virtues” of Henri, but

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also Marie-Thérèse was perceived alike.8 Marie-Thérèse’s significant position in the royal family becomes evident when examining, for example, an anonymous work from 1814 Abécédaire de la cour de France. The work included short biographies of royal family members. Marie-Thérèse was presented before her spouse, the duc d’Angoulême, who was referred to in the work as Marie-Thérèse’s husband and as a descendant of the “Grand Henri”.9 According to another anonymous author (1817), the duc and duchesse d’Angoulême were “[…] the venerable descendants of Saint Louis, Henri IV, and Louis XVI.”10 Henri IV as a historical reference was not only reserved for the duc and duchesse d’Angoulême, but, as we will see, his bloodline was used to justify both the Bourbons’ and the Orléans’ rule in France. Especially at the beginning of the Restoration, Marie-Thérèse was associated with the classical character of Antigone, daughter of Oedipus, and a protagonist of a Sophocles’ play. The character is noteworthy even though it is not strictly medieval or early modern. The Abécédaire, for example, mentioned Antigone repeatedly.11 French historian Hélène Becquet, who has written a recent biography on Marie-Thérèse, explains that the representation of Marie-Thérèse as Antigone française was born as early as 1797. It became widespread only gradually during the first years of the nineteenth century. According to Becquet, the reason MarieThérèse became associated with Antigone was due to the myth of Antigone being the model of filial piety. Antigone’s story, the myth of Oedipus, was made famous in France by a play in 1778 by Jean-François Ducis and later Nicolas Guillard in his opera Œdipe à Colone. Both Marie-Thérèse and Antigone were pictured supporting their exiled fathers (and later Marie-­ Thérèse supported her uncle Louis XVIII), both proved extraordinary piety for the death and both preached social reconciliation.12 Marie-Thérèse was immortalized as Antigone also in images. The Abécédaire featured two images of Marie-Thérèse and the second one was named L’Antigone Française.13 In the image, she was walking with a man and a dog in the mountains, trying to hide her face as if she was leading the man to safety from possible persecutors. The dog in the picture must be Marie-Thérèse’s pet dog Coco,14 and the man MarieThérèse is leading could be Louis XVIII as he seems a bit older than Marie-Thérèse. The aim was not to highlight the king but Marie-Thérèse and her never-ending loyalty to the royal family. Antigone refers to filial piety, which would support the interpretation of the picture illustrating Marie-Thérèse and her uncle. In reality, Louis XVIII was morbidly

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overweight, so he would not have been able to run from his persecutors in the mountains. The references to Antigone were often very brief and the interpretations relatively shallow in a sense that the representation of Marie-Thérèse as Antigone was never discussed in depth. For example, a poem published in the honour of the duchesse (1814) presented her as the daughter of the “second Saint Louis” which referred to Louis XVI. In addition, she was the Antigone of the “unfortunate king”, her uncle Louis XVIII.15 It was apparent that the readers of the poem were familiar with the references since they were not explained in any way. The poem was published in the Journal des débats politiques et littéraires founded in 1814, a pro-­ government magazine. The readership would have been well educated and therefore familiar with the history of Antigone as the history and mythologies of Antiquity were an important part of classical education at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Yet, Antigone was also a topic of entire books dedicated to the duchesse d’Angoulême and discussed at length in the Journal des débats.16 The surge of popularity of references to Antigone dated especially to the beginning of the Restoration when the need for the consolidation of the Bourbon dynasty in France was dire. * * * A representative example of the way Marie-Thérèse was pictured and the way history was used by both political sides, for and against the (Bourbon) monarchy, comes from the reactions to the events in Bordeaux in 1815. Napoléon returned to France in 1815, and by March, he was back in Tuileries. While King Louis XVIII had to leave Paris before Napoléon arrived there, Marie-Thérèse was in Bordeaux where she tried to rally the loyal troops against Napoléon. Eventually, the attempt failed, and she too had to leave France, first for Spain and then for England. The Orléans family went to England in spring 1815. They  did not return to France until early 1817.17 Napoléon’s return to France from exile, the Hundred Days, ended with the famous battle of Waterloo and Napoléon’s final defeat after which the Bourbon family was able to return to France for the second Restoration that lasted until the 1830 Revolution. Hélène Becquet described the events in Bordeaux in March and the reactions to Marie-Thérèse during and after she tried to rally the troops. Both sides, the royalists and the supporters of Napoléon, recognized her efforts but made an opposite reading of her actions.

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According to Becquet, Marie-Thérèse was briefly compared to Joan of Arc in print after the events in Bordeaux became well known.18 Both women, Marie-Thérèse and Joan of Arc, were pictured faithfully supporting the French troops against an enemy. According to her supporters, Marie-Thérèse represented in Bordeaux the courage and loyalty of the Bourbon dynasty.19 A short pamphlet on the life of the duchesse d’Angoulême described how she resembled the resurrected Joan of Arc in Bordeaux and that despite Napoléon’s strict surveillance, people were selling pendants with two portraits, one of Joan of Arc and one of Marie-­ Thérèse.20 Another author describing the events in Bordeaux, Alphonse de Beauchamp, did not make direct references to Joan of Arc but created a similar type of representation of Marie-Thérèse as a self-sacrificing and humble heroine, who only thought of the happiness of France and its inhabitants.21 Both Antigone and Joan of Arc represented courage and loyalty to the king—the Revolution had taught the Bourbons that loyalty was not something to be taken for granted. However, the problem in 1815 was that the Bourbons’ enemies were not the English but the French. Joan of Arc was not noble or a saint in the nineteenth century, so she was not a very good comparison to Marie-Thérèse, according to Becquet.22 According to Isabelle Durand-Le Guern, Joan of Arc was a popular figure in France during the revolutionary and Napoléonic years when France fought against England—like in the fifteenth century.23 Joan of Arc represented the traditional Anglophobia among the French people that culminated with the wars at the turn of the nineteenth century, making Joan of Arc a popular figure among the enemies of Marie-Thérèse and her royalist supporters. Historian Gerd Krumeich has studied the long historiographical tradition of Joan of Arc and has argued that the destruction done during the Revolution to the sites related to her history influenced the popularity of Joan in Restoration France. He has remarked that Joan was popular in Restoration France before 1820, when several essential works and monuments were dedicated to her.24 Many members of the French royal family were exiled in England before returning to France in 1814, and many of them had to return to England in 1815—the Bourbons were allies of royal England. Consequently, the representation of Joan of Arc liberating France from the yoke of England was problematic for royalist France. The wars between England and France were wars between revolutionary and Napoléonic France and England and not between England and Bourbon France. Saint Louis, for example, was popular in England all through the

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nineteenth century.25 Saint Louis’ popularity was partly due to the close connection between the royal families in France and England. Despite the contradictions associated with the representations of Joan of Arc in 1815, she became an  increasingly popular figure in France around the same time as the interest in historical novels grew during the Restoration as Krumeich has noted. For example, the Journal des débats published in 1817 a lengthy review on Philippe-Alexandre Le Brun de Charmettes’ (1785–1880) Histoire de Jeanne d’Arc (1817). According to the reviewer, the hand of God had directed Joan of Arc.26 The reviewer did not mention Marie-Thérèse, but he implied a divine intervention in the acts of Joan of Arc and related her history to the events of Revolution, especially to that of la Terreur in Orléans in 1793. The reviewer no doubt saw that God had directed the pucelle d’Orléans the same way as God had directed the Bourbons back to the throne of France. There were also references to Joan of Arc in the royalist and Catholic magazine L’Ami de la religion et du roi.27 Two years later, in 1819, L’Ami de la religion et du roi described an annual celebration in Orléans for Joan of Arc’s memory. Joan of Arc was presented in the short article as “dear” to all in Orléans, and the magazine continued to proclaim that she should be “dear” for all French people. According to the article, she had been guided by Providence, and her actions and success were a mark from Providence that France was under its protection. The magazine praised the local abbot for his eloquent speech on Joan of Arc and for reproaching France for forgetting Jeanne for 500 years. According to the royalist magazine, only now had a poet and a talented man tried to clear her name and give her the respect she deserved.28 The magazine did not name Le Brun de Charmettes, but it would seem likely that he was the unnamed poet the magazine referred to in the article. Le Brun de Charmettes’ work on Joan of Arc emphasized the way she saved France and how she deserved to be commemorated. Joan of Arc became the popular figure she is today only gradually during the nineteenth century culminating in her canonization in 1920.29 Le Brun de Charmettes’ work, approved by the king himself, contributed to the early veneration of Joan of Arc.30 All the royal family’s actions had an alternative reading, and this was the case as well with Marie-Thérèse in Bordeaux. The critics of the Bourbon Restoration acknowledged the representation of Marie-Thérèse as Joan of Arc, as can be seen in a work by an Englishman published in France in

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1819. Histoire des cent-jours was more favourable to Napoléon than to the Bourbon king, which signified that the work included a long justification from the French editor in favour of the work’s publication. The author, Baron Broughton, cited an anonymous letter regarding the events in Bordeaux in which the duchesse d’Angoulême was mentioned to have been surnamed by the royalist as Joan of Arc of 1815. The anonymous letter produced by the English author argued that Madame’s (as Marie-Thérèse was often called in contemporary literature and press) energy for her cause hardly gained popularity among the soldiers who would have been the ones to shed their blood. The letter repeated a claim that Madame wanted blood rather than words. However, a footnote was added to the book to soften the negative image of Marie-­ Thérèse as vindictive and implacable. According to the additional footnote, Madame was a pious lady, and her words in Bordeaux had been twisted in order for her to look bad.31 The French editor possibly wrote the footnote since the footnote did not exist in another version of the work published in Gand and Brussels in 1817.32 Therefore, it is safe to assume the French editor refuted the negative image of Madame in order to facilitate the publication of the work in France. Especially during the second Restoration, France had relatively strict censorship laws that suppressed many newspapers that published critical articles on the royal family.33 In general, the opponents of the Bourbon rule, particularly the supporters of Napoléon, pictured Marie-Thérèse quite the opposite of a new Joan of Arc. The opponents pictured her, according to Becquet, as a furious woman who sought only to revenge her dead family, who was unnatural in her relationship with her husband, only distantly even resembling a woman anymore. She abnormally ruled over her husband and interfered with politics, which was perceived perverse for her sex. Her opponents made her a monster for a woman.34 The adverse reactions to the events in Bordeaux revealed the stereotypical imagery that was used against MarieThérèse. Almost identical imagery has been used against many historical women any political opponent wanted to defame—the women were represented as unnatural and perverse. The defamation resulted from women’s involvement, real or imagined, in politics, which was seen as a sphere reserved only for men. In Marie-Thérèse’s case, the apparent  historical reference who was insulted quite the same way was her mother, Marie-Antoinette. There were others, too. The life of the Merovingian Queen Fredegund, who died at the end of the sixth century and was herself often portrayed

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as power-seeking and unnatural, was a standard historical narrative used to revile queens such as Marie-Antoinette. As for Catherine de’ Medici, she received her share of criticism and comparisons to the notorious Merovingian queen in the sixteenth century.35 Even if it was only Augustin Thierry’s Récits des temps mérovingiennes in the 1830s that finalized the popularity of the Merovingian queens in France, already Louis-Pierre Anquetil’s (died in 1808) famous and popular Histoire de France from the first years of the nineteenth century, pictured Fredegund very much in the same terms as the  opponents pictured  Marie-Thérèse after 1815. Fredegund, similar to Marie-Thérèse, was pictured revengeful and ruling over her weak husband (who in Anquetil’s narrative was not even the birth father of the heir to the throne). However, unlike Marie-Thérèse, Fredegund was not a noble. Fredegund’s sister-in-law, the famous Queen Brunhilda, was nonetheless a daughter of a Wisigoth king and Anquetil portrayed her equally as unnatural for her desire of power: she wanted to rule instead of her grandsons, the legitimate rulers of the early medieval kingdom of Austria.36 According to Anquetil, both Fredegund and Brunhilda were “furies”— just as Marie-Thérèse was, according to her accusers.37 Marie-Thérèse had “funeste” (fatal, disastrous) power over her husband, and according to Anquetil, Fredegund and Brunhilda also made their time “funeste”—even their actions were “funeste”.38 The theme was repeated again and again in Anquetil’s and in his contemporaries’ works: women who desired power were unnatural. This critical image was produced of Marie-Thérèse after the action she engaged in Bordeaux. As the following chapters propose, this is the same narrative associated with all the four royal women whom their critics saw surpassing the limits of power acceptable to women. I am not proposing that the Bonapartists would have read Anquetil or would have been directly influenced by what he wrote. His description of the early medieval queens was not significantly different from what any of his contemporaries wrote. If anything, the description was very typical. The same way as Marie-Thérèse would not stay, according to her critics, in the ideal role given to women and therefore she became unnatural, Fredegund was multiple times described as lacking all the virtues of her sex. Napoléon allegedly said that Marie-Thérèse was the only man in her family—a phrase that denigrated the men in the Bourbon family and indicated that she would not stay in the passive role assigned to women.39 The negative imagery was not all about women. The defamation was a way to attack a particular regime—Marie-Thérèse as a “fury” was used

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against the Bourbons—to show how weak the Bourbons and particularly the male members of the family were. Fredegund and Brunhilda as unnatural women desiring power emphasized the weakness of certain Merovingian kings—the weakness of the dynasty would explain the rise of the second dynasty, the Carolingians, whose embodiment was the great Charlemagne. Even though Clovis I, who was the most famous Merovingian king and perceived as the first Christian and especially Catholic king of the Franks, was venerated in the 1820s, the esteem was not united. The Merovingians were seen generally as barbarians and their period as the childhood of the French civilization. The imagery of strong women and weak men, used by the Bourbon monarchy’s critics, emphasized the interpretation of the Bourbon family as a vanishing power. The accusations against the Bourbon regime also drew from negative imagery related to the Middle Ages. In an occasion related to the duc and duchesse d’Angoulême, the opposition magazine Le Constitutionnel accused the regime of returning to “féodalité” which the Journal des débats refuted passionately and in its turn accused Le Constitutionnel of insulting what was “sacred and respectable among men”.40 The question of feudality no doubt referred to the Bourbon dynasty’s alleged desire to re-establish the monarchy as it had been before the Revolution and even in the times of the feudal Middle Ages. For Le Constitutionnel, feudality did not refer to the Middle Ages of Saint Louis and heroic kings and queens but to a period of oppression and excessive rule of the Catholic Church. The duchesse herself or her intense religiosity was not attacked but the regime and government imposed by Louis XVIII.  The critical voices accused the Bourbon rule of looking backward, whereas the opposition wished to look to the future. * * * Another key figure in the representations of Marie-Thérèse was King Louis XVIII, whereas her husband Louis-Antoine was often ignored. Many works, including the aforementioned Abécédaire de la cour de France, had powerful imagery of Marie-Thérèse as a queen. Particular works supporting the Bourbon family draw justifications from the early medieval Merovingian period (circa 450–750), such as the Annales historiques de la maison de France41 by Claude-Philbert Simien Despréaux (1756–1842). The work was published in 1815, and similar to the Abécédaire, it offered representations of Marie-Thérèse as Antigone and

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emphasized her courage in Bordeaux in 1815.42 The work produced a scene of Louis XVIII crowning his niece like a queen. According to Simien Despréaux, Marie-Thérèse had foreseen the return of the Bourbon monarchy.43 However, the Bourbon family’s need to justify its reign in France, especially after the Hundred Days, was tangible in the work since it started by highlighting the long history of the Bourbon reign by tracing the Bourbon family’s earliest noted forefather to the early medieval Merovingian period. According to Simien Despréaux, the earliest forefather was Arnulf of Metz, who died in 640. He was a Frankish bishop and an ancestor of Charlemagne. Arnulf was not, according to the author, related to the most famous Merovingian King, Clovis I, but he had other famed ancestors.44 Starting from Arnulf, Simien Despréaux went through the entire ancestry of Louis XVIII and Marie-Thérèse from Charlemagne to Saint Louis and Henri IV. It was not only historiographical curiosity that motivated authors like Simien Despréaux to find the Bourbons’ earliest forefathers but also political needs to prove they were not usurpers or puppets for England, Russia, or Austria. The whole Bourbon family was idealized in royalist publications. Many authors drew justifications for the return of the Bourbons from the Middle Ages and from Classical imagery such as that of Antigone. However, they never ignored the guillotined royal family. Galart de Montjoie, another pro-Bourbon author, had most likely the very same aim in mind as his contemporaries with his work on the history of the Bourbon family (1815). He, however, did not start with the Merovingian period but with Louis I (1279–1341), the first duc de Bourbon.45 The work presented all the Bourbons from Louis I to the current king, Louis XVIII, including Marie-Thérèse and her paternal aunt, Madame Élisabeth, who was guillotined during the revolution.46 In Montjoie’s narrative on the history of the Bourbons, stretching back to the late thirteenth century, Marie-­ Thérèse was introduced before her husband and her uncle, comte d’Artois. Montjoie’s éloge for Marie-Thérèse proclaimed her the mother of the French only wanting the best for her children, the French people.47 References to Marie-Thérèse’s, aged 36 in 1814, possible motherhood were almost entirely  absent from the historical references from 1814 onwards. Only one work, from 1814, still had hopes of Marie-Thérèse bearing children: “God alone has known all the grief of this modern Antigone, the most unfortunate of all daughters and sisters, the most virtuous of all spouses, and could we say soon the happiest of all mothers!“48 Marie-Thérèse being the mother of the nation was compared to the

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motherhood of Marie-Antoinette. The representation was an exact opposite of the way Marie-Antoinette was pictured only twenty years before when she was imagined as a bad mother.49 Obviously, none of the vast amounts of criticism Marie-Antoinette had to face up to her execution day was present in these royalist works published after 1814 when the guillotined king and queen were transformed into martyrs who gave up their lives for the French people. The reactions to the infertility of the union of Marie-Thérèse and Louis-Antoine are interesting, for they were virtually nonexisting in the 1810s. What makes the nonexisting reactions so interesting is that royal women’s primary duty was to bear children, heirs to the family. The reactions to Marie-Thérèse and Louis-Antoine’s sterility are even more interesting compared to the treatment Joséphine, the first spouse of Napoléon, received when she could not give a son to Napoléon. According to the French historian Stanis Perez, Napoléon re-enacted the medieval drama of repudiating Joséphine for her “sterility”. He consequently married the niece of Marie-Antoinette, the Austrian princess Marie-Louise, who would give him a son. During Napoléon’s rule, the Empress could not be the mother of the fatherland on a symbolic or on an institutional level.50 Marie-Thérèse nevertheless assumed the role of the  mother to  the French  people despite her sterility. This role  contrasted her, intentionally or unintentionally, with the role women were given in Napoléon’s reign. All these works, and there were many more similar imprinted after 1814, traced the first Bourbon to various French history  moments and pictured Marie-Thérèse as an essential part of the long dynasty of the Bourbon family. The fact that the Bourbon family would not continue through her was discreetly ignored, and it was Marie-Antoinette’s actual motherhood and Marie-Thérèse’s symbolic motherhood that were emphasized. The pain of Marie-Thérèse’s infertility only increased the shine of the halo placed over her head during the Restoration and slowly turned her into a living relic and nearly into a burden the Bourbons could not let go of. Despite her nearly saintly status among the royalists, she was not exempt from the criticism the Bourbon family faced all through the Restoration period and beyond. * * *

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Religiosity was a defining element in the representations of Marie-Thérèse. As we have seen, she was represented as the daughter of the second Saint Louis and guided by God like Joan of Arc. Her supporters saw her as a “nouvelle Esther”.51 The first Restoration in 1814 witnessed the birth of the French Catholic Church’s public organ, the magazine L’Ami de la religion et du roi, which reported on religious, political, and cultural events and news from France and abroad, and rejected liberalism and enlightenment.52 The magazine frequently reported on the royal family, and Marie-­ Thérèse’s name was often in its pages. The magazine published information on suitable readings related to the Catholic Church, religion, and history. One such recommendation was a short book entitled Le Talisman de la France, ou le Bouquet de Marie-Thérèse (1815) by Joseph Bocous (1772–1835). Le Talisman was dedicated to Marie-Thérèse, and according to L’Ami de la religion et du roi, the author himself presented it to the duchesse. The short work was an allegory of Marie-Thérèse’s life and virtues, a eulogy for the royal family, especially for the princess. The author claimed that MarieThérèse was the personification of the “génie de la France”. He was well aware of the contemporary praises related to Marie-Thérèse and described her as the new Antigone and as the granddaughter of Henri (IV).53 In addition to these praises, the author compared Marie-Thérèse to two other well-known historical queens who were both known for their religiosity: Saint Clotilde54 and Blanche of Castile (died in 1252).55 According to the narrative, all three women made it possible for France to be ruled by an excellent monarch. In the early nineteenth century, Saint Clotilde was celebrated for converting her spouse Clovis I to Christianity. During this period, it was particularly promoted that Clovis converted to Catholicism. As already mentioned, Clovis was particularly popular in France during the 1820s because his history symbolized the alliance between the  Catholic Church and the French throne. In royalist readings of the early Middle Ages, Clotilde was above all a saint, ideal wife, and a mother who assured the benediction for the French people. Her history was an instrument that confirmed the  French throne’s position as a close ally to the Catholic Church, and Bocous proposed a similar reading of Marie-Thérèse as an instrument who sacrificed her happiness for that of the French people. There are several readings of historical persons such as Clotilde who were used as justifications for the re-installation of the Bourbon family to the French throne. Even though the famous liberal historians had not yet published their significant works in the 1810s (the  first one was Swiss

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historian Simonde de Sismondi who published his Histoire des Français in 1821), the history of the Merovingian royals did not evoke uniquely positive emotions among historians. Anquetil as mentioned above, for example, described Clotilde as desiring vengeance for her murdered parents and that she had several villages burnt down as a vengeance.56 Bocous only wrote of Clotilde that she had grace and wisdom.57 No doubt, Bocous’ readers interpreted Clotilde uniquely in a positive light even though Anquetil’s negative representation of the saint corresponded perfectly with the anti-royalist critical reading of Marie-Thérèse’s motives at Bordeaux in 1815. Taking into consideration Bocous’ work’s timing and dedication, vindictiveness was hardly the feature he wanted to emphasize in these two women. Blanche of Castile’s holy reputation was similar to Clotilde’s reputation due to a “great man”. She was the mother of Saint Louis, one of the national heroes of France. Granddaughter of the great queen Eleanor of Aquitaine (1122–1204), who was first married to the king of France and then to the king of England, she acted as a regent both during her son’s minority and during his time on crusade.58 She was a politically influential queen, but like Clotilde, her importance in the nineteenth-century reading lay in the fact that she enabled a great king’s existence. Bocous presented the three royal women, Marie-Thérèse, Clotilde, and Blanche, as fervent supporters of the Catholic Church. This celebration dedicated to Marie-Thérèse focused uniquely on her relationship with her uncle, Louis XVIII, making her comparable to a queen. The duc d’Angoulême, her husband, did not exist in the eulogy, and one could almost believe Marie-­ Thérèse was the spouse of Louis XVIII. Marie-Thérèse ensured the peace between France and heaven that had been broken during the revolutionary and Napoleonic years.59 Bocous’ work was not the only example where we find the comparison between Marie-Thérèse and Blanche of Castile. Among the many works praising the Bourbon family published before 1820, a work entitled Campagnes de 1815 (1816) portrayed Marie-Thérèse with the  following words: […] daughter of Saint Louis showed in Guyenne [old French province including Bordeaux] the heroism of Blanche, Maria Theresa and Marie-­ Antoinette. I believe to see the city of Bordeaux, under the emblem of a young virgin, sitting and crying in the debris of an old and magnificent temple […].60

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In addition to Blanche, the passage made references to Marie-Thérèse’s mother and her maternal grandmother, the Holy Roman Empress Maria Theresa (died in 1780). The young virgin could refer to Joan of Arc because, as we have seen, Marie-Thérèse was earlier compared to her, especially concerning the events in Bordeaux. This is reasonable to assume since most contemporary royalist authors might have come across this comparison, also the author of Campagnes de 1815. Truly interesting in this comparison is that Marie-Antoinette and her Austrian Empress mother were not seen as possibly dangerous foreigners but as respectable role models for Marie-Thérèse. The work did not present them as French, as obviously Maria Theresa was not, but it presented them as heroic and worthy of reverence side by side with Blanche of Castile, mother of the only saint French king. In this citation, “Saint Louis” was not the medieval saintly king but Louis XVI, Marie-Thérèse’s father. Louis XVI was depicted in the 1810s as a martyr; he gave his life to salvage France. The 1814 poem dedicated to Marie-Thérèse had pictured Louis XVI already as a “Saint Louis”.61 The ambiguity in Campagnes de 1815 regarding the identity of Saint Louis was most likely intentional for Saint Louis could refer to both Louis XVI and Louis IX. One reason why Marie-Antoinette and her Austrian mother could be presented side by side with French heroes like Blanche of Castile and Saint Louis was the current political situation in France. After Napoléon’s defeat in Waterloo and his exile to Saint Helena, Austria was one of the significant powers influencing France and contributing to the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy. Austria was an ally and France, especially the re-­ installed monarchy and its supporters, were dependent on the allies’ goodwill. Therefore, it would have been unfavourable to represent Marie-Antoinette and her mother as Austrian foreigners and possible enemies even though the hostilities between the countries were still vivid in people’s minds.62 Instead, Marie-Antoinette was made a heroic, selfless martyr and ideal mother. Historicity was hardly Joseph Bocous’ or any of his contemporary royalists’ first concern. The use of well-known characters in an ahistorical context like the one in Le Talisman signified that the author expected the reader to know the characters beforehand and interpret their significance  in a particular  manner. Starting from the 1820s, there were two extremes in interpreting the French Middle Ages. The image of an ideal Middle Ages was created by the conservatives and those supporting the (Bourbon) monarchy. On the other extreme was the image of the barbaric

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Middle Ages created by the liberals and republicans who emphasized the period’s misery and violence. Both readings were but artificial, cultural, and political constructions, and most nineteenth-century representations of the era can be found somewhere between the extremes.63 It was François-René de Chateaubriand’s (famous author, historian, politician, and a fervent supporter of the French monarchy) book Génie du christianisme (1802) that greatly influenced the idealized image of the Middle Ages among the royalists and contributed to the glorification of the myth of Saint Louis.64 Consequently, this glorification contributed to the representations of Blanche of Castile as a saintly mother who enabled the existence of France’s “saviour”. Three medieval women, Clotilde, Blanche, and Saint Genevieve (the patron saint of Paris and a contemporary of Clotilde), were essential characters in upholding the idea of France as the “fille aînée de l’Église”, and they were celebrated all through the nineteenth century for their role in Christianity. French historian Christian Amalvi has called them the “sainte trinité féminine médiévale” (2011).65 The association between MarieThérèse, Clotilde, and Blanche indicated a desire to present the duchesse as the medieval women’s equal in protecting France and the Church, even though unlike Clotilde and Blanche she was not a mother nor did she have to convert her husband to Christianity. That she was not a mother might be the reason why there were altogether only very few comparisons between Marie-Thérèse, Clotilde, and Blanche. Marie-Thérèse ensuring that France was in the  Catholic  Church’s favour was a recurrent theme in contemporary representations. The widespread literature supporting and justifying the return of the Bourbons to the French throne used this allegory to emphasize Marie-Thérèse’s role in salvaging the errant France. One author even went so far as to present the return of the Bourbons as a fulfilled biblical prophecy enabled by the sacrifices of the royal family and its martyrs, the king and the queen, their son and the king’s sister, “sainte Élisabeth”.66 Obviously, not only Marie-­ Thérèse’s aunt was described as a saint, but also her mother Marie-­ Antoinette, whose martyrdom was emphasized during the first and second Restoration.67 One short pamphlet dedicated to Marie-Thérèse portrayed the guillotined royal couple as martyrs and presented the Virgin Mary herself directly consoling the tormented Marie-Antoinette in her most grievous moments.68 The Journal des débats advertised in 1814 a work entitled Les Deux saintes du sang royal des Bourbons, ou Esquisse d’un parallèle religieux et historique, entre la bienheureuse Isabelle de France, soeur de

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Saint-­Louis, et Madame Élisabeth de France, soeur de Louis XVI. The work focused on two saintly royal sisters, one from the thirteenth century and another one from the eighteenth century, thus intensifying the connection between three kings all named the same: Saint Louis, Louis XVI, and Louis XVIII. Les Deux Saintes was dedicated to Louis XVIII and Marie-­ Thérèse.69 The parallels between the thirteenth-century royal saints and eighteenth-century royal martyrs were highlighted repeatedly to justify the Restoration and Bourbon family’s return to the throne.70 L’Ami de la religion et du roi emphasized Marie-Thérèse’s religiosity in many ways. The magazine reported on her annual visits to the tomb of Saint Genevieve.71 The tomb was in the church of Saint-Etienne-du-Mont, but Saint Genevieve’s relics had been burned in 1793. The magazine also reported on the restoration of the medieval Basilica of Saint-Denis back to its original use as the final resting place for French royals. Several members of the royal family, including Marie-Thérèse’s parents, were re-buried in Saint-Denis, and the duchesse took part in masses in celebration of her guillotined relatives.72 The newspapers reported on the annual celebrations of her father’s and mother’s memorial days. Louis XVI’s celebration was in January and Marie-Antoinette’s in October. For example, in October 1816, the Journal des débats reported that there had been several events to celebrate the queen’s memory in all churches of Paris. On October 16, the duchesse left at eight in the morning to pray on her mother’s tomb at the Basilica of Saint-Denis. Almost the whole of Paris was described mourning the queen.73 The re-burial in the basilica that dates to the seventh century repaired the rupture in the chain of French kings and queens resting in Saint-Denis. Many of the tombs were destroyed during the revolutionary years, but already in 1815, Louis XVIII reinstalled the basilica to its old use and transferred there, in addition to the remains of Marie-Antoinette and Louis XVI, the tombs of many longgone royals, including those of Clovis and Saint Clotilde. Many of the tombs were not, obviously, original ones. The magazine L’Ami de la religion et du roi knowingly presented the royal family very piously, which included repeated references to their charity work. One of the most frequent “news” on Marie-Thérèse (or any member of the royal family) was when she donated money to charity.74 Charity was expected of the royal family, and it was a theme that was repeated in many representations of the medieval saint women: they cared more for the poor than for their earthly richness.75 L’Ami de la religion et du roi equally mentioned the annual celebration of Marie-Thérèse’s patron

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saint, the sixteenth-century Saint Teresa of Avila whose feast day was on October 15.76 Each member of the royal family had their saintly namesake, and the saint’s feast day was a day of celebration for the royal namesake. The celebrations that intensified the alliance between the French monarchy and the Catholic Church were annually reported in French magazines. For example, in October 1816, the Journal des débats reported on the festivities related to the feast of Saint Teresa of Avila, including receptions and musical performances.77 * * * The 1810s was Marie-Thérèse’s decade regarding the historical references and other royal French women. Of the four women, she spent the most time in France during the 1810s, and as the daughter of the guillotined king and queen, she enjoyed wide popularity, which was only increased by the events in Bordeaux in 1815. Nevertheless, her popularity seemed to decline towards the end of the decade, especially due to the duchesse de Berry’s arrival and the birth of new Bourbon heirs. In the Journal des débats, this decline in Marie-Thérèse’s visibility from the 1810s was remarkable. All in all, the Bourbon family’s celebration was reduced little by little towards the end of the 1820s. The Journal des débats became more and more substantial during the years, but the references to MarieThérèse became more and more declaratory and less and less descriptive. The historical references examined in this chapter diminished towards the end of the Restoration. History was always present in nearly everything written about Marie-­ Thérèse. She was portrayed following the norms set for royal women—as a religious benefactor—and fulfilling her religious duties within churches that bore the traces of the recent history of Revolution and centuries of cultural history. The places she visited, such as gardens,78 schools,79 and hospitals80 were related to history as was also much of the art and literature dedicated to her or purchased by her. At the beginning of the Restoration, Marie-Thérèse’s role in the establishment of the Bourbon monarchy was essential, and from this period, we have multiple historical references related to her and the history of the Bourbon dynasty. As we will see, all the references such as Joan of Arc, Saint Louis, Henri IV, and the saintly royal women were reused both by the Bourbon dynasty and by the Orléans family during the following decades. However, only a few of them were used in the Journal des débats

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in direct reference to Marie-Thérèse. In the Journal des débats, the most numerous references to Antigone were all in the 1810s. Later there are only occasional  references to Marie-Thérèse as Antigone. In a sense, Antigone represented the eighteenth-century interest in Antiquity that still dominated the historiography at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The 1820s, however, brought the Middle Ages to the popular conscience of people. Little less than twenty years after the events in Bordeaux in 1815, the very same negative imagery that was used against the duchesse d’Angoulême was reused by the supporters of the Bourbon family to revile Madame Adélaïde, the sister of Louis-Philippe, in order to deny the legitimacy of the Orléans family to rule France. With the same imagery, Adélaïde was represented as a new Messalina, new Lucresia Borgia, and new Athaliah— classical and biblical references with medieval and early modern twists. The Orléans family was not only practically the unique rival of Bourbon power in France in 1814, but they also had something the Bourbons were desperately seeking: an heir to the throne. Whereas the duc and duchesse d’Angoulême would never have a child, the duc and duchesse d’Orléans would have nine children. The only hope for the Bourbon branch was the duc de Berry, who married Marie-Caroline, niece of the duchesse d’Orléans, in 1816 and within few years would produce new hope for the dying older branch of the Bourbon family in the form of two viable children.

2.2   Marie-Caroline, Young Mother and a Wife Marie-Caroline de Bourbon-Siciles became the duchesse de Berry in 1816 when she married the nephew of the late Louis XVI. Many contemporary publications acknowledged and celebrated the occasion. As has been established, the Bourbon family desperately needed a male heir to continue the dynasty, and Marie-Caroline was the best hope for producing an heir. In this chapter, I will examine the representations made of Marie-Caroline during the first four years of the marriage and what expectations she faced in public discussions. In what ways was history used to create the expectations, and what kind of role models authors drew from history for the young duchesse? I will follow the discussion both in short publications published to celebrate the young duchesse and the royal marriage, and in magazines that observed the newlywed couple. Marie-Caroline’s pregnancies and childbirths were reported in the magazines, and I will analyse the historical references used in these contexts.

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When the young duchesse arrived in France in May 1816, the process of making her a French princess had already started. She was an ideal virginal princess that could be moulded into an ideal royal French mother and wife. The duchesse d’Angoulême had not been able to produce an heir, so the pressure was on the young princess who had both maternal and political bodies. Even though many royal women were seemingly reduced to producers of male heirs, they also had political and public bodies that can be detected with the birth of mass media, and even before, for example in popular broadsheets. Even the natural body can be separated from the maternal body since only certain women could produce heirs to the throne of France. All the medieval and early modern references to royal women during the Restoration and July Monarchy had an unquestionable political dimension even though the women were seemingly apoliticized.81 The references to Marie Stuart (Mary, Queen of Scots) or to Jeanne d’Albret that we find in later material related to the duchesse de Berry did not exist in the 1810s.82 At this point, Marie-Caroline was not yet represented as the mother of Henri IV but as his descendant. During her first years in France, Marie-Caroline was above all defined through the great historical men in her ancestry. The same men were equally used to define the Bourbon dynasty: Saint Louis, Henri IV, and Louis XIV, to mention a few. Marie-­Caroline was not yet the active agent she would become and was made to be after her husband’s assassination. This is very understandable because she was expected to focus on producing children for the royal family. For example, a short poem written in honour of the marriage stated that: “Great prince should your gallantry be associated with the great Henri, of your august union should God give us a Louis. Vive le Roi! vive la France! Vive la duchesse de Berry!”83 The author wished the duc de Berry to be as heroic as the Bourbon ancestor Henri IV had been and that the marriage would produce a new king imitating the good qualities of the historical Bourbon kings. The author did not single out which king named Louis was the role model, but the desired heir should have good qualities of all the great kings named Louis: Saint Louis, Louis XIV, Louis XVI, and Louis XVIII who was represented as an equal to his forefathers. The representations of Henri IV that influenced the historical imagery relating to the duchesse and her son, the duc de Bordeaux, born in 1820, were established right at the beginning of the Restoration. The royalists started to use the figure of Henri IV right at the start of the Restoration as political propaganda to legitimize their rule. He was simultaneously an ideal and idealized king who originally represented the reconciliation between the Protestants and Catholics, and at the beginning of the Restoration,

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reconciliation between the “new” and “old” France. He substituted the image of Napoléon as a glorified monarch.84 Another short work, written to justify the marriage between the duc and a princess from the kingdom of Naples, and not with an English princess, portrayed the duchesse as the granddaughter of Philip V of Spain.85 Philip was, in fact, the grandson of Louis XIV, which made the author present Marie-Caroline as his grandchild as well: “Honor, glory, love to the granddaughter of Louis XIV!”86 The author equally acknowledged the new “sister” of the duchesse, Marie-Thérèse. In a relatively obscure passage, the author seemed to want to assure Marie-Caroline that Marie-­ Thérèse would not be jealous even if the young couple would have children: “[…] if the happiness of continuing the family [race] of Henri IV is reserved for you [Marie-Caroline], she would not be jealous, for the prosperity of France is her greatest desire.”87 However, the passage continued by announcing that should the duchesse d’Angoulême give birth to a son, the duchesse de Berry would be the first to celebrate the birth, and her son would happily be the most loyal subject to this prince.88 The passage reminded the reader that despite the happiness of Marie-Caroline’s marriage, the duchesse d’Angoulême was higher in the royal hierarchy, and her son would be closer to the throne. Moreover, it was the duchesse d’Angoulême mentioned in the text, not duc d’Angoulême, who was practically invisible even though he was an heir as well and the inheritance would officially go through the male line. Many of the complimentary texts published in honor of the marriage drew more from antiquity than the  Middle Ages or the early modern period. One text, for example, declared that “Dido and Sophronia, Armida and Helena did not have her brilliance, her sovereign glory, And the old men of Troy, gathered in their tour, if they had seen her features, they would have burnt of love.”89 Dido is a tragic character from Virgil’s Aeneid, Sophronia a virtuous Roman matron, and Helena is of Troy. Armida is a character from La Jérusalem délivrée from the Italian sixteenthcentury poet Torquato Tasso. This last female character seems to be a little odd choice to compare to duchesse de Berry since Armida was a sorcerer and a Saracen. These were all tragic characters, but the comparison aimed to emphasize Marie-Caroline’s beauty and grace. However, we do not encounter the comparisons to these female characters any time later in publications highlighting the graces of the duchesse. The text did not fail to make the nearly obligatory remarks on “grand Henri” and “should he be like Louis”90 when discussing the hopes of a male heir and what was expected of the duc de Berry. In another anonymous work from the same

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year, it is noted that “Salvation, honor, love, to the young Princess whom Louis has elevated among his children!”91 Most likely, “Louis” here refers to Louis XVIII. However, ambiguity was probably intentional since the number of kings named Louis in France was relatively high, and they all could be interpreted as Marie-Caroline’s symbolic fathers. Yet, there are also references in this anonymous work to antiquity and characters such as Titus and Marcus Aurelius.92 Most historical narratives used to emphasize the significance of the marriage were related to men. Women are quasi-absent from these comparisons. In this context, we do not find any famous historical women from the medieval or early modern periods used in comparison to Marie-­ Caroline. Instead, Henri IV and a variety of Louis are referred to. The message was straightforward: Marie-Caroline’s first and foremost function was to continue the line of these famous and popular kings. Everything else was secondary to producing a male heir. Perhaps Marie-Caroline could not be compared to any famous mothers in history before fulfilling her duty towards the Bourbon family. The marriage of the young princess Marie-Caroline to the much older duc de Berry, who already had issue with his English mistress Amy Brown, inspired much interest in newspapers. In 1816, the Journal des débats reported on news around the young bride, and many of the news emphasized the glorious past of the Bourbon family. For example, on June 11, 1816, the magazine published an ode in honor of the princess by a grenadier, which referred to the poet Malherbe and to the time of the Medicis.93 The poem declared, “It is the blood of Bourbons, it is the blood of Caesars/ That run in its veins/[…]”94 No doubt, the duchesse’s origin in Naples affected the choice of references in contemporary poems, that of antiquity. However, the poem drew both from the history of the Bourbons and from the history of Paris, which in itself has always been an enormous lieu de mémoire. The author made references to “Lutèce”, the old name of Paris, which, like the marriage of the duc de Berry and Marie-Caroline, united to the blood of the Bourbons that of the Caesars. In 1817, Marie-Caroline gave birth to her first child that unfortunately died soon after birth. The following year the duchesse suffered a miscarriage, but she gave birth to a viable daughter in 1819. The health of the duchesse was very much a public concern and, for example, in September 1818, the Journal des débats published a bulletin that announced the duchesse had had a miscarriage on September 13.95 The following day, the

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magazine emphasized the virtues of the princess and the way she had only thought of the baptism of the unborn child while suffering the contractions.96 It was important to highlight the purity of the duchesse to prove that she was not to blame for  the miscarriage. Huge expectations were placed on her shoulders, and this was already the second time the pregnancy had ended without a viable child. All the Bourbons, and now also the young duchesse, were associated with Henri IV. The Journal des débats described in August 1816 how Marie-­Caroline had purchased from Lyon a small picture for her husband. The picture depicted a scene from the life of Henri IV. In the historical scene, the king was playing with his son, going on all fours, when the ambassador of Spain arrived. According  to the Journal des débats, the king calmly explained to the ambassador that he was a father and therefore playing with his son. The Journal des débats emphasized that anyone else besides “grand Roi” would have been embarrassed in the situation. The magazine declared that with the act of purchasing the picture, the “granddaughter” of Henri IV proved “the spirit and paternal heart of the Bourbons”.97 The magazine continued that the French always valued in the duc de Berry what he had inherited from Henri IV, notably love for his family and the taste for private life’s sweetness.98 The short article in the Journal des débats contained multiple aspects of the Bourbon family and the way the Bourbons wished to represent themselves. The article presented the Bourbon men and women cherishing family, as loving parents, and that this would have been characteristic for them since the time of earliest ancestors. In addition, it anticipated the children of the newlywed couple—something the whole of  France expected. Furthermore, it portrayed the duc as endorsing the loveliness of private life. This last point was something the magazine needed to emphasize since the duc was a known womanizer and frivolous.99 The article categorically idealized all Bourbon family members to make them meet the new demands positioned for the royal family—intimate family relations and affection in marriage. The Journal des débats associated the Bourbons and the duc and duchesse de Berry multiple times with Henri IV and mentioned them donating funds for the early Bourbon king’s statue.100 The statue of Henri IV involves an interesting history as the statue was first erected in 1614, demolished during the Revolution, and re-erected in 1818.101 The memory of Henri IV was politicized during the Restoration as many historians have demonstrated, and the statue was but one example of the

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politicization. The original statue on Pont Neuf presented Henri IV on horseback as returning victorious from a battle. Historian Victoria A. Thompson argues in her article about the statue of Henri IV that the myth of Henri IV as a good king has a long history, and that the comparisons between Louis XVIII and Henri IV began shortly after 1814. Interestingly, Louis XVIII was somewhat reluctant to restore the statue even though it celebrated the Bourbon king’s return. The statue undoubtedly also evoked its destruction, the Revolution that the Bourbon king and his supporters were trying so hard to forget. All the historical references that strengthened the Restoration monarchy could be inverted to remind of the Revolution and monarchy’s downfall. The statue could have multiple significations that not all were favourable to the king. Thompson argues that the statue was equally about restoring the French people their past that the Revolution had destroyed and not only about restoring the monarchy. Louis XVIII’s return was compared to Henri IV’s return from the Wars of Religion in the late sixteenth century. The eventual re-establishment of the statue was a popular event immortalized by Victor Hugo. The statue was funded by public donations to which also the duc and duchesse de Berry donated money.102 The Journal des débats regularly announced the people who donated money for the statue.103 Thompson’s article brought out that the myth of Henri IV as a good king had long roots in the seventeenth century and that the myth was reused in the 1810s. As Thompson focused on the statue, she made no mention of remembering Henri’s mother Jeanne d’Albret. However, as we will see, especially in the representations of Marie-Caroline in the 1820s and 1830s, the mother of Henri IV had an essential role in the historical imagery used to forge the image of a new “King Henri”. In the 1810s, however, Jeanne d’Albret was nearly invisible in the national historical imagery. A poem was published to celebrate the happy event in 1819 after the duchesse had given birth to her first living daughter, Louise. In fact, the poem had nothing to do with the duchesse and very little to do with childbirth. As the author explained in the forewords, he wanted to celebrate the national glory and the French industry’s progress. In addition, he wanted to make praise for Henri IV, the “excellent Monarque”, and show him how the new century had brought to France religious freedom, freedom of the press, and the abolition of privileges related to nobility.104 The poem itself discussed the long history of the French monarchy and, for example, presented “[T]he mayors of the palaces, insolent protectors/ satisfied to rule under the weak monarchs/[…]”.105 This citation referred

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to the early medieval Merovingian period with its majordomo (ancestors of the Carolingian kings) and rois fainéants. The author saw that the Revolution had been a rightful response to the people’s oppression, but it had gone to extremes. Now, the return of the king and the birth of a new generation enabled better times. The role of Marie-Caroline was but little in this great interpretation of history—she was needed to give birth to new kings. In the poem written in honor of her safe childbirth, women had no other role in the history of France but as bearing children. This somewhat reminds of the reduced position Marie-Louise had as Napoléon’s spouse. History was present in the news about the duchesse de Berry, especially in art. Historical paintings and theatre plays were part of the royal family’s life, and all the members took part in ceremonies celebrating and commemorating historical events and persons such as Saint Louis.106 Royal saints were frequently visible in the pages of the Journal des débats during the years. The omnipresence of history in the life of the young duchesse was tangible—history surrounded her and not least in the form of the Bourbon family. Yet, magazines such as the Journal des débats do not let us hear her voice or opinion about the history of France in the 1810s—or any issue for that matter. She was rapidly included in the ideal image of the royal Bourbon family that had no visible conflicts or troubles. The first years after the second Restoration were years of hope for the Bourbon regime and family. Nevertheless, uncertainty prevailed in the monarchy on  many levels: politics, the  continuation of dynasty, foreign policy, to mention a few. The representations of historical characters were adapted to conceal the problematic situation, and many narratives presented the monarchy as it could ideally have been. The following decade drastically changed the fate of the Bourbon family members—and again, the representations of history adapted to present a better version of the monarchy.

Notes 1. On Marie-Thérèse at the beginning of the Restoration, see also Victoria E. Thompson (2019). “Restoring the Royal Family. Marie-Thérèse and the Family Politics of the Early Restoration,” in Nimisha Barton and Richard S. Hopkins (eds.) Practiced Citizenship: Women, Gender, and the State in Modern France, Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. Thompson presents well the importance of history in the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy and the role Marie-Thérèse had in the

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process. She especially examines the significance of family in the process, both as a representation and as a symbol. 2. Clément (2015). Charles X, 125. See also William Fortescue (2005). France and 1848. The End of Monarchy, London: Routledge, 6. 3. Pamela Pilbeam (1991). The 1830 Revolution in France, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 13–15. 4. Clément (2015). Charles X, 480–481. 5. Clément (2015). Charles X, 175–190; Florence Vidal (2010). MarieAmélie de Bourbon-Sicile. Épouse de Louis-Philippe, Paris: Pygmalion, 125–132; Price (2007). The Perilous Crown, 47–63 passim. 6. Napoléon used history to legitimatize his power as well. He was interested in the history of Charlemagne. See, for example, Brecht Deseure (2017). “The Faces of Power. History and the Legitimation of Napoleonic Rule in Belgium,” French Historical Studies (vol. 40, no. 4), 555–588. 7. Crawford (2007). “Constructing Evil Foreign Queens”. 8. See also, for example, Anon (1814). Voyage de S. M. Louis XVIII, depuis son départ de Londres jusqu’à son arrivée à Paris […], Lille: Imprimerie Veuve Dumortier, 6, 11, 14, 15 & passim. The work referred to Henri IV and declared, for example, how the reign of Henri IV “restarted” in 1814 with the return of the Bourbon king. (14). More examples of Henri IV used as a reference for the restored Bourbon monarchy, see Anon (1817). Recueil de pièces intéressantes relatives aux événements qui ont eu lieu à Bordeaux et dans le département de la Gironde en 1814 et 1815, […], Bordeaux: Impr. de Fernel, 85. 9. Anon (1814). Abécédaire de la cour de France, contenant les détails de la rentrée dans le royaume de S.  M. Louis XVIII…, Paris: Ancelle, 81 & 90, 95. 10. Anon (1817). Recueil de pièces intéressantes, 85. “[…] les augustes descendans de Saint-Louis, d’Henri IV et de Louis XVI.” All the translations are mine, if not otherwise indicated. 11. Anon (1814). Abécédaire, 80, 82, 88. See also Thompson (2019). “Restoring the Royal Family”, 65. 12. Becquet (2012). Marie-Thérèse de France, 159–160. 13. Anon (1814). Abécédaire, 80. 14. Becquet (2012). Marie-Thérèse de France, 160. 15. Journal des débats 3.5.1814: “De saint Louis second, fille auguste et chérie […] Magnanime Antoinette, à ton mâle courage […] Si du Roi malheureux vous fêtes l’Antigone […] Ce trône des Titus ne court plus de hasarde […]” “Of the second Saint Louis, august and cherished daughter […] noble-minded Antoinette, to your male courage […] If you are the Antigone of the unfortunate King […] this throne of Titus will no longer

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run in danger[…]”. See also the Journal des débats 1.8.1815, 4.4.1815, and 4.4.1815 Marie-Thérèse as Antigone. 16. See, for example, 4.4.1815 and 6.2.1816 where there is a review of Pierre-Simon Ballanche’s Antigone (1814). 17. Vidal (2010). Marie-Amélie de Bourbon-Sicile, 135. 18. Becquet (2012). Marie-Thérèse de France, 196–205. About Joan of Arc in the  nineteenth-century historical imagery, see, for example, Isabelle Durand-Le Guern (2006). “Jeanne d’Arc, “in Simone Bernard-Griffiths, Pierre Glaudes and Bertrand Vibert (eds.), La fabrique du Moyen Age au XIXème siècle. Représentations du Moyen-Age dans la culture et la littérature françaises du XIXème siècle. Paris: Honoré Champion, 492–495. 19. Alphonse de Beauchamp (1815). La duchesse d’Angoulême à Bordeaux, ou Relation circonstanciée des évènemens politiques dont cette ville a été le théâtre en mars 1815…, Versailles: J. –A. Lebel. 20. P. Malbec (1816). Notice pour servir à la vie de S. A. R. Madame, duchesse d’Angoulême, Montpellier: A. Seguin, 55. 21. Beauchamp (1815). La duchesse d’Angoulême à Bordeaux, passim. 22. Becquet (2012). Marie-Thérèse de France, 199–200. 23. Durand-Le Guern (2006). “Jeanne d’Arc”, 493. 24. Gerd Krumeich (2017). Jeanne d’Arc à travers l’histoire, Paris: Belin, 15–50. 25. Elizabeth Siberry. “St Louis: A Crusader King and Hero for Victorian and First World War Britain and Ireland,” International Medieval Congress, University of Leeds, July 3, 2018. 26. Journal des débats 10.10.1817. Le Brun de Charmettes’ work itself does not refer to the duchesse d’Angoulême. 27. The magazine briefly mentioned in 1817 a new work Histoire de Jeanne d’Arc (1817) published on Joan of Arc and that the author was permitted to present the work to the king and his brother, the comte d’Artois (future Charles X). L’Ami de la religion et du roi 8/1817, 140. 28. L’Ami de la religion et du roi 5/1819, 10–12. 29. Durand-Le Guern (2006). “Jeanne d’Arc”, 492. 30. Joan of Arc featured also in a play published in 1819. See, for example, the Journal des débats 2.7.1819. 31. John Cam Hobhouse Broughton (1819). Histoire des cent-jours, ou Dernier règne de l’empereur Napoléon, lettres écrites de Paris depuis le 8 avril 1815 jusqu’au 20 juillet de la même année, Paris: Domère, 63. 32. John Cam Hobhouse Broughton (1817). Lettres écrites de Paris, pendant le dernier règne de l’empereur Napoléon, […] traduites de l’anglais, vol. I, Gand and Bruxelles: Houdin, 54.

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33. Robert Justin Goldstein (1989). Censorship of Political Caricature in Nineteenth-Century France, Kent, Oh.: Kent State University Press, 102–104. See also Fortescue (2005). France and 1848, 12. 34. Becquet (2012). Marie-Thérèse de France, 201–205. 35. Aali (2017). Merovingian Queenship, see especially chapter 4. About the representation of the reign of Charles IX of France and Catherine de’ Medici’s power over her son, see Estelle Paranque (2019). “Charles IX of France or the Anti-King: His Legacy in Plays and Chronicles in Seventeenth- and Long Eighteenth-Century France,” in Estelle Paranque (ed.), Remembering Queens and Kings of Early Modern England and France, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 115–132. 36. About Brunhilda and Fredegund, and their legacy in French historiography, see Agnès Graceffa (2009). “Le pouvoir déréglé: Frédégonde, Brunehaut et l’historiographie masculine moderne,” Storia delle Donne, 25–38. 37. Becquet (2012). Marie-Thérèse de France, 204. 38. Louis-Pierre Anquetil (1825). Histoire de France, depuis les Gaulois jusqu’à la fin de la monarchie, vol. I, Paris: Ledentu, 264, 301–302. Becquet (2012). Marie-Thérèse de France, 204. 39. Becquet (2012). Marie-Thérèse de France, 204. See also Broughton (1819). Histoire des cent-jours, 63. 40. Journal des débats 4.10.1819. 41. The entire name was Annales historiques de la maison de France, contenant les traits les plus remarquables de la vie de Louis XVIII, des princes et princesses de sa famille et du sang royal, depuis la Révolution jusqu’à l’époque du rétablissement des Bourbons, et suivies de quelques réflexions sur la conduite des alliés dans la guerre qui vient de se terminer. 42. Claude-Philbert Simien Despréaux (1815). Annales historiques de la maison de France, Paris: chez l’Auteur, 19, 80–81. 43. Simien Despréaux (1815). Annales historiques, 80–81. 44. Simien Despréaux (1815). Annales historiques, 10. See also, for example, Agricol-Joseph Fortia d’Urban (1816). Tableau historique et généalogique de la maison de Bourbon, […] Avignon: F. Seguin aîné, which discussed the origin of the Bourbon branch as well. 45. Galart de Montjoie (1815). Les Bourbons, ou Précis historique sur les aïeux du Roi, sur Sa Majesté et sur les princes et princesses du nom de Bourbon qui entourent son trône, Paris: Vve Lepetit, 13. 46. Altogether, there were only four women. Other two were the mother and the aunt of the duc d’Orléans. All four women were from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. 47. Montjoie (1815). Les Bourbons, 184.

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48. Grégoire Louis Domeny de Rienzi (1814). Tableau de la France, telle qu’elle a été, telle qu’elle est, telle qu’elle peut être, ou Apperçu politique et impartial sur sa restauration, Marseille: Antoine Ricard, 86. “Dieu seul a connu toutes les peines de cette moderne Antigone, la plus infortunée des filles et des soeurs, la plus vertueuse des épouses, puissions-nous dire bientôt la plus heureuse des mères!“ 49. Hunt (1992). The Family Romance, 89–123. 50. Perez (2019). Le Corps de la reine, 240–267. 51. Journal des débats 20.5.1814. 52. Philippe Boutry (2011). “La presse religieuse,” in Dominique Kalifa and Philippe Régnier (eds.), La civilisation du journal: histoire culturelle et littéraire de la presse française au XIXe siècle, Paris: Nouveau Monde, 438–439. 53. Joseph Bocous (1815). Le talisman de la France, ou le bouquet de Marie-­ Therese, Paris: Le Normant, 14, 24. 54. Saint Clotilde from the early Middle Ages must be separated from Clotilde de France who was Marie-Thérèse’s aunt on her father’s side. Clotilde de France died in 1802, and she was the Queen of Sardinia by her marriage to Charles-Emmanuel IV.  Catholic Church has declared Clotilde de France venerable. Bocous also referred to Clotilde de France. Bocous (1815). Le talisman de la France, 8. Also the magazine L’Ami de la religion et du roi compared Marie-Thérèse to her aunts, Élisabeth and Clotilde. 2/1816, 231–232. 55. Bocous (1815). Le talisman de la France, 63, 14 & passim. 56. Anquetil (1825). Histoire de France, 281–282. 57. Bocous (1815). Le talisman de la France, 15. 58. Christian Bouyer (2007). Les reines de France. Dictionnaire chronologique, Paris: Perrin, 168–174. 59. Bocous (1815). Le talisman de la France, 3 & passim. 60. François-Nicolas Dufriche de Foulaines (1816). Campagnes de 1815, ou Les Bourbons, les maisons militaires de Louis XVIII et de Monsieur […], Paris: le chevalier de Rozeville, 15. “[…] une Fille de Saint Louis montrait dans la Guyenne l’héroïsme de Blanche, de Marie-Thérèse et de Marie-Antoinette. Je crois voir la ville de Bordeaux, sous l’emblème d’une jeune vierge, pleurant assise sur les débris des colonnes d’un vieux et magnifique temple […].” 61. Journal des débats 3.5.1814. 62. Becquet (2012). Marie-Thérèse de France, 198. 63. Christian Amalvi (2016), “Du Moyen-Âge barbare au Moyen-Âge matrice de la modernité: histoire d’une métamorphose historiographique. Du romantisme à l’histoire des mentalités 1830–2015,” Perspectives médiévales (vol. 37).

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64. Amalvi (2011). Les Héros des français, 17–18. 65. Amalvi (2011). Les Héros des français, 21, 28. 66. Anon (1814). Les Tuileries, le Temple, le tribunal révolutionnaire et la Conciergerie sous la tyrannie de la Convention; […], Paris: Lerouge, 234–245, 9. Madame Élisabeth de France, sister of Louis XVI, has not been canonized by the Catholic Church but this did not stop the royalist authors declaring her a saint to emphasize her martyrdom. 67. See especially Hélène Becquet (2014). “Marie-Antoinette, invention d’une héroïne royale (1793–1816),” in Paul Chopelin and Sylvène Edouard (eds.), Le sang des princes, Rennes: Presse Universitaires de Rennes, 189–198. 68. F.  Roullion-Petit (1814). Oraison funèbre de Marie-Antoinette, archi-­ duchesse d’Autriche, fille de l’impératrice-reine Marie-Thérèse, femme de Louis XVI, Paris: Cèrioux, 27 & 33. 69. Journal des débats 19.10.1814. 70. See, for example, on the creation of martyrdom of Louis XVI, Bernard Hours (1814). “Le « martyre » de Louis XVI. Les mythographies royales d’Ancien Régime comme matrices d’une revendication,” in Paul Chopelin and Sylvène Edouard (eds.), Le sang des princes, Rennes: Presse Universitaires de Rennes, 105–114. 71. L’Ami de la religion et du roi 11/1815, 265–266; 11/1816, 208–281; 11/1817, 301. 72. L’Ami de la religion et du roi 11/1816, 298 ja 313–314, 341; 11/1815, 331–332. Becquet (2012). Marie-Thérèse de France, 403. 73. Journal des débats 17.10.1816. See also, for example, 22.1.2017; 17.10.1817; 22.1.1818. 74. For example L’Ami de la religion et du roi 1815, 415; 2/1816, 231–232; 5/1816, 246; 5/1818, 212, 77 etc. 75. See, for example, the representations of Clotilde, Aali (2017). Merovingian Queenship, 45–46. 76. L’Ami de la religion et du roi 8/1816, 346; 8/1817, 313; 8/1818, 299. 77. Journal des débats 16.10.1816. 78. Journal des débats 18.12.1819. 79. Journal des débats 15.6.1818. 80. Journal des débats 7.1.1815. 81. See Regina Schulte (2006). “Introduction. Conceptual Approaches to the Queen’s Body,” in Regina Schulte (ed.) The Body of the Queen: Gender and Rule in the Courtly World, 1500–2000, New  York: Berghahn Books, 5–10. 82. Jeanne d’Albret was not very often referred to but there was a painting of her presented in the 1819 Salon by Pierre Révoil. See Charles Paul

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Landon (1820). “Salon de 1819,” in Annales du Musée et de l’Ecole moderne des Beaux-Arts, Paris: Imprimerie royale, 65–66. 83. Jacques Laroque (1816). Ronde sur le mariage de LL. AA. RR. Mgr et Mme la duchesse de Berry, Bordeaux: impr. de Veuve Cavazza, s.p. “Grand prince que ta vaillance rapproche du grand Henri, de ton auguste alliance, quen Dieu nous donne un Louis. Vive le Roi! vive la France! Vive la duchesse de Berry!” 84. Waresquiel (2015). C’est la Révolution qui continue!, 280–281. 85. Claude-Antoine Chambelland (1816). Des Avantages qui résultent à la France du mariage de S. A. R. Mgr le duc de Berry avec S. A. R. la princesse Caroline de Naples, Paris: J.-G. Dentu, 3. 86. Chambelland (1816). Des Avantages, 15. “Honneur, gloire, amour à la petite-fille de Louis XIV!” 87. Chambelland (1816). Des Avantages, 16. “[…] si à vous est réservé le bonheur de propager la race d’Henri IV, elle n’en sera point jalouse, la prospérité de la France est son désir le plus vif.” During the period, “race” could be used as a synonym for a dynasty or royal family. 88. Chambelland (1816). Des Avantages, 16. The passage did not very clearly state of whose son it was speaking and to whom the passage was addressed. 89. Jacques-Philippe Charlot-Breton (1816). Poésies sur le mariage de S. A. R. la princesse Marie-Caroline des Deux-Siciles, avec S. A. R. Mgr le duc de Berry, petit-fils de France, célébré en mai 1816, Rennes: Veuve Frout, 6. “Didon et Sophronie, Armide avec Hélène, n’avaient pois sa splendeur, sa fierté souveraine; Et les Vieillards de Troye, assemblés sur leur tour, S’ils eussent vu ses traits, auraient brûlé d’amour.” 90. Charlot-Breton (1816). Poésies sur le mariage, 12. 91. Anon (1816). Strophes sur le mariage de S.A.R. Mgr le Duc de Berri avec S.A.R. la princesse Caroline de Naples, Strasbourg: Levrault, 7. “Salut, honneur, amour, à la jeune Princesse Que Louis fait asseoir au rang de ses enfans!” 92. Anon (1816). Strophes sur le mariage, 10. 93. Journal des débats 11.6.1816. 94. Journal des débats 11.6.1816. “C’est le sang des Bourbons, c’est le sang des Césars/ Qui coule à la fois dans ces veines.” 95. Journal des débats 14.9.1818. 96. Journal des débats 15.9.1818. 97. Journal des débats 4.8.1816. 98. Journal des débats 4.8.1816. 99. Brégeon (2009). La duchesse de Berry, 45–46. 100. Journal des débats 19.8.1818.

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101. Victoria E.  Thompson (2012). “The Creation, Destruction and Recreation of Henri IV.  Seeing Popular Sovereignty in the Statue of a King,” History & Memory (vol. 24, no. 2), 6. 102. Thompson (2012). “The Creation, Destruction and Recreation of Henri IV”, 29, 28, 25, 21, 14, 13, 11, 7, 8. 103. See, for example, Journal des débats 19.8.1818. 104. Debassieux (1819). Le songe, cantate dithyrambique sur l’heureux accouchement de S. A. S. Mme la duchesse de Berry, Paris: Belin, s.p. 105. Debassieux (1819). Le songe, 8. “Les maires du palais, protecteurs insolens/Satisfaits de régner sous de faibles monarques/”. 106. See, for example, Journal des débats 12.4.1816 (opera Louis IX, Robert & Beatrix Bourbon); 5.9.1817 (opera play of Henri IV); 9.9.1817 (fête de saint-Cloud); 26.8.1818 (fête de Saint-Louis); 18.12.1819 (Athalie); 9.2.1819 (painting about Sibylle).

CHAPTER 3

The Last Bourbon Moment (1820–1830)

3.1   Duchesse de Berry, Mother of the Bourbon Hope The year 1820 changed irreversibly the life of the duchesse de Berry and the way she was represented in public. She was widowed and gave birth to the heir of the French throne, to a miracle child. Consequently, the duchesse became perhaps the most popular member of the Bourbon family and, in many ways, an active agent in her own right. This chapter will trace the gradual shift in the representation of Marie-Caroline from a self-­ sacrificing and suffering widow and a mother to a protector and a consumer of arts. The representations of her motherhood were reused later in turmoil caused by her attempted coup d’état in 1832. The chapter starts by analysing the references that set the tone during the crucial and tragic year. The analysis includes the daily reports of the royal family after the assassination of the duc in February 1820 and the various publications that described the life and virtues of the duc and duchesse de Berry. A significant number of publications on the duc and duchesse de Berry were published after February 1820, but I will only include those that used medieval or early modern history.1 Marie-Caroline’s veritable public body was born in 1820. The constitutional monarchy and mass media enabled the birth of this body, and I will analyse how history was used to create, guide, and shape the duchesse de © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 H. Aali, French Royal Women during the Restoration and July Monarchy, Queenship and Power, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59754-2_3

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Berry’s public body, which rested upon her maternal body but eventually grew to a much larger entity. This chapter presents the two bodies of Marie-Caroline, maternal and public, intertwined in the public discussions. Unlike, for example, the seventeenth-century Queen Marie-Thérèse, the spouse of Louis XIV, the duchesse was not cast out from the proximity of the king and the public representations after giving birth to a male heir.2 The assassination of the duc on February 13 inspired dozens of works that idolized his life and marriage.3 For example, a biography by Madame de Sartory portrayed the duc as a courageous and cultivated prince whose extramarital children or multiple liaisons were conveniently left out. The author acknowledged the duc taking part in violent hostilities against the supporters of Napoléon after the Restoration. She  apologized for  his behaviour by comparing it to the actions of Henri IV and explaining that the duc did not have a mother like Jeanne d’Albret who could tone down her son’s violence.4 To be clear, Henri IV was the most popular historical reference associated with the duc for he was also assassinated in 1610. The birth of a son, named Henri (Charles Ferdinand Marie Dieudonné) d’Artois, further emphasized the connection.5 Marie-Caroline gave birth to Henri, the duc de Bordeaux, on September 29, 1820. He was third in the order of succession after his grandfather, the comte d’Artois, and his uncle, the duc d’Angoulême. The Journal des débats published a lengthy article and a poem to celebrate the birth of Henri on the following day. The poem presented Marie-Caroline being comforted from the grave by the birth of a son. The poem portrayed the duc de Berry exorcising away the thunder of the God of Clovis: “C’est le Dieu de Clovis qui tonnoit sur les mondes : Ton père le conjure, il n’est plus irrité […]”, and asking the early seventeenth-century poet Malherbe to praise the throne that the spouse of Clotilde conquered for the French people in the early Middle Ages.6 The author, comte de Valori, made references to ancient poets such as Horace7 and drew from all historical periods, from Antiquity to the seventeenth century, to celebrate the birth of a new prince. MarieCaroline and Saint Clotilde were, however, the only women mentioned in the poem. Neither of them in their own right but the first one as a mother and the second one as a spouse. Marie-Caroline represented the throne and Saint Clotilde the altar. Together they created the holy union of French monarchy that the Restoration monarchy tried hard to uphold. The miracle of the duchesse de Berry giving birth to a living son after the death of her husband reminded the Journal des débats of similar events during the last centuries: “[U]nthinkable destiny for the oldest monarchy

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in Europe, it is reborn and continued for forever in a moment when it seemed to disappear.”8 The magazine no doubt referred to the birth of Louis XIV in 1638 when his mother Anne of Austria was already 37-yearsold.9 The magazine saw this as God’s will to save France. This was not the first time the magazine made references to the long awaited birth of an heir. It had referred to Anne of Austria and Louis XIII already at the beginning of September: [I]n 1638 France found itself in a similar situation like today when Louis XIII and Anne of Austria made a vow in Notre-Dame-de-Grâce in Province to obtain from God an heir to the throne. After twenty-three years of marriage, the birth of Louis XIV confirmed their sceptre.10

To honour the vow, the municipal council of Arles had decided in August to restore the church to celebrate the birth of the (hopefully) heir to the throne. According to the magazine, the location was significant as Arles was an ancient city from the times when Christianity had been introduced in Gaul. The anticipated birth of an heir was associated with the birth of Louis XIV and with the (perceived) early medieval formation of the union between the throne and the altar. 1820 was indeed a crucial year for the survival of the Bourbon monarchy. The royal family celebrated annually what was called Le vœu de Louis XIII. It is a compilation of promises and acts of celebration the father of Louis XIV made when he hoped to have a male heir with Anne of Austria. The celebrated painting of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780–1867) of the same name was published in 1824, and it increased the popularity of the vows. At least in 1825 and 1826, the Journal des débats reported on the royal family participating in the procession of the vows of Louis XIII. In 1825, the royal family participated in the procession twice, on August 10 and August 15.11 The procession, which generally took place on August 15, was also mentioned in 1823.12 No doubt, the birth of the duc de Bordeaux increased the popularity of the procession even though the duchesse de Berry was not very often compared to Anne of Austria. One consequence of the assassination was the re-imposition of censorship, which signified that there were fewer critical voices heard following the birth of Henri. However, the rapidity of the birth raised doubts about the identity of the child among the opponents of the Bourbon rule.13 The Journal des débats criticized the “soi-disant libérale” magazine Le Constitutionnel for willfully altering the account of the events that took

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place during the birth of the prince and for spreading innuendos. The Journal des débats especially disliked that Le Constitutionnel did not emphasize the all-­encompassing joy that, according to the pro-government magazine, reigned in Paris after the birth. What also annoyed the Journal des débats was that the news of the birth was not the most important news in the day’s Le Constitutionnel.14 Le Constitutionnel did not dare or wish to criticize the young mother Marie-Caroline. However, they criticized the government by discussing the play that had been performed in honour of Henri’s birth: Athalie. The theatre was a way for the liberals to criticize the Bourbon reign and government.15 Athalie was a biblical play by Jean Racine published in 1691 and hugely popular. It could be used against the ruling power, as we see here and as we will see in the 1830s. The liberal magazine Le Constitutionnel suggested that on September 29, following the birth of Henri, the audience had especially applauded on a scene where the characters of the play discussed a misguided king and how a rightful king should always be humble before God and that absolute power only leads to a growing thirst for power and eventually the oppressed would become oppressors.16 Le Constitutionnel’s suggestion that the audience would have seen the Bourbon king as a power-hungry angered the Journal des débats which claimed that the audience had cheerfully applauded scenes that supported the Bourbons. The Journal des débats accused Le Constitutionnel of spreading hatred and insults on such an important day. The pro-government magazine continued by declaring, “[…] our children owe to another Blanche the reign of another Louis IX!”17 Marie-Caroline was no longer only the descendant of the great Bourbon kings, but she was now made the mother of a new Saint Louis. Henri was hardly born when he was made the saviour of France. Henri’s birth had first and foremost a dynastic signification as he represented a new generation of the Bourbon family. A new heir affected the position of the Bourbon king, which is why kingship was discussed in the newspapers. Only the birth of a son made Marie-Caroline a new Blanche of Castile, mother of Saint Louis. The reference to Marie-Caroline as a new Blanche emphasized only one aspect of the great medieval queen, the motherhood of a saint king, even though she was also known as the granddaughter of the famous Eleanor of Aquitaine, Queen of England and France. No matter what other things Blanche of Castile accomplished during her lifetime, only her son was important in 1820.18 The historical references were not always logical. For example, according to the citation mentioned above, the duc de Berry’s role would have been that of Louis VIII, father of Saint Louis.

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However, according to an article written by the royalist author Chateaubriand and published in the Journal des débats, the duc de Berry was “among the children of Saint Louis”.19 The duc de Berry was simultaneously the father and the descendant of Saint Louis the same way as the duchesse was represented both as the mother and descendant of the saint king. Even though Marie-Caroline was often celebrated as the descendant of the great Bourbon kings, only the male line mattered. Chateaubriand also claimed the duc de Berry to be the “last descendant of Louis XIV from the French posterity […]”.20 The French use of “descendant” could refer to all descendants or only male descendants. However,  it seems that the duc’s only legitimate daughter Louise did not count as a French descendant of Louis XIV for Chateaubriand. Marie-Caroline’s most important duty was to produce a male heir, and she had now accomplished the mission. According to some authors, Marie-Caroline had had a premonition when she discovered she was expecting a child. In the dream, Saint Louis appeared to her, but she kept the apparition a secret until later.21 Indeed, such revelation gave a strong religious aspect to the birth of Henri and highlighted the idea of the Bourbons as a chosen dynasty of France. The long history of union between the throne and altar was emphasized, for example, in 1823, when the Journal des débats declared that the children of the duchesse de Berry esteemed the religion of Clovis, Charlemagne, and Saint Louis.22 The religion of these famous kings was Catholicism that was simplified to an immutable entity the same way as the institute of monarchy. The Journal des débats published a letter from the comte de Galliffet, a commander of a  regiment of cavalrymen of Corrèze, that presented the regiment ready to serve the virtuous heir of Saint Louis and Henri IV.23 Already before the birth of Henri, the magazine had published multiple wishes from all around France, hoping the duchesse would have a safe delivery and a son that would “conserve the throne of France to the posterity of Henri IV and Louis-le-Grand”.24 Yet, all these wishes revolved around continuing the male line of kings. Virtually all women were absent in these repetitive references to the grand history of the Bourbon family. The same absence of references to historical women was visible in a work about Marie-Caroline’s visit to Rosny in November 1820. She travelled to Rosny, a château the duc had bought for her, to place the first stone to construct a new chapel. As one could expect, Henri IV was referred to in the work multiple times. Marie-Caroline was defined as the “widow of a grandson of Henri IV” and her role was to teach her son the history of Henri IV.25 No women were named  apart from short references to Henri IV’s mother.

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Omitting women was characteristic of the period’s historical narratives. The period’s political tendency increasingly sought to exclude women from the  political sphere, and most women worth mentioning were those of “Great Men’s” mothers and spouses. Henri IV’s importance in the historical imagery related to the Bourbon family during the Restoration led to a new historical narrative associated with the duchesse de Berry. The Journal des débats published a letter on October 23 from a member of a diplomatic corps written to celebrate the birth of Henri. According to the magazine, “[N]ew Jeanne d’Albret, august Princess responded [to the letter] with deserving greatness of a spirit and nobility: […]”.26 A few days later, the Journal des débats announced that a new book had been presented to the duchesse de Berry. The book was entitled: Cantique et Chansons béarnaises, chantés par Jeanne d’Albret, au moment de la naissance de Henri IV.27 The book was about songs that Jeanne d’Albret sang when her son, Henri IV, was born. Even though Henri IV was referred to during the Restoration to justify and glorify the Bourbon monarchy’s return, this was one of the first times we find associations between the duchesse and Henri’s mother Jeanne d’Albret.28 There was also at least one engraving of the duchesse de Berry where she was named the “Nouvelle Jeanne d’Albret”. In the engraving made by the prolific artist Jean Dominique Étienne Canu (1768–1844), the duchesse was holding her daughter, and they were sitting by the cradle of Henri. Next to the duchesse was the bust of the duc de Berry, which their daughter was reaching for. Interestingly the text in the image defined Henri as the son of Caroline and Thérèse—that is Marie-Thérèse, the duchesse d’Angoulême.29 Marie-Thérèse was already the second mother of Henri and would continue to hold the role in the future. The same way as in connection to Saint Louis, Marie-Caroline was transformed from the descendant of Henri IV to his mother. I would have expected there to be far more references to Marie-Caroline as a new Jeanne d’Albret, taking into consideration that her son had been made a new Henri since the marriage between the duc and the duchesse took place in 1816, had it not been for the religious issue. Jeanne d’Albret was a Protestant, and to associate the duchesse de Berry, who reinforced with Henri the alliance between the throne and the altar, with her would have been dubious. Jeanne d’Albret was a well-known historical person among the reading elite, so she could not be ignored entirely. However, in the early 1830s, Jeanne d’Albret became a popular reference for the duchesse due to the attempted coup. But in 1820, and all through the decade, there

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were only sporadic references to Jeanne d’Albret in connection to Marie-­ Caroline. The existing references only mentioned Jeanne d’Albret briefly, and her religion was wholly ignored. The simplistic comparisons did not aim to present the historical characters as real humans but only to present idolized models for the royal Bourbon women. * * * The duchesse de Berry made a  pilgrimage to Notre-Dame de Liesse (north of Paris) in 1821 to celebrate the Virgin Mary. The pilgrimage was reported in many magazines but also in a book about the baptism of the duc de Bordeaux, her son. The complimentary description of the pilgrimage emphasized the way the duchesse’s visit continued the old tradition of French kings and queens visiting the church built in 1134. The author of the book mentioned Louis XIII, Anne of Austria, and Louis XIV visiting the church and leaving their signs of gratitude (donations).30 The author implied as the Journal des débats had done previously that the birth of Henri was a similar miracle as the birth of Louis XIV. Both mothers, Marie-Caroline and Anne of Austria showed gratitude to the Notre-Dame de Liesse. Another, more extended account (1821) of Marie-Caroline’s pilgrimage to the Notre-Dame de Liesse described how in Soissons there were triumphal arcs with the names of Caroline, Blanche of Castile, and Jeanne d’Albret written on them. Further away, above an entrance, according to the account, were the names of Clovis, Louis IX, and the duc de Bordeaux.31 The account did not comment on the names celebrated in Soissons but acknowledged the significance of Henri IV for the Bourbon dynasty by bringing him up multiple times.32 Marie-Caroline was associated with famous mothers, whereas her son was categorized with the men who were perceived as protectors of the union between the throne and the altar. Jeanne d’Albret or Blanche of Castile were not discussed later in the text about the pilgrimage. By way of describing the pilgrimage, the author was able to discuss important events related to the French monarchy and to stress how highly the young royal mother valued national history. Journeys like this and their complimentary accounts made Marie-Caroline a popular member of the Bourbon family. According to Jean-Joël Brégeon, author of the 2009 biography of the duchesse de Berry, her travels united tourism and official representation. They were of great importance to the

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monarchy and Bourbon dynasty.33 On a daily basis, history surrounded the royal family Everything they did, or did not do, could and would be related to history. The account described in detail the journey of the duchesse and the many places she visited during the pilgrimage. The author seemed to be interested in especially two periods of history that were emphasized throughout the account: the Merovingian era and the period influenced by Henri IV. The author had even included some twenty pages of historical notes to the end of the account. He provided further details on the history of the places the duchesse had visited such as Soissons. The historical details included, among other things, anecdotes about the reign of Clovis from the early sixth century.34 The author described the way Marie-­ Caroline intensively examined the building projects of Catherine de’ Medici.35 In Coucy-le-Château, according to the account, the duchesse de Berry wished to see the apartment where Gabrielle d’Estrées had given birth to Henri IV’s son in 1594.36The author gave a very praising description of Gabrielle d’Estrées, or “belle Gabrielle” as he called her, in the notes stating that she had only ever given good words of advice. The king’s love for his beautiful mistress was glorified, and the author even praised the town of Laon for raising a monument for Gabrielle.37 Henri IV’s spouses, Marguerite de Valois and Marie de’ Medici, were not mentioned. The popularity of Henri IV’s mistress was also apparent in the way Marie-­Thérèse was portrayed in a similar manner as the pregnant Gabrielle d’Estrées.38 Marie-Caroline was presented keenly interested in provincial history, which undoubtedly affected the popularity of the whole Bourbon family positively. According to Jean-Paul Clément, biographer of Charles X (2015), the duchesse de Berry often preferred to escape from receptions to see ruins of monasteries and abandoned churches during her various journeys to the departments.39 The duc de Berry had bought the château of Rosny in 1818 as a summer place for the duchesse and their future family. Rosny was situated in Yvelines, near Paris. Marie-Caroline spent as much time as possible there even after, 1820 and she executed many renovations there. The château held symbolic importance because it was the birthplace of the duc de Sully (1559–1641), the confidant and counsellor of Henri IV. Sully extended and renovated the castle especially after 1590. Rosny was the home of Marie-Caroline’s extensive library that included, among other things, 1162 titles on history. There were only 141 titles on theology, which indicated her relative lack of personal interest in religion. The

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duchesse enjoyed visiting the famous monastery of Jumièges situated near Rosny and, for example, in 1824 she saw there the (fragmentary) tomb of Clovis’ sons and the tomb of Agnès Sorel (1422–1450), the mistress of Charles VIII.40 Frequent visits to Rosny contributed to the public profile of Marie-­ Caroline because magazines such as the Journal des débats reported daily on the movements of the royal family members. Even though Marie-Caroline was associated with saintly women such as Blanche of Castile and Clotilde, she had a very different profile in public compared to the duchesse d’Angoulême. The latter had a  much more religious and saintly, even suffering, role in public, whereas even as a widow and a young mother, Marie-Caroline was not made a saintly woman similarly. In one work, a celebration of holiness dedicated to the duchesse de Berry, Marie-Caroline’s suffering was compared to that of Marie-Thérèse and the author argued that the latter had endured more suffering.41 Yet, on another occasion, Marie-Caroline was described as a new Rachel, a biblical character who had difficulties conceiving a son.42 In 1820–1821, however, the biblical references were quite rare because Marie-Caroline could not be made to be a similarly eternally suffering character as her sister-in-law, Marie-Thérèse. The young princess, as was well known, loved dancing, opera, and theatre.43 * * * During the years 1820 and 1821, there was a clear peak in the duchesse de Berry’s popularity in the press and other publications. I will examine the way the duchesse’s popularity persisted during the last eight years of the Bourbon rule and how her public image transformed from a suffering mother to that of a frequent visitor of balls and theatres. She even had a theatre dedicated to her in 1824, Théâtre de Madame.44 This shift in her public profile was especially visible in the news published in the Journal des débats. At the beginning of the decade, the news mostly related to her husband’s death and the birth of her son, but towards the end of the decade, she was reported on frequenting theatres, travelling, shopping, and doing charity. The king and especially the duchesse d’Angoulême, MarieCaroline’s sister-in-law, managed the upbringing of the royal children. The Journal des débats made only cursory references to Blanche of Castile or Jeanne d’Albret in the context of the duchesse de Berry after 1821.45 More often, the magazine reported on her taking part in various

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events and visits. She took part in the royal family’s annual celebrations such as that of the feast of Saint Louis and the feast of Saint Charles.46 In 1824, Marie-­Caroline visited Dieppe, and the Journal des débats compared her visit to the royal visits of 1815. She was named the granddaughter of Henri IV.47 She also visited Rouen, where she saw the statues of François I and the English king Henry VIII. There was also a feast in Rouen to celebrate the duchesse, and the Journal des débats again found a way to include references to Henri IV.48 In 1826 published biography, Vie anecdotique de S.  A. R.  Madame Duchesse de Berry, summarized many of the visits and historical references employed to emphasize Marie-Caroline’s importance for France and the Bourbon family. The author Émile Marco de Saint-Hilaire (1796–1887) was a prolific author mostly  known for his pseudo-memoirs of the Napoleonic period. The biography, over 300 pages, centred on the marriage of the duc and duchesse de Berry and the tragic events of February 1820. The biography idealized both the duchesse and the entire Bourbon family. It included the usual obligatory references to Henri IV and Saint Louis without forgetting to emphasize the poor people loving MarieCaroline and all the donations she and the duc had made to charity. According to the biography, Marie-Caroline had had already in 1818 a vision of Saint Louis promising her a son. Saint-Hilaire described her as beautiful as the Queen of Saba. However, the biography bypassed completely both the birth of mademoiselle, her oldest daughter and the fact that the two lovely children summoned to the deathbed of the duc were his children by his English mistress.49 Saint-Hilaire recycled most of the historical references used to define Marie-Caroline. The author portrayed the duchesse as a saintly royal mother who focused on charity50 and esteemed the history of France and its past rulers—“Nouvelle Jeanne d’Albret”.51 According to Saint-Hilaire, the duchesse had participated in 1821  in a lecture where the speaker, l’abbé Freyssinous, a bishop and a member of the government: [p]roved that Christianity, which acceded to the throne of the Francs together with Clovis, was consolidated by Charlemagne, honored by Saint Louis and the long continuation of succeeding kings, was destined to come out victorious of all the difficulties and new ordeals that were evoked. He [l’abbé Freyssinous] quoted as an example the birth of the prince Dieudonné, the duc de Bordeaux, born to a young heroine more admirable than Jeanne

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d’Albret and herself formed of the blood of Louis XIV and Maria Theresa of Austria.52

The new ordeals mentioned by the speaker referred to the Revolution, Enlightenment philosophers, Napoléon’s rule, and to the duc de Berry’s assassination. Henri’s birth was made to be a religious sign that the Bourbons had the right to rule France and that the alliance between the throne and the altar initiated by Clovis I was justified. That the duchesse was more admirable than Jeanne d’Albret no doubt referred to her religion—the duchesse was Catholic, whereas Jeanne d’Albret had been a Protestant. Maria Theresa of Austria was an admirable ancestor rather than  a dangerous foreign influence like her daughter Marie-Antoinette had been during the Revolution.53 Austria was pictured as a noble ally to the Bourbons due to its support for the Restoration. The Bourbon France had not fought Russia, England, and other countries during the first years of the nineteenth century, but Napoleonic France had, which the abbot opposed. The biography created a very noble, admirable, and popular picture of the young duchesse. Not surprisingly, it left out all the controversies associated with the Bourbon rule and with the young duchesse such as the womanizing of her husband, her liking of theatres and balls, the government’s growing unpopularity, and government crises compounded with increasing conservatism. The biography packed with historical references was no doubt aimed  at readers who already supported the Bourbon dynasty, for it did not offer much new insight into the role of the duchesse. The work ended with a citation from another contemporary work: “[…] you, who like the heroine of Orléans have not ceased to hope that in you lies our salvation, be blessed!”54 The author portrayed the duchesse de Berry saving France by producing a male heir to the Bourbon throne. Similarly as during the Hundred Years War, a heroine saved France when all hope seemed to be lost. Saint-Hilaire presented the lack of a male heir to be the biggest threat for the Bourbon dynasty even though the king’s politics eventually contributed to the downfall of the dynasty. The aforementioned citation with Joan of Arc came from a travelogue from Vendée and Midi published in 1821.55 Travel accounts such as this are worth keeping in mind because Vendée was the stronghold for the royalists and the place where the duchesse tried to initiate the coup d’état in 1832. Publications like this one undoubtedly contributed to the illusion that she

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would have sufficient  support to start an uprising against the July Monarchy. * * * The duchesse de Berry was associated for a long time with the history of Marie Stuart. According to Brégeon, she was a great admirer of Marie Stuart. One has to keep in mind how popular the history of England, especially the history of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, was during the Restoration. Many authors, notably François Guizot, considered the similarities between the English and French revolutions and how both countries struggled with the heritage of executed kings and exiled royal families.56 The tragic end (1649) of the Stuart king Charles I, the grandson of Marie Stuart, and the family’s later history were well known and sympathized in France. The French considered the English history primarily through the lenses of the revolution, and the history of the Stuarts could be a powerful political weapon in Restoration France. The English Revolution of 1688 would even later inspire some of the participants of the 1830 Revolution.57 For example, Chateaubriand published in 1828 a work entitled Les quatre Stuarts, which discussed the similarities between the seventeenth-century Stuarts and nineteenth-century Bourbons. According to Chateaubriand, the Stuarts were gone, but the Bourbons would stay.58 Histories of England and Scotland were hugely popular topics in France in the 1820s and the award-winning historian Augustin Thierry published his praised Histoire De La Conquête De l’Angleterre Par Les Normands in 1825. The Journal des débats consecrated three long review articles to evaluate the hugely popular work.59 Simultaneously, the French readers craved for the historical novels of Sir Walter Scott, whose Ivanhoe (in English 1819, in French 1820) was reprinted multiple times in the 1820s and beyond. For example, in July 1820, the Journal des débat stated that Scott’s novels were in everybody’s hands and that all had read Rob Roy, Ivanhoe, and Prison d’Edimbourg (The Heart of Midlothian).60 The same year, the Scottish author published another novel, l’Abbé (The Abbot, also published in French in 1820), which was set in the sixteenth century and featured, among others, Marie Stuart. The Journal des débats reviewed the novel in December of the same year and established in the article the queen as a tragic character who was simultaneously beautiful, vain, and shallow but good-hearted.61

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Marie Stuart was a hugely popular historical character in France already before the publication of l’Abbé. In March 1820 premiered the play Marie Stuart by Pierre-Antoine Lebrun, which was based on the famous work by Friedrich Schiller. The play was noticed already in 1819, and it rendered the Scottish queen truly popular when it premiered the next year.62 According to the Journal des débats, the success of the tragedy popularized all the histories of the “unfortunate queen”. New editions were made of old works on the tragic queen to satisfy the curiosity of the reading public.63 There were, in fact, two plays based on the life of Marie Stuart being performed in Paris simultaneously, one in Théâtre Français and another one in Théâtre de la Porte Saint-Martin. This popularity is hugely significant regarding the representations of the French royal women, notably the duchesse de Berry, because she chose to dress as the Queen of Scots in a ball in 1829. As we will see, the association between the duchesse de Berry and Marie Stuart and between the Bourbons and Stuarts generally bore a number of meanings and were referred to in various contexts, especially in the legitimist press after 1830. The relevance of these associations was established, however, right at the beginning of 1820. Marie Stuart was not the only famous historical or mythical character visible in popular culture and at the stage at the beginning of the 1820s. There were plays and operas, for example, about Joan of Arc, Elisabeth I, Charles VI, Athaliah, Robin Hood, Ivanhoe, Rosamund (mistress of Henry II of England), William Tell, and Clovis showing in Paris during this period.64 History evoked royal, academic, popular, and artistic interests. Furthermore, magazines advertised more and more books and plays  about history in the 1820s, which tells about the importance and popularity of history, especially within the Parisian reading elite. The event that ultimately established the association between Marie-­ Caroline and the sixteenth-century queen was the masked ball the duchesse organized in March 1829.65 She enjoyed all masked balls but this one, Quadrille de Marie Stuart, was her favourite. It gathered more than 1300 guests and the novels of Walter Scott inspired it. The ball portrayed a fictional scene of Mary of Lorraine (also known as Mary of Guise, Marie de Guise), queen mother of Scotland, visiting her daughter in France. According to Brégeon, a lot of research was done in the Bibliothéque royale to design the duchesse’s dress in the style of Marie Stuart. Yet, the duchesse’s fascination with the executed Scottish queen did not fully please everybody since her sister-in-law Marie-Thérèse, now Dauphine of

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France, apparently found the interest and choice for a ball a sign of a very poor taste.66 One reason why the Dauphine might have disapproved of her sister-in-­ law’s fascination for Marie Stuart was that the Scottish queen’s tragic history was previously associated with that of Marie-Antoinette. French historian Nicole Cadène has argued that in France the execution of Marie-­ Antoinette revived the memory of Marie Stuart, and already in 1794, gravures of Marie Stuart had started to circulate in France. Cadène suggests that during the early years of the Restoration in the 1810s, the history of Marie Stuart enabled the remembrance of the guillotined queen from a safe distance—Marie Stuart evoked the tragic destiny of Marie-Antoinette without making direct allusions to her. Marie Stuart was Marie-Antoinette’s “sentimental stand-in”. Another reason why the Scottish queen was problematic for the Bourbon family (obviously excluding the duchesse de Berry) was that doubts of immorality tarnished her memory.67 In 1819, the two executed queens had been juxtaposed in Notices sur Marie Stuart, reine d’Ecosse, et sur Marie-Antoinette, reine de France which included short biographies of the two queens.68 By organizing a ball in the fashion of Marie Stuart, the duchesse de Berry thus evoked the conflicted memory of Marie-Antoinette. The popularity of Walter Scott’s novels no doubt affected the transformation of the memory of Marie Stuart in France but also proved the plasticity of her memory—like the memory of any historical person. Marie-Thérèse’s use of memory of Marie Stuart was associated with the Revolution, whereas the duchesse de Berry’s Marie Stuart represented the romantic interpretation of the Scottish queen. The press reported in detail about the 1829 masked ball. For example, Revue de Paris, a French literary magazine, described the event in a long article. According to the magazine, in addition to Marie Stuart and her mother, the ball featured characters such as the young dauphin François and Catherine de’ Medici, his mother. Jeanne d’Albret was also among the characters of the duchesse’s masked ball. The duc de Chartres, the oldest son of the duc d’Orléans had dressed up as the Dauphin François. Revue de Paris described the characters in detail and examined the historicity of the dresses. Especially the clothing of the duchesse de Berry was praised for its historical accuracy. The magazine claimed that the duchesse would have wanted, in the imitation of Louis XIV, to parade the guests in their fancy dresses in Paris for everyone to see them. It would have been, according to the author, “une chose curieuse” to see “the chivalric costumes mixed with the bourgeois characteristics of the great city, [and] the

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travel of the frivolous centuries in the middle of the serious century”.69 The ball and the costumes must have cost the duchesse and participants unimaginable sums of money. It is hard to imagine that the public reaction would have been solely positive considering that France was already experiencing financial hardship in 1829. The duchesse wore a belt with diamonds that alone cost, according to the Revue de Paris, approximately 500,000 francs. The duchesse even lost some of the diamonds during a dance, but “n’en prit que peu de souci”, did not worry much about it.70 This image of a carefree princess who loved tragic historical queens and masked balls, even up to being perceived as tasteless, and did not worry too much about her diamonds is quite contrasting to the saintly mother represented in the 1826 biography. In many ways, the association with famous and pious mothers was imposed on her by others, whereas the association with the queen of the Scots was at least partly her own. She was not a pious sufferer like her sister-in-law but she loved theatre, dance, and shopping in all accounts. Many of the theatre plays she saw drew from history or historical novels, including Ivanhoe, Shakespeare productions, and past French royalty.71 She had now transformed into a consumer of history like so many of her contemporaries. The duchesse de Berry and her husband were important art collectors, and she continued to collect art after the death of the duc. Altogether, she owned 362 pictures.72 According to the historian Philip Mansel, [T]heir collection reflects not only the competing dynasticism of the period but also their personal taste, and the aesthetics of royalism. Like all official patrons of the Restoration, the Duc and Duchesse de Berry tried to appropriate or celebrate the Bourbon past, in particular the patron of the French Restoration, Henri IV.73

The collection, primarily referring to paintings and pictures, had political aspects as well as personal significations. It reflected the period’s well-­ known royalist interest to Henri IV. The collection was also a method to consolidate the Bourbon dynasty’s position in France as the duchesse was given large sums of money to purchase items for her collection. Yet, as Mansel has argued, the collection did not draw uniquely from historical topics but included several landscape scenes from provincial areas and other European countries. The themes included multiple domestic and family scenes, and  scenes of less happy situations such as from prison and poverty.74 Mansel concluded that in the collection the present

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predominated the past.75 Despite the present’s predominance, we find many familiar themes in the paintings that reflected the period’s fluid interest in history. Contemporary perceptions of fashionable periods of history are well visible in the duchesse’s extensive collection. The curator of the collection, Chevalier Bonnemaison, published catalogues of the collection that included both images of the paintings and short descriptions of the works.76 The works included themes such as Saint Louis in prison, Henri IV and his children, Scottish landscapes, Genevieve and Lancelot, and Marie Stuart imprisoned in the castle of Loch Leven. However, in  Bonnemaison’s catalogue these historical topics were in the  minority and most paintings focused, as Mansel described, on other topics. In 1823, an abridged catalogue of the duchesse’s collection was published. It was  aimed at amateurs, according to the author of the book Charles-Paul Landon.77 The catalogue included images of 26 paintings with (very) short descriptions. This abridged catalogue offered a dissimilar view of the duchesse’s collection because it presented virtually no landscapes. Instead, the catalogue included two paintings depicting Henri IV, paintings on Louis XVIII, the duc de Berry, Louise de la Vallière, a Van Dyck painting, Marie Stuart twice, Joan of Arc, death of a historical king of Hungary, and a scene from the prison of Inquisition.78 In this catalogue, the historical themes were overrepresented by far. Therefore it gave a very different  interpretation of the duchesse’s collection from Bonnemaison’s earlier catalogue. In Landon’s catalogue, history ruled over the present even though it did not ignore all scenes of contemporary life.79 The duchesse’s art collection was well known in the press. The Journal des débats did not fail to repeatedly present the duchesse in the news as a protector of arts and literature. For example, in 1826, she purchased a statue of Henri IV enfant.80 The same year, a compilation of French classical literature was dedicated to her.81 These pieces of news did not only promote the duchesse and the royal family as art lovers, but also advertised the artists and boutiques the duchesse visited. For example, on December 16, 1827, it was first reported that the duchesse visited the atelier of a famous miniature painter Jean-Baptiste Jacques Augustin where she admired many of his works. Then the magazine reported that she visited, both alone and together with her daughter, several other  shops.82 Especially in the case of the shops, these pieces of news worked as advertisements. Overall, in this one issue (16.12.1827) there were five reports/

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advertisements of the duchesse visiting shops and ateliers. One issue of the Journal des débats had at the time an average of four pages. Earlier that year, she was called “L’auguste protectrice des beaux-arts”.83 The sanctity of the royal family and their desire and duty to take care of the most disadvantaged were emphasized in the duchesse’s art collection and the press. In October 1828, the Journal des débats reported that a new hospital had been dedicated to the duchesse in the department of Landes. She was given the title of founder of the hospital built on the birthplace of Saint Vincent de Paul, a saint dedicated to abandoned children. Following her example, many famous people donated money to the hospital.84 The sixteenth-century saint featured at least twice in the duchesse’s art collection, in 1817 and 1824, the latter being a painting by the famous Paul Delaroche.85 This is an excellent example how charity, religion, art collections, dynasticism, and politics intertwined to strengthen the positive image of the Bourbon family. The duchesse protected the arts, and the same way as the sixteenth-century saint, she founded hospitals and alleviated the suffering of the poor. Simultaneously she and the whole Bourbon family competed in the press with the Orléans family, the wealthiest family in France and constant reminder of the fragility of the Bourbon power and other rivals as to who donated the most money to the poor. Unlike the saint, the money that the duchesse spent on art and charity was used to advertise the Bourbon family. She bought not only art but also positive press. By protecting the arts, the duchesse contributed to the popularity of medieval and early modern history in France. In September 1828, the Journal des débats wrote about an extensive work entitled Vues pittoresques de l’Ecosse, which contained drawings on the Scottish landscape. According to the magazine, the book was dedicated to the duchesse de Berry, which proved how influential the works of Walter Scott were in Europe. The Journal des débats lamented that due to his influence, the Greek and Roman mythology interested less in France than ballads and histories of revenants told by fifteenth-century English and Scottish wet-nurses.86 As an admirer of Walter Scott and his historical novels,87 the duchesse added to their visibility in France—and implicitly influenced the growing interest in medievalism in early nineteenth-century France.88 The third body of the duchesse, the public opinion, was in her favour even though she could only partially control it. Successful uses of history and historical romantic heroines shaped the opinion as also did the success of her maternal body in 1820. Her seemingly apolitical role and behaviour

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contributed to the new sentimental role of women in the 1820s. Yet, her travels, art collection, charity, and protecting hospitals and schools had all strong political significations. They promoted the Bourbon dynasty and affected the king’s third body—the public opinion.

3.2   Duchesse d’Angoulême, the Dauphine The duchesse d’Angoulême was the most prominent woman of the Bourbon family in the 1810s, but the spotlight was placed upon young duchesse de Berry following the events of 1820. Marie-Caroline seemed to eclipse the childless Marie-Thérèse, at least when measured in terms of media coverage. However, the death of King Louis XVIII rectified the situation in 1824. He had no children so his younger brother inherited the crown under the name, Charles X. Charles X was the last surviving brother of Louis XVI and he had two male heirs: the duc d’Angoulême and young Henri, the son of the late duc de Berry. Thus, the duc d’Angoulême became the Dauphin. With their new titles of the Dauphin and Dauphine, the exposure of the duc and duchesse d’Angouleme increased considerably.89 This level of publicity continued until the July Revolution and the duchesse d’Angouleme’s eventual exile, which radically decreased her exposure in France. This, however, did not result in her disappearing entirely from the French press or national conscience. This chapter will open with a discussion on Marie-Thérèse during and after the dramatic year of 1820 that altered the fate of the Bourbon family forever. What kind of medieval or early modern references do we find after February 1820 concerning  the duchesse d’Angoulême? The duc de Berry’s assassination created a short window of time when the discussion on women’s right to inherit the French throne was relevant since the gender (and viability) of the unborn child was unknown. I shall examine the way the authors employed medieval and early modern history and the role they gave Marie-Thérèse in the reform of royal succession that, in the end, never took place. The second part of this chapter focuses on Marie-Thérèse’s role as a mother and on the period after the death of Louis XVIII when she took one step closer to becoming a queen. As the Dauphine, she was more notable than before, and the press monitored her actions closely. How did the role of the Dauphine affect the historical references used to describe her? Moreover, how did the increasing dissatisfaction with the government and the king towards the end of the 1820s influence the public representation and discussion about the Dauphine? The chapter will argue

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that towards the end of the Bourbon Restoration, discontent with the king and the government was not evident in the historical terms used to describe the Dauphine. The heroine of Bordeaux did not receive, before July 1830, direct criticism. She was close to the last Bourbon king and supported his conservative and religious politics. Unlike several decades earlier when her mother became the focus of discontent, the growing number of critics did not project their dissatisfaction onto the Dauphine. The decade witnessed a general increase in the popularity of the Merovingian dynasty, which culminated in the publication of the awardwinning narrative Récits des temps mérovingiens by liberal historian Augustin Thierry in the 1830s. The early medieval King Clovis I, the most famous of the Merovingian kings, was equally popular in arts, politics, and historiography. Twenty-first-century historians such as Christian Amalvi and Laurent Theis have demonstrated that Clovis was an essential reference point for Charles X during his sacre in 1825. As Theis has argued, the sacre inspired multiple pieces of literature celebrating the spouse of Saint Clotilde.90 I will discuss how  the cultural memory of the Merovingian queens continued to matter in France during this decade and the way historical imagery related to the queens was employed in publications pertaining  to Marie-Thérèse. Yet, the history of the early medieval period was, in some cases, used to undermine the royalist narrative. In fact, Thierry published an essay in the 1820s that underlined how kingship changed from the early Middle Ages to modern times, thus questioning the royalist idea that French kingship has remained immutable throughout history.91 * * * The press continued to construct the same narrative of the duchesse d’Angoulême in 1820 as it had done at the end of the 1810s. The duchesse was reported on participating in charitable events and donating funds to various charitable causes, commemorating deceased family members, participating in festivities, celebrating the Catholic association of the royal family, and visiting multiple historical locations such as museums. The Journal des débats, still a strong supporter of the Bourbon dynasty, reported on these actions, thus strengthening the idealized representation of the duchesse. She was also reported as receiving guests on the feast day of Saint Teresa as she did nearly every year.92 “L’orphelin du temple”, who had spent, according to the magazine, one half of her life suffering and the other half relieving pain, consoled the poor and the sick in the l’Infirmerie

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de Marie-­Thérèse.93 She received an author who had penned travel books (Promenade de Paris à Bagnères-le-Luchon and Promenade de Bagnères à Paris) that made allusions to the cradle of Henri IV and “prophetic references to the birth of M. le duc de Bordeaux”.94 Similar short references to the Madame (as Marie-Thérèse was frequently called in the press) were frequent from 1820 to 1824 after which they increased due to her renewed position in the royal hierarchy. The press mostly recycled old historical references, continuing to emphasise the romantic notion that demanded all queens to be fair and moral.95 Obviously, Marie-Thérèse was not a queen, for France had no queen at this time, but of the royal women, she was closest to the (conservative ideal of) queenship. As the spouse of the heir to the throne, and even before 1824 as the highest-ranking royal woman, she took on the duties of the queen.96 The assassination of the duc de Berry in February 1820 caused, among other things, a dynastic crisis for the Bourbons due to the lack of male heirs. However, some authors saw the situation as an opportunity to introduce a reform that would allow women to inherit the French throne in a situation where there were no direct male heirs. Why could not the legitimate daughter of the late duc de Berry or Marie-Thérèse, the only surviving child of King Louis XVI, inherit the throne of France? Why should the future of France depend on the possible birth of a son when many royal women could rule the constitutional monarchy? The window of time for such questions was short, from February to September, but the discussion is fascinating. The two authors I shall examine in this section drew at length from medieval history and used the history of France to advance their arguments. Even if this discussion did not result in any tangible improvements to women’s rights, the works visualized the change in the “monarchical ideology” as Hélène Becquet has argued.97 The longer of the two works was entitled De la nécessité d’appeler au trône les filles de France, ouvrage précédé d’un examen de la loi salique [Of the necessity to call to the throne the daughters of France, a volume preceded by a study of the Salic Law] and it was authored by Thomassy (no full name given). According to the front cover, he had a degree in law from the “faculté de Paris”. Thomassy devoted the largest part of the work to the refusal of the Salic Law, which he saw uniquely as civil and criminal law and not as a public law that would rule on the succession

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of the throne.98 Thomassy looked into the early medieval origins of Salic Law, and discussed the influence of Clovis and the election of Pharamond as one of the kings of the Saliens.99 Thomassy was a strong supporter of the Bourbon dynasty, and he sought to save it. He founded his historiographical argument on contemporary interpretations of the early medieval Frankish kings. In this genealogy, Pharamond still existed as a historical person. However, with the rise of liberal historiography, starting from the 1820s, and the works of Simonde de Sismondi, François Guizot, and Jules Michelet historians would soon categorize Pharamond among mythical heroes, rather than as one of the Frankish ancestors of Clovis I. Nevertheless, Thomassy was well aware that it was not only the notorious Salic Law that he needed to refute to allow women  to inherit the crown.100 Indeed, he had to prove women capable of ruling France. According to Thomassy, the exclusion was founded on the customs of a tribe that ruled over 1400  years ago and on the idea of women being naturally inferior to men.101 The author argued that this was discriminatory and brought up two contemporary publications to support his view. First, he quoted a short article from the Journal des débats. This anonymous article argued that in no other country women had fewer rights than in France. The author of the article wrote, and Thomassy cited in his work: The modern times have witnessed Marguerite in the North, Elisabeth in London, Maria Theresa in Germany to carry the diadem and lance; in Paris, the masculine pride of the Salic Law has condemned their [women’s] hands to turn the spindle.102

In other words, whereas in other countries, women are included in the succession of the throne, they are doomed only to spin the wool in France. What was equally noteworthy in the anonymous article, but not quoted by Thomassy, was the following: Or, if sometimes all the omnipotence of the beard was forced to bow in front of the superiority of a feminine brilliance, this gallant people [French] say she is a woman above her sex, more than a woman, without, however, being an equal to a man either. She is considered as an intermediate between the weakness of her sex and the magnificence of ours.103

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According to this argument, an accomplished woman, in the eyes of a man, becomes a creature above her sex and something between the two sexes, in other words, an exception.104 Indeed, the way this anonymous author portrayed how accomplished women were treated hit the nail on the head in terms of historiography. A representative example comes from contemporary historiography and the way historians described the  early medieval Merovingian Queen Fredegund (died in 597). Fredegund certainly did not fit the category of an ideal bourgeois spouse and queen in the minds of early nineteenthcentury authors. Authors often described her as surpassing her gender and social class, and as stopping at nothing to secure the throne for her son.105 Contemporary historian and ultra-royalist politician Louis-Antoine-­ François de Marchangy106 described the early medieval queen with the  following words “[…] the too beautiful Fredegund, an ambitious and proud woman, ingenious and cunning, who had the will of a tyrant, mind of a rhetorician, a courage of a man, and all the charms of her sex.”107 The even more notorious sixth-century Queen Brunhilda, Fredegund’s sister-in-law whom the son of Fredegund famously executed in 613, had according to Marchangy, a “drive rare for her sex”.108 These words from 1819 that proved right the criticism of the anonymous author of the Journal des débats, were from the pen that inspired both of the authors who in 1820 argued for the women’s right to inherit the throne of France. Marchangy criticized in his book La Gaule poétique (1819) French women’s exclusion from participating in any type of public affair, including inheriting the throne.109 La Gaule poétique was the second work Thomassy quoted to support the reform and the very same work where Marchangy wrote the above lines about the two Merovingian queens. History, especially medieval history, played an essential role in Marchangy’s work because La Gaule poétique was written to embrace the poetic quality of French history. In other words, the work was a narrative version of French history, a celebration of the nation’s glorious past. Yet, it contained an important message. According to Marchangy, fifteenth-century women such as Joan of Arc and Agnès Sorel, the mistress of Charles VII, saved France.110 Similarly, Thomassy brought up multiple references to women throughout history, from all around the world, to prove that women were capable to rule.111 Marchangy did not perceive Agnès Sorel as a “scheming mistress”, like Boureau had argued her in his article about “the King” as a lieu de mémoire.112

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Neither Thomassy nor Jean François Bellemare, who authored the second work supporting the right of women to inherit the French throne, claimed, however, that women should always be able to inherit the throne. According to Thomassy, a constitutional monarchy was the right form of government to enable women to wear the crown. In a representative monarchy, the queen’s power would be restrained so that she could not pass the power to her favourites. Still, she would be obliged to obey the government, and even the opposition could limit her actions.113 Despite his criticism of women’s unequal position in contemporary French society, Thomassy envisioned that women needed to be, at least to some degree, governed by men. Moreover, he did not propose that daughters should have an equal right to inherit the throne. Oh no. Thomassy argued that women should only inherit the throne when there were no more (direct) male heirs. Even as he advocated for this revolutionary reform, Thomassy did not desire a return of the absolute monarchy. Thomassy and Bellemare valued Marie-Thérèse as the “heroine of Aquitaine” and “daughter of the Martyr-King”,114 but neither of them explicitly stated that she should inherit the crown should the duchesse de Berry give birth to a daughter. Bellemare, whose work Thomassy acknowledged and approved, examined the question of women’s right to inherit the crown from another perspective that, at least for a twenty-first-century reader, seemed fundamental. Bellemare, writing about the representative government, posed the following question: […] if, from the cradle and brink of a grave, the weakest royal hand has been sufficient to hold the reins; if, in the recent times, we have seen Great Britain reach its highest peak in power and grandeur during the reign of a prince with practically no moral abilities; and if, […], our constitutional government protects us from the inconveniences associated with the individual nature of the monarch, by what strange contradiction does this lead us to see a danger in women inheriting the throne?115

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Bellemare’s criticism was twofold. Firstly, why are men, even if they are still in the cradle or without mental capabilities categorically seen as better rulers than women? Secondly, if the representative government were to protect France from the sovereign’s disposition, what difference would the sovereign’s gender make? According to Bellemare, the Bourbon blood mattered more than gender in  a representative monarchy, and like Thomassy, Bellemare supported the present rule and wanted to protect it by any means possible. In addition, Bellemare questioned how it was possible that women could act as regents, when they had been excluded from the succession of the throne.116 He also called into question the relevance of a law that dated back 1400 years and asked how the heritage of Clodion117 could be compared to that of the brothers of Louis XVI, or how the position of Pharamond’s widow could be compared to Maria Theresa’s granddaughter, the duchesse d’Angoulême.118 Thomassy explained, as we have seen, that Salic Law was a civil and criminal law. Moreover, he explained that the law did not affect the succession that rested upon an outdated tradition that could well be overthrown by virtue of a representative monarchy. Like Thomassy, Bellemare referred to multiple examples of accomplished historical women to prove his point. According  to the author, two such women were Jeanne d’Albret and Joan of Arc, whom no man could have replaced.119 He saw that these women, and many others, went above and beyond any man. Women such as Joan of Arc would inspire men to perform even better because no man would want to play second fiddle to a young girl. According to Bellemare, nothing would be impossible for a Queen of France.120 Both Bellemare and Thomassy presented La Gaule poétique as the most beautiful and inspirational celebration of women.121 Censorship in effect, the two authors would not, and could not, criticize the government nor the king. Bellemare went quite far even in suggesting that not all kings were equally capable of ruling. One could read that as a criticism of the elderly Louis XVIII. No reform took place in 1820 because temporarily luck favoured the Bourbon dynasty, but in the long term, a reform might have saved the dynasty. Interestingly though, royalist politicians such as Louis de Bonald (1754–1840) had earlier alluded to the possibility of saving the ruling dynasty by allowing women to inherit the throne the same way as in England.122

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Historical imagery used by the two authors, Bellemare and Thomassy, was anchored in the time’s historiographical knowledge that predated liberal historiography and new interpretations of the origins and meaning of the Salic Law. As Thomassy argued, Salic Law eventually did not play a crucial role in excluding women.123 It was the discriminatory structures of society, created by men, that prevented women from acquiring public power. No matter how many positive examples the authors presented of successful historical women, opponents could always give more examples of “dangerous” women or successful men. A woman had to be exceptional and “surpass” her gender, as the anonymous author in the Journal des débats stated, and still she would not be as good as any man. However, not all women who were in a position to influence women’s political rights chose to do so.124 As we will see, the public profile of Marie-Thérèse was upheld as a conservative, unchangeably. * * * The year 1820 accentuated the fact that the duchesse d’Angoulême had not produced a male heir to the dynasty. Without question, giving birth to a male heir was, and had been for centuries, the queens’ and any married (royal) woman’s most important duty. Through a male heir, a woman could assert power from which many childless women were excluded. The Journal des débats brought up her childlessness in various contexts. For example, in autumn 1820, a letter about the duchesse de Berry and the duchesse d’Angoulême described how the latter, allegedly humorously, lamented her infertility and wished she could compare her child’s cradle with that of the duc de Bordeaux.125 Despite infertility, the duchesse d’Angoulême had been able to assert political power within the Bourbon family. She was described as the mother of all French people the same way as she was described in the 1810s. For example, the Journal des débats published a poem by one marquis de Pons to celebrate the duchesse in the aftermath of her husband’s  military success in Spain. The marquis, a lieutenant colonel, wrote that: Everywhere her presence is cherished, Throughout these words are repeated: All French people have a mother in the heroine of Bordeaux!126

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The duchesse, unlike previous queens of France, was never directly criticized for not being able to produce a male heir.127 On the contrary, the royalists put her infertility down to, for example, the treatment she had endured during the imprisonment in the Temple or with the impotence of her husband. Hélène Becquet has explained that Marie-Thérèse’s direct royal ancestry protected her against any accusations.128 There were historical precedents of childless queens who had been given this same role. For example, Saint Radegund from the sixth century was highly venerated even though she did not have any children with her husband, the Merovingian King Chlothar I (son of Clovis and Saint Clotilde). Radegund was the  daughter of a Thuringian king and was brought to the Merovingian kingdom as a prisoner of war. Chlothar, her captor, consequently married her. Eventually, after years of marriage with Chlothar I, she established the Abbey of the Holy Cross at Poitiers, while her husband was still alive. Her religious devotion was widely acknowledged, and her memory has been actively conserved, especially in the Poitiers region. Without a doubt, she was an important person, both religiously and politically during her time. The abbey and her religious agency ensured her a place in history books.129 Like Marie-Thérèse, Saint Radegund was described as maternal— mother of her nuns and “protective of her Poitevin children”, according to historian Brian Brennan, who has studied Radegund’s cult and politics in nineteenth-century France.130 According to Brennan, “Like Mary, Radegund displayed humility and imperiousness in equal measure. She was a ‘virgin’ and she was the ‘mother’ who had given birth to France. Like all mothers she had suffered and she understood suffering.”131 According to Hélène Becquet, people went to the tomb of Saint Radegund in Poitiers, at the beginning of the Restoration, to pray for an heir for the duc and duchesse d’Angoulême.132 Both Radegund and Marie-Thérèse were royal princesses, who had endured hardship, and lost their families in their youth. Both were also deeply religious. Radegund was a saint in the Catholic Church, and Marie-­ Thérèse had a saintly reputation among her (royalist) contemporaries. Both were perceived as motherly figures who protected their “children”. Even though it is unlikely that the history of Radegund would have directly influenced the way Marie-Thérèse was presented in public, the early medieval saint’s history was probably well known to educated readers and writers. Radegund was not only an important saint in the Poitevin region but historian  Gregory of Tours  put together her history. By

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far,  Gregory of Tours, a sixth-century bishop, was the most important source of the Merovingian era referred to by all nineteenth-century historians.133 Like Radegund, Marie-Thérèse too could fulfil her predestined motherly role by protecting her people’s religious purity. Moreover, just as in Radegund’s history in which the husband was eventually cast away from her story, Marie-Thérèse repeatedly eclipsed her husband. * * * In 1823, the duchesse d’Angoulême travelled to the south of France to be closer to her husband, who was on a military expedition in Spain. The year 1823 was a glorious moment for the duc d’Angoulême, who was otherwise overshadowed by his wife and father. Louis-Antoine had left for Spain in March and returned the following December as a celebrated war hero, having had restored King Ferdinand VII to the Spanish throne.134 The duchesse gained visibility in the press because of the success of her husband—and for a moment, the duc was celebrated. The travels of the duchesse equally increased the popularity of the royal family, at least in appearance. I shall examine this notion through a publication that described the duchesse’s sojourn to Marseille. The publication L’hermite de Saint-Jean was penned by medical doctor Louis-Joseph-Marie Robert who was, judging by the tone of his publication, a fervent supporter of the Bourbon family. This is evident in the first sentence: Guardian angel of France, grand-daughter of Maria Theresa and Henri IV, whose hardship, heroism, eminent piety, and rare virtues have already dedicated her to immortality, and whose birth and the rights of her distinguished spouse destine her to one day enrich the throne of the Lis, will soon arrive within your walls!135

It could hardly have been written in a more admiring tone, repeating the nearly compulsory references to Henri IV and Maria Theresa. Heroism, hardship, and piety defined the duchesse in almost all contemporary works. The author did not explicitly detail why the duchesse arrived at Marseille, but he most likely presumed the audience knew the reason. The first part of the work was dedicated to reminding the reader of the value of the Bourbons and the duchesse. The author used expressions such as “Prince légitimes”, “la digne fille du Juste”, “Ange de paix”,

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“Roi-­ martyr”, “Royale orpheline du Temple”, “l’épouse du Guerrier magnanime” to describe the duc and duchesse d’Angoulême, and the Bourbons in general.136 We find repeated references to Catholicism and Marie-­Thérèse’s role in supporting the spirituality of France, including as the daughter of the “martyr king”. The majority of the historical references drew from the prior fifty years, but the author did not omit the nearly obligatory references to Henri IV and Saint Louis.137 It is noteworthy that the author described the duc as a warrior, which was quite rare before 1823. As we have seen, Henri IV was repeatedly portrayed in public discourse as a warrior king, but the early nineteenth-­ century royal Bourbon men were rarely seen as such. The work presented the duchesse as universally popular in Marseille and the entire population of Marseille as devoted to the royals. Wherever the duchesse went, she was met with expressions of loyalty, and everything she saw pleased her eye. In this regard, L’hermite de Saint-Jean followed in the vein of many similar complimentary writings about the duchesse during the Restoration. Provence was an important region for France for many reasons, according to the author Louis-Joseph-Marie Robert. He emphasized that Louis XVIII used to be comte de Provence before becoming the King of France. The duchesse de Berry had also entered France via Marseille, and in 1793, sections of Marseille had supported the tragic King Louis XVII (Marie-­ Thérèse’s brother).138 Moreover, there was le bon roi René. Robert reported that Marie-Thérèse participated in the inauguration of a monument erected to celebrate the King René d’Anjou, who was apparently Marie-Thérèse’s ancestor on her mother’s side. René himself was the descendant of Saint Louis’s brother, so the duchesse was René’s descendant from both her mother and father’s side.139 René d’Anjou was a fifteenth-century aristocrat, who was, for a time, king of Naples, king of Jérusalem, of Sicily, and so forth. The author Robert described René d’Anjou as the best prince to have ruled Provence before it was united with the kingdom of (Fleur-de-) Lis, that is France.140 Robert increasingly emphasized René’s fidelity to the Bourbon France by reminding the reader that he had fought side by side with Joan of Arc during the Hundred Years’ War.141 The author did not save words in praising the fifteenth-century aristocrat and associating him with all the noteworthy heroes of the French history. No doubt, the question was to prove the region’s unity and loyalty to the Bourbon rule. Otherwise, to praise a

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time of (certain) independence could seem questionable. Most importantly, L’hermite de Saint-Jean emphasized the fifteenth-century duc’s loyalty to France. Similar to the duchesse de Berry’s travels in the 1820s, Marie-Thérèse’s journeys had a political aspect that no one ignored. Robert’s work demonstrated the importance and danger medieval history could pose to the unity of the Bourbon rule in a time of continuous unrest. Robert’s work highlighted what Hélène Becquet described Marie-­ Thérèse to be for the royalists in the 1820s. She was an icon object for the devotion that united heaven and earth, and ensured salvation.142 Such descriptions of her elevated her to the status of a saint, who consolidated the Bourbon family’s (sacred) right to rule France.143 Like Saint Radegund, she united the this quality with royalty and through her suffering brought salvation to people. * * * On September 16, 1824, Louis XVIII died. The following day the Journal des débats published Chateaubriand’s long essay on the king’s death, the French monarchy, and its future. The piece started with praise for the Salic Law, which, according to the author, had ensured the longevity of the French nation. The article emphasised that the blood of the same race had descended from the ninth-century king Robert the Strong to Charles X.144 In addition to drawing from practically all periods of French history since the times of Clovis, the author discussed the role of the new Dauphin and Dauphine. According to him, the liberator of Spain and the daughter of Louis XVI united past and future by reminding people of their noble and touching history.145 The funeral rites of Louis XVIII took place on October 25 in the basilica of Saint-Denis, the traditional resting place of French royals. The basilica itself was an important lieu de mémoire. It had been restored to its earlier function by the Restoration monarchy, after the devastation of the revolutionary era when many of its royal tombs were destroyed. The historical basilica, which can be traced to the early medieval Merovingian era and Saint Genevieve, the patron saint of Paris, were given considerable importance in major newspapers such as the Journal des débats and Le Constitutionnel. According to Le Constitutionnel, “[T]here were allegedly more than fifteen million lights shining in every corner.”146 The basilica had become an “immense pious chapel”.147

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Whereas the description of the funeral in the Journal des débats drew from history and incorporated short references to the history of the basilica, Le Constitutionnel focused more on narrating the course of the funeral. The Journal des débats pictured in detail the notable participants of the obsequies, whereas the magazine of the opposition mentioned the participants only briefly. According to the Journal des débats, the gallery where the Dauphine arrived for the funeral was “a familiar sanctuary for her pious torments […]”.148 Le Constitutionnel, on the other hand, only mentioned that she had attended. When the Journal des débats compared the catafalque of Louis XVIII to the sixteenth-century style mausoleums of François I and Henri II, Le Constitutionnel did not make any historical references regarding the style.149 The following day, the remains of Henri IV and Marie de’ Medici, and the hearts of Louis XIII and Louis XIV, were placed in their tombs in the basilica. Le Constitutionnel mentioned the event briefly without giving any context or background. The liberal opposition’s magazine did not make any historical references to this issue, whereas the Journal des débats took the opportunity to emphasize the horrors of the Revolution. The magazine gave the exact dates when the tombs of the Bourbon royals had been sacked and described how the destruction had lasted for four months in 1793–1794.150 For the Journal des débats, the memory of the Revolution and its horrors were crucial and the magazine continuously referred to these events in one form or another. In contrast, the opposition magazine gave little attention to describe the Bourbon family, history of the Bourbon monarchy and its members. Marie-Thérèse was a constant reminder of the Revolution, and the Journal des débats, unlike Le Constitutionnel, brought up repeatedly her suffering and alleged holiness. It is easy to conclude that Le Constitutionnel made fewer references on history, especially in regards to the revolutionary period and MarieThérèse. The magazine ignored her and in this way, diminished her significance. In the Journal des débats, on the other hand, history was a means to underline the importance of the Bourbon family. One has to keep in mind, however, that censorship was in effect, which meant that criticizing the royal family was practically impossible. Ignoring them, however, was possible. The following year, an even larger royal event took place: the sacre of Charles X, which would be the first and last sacre in nineteenth-century France. The proceedings drew extensively from French history and all members of the royal family had a prominent role.

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On May 30 1825, the Journal des débats announced, “[T]he protection of God of Clovis has manifested itself in the person of his venerable successor.”151 The previous day, the king had been crowned in Reims in a flamboyant ceremony before the eyes of the royal family and political elite. According to a press report, the first members of the audience had arrived already at five o’clock in the morning to ensure their seats.152 On his way to Reims, as the Journal des débats reported, a sous-­préfet had declared to the king: Sire, it is in these cantons where France became Christian, by the altar where Clovis was crowned and where the ancestors of Your Majesty received the holy royal anointment that the God of Saint Louis seems to enjoy to pour his most profuse blessings on the Kings […]153

The reports of the sacre were full of historical references concerning the milieu, the cathedral of Reims, its decoration, and all parts of the ceremony. One essential purpose of the crowning was to remind everyone of the long history of French monarchy, starting from the conversion of Clovis and continuing with Charlemagne,154 Saint Louis and all the Bourbon kings that would follow. Yet, the sacre was also a brilliant opportunity to discuss the king’s role in the  constitutional monarchy, as the opposition magazine Le Constitutionnel did. For  example, the magazine emphasized that the oath of Charles X given in the sacre was subordinate to the constitution.155 The same magazine also compared the oath of Charles X to that of Louis XVI, and noted differences, such as religious references that had been cut off from the 1825 version.156 Marie-Thérèse, now the Dauphine of France, was justly present at the crowning. Like the rest of the royal family, she took the opportunity to visit various sites in and near Reims before and after the crowning. In addition to press reports, entire books were published about the royal event. Already in early November 1825, the Journal des débats published a review of a study about the crowning of Charles X.157 It is noteworthy that the Journal des débats highlighted one passage, in particular, from the study that concerned Marie-Thérèse. The passage described how the princess cried at the crowning, but this time, they were tears of joy, rather than suffering. According to the author of the study, François Miel, Marie-Thérèse had always been above her grief, shedding tears only for the suffering of others. Miel continued to emphasise the challenges the

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Dauphine had faced in her life, and the Journal des débats quoted: “Earlier so many adversities and today so much glory! such a victory after such a degrading! all the extremes of good and bad fortune!”158 The life of the Dauphine offered fodder for propaganda in 1825 during a political transition period. In 1825, Émile Marco de Saint-Hilaire, the same author who would publish in 1826 the biography of the duchesse de Berry, published a lengthy biography on Marie-Thérèse. Similar to Marie-Caroline’s biography, the biography of the Dauphine did not offer any new insights, recycling most of the anecdotes related to the life of Marie-Thérèse. It  also presented the nearly obligatory references to Henri IV and Antigone that all authors supporting the Bourbon family used in their works. As Paule Petitier has argued, however, references to the “good kings” such as Henri IV were used as propaganda by all political sides. No doubt, this biography can be understood as political propaganda.159 The author presented the first ancestor of the Bourbons as the seventh-century Saint Arnulf of Metz, an ancestor of Charles Martel. Moreover, the Bourbon family included living saints such as Marie-­ Thérèse and a saint had started the family and dynasty.160 It is obvious the work was published to support the Bourbon dynasty during the transition from the rule of Louis XVIII to that of Charles X, and to convince readers that all French people wished to have the Bourbon family as their rulers. As the Dauphine, Marie-Thérèse was “princesse, presque reine de France” as another author, Jean Nicolas Quatremère de Roissy, wrote in 1825.161 She was now one step closer to the throne of France. She too had ambitions, and her aim was to rule France by virtues and good acts, according to the author.162 Again, she was compared to her maternal grandmother, Empress Maria Theresa, to demonstrate that she was as courageous and brave as the Empress had been. She too could “rise above her sex” and had “male courage”.163 She was an exceptional woman who was destined to rule France (again, her husband, the future would-be-king, was forgotten) with a level of ambition appropriate for a woman. According to Quatremère de Roissy, she could become as great as her maternal grandmother had been because she had the right male virtues. She could motivate armies as she had done in Bordeaux, which reminded the readers of another French heroine, who had surpassed her sex: Joan of Arc. Descriptions such as this were a reminder that women had to exceed their gender to be “worthy”, and even then, they were not permitted to have the same type of political ambition as men.

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In addition to Marie-Thérèse, Joan of Arc was also celebrated in François Miel’s Histoire du sacre de Charles X. According to the author, the fifteenth-century heroine was one reason why Reims and its cathedral were so significant for France and its monarchy. She had escorted King Charles VII to Reims for his coronation, and Miel described Joan as the “second Genevieve” and “another liberator of France”.164 Saint Genevieve from the early Merovingian era was well-established as the patron saint of Paris, but Joan of Arc was not yet a saint even though her religious importance was rising. Following the crowning in 1825 and the royal family’s visits, multiple recognitions were awarded to people with merits. Among other distinctions, an annual pension was awarded to two descendants of Joan of Arc’s brother.165 Miel did not hesitate to express his support for the importance of the Bourbon kings, and the Journal des débats repeated his words as it had repeated the passage about MarieThérèse. According to Miel, Louis XVIII, the recently deceased older brother of Charles X, had fulfilled the dream of Charlemagne by creating the representative government in France.166 Interestingly, in his biography of Marie-Thérèse, Saint-Hilaire had dismissed the events in Bordeaux quite rapidly and had not mentioned Joan of Arc. Nor did he write anything about the  “male courage” of Marie-Thérèse or her surpassing her sex. The early Middle Ages’ importance for the French monarchy manifested itself in various ways besides great national events such as the crowning or royal funerals. Members of the royal family, both Bourbon and Orléans, frequently  participated in cultural events such as visiting the theatre and, as we have seen in the case of the duchesse de Berry, the press regularly reported on the visits. As Sheryl Kroen has convincingly argued in her Politics and Theater: The Crisis of Legitimacy in Restoration France, 1815–1830, certain theatre pieces could be used as a means of political resistance. Kroen pointed, in particular, to Molière’s Tartuffe and the way the play was used as a means to criticize the king, especially Charles X, and his alleged sympathies for the Jesuits. The play became wildly popular in 1825 following the coronation of the king, the introduction of certain unpopular laws, and an increase in the visibility, and influence, of the Jesuits.167 In June 1825, only a few weeks after the coronation, the Journal des débats published two articles related to theatre and the royal family. The first was an essay about a new edition of Tartuffe with preliminary comments by M.  Etienne and the second was a review of a theatre piece

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entitled Pharamond that the king and entire royal family, including MarieThérèse, had seen. The essay about Tartuffe emphasized the dangers of hypocrisy and that a good king would not be afraid of historians hating tyrants. The author did not obviously criticize Charles X directly. Still, one can read an implicit fear that the king or the ruling elite would not enjoy the play for they would or could recognize themselves in the play in the role of Tartuffe. A different tone was adopted, on the other hand, when describing the king and the royal family at the performance of Pharamond. Not only did the author of the review find multiple reasons to celebrate Charles X in the review, but also described how the audience had spontaneously chanted “Vive le Roi! vive le Dauphin!”. In addition, at the end of the play, several pictures of famous French kings had been displayed in the theatre, making the performance, and its review, an uncritical celebration of the king. Pharamond, according to the reviewer, symbolized the birth of the French monarchy, whereas the presence of Charles X and his family symbolized its culmination.168 As the reviewer stated, historical accuracy was far less important than the play’s artistic message. Pharamond, as one of the semi-legendary ancestors of Clovis I, was closely linked to the origins of the French monarchy. * * * In August 1829, a year before the July Revolution, the Journal des débats reported Dauphine’s visit to the castle d’Eu hosted by the duc d’Orléans and his family. The article included many references to notable individuals and families who had a strong influence in the area. This included the Artois branch from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Mademoiselle de Montpensier from the seventeenth century, the third duc de Guise (Henry I) and his wife Catherine de Clèves from the sixteenth century, and, of course, Henri IV.169 The third duc de Guise and his wife Catherine de Clèves initiated the construction of the castle. Through Mademoiselle de Montpensier, a cousin of Louis XIV, the castle became the property of the Orléans family. There was an assumption that the reader knew who these individuals were, as there were no introductions in the article. There was, however, a well-known connection between the two families. In 1829, the last member of the Guise family, a Bourbon-Condé, Louis IV Henri, bequethed the major part of his immense fortune to the second youngest son of the duc d’Orléans.170

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The article also speculated that the Dauphine was thinking about the misery of a civil war when visiting the mausoleum of the third duc de Guise and his wife Catherine de Clèves. They had lived during the French Wars of Religion in the late sixteenth century.171 This reference was hardly an innocent remark, but the reference to civil war actually alluded to the contemporary period. In 1829 political unrest was very much a daily issue. In early August, Charles X had appointed a new government with the highly unpopular ultra-royalist politician, and the king’s loyal supporter, Jules de Polignac, as its head. Polignac’s appointment to the government evoked criticism in the press, mostly from the now very popular liberal opposition. There were even comparisons between the situation in France and that of England in 1688, which had ended with the English king been deposed.172 The Journal des débats did not hide its dislike for the Polignac government and even cited Marie-Thérèse, who very explicitly condemned the new government. The magazine emphasized that Madame, known for her bravery in Bordeaux in 1815, now advised for moderation and that her advice should be considered.173 The Journal des débats argued for Marie-­ Thérèse’s right to criticize the government—for her right to demand the government to perform better, as recompense for the difficulties she had endured. Neither the previously loyal magazine nor the Dauphine were satisfied with the political situation. According to the magazine, the present government did not have the power needed to govern France at such a tempestuous moment. However, even in these challenging times, the magazine did not criticise the Dauphine, but rather, it set store by her wisdom. In less than a year, the royal family would be in exile. During the last decade of the older Bourbon branch, the daughter of Marie-­Antoinette was celebrated as the Dauphine. The decade witnessed a discussion about the right of royal princesses to inherit the crown and cemented the Dauphine’s reputation as a pious woman. Her role as the mother of the French was not without historical parallels and drew from the popular early medieval Merovingian period. The construction of the Dauphine’s public image with references to both saintly historical men and women could not disguise, however, the Bourbon’s diminishing popularity. She could have been part of major reform, like in 1820 before Henri’s birth, but her public image embraced history and conservative norms, rather than change and reform. It was not until the very end, in July 1830, when the Journal des débats reported that the Dauphine’s visit

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to the local theatre had been interrupted by repeated cries such as “Vive la Charte! vivent les 221! vive la liberté de presse!”174 In the end, the great ancestors, Saint Louis, Henri IV, and Maria Theresa, did not help the daughter of Marie-­Antoinette, who was again cast out of France.

3.3   The Rising Star of the Orléans Family During the decade that began with the duc de Berry’s assassination and ended in the July Revolution, two events devastating for the Bourbon family, the Orléans family gathered wealth and power within the liberal circles. Louis-Philippe, his wife Marie-Amélie, his sister Adélaïde, and the children had returned to France in 1817 after the second Restoration. Louis-Philippe had been a candidate for the throne of France already in 1814. In 1815, for example, the Czar of Russia Alexander I would have preferred Louis-­Philippe over Louis XVIII on the throne of France.175 The Orléans family were princes and princesses du sang, highest-ranking senior members of the royal family besides the older branch of the Bourbon family. In the 1820s, Adélaïde and Marie-Amélie, who gave birth to her last child in July 1824,176 stayed mostly out of the public and political spotlight. However, they frequented Parisian social events such as opera, major royal events, balls, and ceremonies, and actively donated to charity as they were expected to do. The 1820s was marked by growing conservatism and censorship, and the increasing influence of the constitutional and liberal opposition, which included many politicians, who would rise to power after 1830. Many of these politicians were historians, notably François Guizot and Adolph Thiers. Censorship was re-imposed after the assassination of the duc de Berry in 1820, which was followed by electoral victories for the ultraconservatives. Only a few months after the death of Louis XVIII in 1824, the new king Charles X, the youngest brother of Louis XVI, imposed laws on sacrilege that would mark the end of Louis XVIII’s politics of reconciliation.177 The magazine Journal des débats, still pro-government in 1820, would mock the liberals and even compare them to the Inquisition.178 The decade witnessed the increasingly conservative Charles X trying to restrain the growing influence of the liberals who would be victorious in elections, especially towards the end of the decade. Charles X’s attempts to limit the weight of the liberals would eventually turn against the

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royalist cause and accelerate the downfall of the Bourbon dynasty. France faced an economic crisis starting from 1827, which impacted the popularity of the king and government. This chapter discusses Marie-Amélie and Adélaïde together because neither of them had similar visibility or political importance in the 1820s as they would have in the following decade. There was no similar public juxtaposition between the Bourbon women and Orléans women in the 1820s as there would be in the following decade. In the 1820s, the four women, Marie-Thérèse, Marie-Caroline, Marie-Amélie, and Adélaïde, were all seemingly on the same political side even if, according to the French historian Benoît Yvert, Adélaïde hated the older branch of the Bourbons.179 The tensions between the two families grew towards the end of the 1820s. The Bourbon king and his entourage did not forget that Louis-Philippe had been a candidate to become a king already after the fall of Napoléon nor the role of Louis-Philippe’s father, Philippe Égalité, during the Revolution. Louis-Philippe’s popularity among liberal politicians and press did not increase his popularity among the ultra-royalists even if he swore allegiance to the king right up until the end of July 1830. In the Restoration press, Marie-Amélie and Adélaïde were most often mentioned in relation to the official events, travels, and the Bourbon family members. The Journal des débats, for example, reported when the duc, duchesse, and Adélaïde d’Orléans had dinner with the king, when they visited the Bourbon family members when their children were born, and, for example, in 1820 when they witnessed the birth of the duc de Bordeaux.180 The Journal des débats reported on the family’s frequent visits to various theatres to see pieces such as Robin des bois (Robin Hood).181 The duchesse d’Orléans and Adélaide, together with Louis-Philippe and the Bourbon family members, were also reported to order the Histoire générale de l’Europe by the late pair of France, comte de Lacépède in 1826.182 This kind of short news were as much advertisements as information of the officially embraced historical interpretations of the day. Lacépède’s work reflected the royalist interpretation of history, for example, in presenting the Merovingian King Clovis I as the “roi des Français” who protected the orthodox religion, that is, Catholicism.183 Marie-Amélie and Adélaïde were public figures even if on a much smaller scale than the Bourbon women were.

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There are  not many works published before August 1830  on the Orléans family where Marie-Amélie and Adélaïde would have been acknowledged in more than a few lines. Therefore, we must seek them in the works that focused on the male members of the Orléans family. Based on the scarce works, the image of Marie-Amélie and Adélaïde as apolitical ladies, who possessed the same royal heritage as the Bourbons, was established during this decade. Yet, one must keep in mind that Marie-Amélie was not the only duchesse d’Orléans at the beginning of the 1820s because Louis-Philippe’s mother, the dowager duchesse Adélaïde de Bourbon-­ Penthièvre, only passed away in 1821.184 The Penthièvre family was immensely wealthy, and upon her death, her children Louis-Philippe and Adélaïde inherited a large fortune. The wealth of Louis-Philippe and his family continued to increase the year later when their paternal aunt Bathilde d’Orléans, duchesse de Bourbon, passed away and left a considerable inheritance for Louis-Philippe and Adélaide. Marie-Amélie’s biographer Florence Vidal has argued that for the duc d’Orléans, the Restoration signified most of all restoration of his fortune.185 Memoires were an especially popular genre during the Restoration, and most of them had precise political functions vis-à-vis to the Revolution. After the death of the dowager duchesse d’Orléans in 1821, her “journal” was published. Even though the journal carried her name, it was not penned by the dowager duchesse d’Orléans. An important reason for the publication of the Journal de la vie de S. A. S. Mme la Duchesse d’Orléans186 was the desire to distance her and the entire family of the previous duc d’Orléans, Louis-Philippe’s father. The family most likely wished to prove the rest of the family’s excellent qualities and their loyalty to the reigning Bourbon family in a moment when the future of the Bourbon family lay on the shoulder of a toddler. Moreover, in 1822, Louis-Philippe and Adélaïde were only entitled to S.A.S (Son Altesse Sérénissime) even though they wished to require the more prestigious title of S.A.R (Son Altesse Royale), which King Louis XVIII refused to grant them. Marie-Amélie had the title of S.A.R since she was the daughter of a king, which made her more high-ranking than her spouse.187 The Journal of the dowager duchesse included several passages and anecdotes about her son, daughter, and Marie-Amélie. The Journal emphasized the Orléans family’s loyalty to the Bourbons even so far that King Louis XVI was compared to Christ who pardoned his executioners.188 When the dowager duchesse was living in exile in Spain after the

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Revolution, according to Delille, the author of the Journal, her faith made her believe that the Bourbon family would one day claim the inheritance of Saint Louis.189 Delille bypassed completely the events related to her husband during the Revolution  and the questions of regicide.190 Furthermore, the Journal presented the marriage of Louis-Philippe and Marie-Amélie as a decision made by their mothers thirty-three years before the wedding. Marie-Caroline, the duchesse de Berry, had a role in the Journal as well. According to the Journal, the dowager duchesse already liked her as a child, and the marriage between the duchesse and duc de Berry was pictured as an ideal one.191 Adélaïde’s primary role in the Journal was that of a loyal daughter and sister. The dowager duchesse had started the construction of the new chapel of Dreux in 1816, which would become the family necropolis and would be named in 1830 as the Royal Chapel of Dreux. According to the Journal, the chapel had a dedicatory inscription for especially three saints: Saint Louis, Saint Arnoul (Saint Arnulf of Metz), and Saint Adelaide. As we have seen, Saint Arnoul was considered the ancestor of the Bourbon family and Saint Adelaide was the namesake of the dowager duchesse as well as her daughter’s.192 Saint Adelaide’s feast day was December 16; she was the wife of Otto I, Holy Roman Emperor, and died in 999. Later during the reign of Louis-Philippe, a stained glass window entitled Sainte Adélaïde, reine de Lombardie, distribuant des aumônes aux pauvres (Saint Adelaide, Queen of Lombardy, distributing alms to the poor) would be added to the chapel. In later chapters, we will see that the Orléans family constructed this necropolis to become a new resting place for the dynasty they wished to commence in 1830. The necropolis was made to emphasize the divine connection between the Orléans family members and the royal saints. Overall, however, the Journal of the dowager duchesse focused mainly on the Revolution events and drew very little from other historical references. This was understandable since the relationship between the Bourbon and Orléans families essentially concentrated around legitimacy and regicide. By concentrating on the hardships of the dowager duchesse during the Revolution, the Journal avoided the uncomfortable questions about her husband’s role in the regicide. The immense wealth of the Orléans family and the closeness to the ruling family signified a certain degree of power and authority for both Marie-Amélie and Adélaïde. Nevertheless, in the 1820s, Marie-Amélie

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commenced to be portrayed as a bourgeois lady, who was first and foremost a mother and a spouse, and secondly a king’s daughter who only had virtues and devoted her time to charity.193 According to an anonymous work entitled Notices biographiques des princes et princesses de la maison d’Orléans (1824), Enlightened mother, she remembered the words of Jeanne d’Albret, who did not want his son to be a celebrated ignorant; equally proud and happy to share the feelings of the prince her husband, she supported the decision to give the duc de Chartres the benefits of public education. We would love to repeat here all the qualities that distinguish her: spouse and a mother, she is the model of all spouses and mothers; king’s daughter, her dignity is without pride, her virtue without pomp, and her charity without ostentation.194

The passage associated the duchesse d’Orléans with Jeanne d’Albret, the mother of Henri IV. Marie-Amélie was made to be as good a mother as Jeanne was by taking care of her sons’ education. The duc de Chartres was Marie-Amélie’s oldest son who was enrolled in public school rather than home-schooled. The aim was to educate the sons like any other bourgeois children, in a different manner than the royal Bourbon children. The duc de Chartres went to the Collège Henri-IV.  The desired association between Marie-Amélie and Jeanne d’Albret was, however, more extensive than just the education of the son. It is essential to keep in mind that the duchesse de Berry had also been associated with Jeanne d’Albret after the birth of Henri. The Bourbons and their supporters were obsessed with the history of Henri IV, and therefore the Orléans supporters desired to demonstrate that they too shared the legacy of Henri IV. Moreover, that the Orléans family could also raise their son to become a new Henri. Publications such as Notices biographiques des princes et princesses de la maison d’Orléans were not published without political motives for which one has to consider the publication date. In 1824, King Louis XVIII, who had been somewhat unfavourable to the duc d’Orléans, died, and his younger brother Charles X became the king. Charles would grant the Orléans family the prestigious titles of altesses royales (S.A.R.).195 On can thus ponder if the work was published to further the cause of the Orléans family in a moment of transfer of power, especially when considering that the work, instead of ignoring his deeds, portrayed the previous duc

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d’Orléans as another victim of the Revolution.196 Adélaïde’s life was narrated briefly as well as her desire to help the poor. The unity of the Orléans family was emphasized.197 The association between Marie-Amélie and Jeanne d’Albret surfaced again in 1826 when a biography of Louis-Philippe was published.198 Agricol-Hippolyte de Lapierre de Châteauneuf, novelist and historian, cited the Notices biographiques regarding the alleged words of Jeanne d’Albret of an illustre ignorant and continued that “[S]he [Marie-Amélie] wanted her oldest son, the duc de Chartres, to enjoy, like his forefather Henri IV had enjoyed, the benefits of a public education.”199 In this passage, more explicitly than in the original, the duc de Chartres was related to Henri IV and his mother to Jeanne d’Albret. The public education’s significance is unclear since the author did not explain what kind of “l’éducation publique” Henri IV had had in the sixteenth century. The establishment of the Orléans family as equally worthy descendants of Henri IV was the key in the passage, as was also the emphasis of the choice of public education for their children, which significantly differed from the education of the children of the duchesse de Berry. Highlighting Marie-­ Amélie’s motherhood was not without significance in the passage because the Bourbons had very few heirs, the union of the duc and duchesse d’Angoulême being sterile. In contrast, the Orléans family had nine sons and daughters. Producing male heirs was royal women’s most important duty, and comparing Marie-Amélie to the mother of Henri IV emphasized that she had successfully fulfilled her duty. The representation of Marie-Amélie following in the footsteps of Jeanne d’Albret in educating her sons was also repeated in later biographies of Louis-Philippe. Another biography from 1826 presented Marie-­ Amélie following the words of her “illustre aïeux” that she did not want her son to be “illustre ignorant”. Later in this biography, Louis-Philippe wished his oldest son to enjoy public education the same way Henri IV had enjoyed.200 The reference to Marie-Amélie as the mother of another Henri IV was repeated from 1824 up until at least 1830 when the second version of this biography was published under the name of Vie anecdotique de Louis-Philippe duc d’Orléans, lieutenant général de ce royaume depuis sa naissance jusqu’à ce jour par un grenadier de la Garde nationale. Marie-­ Amélie was described following the example of Jeanne d’Albret in the 1824 biography of the Orléans family members. In addition, there was

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another association between Louis-Philippe, Adélaïde, and Henri IV that was re-enforced following Charles X’s sacre in 1824. Multiple accounts related to the sacre reported about the complimentary words the representatives of the city of Reims addressed to the royal family members, including Louis-­ Philippe, Marie-Amélie, and Adélaïde. According to these words, the day of the sacre was a triumph to all descendants of Henri the Great, including the Orléans family. Adélaïde was explicitly called the granddaughter of Henri IV.201 It is noteworthy that the same biography on the Orléans family could be published before and after the 1830 revolution and the representations, such as Marie-Amélie following in the footsteps of Jeanne d’Albret, were still valid. Essentially Marie-Amélie had the role of mother of Henri IV, who was the first king of a new dynasty even if the duchesse de Berry had the exact same role within the Bourbon dynasty. Whereas for the Bourbons Henri IV was a conciliatory figure; for the Orléans family, he could signify the birth of a new but equally legitimate dynasty. In both uses, Jeanne d’Albret’s Protestantism was ignored entirely. Henri IV and many other royal sixteenth- and seventeenth-century persons were evoked in the Journal des débats when the Dauphine visited the Orléans family in the castle of Eu in 1829 as we have seen. The short article referred mainly to the previous owners of the castle: the noble family of Guise, and the Mademoiselle de Montpensier, better known as La Grande Mademoiselle and as the cousin of Louis XIV. The Guise family and the duchesse de Montpensier were also known for their significant roles in two French civil wars, the French Wars of Religion and the Fronde (from 1648 to 1653).202 A seemingly pleasant visit containing references to tragic civil wars symbolized the increasing agitation France was heading for in 1829. In June 1829, the Orléans family gave a superb ball to honour the visit of the King and Queen of Naples and the Two Sicilies. The King François (Francesco I) was Marie-Amélie’s older brother and father of the duchesse de Berry. According to the Journal de débats, the ball had three thousand guests, dinner at two o’clock in the morning, and the ball was vibrant like a “fête bourgeois”. Nearly everything was perfect in this historical ball where also Charles X enjoyed himself until half past midnight. The Journal des débats described how the king had kind words for everybody and how he mingled among his subjects, peacefully even among the deputies from the parliament that had recently been dissolved. The successful ball was a fairyland, according to the magazine, with a great king in peaceful

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harmony with his subjects. The fall into reality was, therefore, even harder afterwards, according to the Journal des débats.203 * * * The 1830 Revolution was not an isolated event only limited to the three days of July, the “Three Glorious Days”, in Paris. Its roots reached far to the Restoration period, Napoléon’s era, and the revolutionary period of 1789 to 1799. Pamela Pilbeam, who has authored a groundbreaking study on the July Revolution (1991), argued that: The 1830 revolution was the product of the coincidence of a political conflict between the fast-growing liberal majority in parliament and the ultra-­ royalist Polignac government on the one hand, and an economic crisis, which made Paris volatile and disturbed the provinces on the other.204

The political disputes between the ultra-royalists, moderate royalists, and liberal opposition that defined the whole Restoration period from 1814 to 1830 culminated in a conflict in 1830. In July, Charles X signed the three ordinances that aggravated the political crisis into a revolution. That year the decisive moment of crisis for Charles X was that liberals had succeeded in elections despite the electoral laws, and even electoral frauds, favouring the (ultra)royalists. The first ordinance suspended the liberty of the press, the second one dissolved the recently elected Chamber of Deputies overwhelmed by liberals and imposed severe restrictions on election laws, now strongly favouring the loyal supporters of Charles X. The third ordinance called for new elections.205 Charles X and his supporters blamed the liberals, which were far from a coherent political bloc, for the government’s inactivity. France had an economic crisis roughly from 1827 to 1832. However, the crisis was not the only reason for the revolution, nor did the revolution immediately end the crisis. The crisis did not hit only Paris, but the crisis and dissatisfaction, especially among the Parisian artisans, resulted in them rising to the barricades in July 1830. Interestingly, the revolution did not change the economic or social situation in France  considerably even though Charles X and his ultra-royalist supporters were out of the political limelight. There were more continuities than ruptures resulting from the revolution. Many social problems persisted, the poor workers continued to be poor, and no universal suffrage resulted from the revolution. France continued to be ruled by a small wealthy minority.

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Charles X refused to react to the crisis when the unrest began in Paris in July 1830, and this inactivity cost him the throne. Charles X abdicated together with his son, the duc d’Angoulême, on the second and third of August after violent revolts in Paris. Charles X and  the royal family, including the Dauphine and the duchesse de Berry, were exiled to England. On August 9, Louis-Philippe was declared the King of the French after he had earlier been declared the Lieutenant-General of the Kingdom. Before this declaration, one crucial moment had taken place on July 30 when Adolphe Thiers, delegate for the liberals in Paris organizing a new government, arrived at Neuilly to discuss with LouisPhilippe the political situation. The duc d’Orléans was not there. Adélaïde and Marie-Amélie, however, were at Neuilly. Thiers inquired LouisPhilippe’s standpoint on accepting the throne. After negotiations, Adélaïde, on behalf of her brother, took the step to accept the throne and agreed to leave for Paris with Thiers. Had the plan not worked, and Louis-Philippe would not have been crowned king, Adélaïde would have been able to take the blame instead of her brother. Marie-Amélie was also present in these negotiations, but Adélaïde was more decisive negotiator of the two.206 Notably, Charles X was not replaced with Louis-Philippe because Charles would have been tremendously more unpopular than Louis-­ Philippe. Louis-Philippe was a compromise that benefitted the key political actors of 1830. All sides wanted to avoid violent tumult and unrest like one that had taken place in the 1790s. In addition to LouisPhilippe, other options were also discussed in July to avoid the escalation of the restlessness. Napoléon’s relatives were considered, and even the republicans had their visions. However, democracy was not an option, and those who had financial and political authority wanted to keep it in their hands even though the number of those entitled to vote increased from 94,000 (1814) to 166,500 in 1830.207 The biggest loser of the 1830 Revolution, in addition to Charles X and his immediate family, was the Catholic Church. After 1830, it no longer had the position of a state church, but only the religion of the majority of the French people.208 Straightforward anti-clericalism surfaced because of the revolution even though there were large geographical differences in the way people reacted to the Catholic Church, or even to the complete change of regime.

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The 1830 Revolution was more political than social, and the most significant changes occurred in administration as many ultra-royalists were replaced with those loyal to the Orléanist regime. The July Monarchy held certain aspects in common with Napoléon’s reign. One such was (apparent) meritocracy.209 The Restoration period had seen the administrative positions filled with loyal rather than capable men, whereas Napoléon’s era emphasized the officials’ skills. Many men who ended up without position in 1814 and 1815 were re-employed in Louis-Philippe’s administration. No doubt, the situation contributed to the growing idealization of Napoléon towards the end of the 1830s.210 The beginning of the Orléans reign was defined by the continuing economic crisis, social tensions, and internal power struggles within the government. Eventually, Louis-Philippe re-installed the press censorship, forbade all political associations, and was no more attentive to working-­ class issues than Charles X.211 Political unrest continued all through the July Monarchy as during the 18 years there were 13 governments led by ten men. The new regime had to take into consideration foreign policy and avoid at all cost irritating the allied powers that had helped restore the Bourbons to the throne of France only 15 years earlier. The royalists, called legitimists  after 1830, would not stop rallying for the Bourbons in France. The aftermath of the 1830 Revolution was consequently a disappointment for many of those who had hoped for a social change in France. Within a couple of years after establishing the July Monarchy, the conservatives (within the liberal camp) had consolidated their authority. For example, this is apparent in the way the attempts to legalize divorce were brought down in 1833–1834, even though only a couple of years earlier the legalization had seemed certain. One reason why divorce was not legalized, even though it had been already once legalized during the previous revolution and delegalized by the Bourbon restoration, was Queen Marie-Amélie’s opposition.212 Orléans dynasty’s repressive measures became obvious at the latest in April 1834 when the government violently suppressed a popular uprising among the silk workers in Lyons. The republicans accused the government of suppressing the workers’ rights and of excessive power against the protesters.213 Like her spouse’s regime that had difficulties differentiating itself from the previous regime, Marie-­ Amélie, despite representing a new kind of queenship in France, was fixed to age-old imagery of an ideal queen.

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Notes 1. Not all publication used history or they used it very vaguely. For example, a short poem Epitre à son altesse royale M.me la Duchesse de Berry (Nestor de Lamarque (1820). Toulouse: De l’imprimerie de Benichet aîné) made vague allusions to Antiquity and Italy, and only mentioned Henri IV in relation to the duc. 2. Schulte (2006). “Introduction”, 6. See also Margadant (1997). “The Duchesse de Berry”, 25–26. 3. In the digital library Gallica, there are over 70 works published between 1820 and 1821 related either to the assassination of the duc or to the birth of Henri. 4. Madame de Sartory (1820). Mémoires historiques sur son A. R. Mgr le duc de Berri, Paris: Roza, 23. The mother of the duc de Berry, Marie-Thérèse de Savoie, had died in 1805. 5. See, for example, Pesme (1821). Lettre adressée à S. A. R. Mme la duchesse de Berri, sur le dernier attentat dirigé contre le roi et sa famille, […], Paris: A. Égron Sartory (1820). Mémoires historiques. See also René de Chazet (1820). Éloge historique de son altesse royale Charles-Ferdinand d’Artois, duc de Berry, fils de France, Paris: Imprimerie royale, 44–45. Anon (1820). Chant funèbre sur la mort de son Altesse Royale Mgr le Duc de Berry, Paris: Le Normant. 6. Journal des débats 30.9.1820. 7. Quintus Horatius Flaccus (8 December 65 BC—27 November 8 BC). 8. Journal des débats 30.9.1820. “Inconcevable destinée de la plus antique monarchie de l’Europe, elle renaît et se perpétue au moment où elle sembloit disparoître.” 9. Allusions between the birth of Henri and Louis XIV in 1638 were also made in work dedicated to the blissful delivery of the duchesse de Berry: Anon (1821). Pèlerinage des pénitents blancs de Monléon-Magnoac, Hautes-­Pyrénées, à la chapelle de Betharram, Basses-Pyrénées, […], Tarbes: Lagleize, 12–13. 10. Journal des débats 10.9.1820. “En 1638, la France se trouvant dans une situation pareille à celle d’aujourd’hui, Louis XIII et Anne d’Autriche firent un voeu à Notre-Dame-de-Grâce en Provence, pour obtenir de Dieu un héritier de leur couronne, et après vingt-trois ans de mariage, la naissance de Louis XIV vint affermir leur sceptre.” 11. Journal des débats 10.8.1825 and 15.8.1825. 12. Journal des débats 15.8.1823. 13. Margadant (1997). “The Duchesse de Berry”, 33–34. 14. Journal des débats 1.10.1820.

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15. See, for example, Sheryl Kroen (2000). Politics and Theater: The Crisis of Legitimacy in Restoration France, 1815–1830. Berkeley: University of California Press. 16. Le Constitutionnel 30.9.1820. 17. Journal des débats 1.10.1820. “[…] nos enfans devront à une autre Blanche le règne d’un second Louis IX!” 18. About the power of Blanche of Castile, see, for example, Eliane Viennot (2006). La France, les femmes et le pouvoir. L’invention de la loi salique (Ve—XVIe siècle), Paris: Perrin, 247–253. 19. Journal des débats 19.2.1820. “[…] parmi les enfans de saint Louis.“ 20. Journal des débats 19.2.1820. “dernier descendant de Louis XIV, par la lignée française[…]”. 21. Anon (1820). Le miracle du 29 septembre 1820, […]. Paris: P. Gueffier, 2. About the premonition, see also Brégeon (2009). La duchesse de Berry, 108. 22. Journal des débats 9.6.1823. 23. Journal des débats 22.10.1820. 24. Journal des débats 27.7.1820. “[…] qui conserve le trône de France à la postérité de Henri IV et de Louis-le-Grand.” See also, for example, 31.7.1820; 19.8.1820; 9.8.1820; 14.9.1820; 26.7.1820. 25. François-Thomas Delbare (1820). La Duchesse de Berri au château de Rosny dans les premiers jours de novembre 1820, Paris: Mlle Deville, 11, 24. 26. Journal des débats 23.10.1820. “Nouvelle Jeanne d’Albret, l’auguste Princesse a répondu avec autant de grandeur d’âme que de noblesse.“ 27. Journal des débats 30.10.1820. 28. In 1821 there were also  other references to Marie-Caroline as Jeanne d’Albert, see, for example, P.-J.-J.  Boudet (1821). Les Deux Journées, hommage poétique à son Altesse Royale Mme la duchesse de Berry, Paris: Le Normant, 5. In the poem, “Henri” was simultaneously the son of Marie-­ Caroline and the father of her son. 29. Jean-Dominique-Étienne Canu (1821). “La nouvelle Jeanne d’Albret,” In Œuvre de Jean-Dominique Etienne Canu, vol. II. 30. Adrien-César Égron (1821). Allons à Paris, ou les Fêtes du baptême, Paris: A. Égron, 173–174. 31. Jean-Baptiste-Louis Brayer de Beauregard (1821). Relation du voyage de S. A. R. Mme la duchesse de Berri, et de son pèlerinage à Notre-Dame-deLiesse […], Paris: Mme Dufriche, 9. 32. See, for example, Brayer de Beauregard (1821). Relation du voyage de S. A. R., 65–67. 33. Brégeon (2009). La duchesse de Berry, 122.

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34. Brayer de Beauregard (1821). Relation du voyage de S.  A. R., 48–49. Soissons was the place where the case of the so-called vase of Soissons took place, according to a famous anecdote. 35. Brayer de Beauregard (1821). Relation du voyage de S. A. R., 35. 36. Brayer de Beauregard (1821). Relation du voyage de S. A. R., 37. 37. Brayer de Beauregard (1821). Relation du voyage de S. A. R., 79–80. In this depiction, there was nothing “malign” in the mistress of the king, as Christine Adams has claimed that there was in the representations of some royal mistresses in the nineteenth century. Christine Adams (2020). “The Gallic Singularity and the Royal Mistress,” French Politics, Culture & Society (vol. 38, no. 1), 53–56. 38. See the duchesse d’Angoulême by F. Lignon. The engraving is based on the painting of J. B. J. Augustin (1818). 39. Clément (2015). Charles X, 270. 40. Brégeon (2009). La duchesse de Berry, 131–141. 41. Théophile Mandar (1820). Sa Sainteté, à sa fille bien-aimée, très-haute et très-puissante princesse Madame la duchesse de Berry, Paris: A. Égron, 13. 42. Anon (1821). Pèlerinage des pénitents blancs, 16. 43. Clément (2015). Charles X, 266–269. 44. Journal des débats 25.10.1824. 45. Blanche of Castile: Journal des débats 11.6.1823. “Fille de Jeanne d’Albret” Journal des débats 13.8.1824. 46. Journal des débats 1.9.1822 & 2.11.1822. 47. See, for example, Journal des débats 22.8.1824; 6.8.1824. 48. Journal des débats 26.7., 27.7., 29.7.1824; 23.8.1824. 49. Émile Marco de Saint-Hilaire (1826). Vie anecdotique de S. A. R. Madame Duchesse de Berry, depuis sa naissance jusqu’à ce jour, Paris: Seguin, 10, 45, 46, 50, 83, 107, 147, 160, 184–5, 196. 50. Saint-Hilaire (1826). Vie anecdotique de S.  A. R.  Madame Duchesse de Berry, 184–5, 243. 51. Saint-Hilaire (1826). Vie anecdotique de S.  A. R.  Madame Duchesse de Berry, 219. 52. Saint-Hilaire (1826). Vie anecdotique de S.  A. R.  Madame Duchesse de Berry, 228. “Il prouva que la religion chrétienne, montée sur le trône des Francs avec Clovis, consolidée par Charlemagne, honorée par saint Louis, et la longue suite des successeurs de ce Roi, est destinée à sortir triumphante de toutes les difficultés, et des épreuves nouvelles qu’on lui suscite. Il en cita pour preuve la naissance du prince Dieudonné, duc de Bordeaux, né d’une jeune héroïne plus admirable que Jeanne d’Albret, et qui est formée elle-­même du sang de Louis XIV et de Marie-Thérèse d’Autriche.”

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53. See Becquet (2014). “Marie-Antoinette”, 193–194. 54. Saint-Hilaire (1826). Vie anecdotique de S.  A. R.  Madame Duchesse de Berry, 311. “[…] vous qui, comme l’héroïne d’Orléans, n’avez pas cessé d’espérer qu’en vous reposait notre salut, soyez bénie!” 55. The original citation came from Antoine-Eugène Genoude (1821). Voyage dans la Vendée et dans le midi de la France; suivi d’un Voyage pittoresque en Suisse, Paris. 56. See, for example, Yvert (2013). La Restauration, 17. 57. Gabriel de Broglie (2011). La monarchie de Juillet, 1830–1848, Paris: Fayard, 29. 58. Soon-Hee Lee (2019). “Parallèle des Stuarts et des Bourbons: Les Quatre Stuarts de Chateaubriand au temps de “la restauration possible,” Nineteenth-Century French Studies (vol. 47, nos. 3 & 4), 225. 59. Journal des débats 23.6.1825; 29.6.1825; 13.7.1825. 60. Journal des débats 28.7.1820. 61. Journal des débats 16.12.1820. 62. Journal des débats 22.10.1820. 63. Journal des débats 10.4.1820. See also about Marie Stuart in the early nineteenth-century France, Cadène (2014). “Marie Stuart trois fois martyre?”, 199–204. 64. Journal des débats: William Tell 5.8.1829; Elisabeth I 6.12.1829; Charles IV 11.3.1826; Ivanhoe 17.9.1826; Rosemunde 30.10.1826; Joan of Arc 20.3.1825; Robin Hood 28.12.1824; Athalie 16.10.1820; Joan of Arc 21.5.1820; Clovis 24.2.1820. 65. Masked balls were hugely popular in the nineteenth century, and Mary Stuart was a popular figure in them especially in England all through the century. See Benjamin L.  Wild (2019). “Romantic Recreations: Remembering Stuart Monarchy in Nineteenth-Century Fancy Dress Entertainments,” in Estelle Paranque (ed.), Remembering Queens and Kings of Early Modern England and France, New  York: Palgrave Macmillan, 179–196. 66. Brégeon (2009). La duchesse de Berry, 125–126. 67. Cadène (2014). “Marie Stuart trois fois martyre?”, 199–204. 68. Quentin Craufurd (1819). Notices sur Marie Stuart, reine d’Ecosse, et sur Marie-Antoinette, reine de France; […], Paris: J. Gratiot. 69. Revue de Paris 1829 (t.1), 250. “ces habits chevaleresques mêlés à la physionomie bourgeoise de la grande cité, que ce voyage des siècles frivoles au milieu d’un siècle sérieux.” 70. Revue de Paris 1829 (t.1), 249. 71. See, for example, Journal des débats 29.10.1826; 10.8.1827; 16.12.1827; 25.12.1828; 16.12.1828; 16.5.1828; 9.4.1828; 3.12.1829; 13.12.1829; 9.3.1829; 23.9.1829.

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72. Philip Mansel (2012). “The Duchesse de Berry and the Aesthetics of Royalism: Dynastic Collecting in Nineteenth-Century France,” in Susan Bracken, Andrea M. Galdy and Adriana Turpin (eds.) Women Patrons and Collectors, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 140. 73. Mansel (2012). “The Duchesse de Berry and the Aesthetics of Royalism”, 141. 74. Mansel (2012). “The Duchesse de Berry and the Aesthetics of Royalism”, 147. 75. Mansel (2012). “The Duchesse de Berry and the Aesthetics of Royalism”, 145. 76. Féréol Bonnemaison (1822). Galerie de son Altesse Royale Madame la duchesse de Berry. Paris: J. Didot l’aîné. 77. Charles Paul Landon (1823). Choix des tableaux modernes de la galerie de son altesse royale Mme la duchesse de Berry, Paris: Imprimerie royale, 3. 78. L’Entrée de Henri IV dans Paris; Henri IV et ses enfans; Une croisée de Paris le jour que S.M. Louis XVIII fit son entrée dans cette ville; S.A.R.M.gr le Duc de Berry; M.lle de la Vallière au couvent de Chaillot; Van Dyck faisant le portrait d’une jeune paysanne; Marie Stuart jouant du clavecin […]; Marie Stuart séparée de ses fidèles serviteurs; Une scène des prisons de l’Inquisition; Jeanne d’Arc prisonnière à Rouen; La Mort du roi André de Hongrie. Landon (1823). Choix des tableaux modernes, 4–6. 79. The scenes of contemporary life included, for example, Le Trompette mort; Le Marchand de volaille; Le petit Malade; Le Joueur de violon. 80. Journal des débats 16.2.1826. 81. Journal des débats 30.1.1826. 82. Journal des débats 16.12.1827. 83. Journal des débats 10.10.1827. See also a little different wording, Journal des débats 19.3.1827. 84. Journal des débats 18.10.1828. 85. Bonnemaison (1822). Galerie, vol. II, s.p. Landon (1823). Choix des tableaux modernes, 6. 86. Journal des débats 28.9.1828. 87. Clément (2015). Charles X, 285. 88. See also Brégeon (2009). La duchesse de Berry, 13. 89. For example, in the Journal des débats, in 1823, there are 76 hits for “Angouleme” and in 1824, there are 285 hits for “Dauphine”. 90. Laurent Theis (1996). Clovis: De l’histoire au mythe, Paris: Éd. Complexe, 178–184; Christian Amalvi (1996). “Le Baptême de Clovis: Heurs et Malheurs d’un Mythe Fondateur de la France Contemporaine, 1814–1914,” in Olivier Guyotjeannin (ed.), Clovis chez les historiens, Paris: Librairie Droz, 241–244.

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91. Petitier (2019). “Introduction”, 188. Thierry’s work was Lettres sur l’histoire de France and especially “Lettre IX. Sur le caractère et la politique des Franks.” 92. Journal des débats 16.10.1820. 93. Journal des débats 21.9.1820. 94. Journal des débats 6.10.1820. “l’allusion prophétique alors sur la naissance de M. le duc de Bordeaux.” 95. Schulte (2006). “Introduction”, 7. 96. Becquet (2009). “Une royauté sans reine”, 137. 97. Becquet (2009). “Une royauté sans reine”, 139. 98. Thomassy (1820). De la nécessité d’appeler au trône les filles de France, Paris: A. Égron, 72. See also about the Salic Law, Sarah Hanley (2003). “The Salic Law,” in Christine Fauré (ed.), Political and Historical Encyclopedia of Women, New York: Routledge, 3–12. See also about Salic Law and female exclusion, Tracy Adams (2020). “The Gallic Singularity. The Medieval and Early Modern Origins,” French Politics, Culture & Society (vol. 38, no. 1), 31–34. 99. Thomassy (1820). De la nécessité, 4–5. 100. This is very interesting because according to Hanley (2003). “The Salic Law”, 11, for example, “the Napoléonic Civil Code of 1803 declared […] that the male right to govern was founded in natural law.” Therefore, it was not the Salic Law Thomassy needed to refute but the idea of natural law. 101. Thomassy (1820). De la nécessité, 79. 102. Journal des débats 14.2.1820. “Les temps modernes ont vu dans le Nord Marguerite, à Londres Elisabeth, en Allemagne Marie-Thérèse, porter le diadême et la lance; à Paris, l’orgueil viril de la loi Salique eût condamné leurs mains à tourner la quenouille.” Thomassy (1820). De la nécessité, 83–84. 103. Journal des débats 14.2.1820. “Ou bien si quelquefois la toute puissance de la barbe est forcée de s’incliner devant la superiorité d’un genie féminin, on dit chez ce people galant, que c’est une femme au dessus de son sexe, qu’elle est plus qu’une femme, sans être néanmoins autant qu’un homme; on la regarde enfin comme un être intermédiaire entre la foiblesse de son sexe et l’excellence du nôtre.” The author identified himself as a man but it might have been just a disguise for it was common for a woman to write under a pseudonym of a man. 104. These ideas echo well with what Bonnie G. Smith has written about the gender of history. Smith (1998). The Gender of History, esp. 132, 143–4. 105. Aali (2017). Merovingian Queenship, 218–9. 106. See Assemblée nationale: Louis-Antoine François de Marchangy.

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107. Louis-Antoine-François de Marchangy (1819). La Gaule poétique, ou L’histoire de France considérée dans ses rapports avec la poésie, l’éloquence et les beaux-arts, Paris: Chaumerot, vol. II, 75. “la trop belle Frédégonde, femme ambitieuse et fière, adroite et dissimulée, qui avait la volontée d’un tyran, l’esprit d’un rhéteur, le courage d’un homme, et toutes les graces de son sexe.” 108. Marchangy (1819). La Gaule poétique, vol. II, 77. “une énergie peu commune à son sexe.” 109. Marchangy (1819). La Gaule poétique, vol VI, 495–6. 110. Marchangy (1819). La Gaule poétique, vol VI, 495. 111. Thomassy (1820). De la nécessité, for example, 106–112. 112. See the introduction of this volume. Boureau (2001). “The King”, 213. 113. Thomassy (1820). De la nécessité, 101. 114. Thomassy (1820). De la nécessité, 110. 115. Jean François Bellemare (1820). Le Crime du 13 février et le moyen d’en prévenir de nouveaux, Paris: Pillet aîné, 4–5. “[…] si, du fond d’un berceau comme des bords de la tombe, la plus faible main royale suffit pour en tenir les rênes; si, dans ces derniers tems, on a vu la Grande-Bretagne atteindre à son plus haut degré de force et de splendour sous le règne d’un prince frappe de mort dans ses facultés morales; si, en un mot, notre régine constitutionnel nous met à l’abri des inconvéniens attachés au personnel de la royauté, par quelle étrange contradiction affecterions-nous de voir du danger à ce que les femmes puissant hériter du trône?” 116. Bellemare (1820). Le Crime du 13 février, 8. 117. Early Frankish king and possible fifth-century ancestor of Clovis I. 118. Bellemare (1820). Le Crime du 13 février, 12. 119. Bellemare (1820). Le Crime du 13 février, 18. 120. Bellemare (1820). Le Crime du 13 février, 19. 121. Bellemare (1820). Le Crime du 13 février, 19–20. 122. Flavien Bertran de Balanda (2019). “De la Royauté en France (1814): Autour d’un pamphlet inédit de Louis de Bonald: ressusciter la légitimité?” Nineteenth-Century French Studies (vol. 47, nos 3 & 4), 204. 123. Tracy Adams also argues it was more of a political necessity, see Adams (2020). “The Gallic Singularity”, 31–34. 124. See, for example, the case of Marie-Amélie in following chapters. See also Aali (2017). Merovingian Queenship, 54. 125. Journal des débats 30.9.1820. 126. Journal des débats 18.1.1824. “En tous lieux sa présence est chère, Partout on répète ces mots: Chaque Français n’a-t-il pas une mère, Dans l’héroïne de Bordeaux!”

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127. As we saw in the earlier chapter, Joséphine was strongly criticized for not being able to give a child to Napoléon. See also Perez (2019). Le Corps de la reine, 74–78, 216–219, 251–258. 128. Becquet (2009). “Une royauté sans reine”, 145. 129. Radegund was a well-known early medieval saint in the nineteenth-­ century France. See, for example, a historical novel about her, Augustine Gottis (1823). L’Abbaye de Sainte-Croix de Radegonde, reine de France, vols. I-V, Paris: Lecointe et Durey, and, for example, Louis Marie Prudhomme (ed. 1830). Biographie universelle et historique des femmes célèbres mortes ou vivantes, vol. IV, Paris: Lebigre, 114. See also Aali (2017). Merovingian Queenship, 58, 100–102. 130. Brian Brennan (1996). “Piety and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Poitiers: The Cult of St Radegund,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History (vol. 47, no. 1), 71. 131. Brennan (1996). “Piety and Politics”, 72. 132. Becquet (2012). Marie-Thérèse de France, 218. 133. About Gregory of Tours, see Heta Aali (2014). “Interpreting the Merovingian historian Gregory of Tours in early nineteenth-century France,” Mirator (vol. 15, no. 15). 134. Becquet (2012). Marie-Thérèse de France, 404. 135. Louis-Joseph-Marie Robert (1823). L’hermite de Saint-Jean, ou Tableau des fêtes marseillaises lors de l’arrivée et durant le séjour de S.A.R. Madame, duchesse d’Angoulême, à Marseille, Marseilles, vol.I, 1. “L’ange tutélaire de la France, la petite-fille de Marie-Thérèse et de Henri IV, que ses malheurs, son héroïsme, son éminente piété et ses rares vertus ont déjà consacrée à l’immortalité, et que sa naissance et les droits de son illustre époux destinent à devenir un jour l’ornement du trône des Lis, arrive bientôt dans vos murs!” References to Maria Theresa and Henri IV were repeated in the volume XII, 3. 136. Robert (1823). L’hermite de Saint-Jean, vol. I, 4 & 5. 137. See, for example, Robert (1823). L’hermite de Saint-Jean, vol. XII, 4 & 7. 138. Robert (1823). L’hermite de Saint-Jean, vol XII, 2 & passim. 139. Robert (1823). L’hermite de Saint-Jean, vol XII, 4 &5. 140. Robert (1823). L’hermite de Saint-Jean, vol XII, 6. 141. Robert (1823). L’hermite de Saint-Jean, vol XII, 6. 142. Becquet (2012). Marie-Thérèse de France, 249. 143. There were also other much shorter works published on Marie-Thérèse in 1823. See, for example, Anon (1823). Madame, ou Recueil de quelques traits relatifs à cette auguste princesse, Nantes: 1823, Mellinet-Malassis, and Anon (1823). Notice sur S.A.R. MADAME, duchesse d’Angoulême, depuis ses premières années, jusqu’à sa rentrée en France, le 3 Mai 1814, Aix: F. Guigne. Both works described the hardness of Marie-Thérèse’s life

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and her commitment for charity. Both works equally called her Antigone, especially in the context of her exile. See p.12 and p.6, respectively. In these two works, the Revolution was the main historical reference. 144. Chateaubriand in Journal des débats 17.9.1824, 1. 145. Chateaubriand in Journal des débats 17.9.1824, 3. 146. Le Constitutionnel 26.10.1824. “Le nombre des lumières, qui étincelait de tous côtés, surpassait, dit-on, quinze mille.” 147. Le Constitutionnel 26.10.1824. “vaste chapelle ardente”. 148. Journal des débats 26.10.1824. “sanctuaire accoutumé de ses pieuses douleurs”. 149. Journal des débats 26.10.1824. 150. Journal des débats 26.10.1824. About the burial of the royal remains of these kings and a queen, see also Journal des débats 13.12.1824. Le Constitutionnel 26.10.1824. 151. Journal des débats 30.5.1825. “La protection du Dieu de Clovis s’est manifestée sur la personne de son auguste successeur.” 152. Le Constitutionnel 31.5.1825. 153. Journal des débats 30.5.1825. “Sire, c’est dans les cantons où la France devient chrétienne, c’est au pied de l’autel où fut sacré Clovis, où les aïeux de V.M. ont reçu l’onction royale, que le Dieu de Saint-Louis semble se plaire à verser ses plus abondantes bénédictions sur les Rois […]”. 154. Le Constitutionnel 31.5.1825; Journal des débats 31.5.1825. 155. Le Constitutionnel 29.5.1825. 156. Le Constitutionnel 31.5.1825. 157. François Miel (1825). Histoire du sacre de Charles X, dans ses rapports avec les beaux-arts et les libertés publiques de la France […], Paris: C. L. F. Panckoucke. The work, which contained more than 300 pages, was written and published within five months of the crowning. 158. Miel (1825). Histoire du sacre de Charles X, 262 “Naguère tant d’adversités et aujourd’hui tant de gloire! un tel triomphe après un tel abaissement! tous les extrêmes de la bonne et de la mauvaise fortune!” Also Journal des débats 5.10.1825. 159. Petitier (2019). “Introduction”, 184. 160. Émile Marco de Saint-Hilaire (1825). Vie anecdotique de Mme la dauphine, depuis sa naissance jusqu’à ce jour, Paris: A.-J. Sanson, 321–323, 119, 153, 159, 208, 222, 224. Besides the short reference to Saint Arnulf and the compulsory references to Saint Louis and Henri IV, medieval and early modern history were not much present in the biography. The focus was in the events of the Revolution, and on the suffering and saintly nature of Marie-Thérèse.

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161. Jean Nicolas Quatremère de Roissy (1825). Marie-Thérèse d’Autriche, impératrice-reine, Marie-Thérèse de France, dauphine, Paris: Le Normant père, 118. 162. Quatremère de Roissy (1825). Marie-Thérèse d’Autriche, 109–110. 163. Quatremère de Roissy (1825). Marie-Thérèse d’Autriche, 103, 105. 164. Miel (1825). Histoire du sacre de Charles X, 38. 165. Miel (1825). Histoire du sacre de Charles X, 350. 166. Journal des débats 5.11.1825; Miel (1825). Histoire du sacre de Charles X, 184. 167. Kroen (2000). Politics and Theater, 4. 168. Journal des débats 12.6.1825. 169. Journal des débats 18.8.1825. 170. Vidal (2010). Marie-Amélie de Bourbon-Sicile, 161–165. 171. Journal des débats 18.8.1825. 172. Clément (2015). Charles X, 329–336. 173. Journal des débats 23.10.1829. 174. Journal des débats 31.7.1830. 175. Price (2007). The Perilous Crown, 81. 176. See, for example, Journal des débats 10.9.1824. 177. Clément (2015). Charles X, 215. 178. Journal des débats 20.10.1820. 179. Yvert (2013). La Restauration, 138. 180. See, for example, Journal des débats 11.2.1820 (Louis-Philippe Marie-­ Amélie and Adélaïde have dinner with the king); 31.5.1820 (the baptism of the son); 3.3.1820 (Adélaïde and Marie-Amélie visited the duchesse de Berry); 1.10.1820 (the official declaration of the  birth of Henri); 18.1.1822 (another birth in the Orléans family). 181. Journal des débats 16.7.1825. 182. Journal des débats 24.4.1826. History and advertisement were intermingled in many “news” in the Journal des débats. The magazine, for example, reported that a store where the royal women bought gifts now included “parures Marie Stuart” (“ornaments Marie Stuart”). Journal des débats 21.12.1825. 183. Bernard Germain Etienne de La Ville de Lacépède (1826). Histoire générale, physique et civile de l’Europe: Depuis les dernières années du cinquième siècle jusque vers le milieu du dix-huitième, vol. I, Paris: Cellot, Mame et Delaunay-Vallée, 205–206. 184. See, for example, the Journal de débats 24.6.1821. The dowager duchesse had nearly a saintly reputation as had also her father, the late duc de Penthièvre. The Journal des débats reminded the readers that the dowager duchesse, and consequently her children, were direct descendants of Louis XIV.

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185. Vidal (2010). Marie-Amélie de Bourbon-Sicile, 149. 186. In addition to the Journal de la vie de S. A. S. Mme la Duchesse d’Orléans, there was also other works commemorating the late duchesse. For example, Prudent Marc Xavier Victor Arnaud (1821). Ode à S. A. S. Mgr le duc d’Orléans après la mort de son auguste mère, Paris: Dupont; Jean François Hyacinthe Feutrier (1821). Oraison funèbre de son altesse sérénissime madame la duchesse douairière d’Orléans; […], Paris: Adrien Le Clerc. 187. See, for example, a description of a memory service to the recently deceased Louis XVIII, where Marie-Amélie’s rank was particularly highlighted: Journal des débats 20.9.1824. 188. E. Delille (1822). Journal de la vie de S. A. S. Mme la duchesse d’Orléans, douairière; […], Paris: J.-J.  Blaise, 205. See also about the royalist attempts to have Louis XVI beatified in the 1820s, Paul Chopelin (2014). “Un ­régicide contre Dieu? Les tentatives de béatification de Louis XVI après le refus romain de 1820,” in Paul Chopelin and Sylvène Edouard (eds.), Le sang des princes, Rennes: Presse Universitaires de Rennes, 281–289. 189. Delille (1822). Journal, 101. 190. Delille (1822). Journal, 78. The author mentioned that the duchesse was widow by 1793 but the death of her husband was not evoked in any way. 191. Delille (1822). Journal, 117, 119, 120–121, 162–163. 192. Delille (1822). Journal, 164–169. 193. Marie-Amélie and Adélaïde would often appear in public supporting Louis-Philippe and the sons. See, for example, the Journal des débats 31.10.1827 when the entire family watched a military ceremony, which involved their son the duc de Nemours now a colonel. 194. Anon (1824). Notices biographiques des princes et princesses de la maison d’Orléans, Paris: Imprimerie de Plassan, 115. “Mère éclairée, elle s’est souvenue du mot de Jeanne d’Albret, qui ne voulait pas que son fils fût un illustre ignorant; et fière autant qu’heureuse de partager tous les sentiments du prince son époux, elle a vivement secondé sa résolution de faire participer le dic de Chartres aux avantages de l’éducation publique. Nous aimerions à retracer ici toutes les qualités qui la distinguent: épouse et mère, elle est le modèle des épouses et des mères; fille des rois, sa dignité est sans orgueil, sa vertu sans faste, sa charité sans ostentation.” 195. Vidal (2010). Marie-Amélie de Bourbon-Sicile, 153. 196. Anon (1824). Notices biographiques, 41. 197. Anon (1824). Notices biographiques, 147–148. 198. There were also other biographies, see, for example, Eugène L*** (1827). Épitre à Son Altesse royale Monseigneur le duc d’Orléans, premier prince du sang, Paris: imprimerie de Lachevardière.

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199. Agricol-Hippolyte de Lapierre de Châteauneuf (1826). Le Duc d’Orléans, essai historique, Paris: Jehenne, 111. “Elle a voulu que son fils aîné, le duc de Chartres, jouît, comme son aïeul Henri IV, des avantages de l’éducation publique.” Lapierre de Châteauneuf used the same source in his description of Adélaïde, see p. 113. Lapierre de Châteauneuf also, like the previous work, brought up that Adélaïde was supposed to marry the duc d’Angoulême but the Revolution had changed the plans. 200. Émile Marco de Saint-Hilaire (1826). Vie anecdotique de S. A. R. Mgr. Le Duc d’Orléans, premier prince du sang […], Paris: Mansut fils, 170, 257. This is an earlier version of his 1830 bioraphy Vie anecdotique de Louis-­ Philippe duc d’Orléans, lieutenant général de ce royaume. 201. Saint-Hilaire (1826). Vie anecdotique de S. A. R. Mgr. Le Duc d’Orléans, 211–212; Émile Marco de Saint-Hilaire (1830). Vie anecdotique de Louis-­ Philippe duc d’Orléans, lieutenant général de ce royaume, Paris: Mansut fils, 211–213; Achille Darmaing (1825). Relation complète du sacre de Charles X avec toutes les modifications introduites dans les prières et les cérémonies […], Paris: Baudoin frères, 39–41; Miel (1825). Histoire du sacre de Charles X, 107–109. 202. Journal des débats 18.8.1829. About the passage, see also chapter 2.3. 203. Journal des débats 2.6.1830. 204. Pilbeam (1991). The 1830 Revolution in France, 37. Jules de Polignac (1780–1845) was the head of Charles X’s last, highly unpopular government from 1829 to 1830. Polignac tried to leave France for England in July 1830 but he was arrested and, like couple of other key persons in the last Bourbon government, he was sentenced to imprisonment and civil death in December 1830. The king’s key ministers had to take the blame for the failed government instead of the king, and they were accused of causing the revolution. Clément (2015). Charles X, 500. 205. Pilbeam (1991). The 1830 Revolution in France, 60–61. 206. Price (2007). The Perilous Crown, 163–169. 207. Price (2007). The Perilous Crown, 187. The population of France in 1830 was 32.6 million. 208. Pilbeam (1991). The 1830 Revolution in France, 104 & 148. 209. Fortescue (2005). France and 1848, 27. 210. Pilbeam (1991). The 1830 Revolution in France, 146–149. See also Fortescue (2005). France and 1848, 28. 211. Pilbeam (1991). The 1830 Revolution in France, 149. 212. Francis Ronsin (1992). Les divorciaires. Affrontements politiques et conceptions du mariage dans la France du XIXe siècle, Paris: Aubier, 61–62. 213. Fortescue (2005). France and 1848, 24–27.

CHAPTER 4

New Dynasty, Old History (1830–1839)

4.1   Saintly Queen Marie-Amélie Marie-Amélie became the Queen of the French in August 1830. For the first time in more than 37 years, France had a queen. Whereas the Bourbons had struggled with producing an heir to the throne (the duc d’Angoulême had no children and his late brother, the duc de Berry, had fathered only one son), the Orléans family had six sons and three daughters in 1830. The previous Queen of France, Marie-Antoinette, Marie-Amélie’s maternal aunt, had been very unpopular during her lifetime. Due to this unpopularity it is essential to study what kind of roles Marie-Amélie was given by the press, politicians, and authors during the eighteen years of the July Monarchy. Which histories, interpretations of the past, were employed to construct new roles for the Queen of the French? The early 1830s witnessed a surge in literature and articles supporting the Orléans family, justifying their rise to power, and defaming the Bourbon family. The early 1830s saw several similar types of propaganda pamphlets on the Bourbons as were produced after 1789. It is significant to recall that the Orléans family was a younger branch of the Bourbon family, and they shared with the older branch of the family many famous ancestors such as Henri IV. Even though she was the last queen in France, Marie-Amélie has not been as popular in later literature as, for example, Marie-Antoinette has been. Only three short works focusing entirely on Marie-Amélie were © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 H. Aali, French Royal Women during the Restoration and July Monarchy, Queenship and Power, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59754-2_4

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published during the July Monarchy; two in the 1830s and one in the 1840s. There are several other biographies of her from the latter half of the nineteenth century.1 From the early twentieth century, there is only one biography.2 The most recent one is from 2010 by Florence Vidal. I analyse first the works from the 1830s, both of which were published by the supporters of the July Monarchy, after which I examine other representations of her both in literature and in art. After studying the representations created by the monarchy’s supporters, attention is given to the critical voices of the 1830s. One also needs to ask why there are so few biographies of the last queen. One reason is the new role given to the Queen of France, no longer the holder of a public position but seemingly only the spouse of the king. Marie-Amélie embraced the “intimate” role and did her best not to evoke scandals. This “intimate” position, however, was a social and cultural construction that hid an elaborate scheme of implicit uses of power: financial power related to charity,3 dynastical power related to royal children, to their lives and marriages, implicit political power related to counselling the king, and religious as well as cultural power related to cultural patronage and ties to the Catholic Church. According to the historian Susan K. Foley, in the (eighteenth-century) revolutionary imagination, the queen was conceived as an “archetypal political woman”. If the object was to eliminate such a dangerous archetype, Marie-Antoinette’s execution in 1793 was not surprising.4 A queen had a public role, but the early nineteenth century  trend was to draw women away from public roles and into the privacy of homes. According to Lynn Hunt in her groundbreaking The Family Romance of the French Revolution (1992), “[P]romiscuity, incest, poisoning of the heir to the throne, plots to replace the heir with a pliable substitute—all of these charges reflect a fundamental anxiety about queenship as the most extreme form of the invasion of the public sphere by women.”5 Thus, the late eighteenth-century authors and politicians considered that queenship needed to be relocated from the public sphere to the intimate sphere in order to maintain a functional society.6 This anxiety of the  queen as a political woman and the denial of her political role are apparent in the representations of Marie-Amélie. In her article French Noblewomen and New Domesticity 1750–1850 (1979), Margaret H. Darrow studied the influence of the Revolution on the noblewomen’s lives. Darrow argues that whereas in the eighteenth

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century, noble women had lived a public life, in the early nineteenth century, these women used their influence within the privacy of their homes. The Old Regime had made a public life possible for aristocratic women. However, with the Revolution, these possibilities ended.7 Darrow presents the long-term change in views on ideal marriage and the aristocratic woman’s position in France. In the bourgeois model the maternalcentred family became the basis of a stable society, simultaneously justifying women’s “dedication” to the domestic sphere and excluding them from “public” political life.8 For Marie-Amélie maternity was no doubt an essential function, and her maternal role was emphasized in nearly all representations. Denise Z.  Davidson has argued in her study France after Revolution (2007) that narrower behavioural norms emerged for women in the 1820s, after which women had increasingly fewer political roles available in the French society. Instead of strong monarchical and religious agents, women became to be seen as delicate beings easily misled by priests, for example.9 In addition to gender, social standing, wealth, and education influenced the possibilities women had in early nineteenth-century France—and the Orléans were the wealthiest family in France. According to Foley, the bourgeois monarchy initiated in 1830 assured women’s political exclusion since political rights were based on individual “capacity” to participate in politics, which effectively meant possession of wealth. Even the richest women were not legally responsible for their property, and therefore, they were denied basic political rights.10 Despite the lack of political rights, wealthy women such as Marie-Amélie and Adélaïde had other means to exercise power, notably through their male family members, patronage, and charity. The representations of Marie-Amélie illustrate the new ideal role given to the queen—including the seemingly simple relationship to power and politics. In an undated11 short booklet on Marie-Amélie, the author Pierre-François Tissot12 (1768–1854) declared [W]arned by examples, which are tough lessons, the princess did not get involved in the government’s affairs. She was afraid of having an influence usually full of dangers for women; all of her politics consisted of seeking pardon, and, one has to admit, she is happy to receive them for she prays with her full heart.13

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Marie-Amélie wanted to do charitable work without too much publicity since she was very humble. Prayers and charity were Marie-Amélie’s most vital political assets, as stated by Tissot. He emphasized that becoming a queen did not change Marie-Amélie in any way. She was afraid of the responsibility but obediently followed Louis-Philippe’s “fortune”. Tissot presented Marie-Amélie as afraid of dangers related to the French crown and initially desiring a  more peaceful position.14 Marie-Amélie knew, according to Tissot, her place as a queen and as a woman. She knew to stay silent and invisible in areas of life that were not suitable for women at this time. Together with Adélaïde and other women in the court, she was “occupée avec elles des travaux de son sexe […]”, busy with work suited to their gender.15 Biographies such as this promoted the image of an ideal woman silent in public and away from politics, which was deemed a masculine sphere. Classicist Mary Beard has argued that a tradition for silencing women had its roots in the earliest ancient Greek works that, as we have seen, were popular and well read in nineteenth-century France.16 The warning examples of women getting involved in the government  affairs can refer to both Marie-Amélie’s own family and multiple earlier French queens. The references to Marie-Amélie’s family also fall into two categories, her family of Bourbon-Siciles and her marital family of Orléans. Marie-Amélie’s mother, Maria Carolina, sister of Queen Marie-Antoinette, ruled de facto the kingdom of Naples, and for this reason, she was heavily attacked, especially after 1789.17 The warning examples could thus refer to Marie-Amélie’s mother who would not stay away from the affairs of the government. According to Tissot, Queen Maria Carolina had to suffer in 1814 for her “politique passionnée” and not having listened to the advice she had received earlier.18 Tissot emphasized Queen Maria Carolina’s incapability to rule wisely but scarcely wrote anything about the rule of Marie-Amélie’s father.19 The term “passion” was associated with women who used political power. Marie-Amélie, however, was not passionate like her mother because she was “calme et digne”.20 Adélaïde was not presented as passionate either but no supporter of the July Monarchy ever did present her as such. We will see the reactions Adélaïde’s political influence provoked among the legitimists, and the negative reactions undoubtedly influenced the role Marie-Amélie adopted in the 1830s. The warning examples Tissot mentioned could also refer to

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a broader category of queens of France who had exercised (real or imaginary) political power such as Catherine de’ Medici, Anne of Austria, and most recently Marie-Antoinette. The legitimists registered Marie-Amélie’s praising biography. In October 1837, the legitimist magazine La Mode published a short article criticizing Tissot’s work. According to the legitimist magazine, the author presented the queen primarily as a spouse and a mother. The magazine argued that she should have been presented more as a cousin and an aunt. Instead of presenting Marie-Amélie as a king’s spouse and as royal children’s mother, she should have been portrayed as Marie-Thérèse’s cousin and Marie-Caroline’s aunt.21 According to the criticism, she should have been defined through the Bourbon family and not through her immediate Orléans family because only the Bourbons were legitimate rulers. Tissot’s description of Marie-Amélie was by no means unique. On the contrary, it was very typical as is shown by the other short work dedicated to the Queen of the French in 1838.22 The anonymous author asked which saint’s vita could ever compare to that of Marie-Amélie and continued: [O]n her knees in the morning in her oratory, she offers her first thoughts to God and asks health for her family, happiness for France, the power to dry all the tears, and to pour healing balm to all wounds. […] she takes care, like a simple bourgeois, of cutting babywear and small outfits of fabric that the princesses would then finish […].23

The author praised the queen: [A]ncient Roman emperor lamented that he had had one day in his life without doing charity. Amélie would not have even a minute of her existence lost for this misery [of not doing charity]. She has done more than Titus, she would do anything to be useful. Good, simple in her taste, manners, and ornaments, she became elegant and even coquette to boost industry.24

This saintly picture of Marie-Amélie’s humble and religious acts was emphasized all through the short booklet. It dedicated almost a page to describe how Marie-Amélie had boosted the French economy and industry by purchasing a significant number of beautiful dresses, jewellery, and

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decorations for the palaces the Orléans family inhabited. These purchases were presented not as vanity but as best for France, as they benefitted the economy. Marie-Amélie became altruistically interested in beautiful things in order to help the struggling artisans. This passage appears to be a defence against the accusations that the Orléans family was miserly in charity and not genuinely interested in the well-being of the French but only on that of their own immediate family.25 Marie-Amélie was compared to the Roman Emperor Titus (died 81 AD) rather than to any medieval or early modern royal or saint in the 1838 work. On an intertextual level, the comparison was logical since the text, authored by an anonymous “ex-professeur de l’Université”, made multiple references to Antiquity from Parthenon of Athens to Spartacus and Themistocles.26 The author saw the July Monarchy not comparable only to the Old Regime but also to the glories and culture of Ancient Greece and Rome. It is imperative to keep in mind that Antiquity’s history and culture were seen to be part of all learned men’s repertory, and many of the educated readers read Latin and Greek. The references to Antiquity also distinguished the Orléans from the Bourbons in that the French Middle Ages was strongly associated with the Catholic Church and the Old Regime from which the Orléans dynasty, in some degree, wished to distance itself. Nevertheless, the imagery related to Antiquity could also be used against the Orléans family, like in an 1832 lithograph called Les faux dieux de l’Olympe, which depicted the king as effeminate “JupiterLouis-Philippe”.27 The legitimist magazine La Mode seized on the history of Emperor Titus and declared that similarly as Titus would not spend one day without doing good deeds, the Orléans family would not spend one day without increasing their property.28 Yet, more often than not, the vocabulary in the descriptions of Marie-Amélie referred to the typical image of medieval saint queens. The idea of a good saintly apolitical queen was presented as ahistorical even though it was a cultural construction of the nineteenth century. The contemporary readers likely identified several similarities between Tissot’s description of Marie-Amélie and the multitude of descriptions of medieval saint queens produced during these decades. The same applied to the description offered by the anonymous work in 1838 even though the ex-­ professeur seemed to prefer the Antiquity as a narrative reference. One example of such medieval queen whose description the learned readers could recognize was the seventh-century Saint Balthild. Josephine Amory

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de Langerack published in 1847 a collective biography on famous women, where she described the seventh-century queen as following: Balthild, a  model of queens and spouses, wanted all mouths to bless the choice of the monarch who had chosen her to his side. Of the royal prerogatives associated with her title [of queen], she only wanted those of drying all the tears, easing all the misery, staving off all the evil.29

In 1820, Alexandrine Bonaparte, sister-in-law of Napoléon Bonaparte, described the saint queen as following: She obeyed the king as her lord. She honoured the bishops and priests as her fathers and the monks as her brothers. She cherished the princes and lords of the kingdom as if she was their mother. She treated the poor as if she had been their wet nurse. Finally, she had kindness and universal love; she only used her power to do good in the world, to uphold benevolence, to protect the weak […].30

Saint Balthild was a well-known saint in France: Louis-Philippe’s paternal aunt was Bathilde d’Orléans. Saint Balthild was also given a sculpture in the Jardin du Luxembourg during the July Monarchy together with famous women such as Saint Clotilde and Blanche of Castile. One needs to keep in mind that the representation of Balthild as a saint queen was equally a historiographical, literary, and religious construction that dates back to the writing of her hagiography in the late seventh century.31 Saint Balthild was, of course, not the only saint whose literary image bore similarities with that of Marie-Amélie. The descriptions united many ideal features of women from various periods of history, such as obedience, charity, kindness, and religiosity. Saint Clotilde, Saint Radegund, and Blanche of Castile were among the women, especially queens, who were in the Catholic historiography described with similar features. Marie-Amélie’s saintly image was further strengthened in art in the early 1830s. One interesting example is the long lost and now found painting Sainte Amélie Reine de Hongrie by the  famous French painter Paul Delaroche.32 The painting, which was presented in the Salon of 1834, pictured a praying saint queen surrounded by her servants. The painting’s importance lies in the fact that it presented the queen’s namesake in the

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act of worship. In a positive review of the painting, the literary magazine Revue de Paris described it at the 1834 Salon and shed light on Saint Amelia herself. There has been no Amélie on the throne of Hungary (Saint Elisabeth of Hungary33 who died in 1231 comes closest), but according to the Revue de Paris, the model of the painting was: Saint Amelia, daughter of a Christian sovereign prince of the Ardennes in the times of Charlemagne (according to a legend), [who] had constructed in the garden of her father’s castle an oratory and built the altar there with her own hands. She often went there with young girls to decorate the altar with flowers and fruits of the season and make her prayers.34

This Saint Amelia seems to be a mysterious saint since almost nothing more is known of her. The identity of the saint, however, is secondary because the primary relevance of the painting is the association of the atmosphere of devotion, calm, and piety, as the magazine described,35 with the queen whose religious ardour was so often emphasized. The painting was made to be a model for a stained glass window at the chapel of castle d’Eu.36 Even though the painting was presented in the Salon of 1834, it was already painted in 1831.37 The legitimist magazine La Mode mentioned the painting Sainte Amélie Reine de Hongrie, and in its customary way, used the occasion to criticize the royal family and especially Marie-Amélie. La Mode stated: [T]he saint queen is praying by the altar with her two daughters. The saint’s noble and merciful character has calmness and happiness, she prays, but she has nothing to ask forgiveness about. She thanks the heaven that she was not made to be either ungrateful or a  hypocrite. The painting is charming, a lovely portrait of fantasy.38

La Mode attacked the queen’s pious reputation and the Orléans’ family’s supporters’ desires to present her as a saintly person. Questioning her true motives and devotion was a recurrent theme in the legitimist attacks against the queen. Interestingly, however, La Mode saw the painting presenting the queen herself. In contrast, Revue de Paris interpreted the painting to present an obscure early medieval saint and only figuratively referring to the queen. Saint Amelia was pictured in multiple churches and chapels during the July Monarchy. For example, in The Royal Chapel of Dreux, the Orléans

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dynasty’s necropolis, she was pictured together with Saint Philip, Saint Clotilde, Saint Genevieve, Saint Adelaide, and a multitude of other French national saints. The stained glass windows and sculptures were prepared in Dreux during the mid-1840s, so Delaroche’s painting preceded them. Nevertheless, the function of the representations was the same. Presenting the members of the royal family as saints indicated that they are worth imitating. The holiness signified conduct above reproach. However, the royal blood did not matter as much as the virtues of the Orléans family, according to a French historian Grégoire Franconie.39 Marie-Amélie had been taught the “love of virtue” already as a young girl.40 The virtues were emphasized in many of her descriptions. Adolphe de Leuven (1833) highlighted that Marie-Amélie had no political ambitions in marrying Louis-Philippe and the union was without any political or economic interests. Her virtues and misfortunes were emphasized repeatedly in the passage about her marriage to Louis-Philippe, “grand-­ son of Henri IV”.41 The marriage was presented as one of mutual love and harmony without dynastical interests. It just happened to be coincident that the perfect spouse for Louis-Philippe was also from a suitable family. The same pattern also existed in the period’s romanticized narratives of the marriage between Saint Clotilde and Clovis. Their marriage was portrayed as that of mutual love and respect rather than as a calculated union contributing to the families’ political aspirations.42 The political and economic interests were omitted from the descriptions of Marie-Amélie and Louis-Philippe’s marriage to emphasize the selfless love of the Orléans family for the French people. The possibility of the marriage being a part of a determined path for the French throne was not evoked. The reference to Henri IV aimed to prove Louis-Philippe and the Orléans family’s equal dynastical rights for the throne of France. The virtues and the dynastical rights complemented each other. This idealized image of the queen was very normative and emphasized her religious role both in family and society. The queen was portrayed as abhorring political authority and reluctant to use any authority besides that related to charity. These saintly descriptions of Marie-Amélie are noteworthy considering that anticlerical tensions erupted in France after the 1830 Revolution, and the Catholic Church was one of the biggest losers in the fall of the Bourbon dynasty. Nevertheless, the booklets on Marie-Amélie demonstrate that the representations of the saint queens

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continued to hold importance in the 1830s amidst the struggles the Church faced following the Revolution. * * * Marie-Amélie was like a “simple bourgeois”, according to the anonymous 1838 booklet.43 The comparison is very intriguing because the significance of the term “bourgeois” was anything but simple during the early nineteenth century. The full discussion related to the concept of “bourgeoisie” in early nineteenth-century France is very extensive and out of scope of the current volume. Therefore, I examine the concept uniquely concerning the explicit references to the royal women, such as in the 1838 booklet. Sarah Maza has argued that before the 1850s, the term was mostly employed as a derogative term used on others but only rarely used to define oneself. However, the term had other meanings for the liberal politicians since the 1820s. Many liberal politicians, such as François Guizot and Adolphe Thiers, made their name equally as historians. From the Observations sur l’histoire de France (1765) of Gabriel Bonnot de Mably originated the idea of “bourgeoisie” as the loyal supporter of the king against the greedy and violent nobility. The liberal historians reproduced the idea in the 1820s. In addition to defending the monarchy, bourgeoisie was seen as hard-working and protecting the arts. The clashes between “bourgeoisie” and nobility are to be found, according to the liberal politicians and historians, all the way from the early Middle Ages.44 For the liberal historians, the period of Clovis I was not only the period of the  first alliance between the monarchy and the Catholic Church but the beginning of the subjugation of the Third Estate by the nobles. The violent subjugation would not end until the Revolution of 1789 followed by repressive laws, the reign of Napoléon, and emergency laws under the Restoration.45 Historians such as François Guizot, Augustin Thierry, and Simonde de Sismondi contributed to the development of the liberal historiography in the 1820s.46 The liberal historiography opposed the interpretation of the Middle Ages as an era of throne and altar—new importance was granted to the Middle Ages as the cradle of guilds and middle classes. One possible interpretation of Marie-Amélie as a simple bourgeois could relate to the definition of the nobility as the true enemy of the monarchy (and France), corrupted together with the Bourbon dynasty

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and (seemingly) chased from the kingdom. This way Marie-Amélie was made to oppose the corrupted Bourbon dynasty. According to Jo Burr Margadant, following the arguments presented by Sarah Maza, bourgeoisie could also be seen as the social forces that fought off the “aristocratic and clerical rearguard action”.47 These representations of Marie-Amélie as a simple bourgeois could not undo the fact that she was a noble and a member of the richest family of France. Nevertheless, to represent the queen as something else is exactly what the supporters of the Orléans dynasty aimed for to prove there was a difference between the Orléans and the Bourbon branch. For many liberal politicians, the aristocrats and the Catholic Church represented much of what was wrong with the Old Regime and the Restoration monarchy. For example, Thierry had no great sympathy for the Catholic Church in his historiographical thinking.48 Margadant also gave another definition for the bourgeoisie: [A]pplied to this arena, ‘bourgeois’ conjured up the image of a tightly-knit family, bound by affection, reciprocal duties and the attractions of domesticity; whereas an ‘aristocratic’ marriage presumed a familial style based on obedience and respect, with spouses leading separate social lives.49

Margadant has convincingly demonstrated that Marie-Amélie had a distinctively different vision of her role as a spouse and mother compared to that of Old Regime queens. This second definition of the bourgeoisie complements the first definition of the term as a defender of the French monarchy. This is especially true in Marie-Amélie’s case as a defender of particular virtues and way of life. In her article, “Representing Queen Marie-Amélie in a ‘Bourgeois’ Monarchy”, Margadant argues that the way Marie-Amélie represented herself, the role she took in the “bourgeois” family, initially helped the Orléans to get the popularity needed to reach the throne of France. However, later the negative responses and the idea of selfish “bourgeoisie” furthered their downfall in the 1840s. Margadant has studied mainly the caricatures and illustrations of the royal family. Her otherwise excellent and groundbreaking article does not consider Marie-Amélie’s “bourgeois” role concerning religiosity and canonized queens. Marie-Amélie’s example influenced the representations of the historical canonized queens: historical queens were made to resemble the nineteenth-century bourgeois

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ladies. I equally consider that this transformation of the royal representations did not begin in 1830, but it resulted from a long process that began after the 1789 Revolution. Many of the representations of Marie-Amélie were established already in the Restoration period. They demonstrate continuity rather than a sudden change. The royal women, namely, Marie-­ Amélie, were no passive victims of the changing expectations and gender norms, nor were they the principal instigators of the changes during these decades. Margadant called the Orléans family during the July Monarchy an embodiment of “the hopelessly contradictory symbolic order”.50 She argues that the Orléans family faced essentially three problems: dynasticism conflicting with meritocracy, the gendered taboos affecting honour, and the period’s elite’s cynical reading of their contemporaries’ motives.51 Margadant based her conclusions also on the private letters of the royal family, which are out of scope for the current volume. However, she did use extensive sources concerning the public debates even though she did not explicitly examine the uses of history in her conclusions. Nevertheless, she recognized that many of the issues that tormented the Orléans family as a ruling family in the 1830s and 1840s were legacies from the late eighteenth-century revolutionary period and the  Old Regime era. The conflict between change and continuance caused contradictions both on a practical and a representational level. * * * A devoted and affectionate spouse and mother, the saintly queen sacrificed her happiness for her family and the French. This was the image of Marie-­ Amélie propagated by the supporters of the July Monarchy that did not equate with the critics’ reading of the Orléans family and July Monarchy. Marie-Amélie’s religiousness was a repetitive theme the critics of the July Monarchy attacked during the eighteen-year reign, especially during the first ten years.52 The legitimist La Mode repeatedly portrayed the queen of the French as an archetype of a shallow and superficial religious woman. She was indirectly juxtaposed with the legitimate saint of the French monarchy, Marie-Thérèse, the daughter of a martyr king. The critics of the Orléans dynasty, particularly La Mode, repeatedly portrayed Marie-Amélie (and the entire Orléans family) as selfish, greedy usurpers who only pretended to desire the best for France when in reality they only cared about their own family and wealthy.53

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The Orléans family restored multiple historical locations during their reign and memorialized the images of their namesake saints in many churches and chapels. One such chapel was the chapelle Saint-Saturnin at the castle of Fontainebleau. The chapel was renovated and restored to its religious function in 1836. During the July Monarchy, stained glass windows were installed in the chapel, and in the windows were represented Saint Philip and Saint Amelia. Princess Marie, the daughter of Louis-­ Philippe and Marie-Amélie, prepared the images for the stained glass windows. The two saints bearing a strong resemblance to the royal couple, designed by the princess, did not go unnoticed by the legitimists. In 1836, La Mode wrote a short article on the artwork and restoration of the chapel, which represented well many of the recurrent arguments the legitimists used to criticize particularly the queen and the entire Orléans dynasty. Firstly, the article named the magazines favourable to the Orléans family as guilty of “flagornerie”, toadyism, as if they themselves were an impartial publication.54 Secondly, the article portrayed the royal couple as vain and superficial in their religious devotion. La Mode criticized that Saint Philip looked more like a French instead of a Galilean and that Saint Amelia looked like a fifty-year-­old when in reality, the saint had died at the age of twentyseven. The magazine believed the reason for the saints to resemble the royal couple was that her filial devotion had guided the artist, Princess Marie. The article continued to argue that the artist had only wanted to place family portraits over an altar instead of saints’ images, which it only saw as another sign of the family’s hypocrisy. La Mode then proceeded to compare the placing of the royal saints’ images in the chapel to another religious establishment, l’hospice de Marie-Thérèse, where there would have been a painting over the altar bearing a  resemblance to Madame la Dauphine, Marie-Thérèse. According to the article, Marie-Thérèse had been very anxious about the painting once she heard about it for flattering had no room in a place of worship even though, according to La Mode, Marie-Thérèse indeed was a saint, unlike Marie-Amélie.55 La Mode’s criticism is particularly noteworthy when one recalls the way Marie-Thérèse was repeatedly portrayed as Antigone during the 1810s, which above all symbolized her filial love for her father and uncles. It appears that only legitimist filial love was acceptable. According to La Mode, the historical truth was that Saint Amelia had died at the age of twenty-seven, and Saint Philip had been Galilean. As we

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saw regarding the discussion around the Delaroche’s painting Sainte Amélie Reine de Hongrie, the early medieval saint’s history is very obscure and, therefore, it is difficult to refer to any historical truth regarding the death of the saint. Not to mention that La Mode did not raise the question of historical truth in an earlier issue where it discussed Delaroche’s painting. Perhaps La Mode did not want to pass over a chance to criticize the artist of the stained glass windows, a member of the Orléans family. The young sculptor and artist, Marie d’Orléans, duchesse de Wurtemberg, died in 1839 at the age of twenty-five. Her best-known sculpture was that of Joan of Arc made for the new musée de Versailles in 1837. The death of Princess Marie was one more occasion for the legitimist press to criticize the Orléans family, and the role model of the princess’ most famous sculpture was a convenient tool for this purpose even if the magazine did not criticize her art itself. La Mode suggested that a statue of Joan of Arc could be placed on her grave to celebrate Marie as an artist and to remind her of the glory of legitimacy. According to La Mode, Joan of Arc only fought to save the French throne for the “monseigneur le vrai roi”.56 In another article, the magazine called the artist a noble and complimented the young princess for capturing the heroic and modest nature of Joan of Arc in the sculpture. Edouard Walsh, the director of the magazine and contributor of this article, continued that she had captured well “la vierge des fleurs de lys” but did not have any fleurs de lys in her mortuary sheet.57 According to Walsh, it was a pity that the royal princess, despite capturing the heroic spirit of Joan of Arc in her art, did not have the true symbol of the French monarchy in her mortuary sheet. According to the legitimist journalist, the symbols of Bourbon rule were undoubtedly the only legitimate symbols of the French monarchy. Another means to attack the saintly image of Queen Marie-Amélie was through the spouses of her children, the royal princes and princesses married to the house of Orléans. The legitimists perceived Catholicism as the only true faith in and for France, but certain spouses of the Orléans princes and princesses came from Protestant families. La Mode used the situation against Marie-Amélie even though the magazine had repeatedly referred to the duchesse de Berry as a new Jeanne d’Albret all through the beginning of the 1830s. The legitimist magazine conveniently omitted that Jeanne d’Albret was a fervent Protestant. The heir to the throne, the duc d’Orléans, had married a Protestant princess in 1837. According to La Mode, the queen had ordered for the

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bedroom of her daughter-in-law pictures of Saint Clotilde, Saint Radegund, Saint Balthild, and Queen Blanche to convert her to Catholicism. The father of the princess had ordered a picture of Luther to the bedroom to fight the Catholic influence, according to the legitimists.58 The magazine implied that the Bourbons would have never agreed to marry a Protestant and that this marriage only proved how desperate and unwanted the Orléans family was.59 The magazine pictured Marie-Amélie’s efforts as superficial as her whole saintliness. The episode of religious images, no doubt, was drawn entirely from the imagination of the legitimist author.60 Another sign of Marie-Amélie’s alleged shallow devotion to Catholicism and French people was the abandoning the basilica of SaintDenis as a royal burial place. In 1838, Edouard Walsh bemoaned the pitiful state of Saint-Denis and the way the final sleeping place of so many French queens and kings was left to such a miserable state after its destruction in the late eighteenth century. The author presented the restoration’s slow progress as negligence from the part of the Orléans family and bemoaned that there were no images of Saint Clotilde, Saint Radegund, or Saint Louis there. Walsh pleaded to the “pieuse” MarieAmélie to bring flowers to the church as a decoration.61 In addition to evoking the medieval royal saints, the legitimist author implied that forsaking the royal burial place signified abandoning the last Bourbon kings and queens, notably Marie-Antoinette, Louis XVI, and Louis XVIII. On a symbolic level, the Orléans family did exactly that; they discontinued the chain of Bourbon kings and wished to start a new dynasty, at least to some degree. According to La Mode, whatever the Orléans family did, they did it wrong because they were not the Bourbon family. Even when, as we saw earlier, the Orléans royals made references to the medieval royal saints, they did it wrong. The historical references inevitably give the image of an Orléans dynasty looking backwards.However, one has to remember that the public images were only partially in the hands of the royal persons themselves. Yet, the existence of these idealized representations of the queen tells a straightforward story of the narrative the July Monarchy wanted to associate itself with—despite the ever-growing gap between the narrative and the reality. One feature defining especially the Orléans dynasty, stemming from the examples mentioned above, is the failure to not attach itself to a different (monarchic, national, royal) past as the Bourbon dynasty had attached itself to. For it was this very same history that the Orléans dynasty’s critics

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used against it. This conflicting situation related strongly to the idea of modernity: whose history the monarchy associated itself with, whose narrative they were telling, and how they made sense of the world. Both the supporters and critics of the July Monarchy agreed that the justification(s) for the monarchy had changed, and the people now justified the existence of the monarchy. Nevertheless, the practical implementation of this idea divided the supporters and critics. Indeed, the July Monarchy failed to re-­ invent the need for a monarchy.

4.2   Adélaïde d’Orléans, Power Behind the Throne Adélaïde d’Orléans was an immensely wealthy and powerful woman who was able to influence her brother, the king, and other powerful men of the July Monarchy. Nevertheless, in many ways, she was (made) invisible. As an unmarried sister to the king, she had a very different role in the monarchy compared to Marie-Amélie, the duchesse de Berry, or the duchesse d’Angoulême. Adélaïde’s position was not dependent upon giving birth to an heir or legitimating the dynasty with history. She was not considered as a symbolic mother of the French, nor, despite being included in the representations of the larger Orléans family, made the focus of these representations. Supporters of the Orléans rule, therefore, made fewer representations of her, than critics of the regime. Adélaïde drew the focus of critics, because she was her brother’s unofficial political adviser and her network included many significant politicians within the July Monarchy. Of particular interest in this chapter is how historical references and narratives presented and emphasised Adélaïde’s influence on her brother as well as the relationship between the pair. Due to the ever-increasing censorship, the opponents of the July Monarchy, especially, had to be witty, implicit, and equivocal in their criticism. As these opponents were aware, to criticize Madame Adélaïde was to criticize Louis-Philippe and the July Monarchy. Munro Price writes in his work, The Perilous Crown, that the opposition attacked Adélaïde because of her politics and her gender.62 The opposition press harshly criticised all the central politicians of the Orléans regime, but gender did not come into play when the criticism was aimed at men. Examining this criticism more closely, it is evident that it draws on historical narratives related to earlier (fictional or factual) women who used power. In other words, Adélaïde was not portrayed exceptional, but

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typical by both the opponents and supporters. The relationship between genders, uses of history, and political authority were far from unambiguous, and these three need to be read within their social, cultural, and political context. In the following chapter, the representations associated with Adélaïde in the 1830s are thoroughly deconstructed to analyse the political and historical narratives. I will enlarge, diversify, and deepen the excellent foundation laid by Munro Price. The way Adélaïde’s political role and influence were represented in contemporary discussions strongly divided debaters decisively into the July Monarchy supporters and critics. The supporters of the new rule portrayed Adélaïde’s influence very discreetly. While Marco de Saint-Hilaire (1796–1887) does not specifically state his allegiance to either party in his 1830 work, it is still a compelling example. He portrayed Adélaïde as ruling hearts, which was a common expression to describe women’s power as opposed to political power.63 The author presented Adélaïde using soft, feminine power, a narrative typical for the supporters of the Orléans dynasty. He also portrayed Louis-Philippe positively without saying a negative word about the Bourbons. Saint-Hilaire did not present LouisPhilippe as a king, due to the publishing time, August 1830.64 Madame Adélaïde was portrayed as always on her brother’s side, but without any political role. In his work, Saint-Hilaire described Adélaïde as the granddaughter of Henri IV with the virtues and honesty of the first Bourbon king.65 The son of Jeanne d’Albret was frequently seen in contemporary literature as the forefather of the Bourbon family. However, he was also, in fact, the ancestor of the Orléans branch since the two branches existing in the 1830s only separated at the time of Louis XIV.  The author emphasized that Louis-Philippe and his family were as much Bourbons as Charles X was and, consequently, France continued to be ruled by the same family in 1830 as it had been in the 1820s. This interpretation emphasized the continuation of the monarchy more than the rupture. However, as we saw in the previous chapter, the first Bourbon king was much more important to the Bourbon branch than to the Orléans branch. Adélaïde’s life was often idealized in works supporting her brother’s politics. Another author, Adolphe de Leuven,66 wrote: Madame Adélaïde unites a strong and noble character to great charity and all virtues of her sex. She courageously endured the long misfortunes that

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showered her during her youth. Her sensibility has not become blunt; Madame is happy whenever she can help an unfortunate soul. Charity work is a virtue of the Orléans and Penthièvre families, and she has not abandoned this heritage.67

Leuven did not make many historical references in the parts where he discussed Adélaïde, nor did he provide any additional information about Adélaïde’s character except emphasizing her apolitical nature. In the citation above, the author made reference to her maternal ancestors: the Penthièvre family that had, as we saw in previous chapters, a very charitable reputation. Adélaïde’s difficult past was evoked to underline that she understood the importance of charity, which, according to works such as these, was her most important activity. Charity was also one of the rare socially acceptable activities an unmarried woman could perform during this period. In Leuven’s work, Le Roi des Français et sa famille/par un patriote de 1789, Madame Adélaïde was considered to have strong “liberal” opinions in the court of the “corrupted” Bourbon king.68 No doubt, Adélaïde did not support Charles X’s politics, but one should not consider this statement as a neutral description of Adélaïde’s political position. The work supported the Orléans’ politics, and therefore, it was in its interest to present Madame Adélaïde as (moderately) liberal in order to create a juxtaposition between the Bourbons and the Orléans. However, the author firmly denied that Adélaide would have been guilty of having “des opinions libérales très prononcées[…]” because that would have been unforgivable and unthinkable for a princess like her. According to Leuven, “bons citoyens” absolved Adélaïde from the “crime” of having political opinions that were too strong.69 Both texts demonstrate the conflict in the representations of Adélaïde during the reign of her brother. The more favourable the text was to Adélaïde and the July Monarchy, the less it brought up her political influence. Leuven’s work is an excellent example in its denial that Adélaïde would have had strong political opinions of any kind. Indeed, it seems that the question was not about Adélaïde’s liberal opinions, but that she had public opinions at all. In contrast, the adversaries of the July Monarchy did not hesitate to highlight how powerful she was during the 1830s and 1840s and how she influenced her brother. For example, in 1835, La Mode published a disparaging article of a fictional government crisis where

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all the men refused to serve Louis-­Philippe. Therefore, he had to resort to women to form a government. According to the magazine, présidente du conseil (leading the government) and the minister of war was none other than Madame Adélaïde.70 Furthermore, in 1890, Comtesse de Mirabeau published the correspondence between Charles-­Maurice de Talleyrand, a famous French diplomat, Adélaïde, and Louis-­Philippe in which Adélaïde was described as a “homme d’État”, a statesman, without sarcasm.71 In sum, the recurrent pattern in these contemporary representations was that supporters diminished Adélaïde’s political influence and role, while critics repeatedly emphasised her authority. The conflict was equally apparent in one of the rare contemporary biographies of Madame Adélaïde. In 1832, Léon Pillet (1803–1868), head of the Opéra de Paris from 1840 to 1847 and supporter of the Orléans dynasty, published a short biographical pamphlet about Adélaïde.72 Pillet’s work is, unfortunately, missing several pages, but it offered a portrait of Adélaïde as a religious, humble, and submissive, yet good-humoured person.73 The booklet did not contain historical references, at least in the pages available. It focused mainly on Adélaïde’s youth before the Restoration and the hardships she and her entire family had to endure. Her political ambitions were not mentioned at all. On the contrary, Pillet portrayed her as any other ideal royal woman: intelligent, religious, virtuous, and modest. Pillet presented Adélaïde as loyal to her brother and as an active partisan during the July Revolution and the process of Louis-­Philippe becoming a king. Pillet described the famous discussion Adélaïde had with Adolphe Thiers that resulted in Louis-Philippe ascending the throne to save France. The author emphasized that Adélaïde interfered with revolutionary events, for the sake of her brother and France. He highlighted her superior skills of contribution (agrément), which helped to further her brother’s cause. At the end of the biography, Pillet returned to a more conventional royal representation of Adélaïde by describing her wish to educate her nieces and her charity work for the poor and sick. She even contracted a mild version of cholera, “a payé son tribut”, during the epidemic in Paris.74 Pillet did recognize Adélaïde’s role in the outcome of the July Revolution, but overall, his portrayal of her was highly idealized. The Journal des débats, now favourable to the Orléans regime, frequently reported Adélaïde’s and the royal family’s travels and activities. In the same way as almost all the literature supporting the Orléans family did

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so in the 1830s, the Journal des débats mostly focused on Adélaïde’s charity work and how she always stayed by her brother and his family’s side.75 These were concise articles without any elaborate descriptions. Occasionally, however, the Journal des débats brought up her political role when she met politicians, either alone or together with the king. For example, in 1831, the Journal des débats reported that she met with the Minister of Foreign Affairs; in 1832, she met Talleyrand (a friend and a diplomat), and in 1833, she reportedly met Étienne Maurice Gérard, Marshal of France (and Prime Minister of France in 1834).76 These brief mentions revealed her political influence within her brother’s regime, yet they were far rarer than those about her charity work. The same pattern, or conflict, also existed in other representations of great (historical) women. When historians pictured, for example, the early medieval Merovingian queens, they highlighted the political power of those queens that they wanted to defame and diminished the political influence of those they praised. This pattern is especially visible in regards to the history of the saint Merovingian queens, such as Saint Balthild from the seventh century. She was a regent for her sons, but according to early nineteenth-century authors, such as Élisabeth Brun, who published Balthild’s biography in 1847, she abhorred this power. In fact, according to Brun, she only accepted it out of duty, constantly wishing to be able to retire to a convent.77 Several nineteenth-century authors emphasized that nothing was as appalling as a woman who desired power. Therefore, historians presented the saint queens in a very normative manner. In other words, these women were depicted as categorically disdaining worldly power. The supporters of the July Monarchy presented Adélaïde the same way as uninterested in earthly authority but the legitimists fully embraced the narrative of her as a power-­hungry princess. * * * The opponents of the July Monarchy and the Orléans family insulted Adélaïde more or less openly to expose her influence on her brother. They also sought to portray her as an epithet of vices to undermine the authority of the Orléans family and the king. One method was to question her chastity. The fact that she had remained unmarried led to speculations about possible secret marriages, illegitimate children, or even incest with her brother. References to history allowed the critics to defame

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Adélaïde  implicitly, without mentioning her name. In other words, the allusions were sufficient. Throughout the nineteenth century, there were accusations that Adélaïde had had an affair with her brother and that the affair had resulted in illegitimate children.78 Munro Price has shown that during the July Monarchy, there were cartoons that depicted Adélaïde with her supposed illegitimate children, who shared particular features with LouisPhilippe: they resembled the shape of a pear. The pear was associated with Louis-Philippe after caricaturist and artist Honoré Daumier published a popular caricature of Louis-Philippe slowly transforming into a pear.79 Even the Journal des débats, a magazine favourable to the Orléans, published a short article in 1832 about a woman called Rose-Sophie, arrested near Paris, who claimed she was Madame Adélaïde’s illegitimate child. Rose-Sophie was accused of multiple frauds, among other things.80 This news might have inspired many of the regime’s critics to accuse Adélaïde of having illegitimate or even incestuous children. Price took issue, in particular, with La Mode’s accusations against Adélaïde, but these have not yet been thoroughly analysed. La Mode was one of the leading legitimist newspapers during the July Monarchy. It was dedicated to the duchesse de Berry and to the cause of her son, whom the magazine saw as the legitimate heir to the French throne. La Mode published short sarcastic “news” called épingles (pins) in each issue. In 1833, the magazine published the following épingle: “A reasonable recompense on the news about a child born in London in 1793 for an unknown father and a mother; address to Tuileries, to Madame Messalina.”81 Tuileries was the residence of the Orléans family. Madame Messalina referred to Adélaïde because in the Tuileries there were not very many prominent women La Mode would want to defame. Marie-Amélie was not in London in 1793 and her daughters were not yet born at that time. La Mode implied that Adélaïde would have had this child in London at the age of sixteen, when she fled the Revolution. In addition to implying that Adélaïde would have had a secret child as a young girl, there are two other noteworthy points in this épingle. The first point is that Adélaïde was called Messalina, and the second is that the épingle was published in 1833. To call Adélaïde Messalina implied that the magazine wanted to represent her as a promiscuous and scheming woman. Messalina was the third wife of the Roman Emperor Claudius, whose notorious reputation has made her name a synonym for women deemed

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unnatural, promiscuous, and politically dangerous. La Mode gave no information about the history of Messalina, but the magazine assumed the readers would understand what this word signified. One has to keep in mind that the readership of La Mode in the 1830s comprised most likely of well-educated people who knew their history of Roman Emperors. Adélaïde, however, was not the only one to be called with this name. The most famous Messalina from recent history was Marie-Antoinette, who was defined as such in multiple pamphlets, as Price has also mentioned. For example, in 1789, an anonymous short pamphlet was published, which described three famous “evil” queens having a conversation in Hell: Marie-Antoinette, Catherine de’ Medici, and the early medieval Merovingian Queen Fredegund. Marie-Antoinette was the Messalina of these three women, and according to the pamphlet, she outweighed even the two notorious queens with her evil and immoral deeds.82 This was not the only pamphlet of this kind. Lynn Hunt has identified several other similar pamphlets from the same period in her study The Family Romance of the French Revolution.83 The logic behind the defamation was the same during the 1790s and 1830s: to attack the regime by disgracing the women embodying it. It is noteworthy that already in the late sixteenth century, during the reign of Catherine de’ Medici and, especially, after the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre, several Merovingian queens were referred to as being as equally evil female rulers as Catherine.84 Catherine’s critics, particularly Protestants and those generally opposing the rule of women, used historical narratives of queens such as Fredegund to argue against women in positions of power. Bringing up the famous sixth- and seventh-century Merovingian queens in the sixteenth century highlighted the idea of France’s long struggle with women using illegitimate power. This is an exact repetition of what followed after Marie-­Thérèse tried to rally troops in Bordeaux in 1815—the opponents of the Bourbon rule defamed her for using allegedly illegitimate power. They represented her as a monstrous woman similar to the Merovingian queens such as Fredegund and Brunhilda. La Mode added Adélaïde to the long chain of “Messalinas” even though her position substantially differed from the other aforementioned royal women. Firstly, she was not married and had no offspring. The maternal roles of Fredegund, Catherine, and Marie-Antoinette, on the other hand, were integral to the propaganda used by their opponents. To be more

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exact, it was their roles as mothers to legitimate male heirs, which was essential. Adélaïde was only alluded  to having an illegitimate child. Accusations of incest can be found in the propaganda directed against the royal Messalinas. Secondly, Fredegund was Germanic, Catherine Italian, and Marie-­Antoinette Austrian. The political opponents never forgot to remind the readers that these women did not represent France but foreign powers.85 Adélaïde was not a foreigner, and even though she was accused of many things, including stinginess and alcoholism, she was French. Marie-Antoinette was not Adélaïde’s only relative who was called Messalina. Marie-Antoinette’s sister, Maria Carolina of Austria, Queen of Naples, was Marie-Amélie’s mother and, in revolutionary propaganda, often portrayed as Messalina similarly to her younger sister. Maria Carolina, who died in 1814, was a strong political figure in her kingdom. During the revolutionary era, at the end of the eighteenth century, she too was vilified like,  and because of, Marie-Antoinette.86 Interestingly, MarieAmélie was not described as Messalina, nor were there references to her mother as Messalina in the 1830s. There was more than one reference, however, to Adélaïde as Messalina in La Mode. In the same 1833 issue, which espoused the rumour about Adélaïde’s illegitimate child, there was another épingle that announced: “Madame Messalin went to see Lucrèce Borgia. She found the tragedy very tame.”87 By referring to Victor Hugo’s play about the famous Italian Renaissance noblewoman Lucrezia Borgia, a play that strongly contributed to popular representations of Lucrezia as a cruel and violent woman, La Mode implied that Adélaïde was even worse. The play had its opening in February 1833.88 According to French researcher Sylvain Ledda, Hugo’s Lucrezia is not merely an incarnation of evil, but an allegory of death that can surpass time and place.89 She is a murderer and commits adultery. In Hugo’s play, Lucrezia has a son with her brother, and in the end, the son kills her. Lucrezia’s (uncontrolled) sexuality is the point of criticism in La Mode. According to Ledda, the name Borgia was associated in the play with orgy (l’orgie) and especially with the l’orgie funébre, death, and lust.90 La Mode was insinuating that, like Lucrezia, Adélaïde had an incestuous relationship with her brother. To remind the reader, only three lines later, the magazine implied that Adélaïde had had a child in London at the age of sixteen. Lucrezia was yet another synonym for Messalina, and this illustrated a very inventive use of contemporary culture to defame Adélaïde. No doubt, the history of the Borgias was familiar to the readers

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of La Mode because the magazine repeatedly referred to contemporary plays and works of art. The same year, 1833, La Mode published two very similar épingles. They read: [M]adame Messalina was distressed to notice that there are no vineyards in Normandy: she would have strongly preferred to travel to Bourgogne.91 [M]me Messalina does not comprehend why someone would want to take thermal waters anywhere else than in Bourgogne or in Champagne.92

The pins attacked Adélaïde in three ways. Firstly, she was referred to as Messalina, which represented her as a  scheming and immoral woman using illegal power, as we have seen. Secondly, the pins emphasized her alleged drinking problem. According to Price, Adélaïde was frequently mocked to be fond of drinking due to her reddish skin colour.93 Thirdly, the location of Bourgogne can refer, in addition to being a famous wine region, to Marguerite de Bourgogne. In 1832, Alexandre Dumas published a play entitled La Tour de Nesle, which focused on the scandal in 1314 around the (future) Queen of France, Marguerite de Bourgogne. She was accused and condemned of adultery and imprisoned for the rest of her short life.94 She died in 1315. Sylvain Ledda pointed out in his article that La Tour de Nesle had only appeared sometime before Hugo’s play on Lucrezia Borgia. He also noted that two plays had very similar themes, especially regarding their heroines’ “crimes” and adulterous affairs.95 Considering these factors and La Mode’s wish to use any means possible to defame Adélaïde, it is reasonable to assume the épingles also alluded to La Tour de Nesle. Thus, the magazine used two quite similar historical narratives to undermine Adélaïde’s sexual moral. The early 1830s witnessed a number of plays where the royal power was feminized such as Victor Hugo’s Marie Tudor (1833), La Tour de Nesle, and, for example, Henri III et sa cour also by Dumas (1829).96 The feminization of royal power was a sign of decadence in these plays, and perhaps La Mode implied a similar corruption of power within the Orléans dynasty. In 1833, there were more than a  dozen references to Adélaïde as Messalina in La Mode. After this year, however, the references diminished rapidly.97 This clear peak was a direct result of the political situation in France. In 1832, the patron of the magazine, the duchesse de Berry, attempted a coup, and she was imprisoned after it failed. La Mode supported

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the duchesse throughout her imprisonment, and the magazine attacked the royal family, especially Louis-Philippe and Queen Marie-Amélie. Adélaïde had her share of the criticism, portrayed as Messalina, scheming for her brother. La Mode did not withdraw its support for the duchesse de Berry even after it was discovered that she, a widow since 1820, was pregnant and a secret marriage had taken place. The year 1833 was an equally significant year for the legitimist cause because it was the very year “Henri V”, the son of the duchesse de Berry, came of age. In July 1833, the duchesse de Berry was released with her infant daughter, and sailed to Palermo to meet her husband. As there was no longer any need to put pressure on Louis-Philippe by insulting Adélaïde on behalf of the duchesse de Berry, Adélaïde almost completely ceased to be called Messalina in the pages of La Mode. This incident is an excellent example of how, due to her political influence, Adélaïde’s gender and sexuality were used against her. Historical queens also  received their share of political defamation, deemed immoral, promiscuous, or power-hungry. For example, Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine was demonized in the nineteenth century. Historians, who took againts her, called her Mélusine, a monstrous female figure first mentioned in the late fourteenth century, who appeared as a half serpent on Saturdays. Jules Michelet, one of the most famous French historians and politicians of the nineteenth century, also called Eleanor a Jezebel.98 Similarly, Brunhilda was often demonized as an  incestuous and powerseeking queen. She was labelled Jezebel after her death, and this name was used repeatedly during the sixteenth century in connection to Catherine de’ Medici and again in the nineteenth century.99 La Mode did not label Adélaïde as Jezebel or Mélusine, but the magazine called her Madame Atthalin, which referred to the name of Jezebel’s daughter in the Bible, Athaliah. In January 1833, La Mode wrote that “The statue of Messalina has been ordered to the private apartments of madame Ath...”.100 Like so many of La Mode’s insults, this was laden with multifaceted meanings. This épingle implied that Adélaïde would have ordered the statue of the famous Roman empress to her apartment, to celebrate herself if we are to believe the other épingles published the same year. “Madame Ath...” is a short name for Madame Atthalin, which, according to Munro Price, was a popular name for Adélaïde in the contemporary press.101 The name also referred to Baron Atthalin. He was Louis-Philippe’s aide-de-camp and Adélaïde had known him for decades. Magazines like La Mode implied that there would have been an affair or a

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secret marriage between Adélaïde and the baron Atthalin, which is the reason why the magazine continually questioned her marital status.102 Madame Atthalin, or “Madame Ath..”, therefore can be read as a reference to a secret marriage and to Jezebel’s daughter. As well as these meanings, Munro Price adds that Athalie, the French name for Athaliah, was made memorable by Jean Racine in one of his tragedies in the late seventeenth century.103 Racine’s Athalie was performed several times in Comédie-­Française throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. According to the French magazine Revue des deux mondes (1901), Athalie was praised in many literary histories as Racine’s best tragedy but it fell behind Phèdre and Andromaque in popularity. Athalie was performed 311 times after 1774.104 The play was very well known in the 1830s by the time La Mode started referring to it. It was even performed to celebrate the birth of Henri in 1820.105 Yet, Adélaïde was not the only target of criticism. Legitimists drew a multitude of similarities between Racine’s play and the Bourbon family. Indeed, La Mode’s use of references to Racine’s play went so far that the magazine was heavily fined in 1838 for mocking the king. This was possible due to the new censorship laws imposed in France in 1835. The press had criticized the king and the royal family quite harshly for the first five years of the regime, and there had been a Republican uprising in France in 1834 and attempts on the king’s life the following year. The September laws of 1835 ended the relative freedom for the French press imposed after the Revolution of 1830.106 One should remember that one catalyst for the July Revolution was the highly restrictive law on the press imposed in 1830. The fine resulted from a gravure of the coronation of Joas107 that La Mode published in 1838. Joas was a character in Racine’s aforementioned play Athalie. In the play, Joas’ coronation was preceded by the death of Athaliah. La Mode, in a commentary, paralleled Joas to the exiled duc de Bordeaux whom the legitimists perceived as the rightful king of France. Athaliah and her crimes were paralleled to Adélaïde and the whole Orléans family.108 The message in La Mode was that the Orléans family and King Louis-Philippe were usurpers. This image and the related commentaries led to a conviction for the magazine. As we have seen, the attacks by La Mode against Adélaïde increased when the duchesse de Berry was arrested in 1832. Right after the arrest, Adélaïde becomes Athaliah when, according to La Mode, she waits for the duchesse de Berry’s execution by the place de la Révolution.109 Adélaïde as

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Athaliah was also accused of dancing with the man, who had exposed the duchesse when she was hiding after the coup.110 Yet the references to Joas, for example, did not seem to surface in La Mode until 1837. We can deduce that Adélaïde was first Athaliah, and then the imagery related to the story of the biblical villain was extended to the whole Orléans family over the course of six years from 1832 to 1838. La Mode’s conviction in 1838 did not, however, put an end to the criticism heaped upon Adélaïde. In fact, the late 1830s and early 1840s were the years when Adélaïde was most visible in La Mode. * * * La Mode also used the history of the Orléans family in the seventeenth century in reference to Adélaïde. Many of these references were also aimed against King Louis-Philippe because the legitimists discovered similarities between the Fronde and the July Revolution. The Fronde took place between 1648 and 1653 during the early period of Louis XIV’s reign. The conflict originated from the nobility’s wish to control the monarchy’s power, especially the power of unpopular ministers and Louis XIV’s mother. The Orléans family, including mademoiselle d’Orléans, Anne Marie Louise d’Orléans, also known as La Grande Mademoiselle (1627–1693), and a cousin of Louis XIV, opposed the royal troops. In 1837, La Mode published an article dedicated to the young duchesse d’Orléans, Helene of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, on the occasion of her marriage to the crown prince of France, Ferdinand-Philippe d’Orléans: Hotel de Ville, where you are, Madame, also witnessed the most memorable scenes of the Fronde. More than once La Grande Mademoiselle d’Orléans, who had a canon fired against the army of the King (I am here referring, Your Highness, to the daughter of Gaston and not to your aunt Mademoiselle Adélaïde), came here. […] At that time, there was an uncle of the King, an  unnatural relative, mutinous subject, an  infidel prince, who conspired against the minority of the monarch. It was the duc d’Orléans. All this restlessness, Madame, lasted many years; it resulted in unlimited misery for the habitants of the good city, destruction of all commerce, a civil war, and even a massacre that had its starting signal given from the window you see across from you.111

In this passage, La Mode implied similarities between Adélaïde and La Grande Mademoiselle, who was portrayed fighting against the king’s army

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(or rather, the king’s mother and ministers) with her father Gaston d’Orléans, the uncle of King Louis XIV. La Mode was using sarcasm when it started that it was not referring to Adélaïde, even though, according to the magazine, one could easily confuse La Grande Mademoiselle with Adélaïde since both fought against the legitimate king. La Mode explicitly implied that the July Revolution, and 1830 uprising against the Bourbon king, led to a similar tragedy following the betrayal orchestrated by La Grande Mademoiselle and the duc d’Orléans in the seventeenth century. In other words, according to the magazine, the Orléans family had already shown in the seventeenth century that they were not able to be trusted. La Mode did not fail to recognize the role of Mesdemoiselles d’Orléans in these significant political events, even though the defamation was mostly aimed at  La Grande Mademoiselle’s father, Gaston d’Orléans, who had been portrayed very negatively in literature ever since the seventeenth century.112 The passage in La Mode explained the way the Fronde ended. According to the magazine, “le peuple”, tired with the rebels, called for the king and opened the city gates for him.113 In addition to accusing Adélaïde and Louis-Philippe of betraying the rightful king and causing misery in France, La Mode implied that eventually “le peuple” will grow tired of them and will call back the Bourbon king. “Le peuple” will, according to La Mode, recognize, as it did in the seventeenth century, the lawful ruler and overthrow the usurper. La Mode did not explain, however, why “le peuple” had not saved the king and queen from execution in the 1790s. The Fronde was a popular topic in La Mode, and, for example, in 1839, the magazine took up news from Le Moniteur that “Her Highness Madame” would have donated 10.000 francs to the victims of a storm. La Mode’s article’s point was to try to discover, who this Madame could be since the only lawful Mesdames were the duchesse de Berry and the Dauphine, the duchesse d’Angoulême. To keep in mind, the title “Madame” referred to the sister(s) and sister-in-law(s) of the king.114 Neither were in France, so it had to be Adélaïde. But: Could it be by chance that the July Revolution, because it made Louis-­ Philippe a king, imagined that it is powerful enough to change the title of Mademoiselle to that of Madame, mademoiselle Adélaïde d’Orléans? The July Revolution would thus be indiscrete and contemptuous. The Fronde, its forefather, was more timid and limited; it conserved the name of

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Mademoiselle for the old frondeuse [participant of Fronde] duchesse de Montpensier, even after she tried hard to lose it together with M. de Lauzun.115

The duchesse de Montpensier was no other than La Grande Mademoiselle, the daughter of Gaston d’Orléans. La Mode compared the July Revolution again to the Fronde and criticized that Adélaïde was made a Madame after her brother became a king. La Grande Mademoiselle was never a king’s sister or daughter, which makes the comparison between the two women of the Orléans family untenable. The point in La Mode’s comparison of Adélaïde to La Grande Mademoiselle was to ridicule her for the alleged marriage to Atthalin, which we discussed earlier. In La Mode’s view, Adélaïde could not be a Madame as the king’s sister because LouisPhilippe was a usurper, so they insinuated that she had been awarded the title due to a secret marriage. M. de Lauzun was the love interest of La Grande Mademoiselle, whom she would have wanted to marry, but he was below her social class. This passage, however, reveals a contradiction in La Mode’s writings about Adélaïde. On many occasions, the magazine implied that Adélaïde was married to Atthalin, but here the magazine denies the marriage and makes a point of calling her a mademoiselle to highlight her lower value, especially compared to the two lawful Mesdames, the duchesses de Berry and d’Angoulême. * * * In December 1837, La Mode published a two-page satirical article entitled “La Sainte Adélaïde”, which was ostensibly dedicated to the tenth-century Saint Adelaide (931–999), whose feast day was December 15. The article began with a description of the virtues of the tenth-­century Adelaide, who “[…] did not love revolutions or revolutionaries.”116 This statement referred both to Madame Adélaïde’s actions during the 1830 Revolution, and to her father. Saint Adelaide was also a “model for sobriety”.117 The article continued with descriptions of other Adelaides from the history of France, such as “Adélaïde, marquise de Suze” from the eleventh century who “found so many husbands” due to her gentle nature and beautiful appearance.118 Then the article continued briefly with two other medieval Adelaides, both Queens of France, before pausing with a different kind of Adelaide.

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The article was written as a dialogue between two anonymous people, where the first one was trying to guess which Adelaide the other one wanted to hear about. After mentioning virtuous Adelaides from medieval France, the first person begins to describe a different type of Adelaide who was “arrogant, ambitious, mean, resentful, who interferes with state affairs, who throws herself to political furies, and who never received from the esteem of a man the title of a spouse.”119 This Adelaide with a black heart “was driven by these wicked passions that she blew around her, she helped to chase off the legitimate heir to her fortune […]”.120 The article implied that the description could concern Madame Adélaïde d’Orléans by emphasizing her political meddling and unmarried status. As we have seen repeatedly, ambition and participation in political affairs were not acceptable for women.121 In the last lines of the article, La Mode revealed that it was not referring to the king’s sister, but to a fourteenth-century Dutch Adelaide. The entire article, however, was a thinly veiled slur against Madame Adélaïde. The article recycled the very same arguments the magazine has used many times before, and historical accuracy was not the focus in this article but the will to demonstrate how many better Adelaides France had seen the years. Over a thousand years ago, there was an Adelaide, who knew how to behave and would not access the male public sphere.122 The medieval royal Adelaides, Adelaide of Paris (c.853–901), Adelaide of Savoy (c.1100–1154), and Adelaide of Susa (c.1020–1091), were not well-known queens in the nineteenth century, and the article offered no background to them—except that they were the complete opposite of Madame Adélaïde in all aspects. The article did not mention the mother of Adélaïde and Louis-Philippe, deceased in 1821, Marie-Adélaïde de Bourbon-Penthièvre. The tenth-century Saint Adelaide was chosen to be the centre of the article due to her feast day. The custom of celebrating the royals on their namesake saint’s feast day was reversed to insult the king’s sister. The legitimists drew significantly from history to defame Adélaïde d’Orléans. They considered the Orléans king a usurper and those around him as, more or less, traitors. Even if their claim was not very successful, they nevertheless continued to propagate the idea of the Orléans family as disastrous for France.123 Adélaïde had many qualities the legitimists could attack, and they used narratives of women’s illegitimate power and unnatural character to defame her. They employed virtually the same narratives the French monarchy’s opponents had used against previous queens, royal

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women, and members of the Bourbon family. Indeed, the way Adélaïde and her position were discussed in contemporary press resembles the way French royal mistresses since the sixteenth century were discussed in their contemporary and early nineteenth-century historiography. As historian Christine Adams has recently argued, the mistresses also served as political advisors for the king, but since the nineteenth century, after 1789, historians have tried to “diminish and denigrate” their central role.124 The royal mistresses were portrayed as meddling with politics and having too much personal ambition: “In the postabsolutist polity of the nineteenth century, powerful women were a threat to the political order; the royal mistress had to be cut down to size.”125 In the nineteenth century, a woman, be it a sister or a mistress, could no longer serve as the king’s advisor, and therefore her role was concealed in the literature supporting the Orléans dynasty.

4.3   Duchesse de Berry and the Crisis of the Bourbons The duchesse de Berry was undoubtedly the most prominent figure in the Bourbon family in the early 1830s. She was the mother of “Henri V”, legitimist claimant of the French throne, and the figurehead of the attempted coup d’état in the spring of 1832, which ended with her imprisonment in November 1832 and (re)exile in 1833. Other than the brief time in France before and after the attempted coup, the duchesse sojourned in England and various continental countries in the 1830s since the Bourbon family had been forced to leave France in August 1830. This chapter begins by examining the legitimist discussion before the attempted coup to determine the change in her public profile that took place during and after the coup. After examining the legitimist reactions to the coup and imprisonment, the chapter analyses her critics’ reactions before and after the coup and final exile. The attempted coup and the imprisonment that followed were scandalous for the duchesse and the entire Bourbon family. They were politically and dynastically significant events due to the discovery of her pregnancy while she was in prison in early 1833. The concurrent revelation, in 1833 when the duchesse was still imprisoned in France, of her marriage with an Italian aristocrat, comte Hector Lucchesi-Palli, signified that she no longer qualified as a potential regent for her son. Jo Burr Margadant (1997)

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has argued that only when the duchesse returned to France in the spring of 1832, she became a “politically potent royal symbol”.126 According to Margadant, the duchesse’s motherly role became central in the legitimist narrative due to the attempted coup.127 I consider that, even though the attempted coup definitively made her central in the narrative, her motherhood had been highlighted already in 1820. The coup altered the narrative, but there were significant continuities. How did the revelation of her pregnancy and new marriage affect the public discussion, and how did the legitimists and the July Monarchy supporters receive the news? How was she discussed in France after her second exile, or did she disappear from the public spotlight? The events surrounding the attempted coup in 1832 have attracted much interest among historians and authors, starting almost immediately after her imprisonment and continuing until the recent day.128 This chapter will not discuss in detail the events and reactions they evoked, but confines to the analysis of the uses of historical imagery related to the duchesse. Many historical mothers and mother figures were evoked in the discussions related to the duchesse but the narratives were conflicted and simplistic, only offering one-sided interpretations of history. The duchesse de Berry, beautiful and the most popular member of the Bourbon family, was with King Charles X, her father-in-law, during the fateful days of July and August 1830. She was with the king first in SaintCloud when the gravity of the situation started to become tangible, and later she travelled with him from one estate to another towards the east coast and Cherbourg. On August 16, she crossed the Channel with the ship Great Britain. Whereas most of the Bourbon family settled to the castle of Holyrood in Scotland, the duchesse spent time travelling in England before settling in a private mansion near Holyrood, away from Charles X and the duchesse and duc d’Angoulême. Her children stayed with their grandfather, aunt, and uncle.129 As we have established, the situation in France was volatile and critical for quite some time after Louis-Philippe had been declared king on August 9. One imminent effect of the Revolution was the relative freedom of the press, which enabled the publication of critical voices against the July Monarchy. Also several works defaming the exiled Bourbon family were published following the Revolution. Nevertheless, the legitimists were one of the loudest group of July Monarchy’s critics who would continue to remind the French of the existence of the Bourbon family, even if their political significance was not as considerable as they would

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have wished. The legitimists were not, however, a homogenous group. La Mode, the magazine dedicated to the duchesse, furthered the duchesse and her son’s cause relentlessly all through the 1830s. It was a fortunate coincidence that the exiled royal family found themselves in Holyrood, which was strongly associated with the history of Marie Stuart. All through the July Monarchy, the Bourbons were connected with the history of the Stuarts because the two families shared, according to the legitimists, similar tragic fates.130 The association between Marie Stuart and the duchesse de Berry had already started in the 1820s, as we saw in previous chapters. This chapter opens with examining the defaming works published on the Bourbon family imminently after their exile. After analysing the negative representations, the chapter will continue with the legitimist reactions to the exile and especially to the failed coup of 1832. The magazine La Mode and the publication of François-René Chateaubriand Mémoire sur la captivité de Madame la duchesse de Berry are used as examples of the way history was used to support the rebellious princess. Even though both La Mode and Chateaubriand’s work are well known to historians, their historical references have not been thoroughly analysed. * * * The duchesse was idolized in legitimist publications that aimed to win as much sympathy as possible for the exiled Bourbon family and their supporters. However, simultaneously multiple writings sought to defame the Bourbons. These works often included the duchesse de Berry due to her fundamental role as the mother of the Bourbon heir. As the following example demonstrates, the main target was the Bourbon dynasty’s honesty, legitimacy, and lawfulness. Horace-Napoléon Raisson’s (1798–1854) Amours secrètes des Bourbons, depuis le mariage de Marie-Antoinette jusqu’à la chute de Charles X, par la Csse du C*** was published in 1830, most likely right after the Revolution. The work focused on Louis XVIII and Charles X, and on the latter’s sons and daughters-in-law since Marie-­ Antoinette’s marriage in 1770. The work was pure and simple propaganda that was aimed to strengthen the July Monarchy. In many ways, the work resembled the defaming works published before and during the late eighteenth-­century revolutionary period, such as Les crimes des reines de France, depuis le commencement de la monarchie jusqu’à Marie-Antoinette (Paris 1791).131

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Les crimes des reines de France drew extensive inspiration from the history of France to attack the Bourbon family and monarchy, and it presented all queens as  evil. In Raisson’s work, the emphasis was on the current affairs, especially concerning the duchesse de Berry. In 1830, the Bourbon dynasty’s future lay on the narrow shoulders of the young comte de Chambord (duc de Bordeaux before 1830). Therefore, it was logical to attack his legitimacy. Raisson argued that comte de Chambord was not the son of the duchesse but an impostor and that the duchesse had not been pregnant when the duc de Berry was assassinated. According to Raisson, the duc d’Orléans, currently King of the French, had issued a protest published in an English newspaper in 1820. He claimed that the duchesse’s delivery had been a sophisticated fraud.132 Raisson claimed that the duc d’Orléans had paralleled in his protest the impostor “Henri V” to Napoléon and had warned that France and Europe would face the same misery under the impostor as they had faced during the reign of Napoléon.133 Raisson de-legitimized the only hope of continuity for the Bourbon family but quite revealingly, for a protest “published” in 1820, it ignored that at that moment comte d’Artois (future Charles X) and duc d’Angoulême were also heirs to the throne. It was not until 1830 that they abdicated. The abdication was hardly foretold in 1820. To argue that the duchesse had no legitimate son was to deprive her of all claims to the regency. Raisson’s work was published before the attempted coup took place, so it was not a response to the coup’s justifications. It did aim, at least implicitly, to marginalize the duchesse, for historically widows without male heirs were rapidly cast out of power. Questioning the legitimacy of an heir was a common practice to undermine any regime. We have seen the same practice in historiography when, for example, LouisPierre Anquetil portrayed Merovingian Queen Fredegund’s only surviving son and the future king as a fruit of an adulterous affair.134 Raisson’s work was not by any means the only one presenting LouisPhilippe protesting the legitimacy of the duc de Bordeaux. Le faux héritier de la couronne de France from 1830 was a work dedicated to proving Henri was an impostor and Louis-Philippe was the only rightful ruler of France. The duchesse de Berry had only a minor role to play in the schema proposed by the work, which hardly mentioned her at all within the 175 pages. She was not presented as the instigator of the fraud but merely as a minor accomplice. The Bourbon kings, Louis XVIII and Charles X, were the evil

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criminals according to the Le faux héritier de la couronne de France. The work did not vilify Marie-Caroline but presented her in an almost positive light as the most popular Bourbon family member.135 Raisson’s work Amours secrètes des Bourbons was cited in a very similar type of work published in 1830. An anonymous Histoire scandaleuse politique, anecdotique et bigote des duchesses d’Angoulême et de Berry attacked the daughters-in-law of Charles X. It repeated much of the same accusations as Raisson: that the duchesse de Berry had not been pregnant when her spouse died in 1820 and that the comte de Chambord was an impostor. In addition, the duc de Berry was portrayed as a bigamist and that both spouses had had numerous affairs during their marriage. Similar to Raisson’s work, this one made only very few historical references concerning the duchesse de Berry. The author only remarked briefly that the images of Saint Louis, Saint Balthild, Saint Henri, and Saint Philip, among other French and Bourbon saints, were hung up over the altar in Notre-­ Dame during the duc and duchesse’s wedding ceremony.136 These very same saints King Louis-Philippe would eternalize in chapels—he would transform the Bourbon saints into Orléans saints. A similar type of work, but much larger, was anonymously published in 1831. The publication was entitled Les crimes, les forfaits et les turpitudes des rois de France (Vol. I) and Crimes, scélératesses et turpitudes des reines de France (Vol. II). It followed in the footsteps of the propaganda literature of the 1790s. Both volumes started with the Merovingian period. The first volume proceeded until Charles X, and the second volume until MarieAntoinette. The first volume was strongly inspired by Louis Lavicomterie de Saint-Simon’s 1792 work Les crimes des rois de France, depuis Clovis jusqu’à Louis XVI. The 1831 anonymous author if not supported but at least did not attack against the Orléans family. One clear indication of this nearly favourable approach to the July Monarchy was that Louis-Philippe’s father was not accused of voting for the death of Louis XVI. He was not mentioned at all in the context of Louis XVI’s death.137 It is equally noteworthy that despite attacking the Old Regime monarchy, this anonymous 1831 author did not present the comte de Chambord as an impostor. Like the 1830 Raisson’s work, the duchesse de Berry was not the primary target of any defamation. According to the 1831 anonymous author, Charles X was taking France slowly back to the Middle Ages.138 The only thing written about the duchesse de Berry was related

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to the Bourbon family’s exile in 1830 when she was with her children and “in the Amazon costume, wearing a man’s hat and having a pistol on her waist.”139 A true lioness protecting her children. Even though the work was written to criticize the Bourbon family, in a sense it had in the duchesse’s representation the very same elements as Chateaubriand had a year later in her defence: she surpassed her gender to protect her offspring. The anonymous author made her an Amazon, female warrior, which could equally refer to her well-known love for masked balls. The aforementioned 1830 work, Histoire scandaleuse, politique, anecdotique et bigote des duchesses d’Angoulême et de Berry, also made references to the duchesse’s love of masked balls. According to the work, at some point in the 1820s (the work provided very little exact information such as dates or full names), the duchesse had organized a ball where she had dressed as Agnès Sorel, the infamous mistress of Charles VII of France. The author claimed that one altesse had dressed as the King Charles l’amoureux (VII of France), but the altesse’s name was not revealed. The author implied the person dressed as Charles VII was one of the duchesse’s many admirers or lovers, and called him altesse libérale, which could imply he was from the liberal party or the Orléans family. The main intention was to emphasize the immorality of the duchesse by paralleling her to the famous late medieval mistress. She was voluptuous, passionate, and frivolous.140 Yet, without a doubt, as we will see later, the work portrayed Marie-Thérèse as far more dangerous for France than Marie-Caroline, who was merely portrayed as inconsiderate and shallow. The number of defaming works did not increase during the flight or imprisonment of the duchesse in 1832–1833 as it seems that while her supporters tried their best to keep her cause alive in public, the Orléans regime wanted her to disappear without too much noise. She was not made into a martyr, for that was the last thing the new regime needed. Consequently, her pregnancy and marriage, which destroyed her hopes for a regency in France, were a jackpot for the government of Louis-Philippe. She was far less dangerous to the Orléans regime than what her supporters made her seem to be. * * * The legitimist magazine La Mode, founded in 1829, developed a specific political voice in 1831 as a response to the exile of its patroness.141 In July

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1831, the magazine published a short article about the duchesse de Berry in Bath to win sympathy for the tragic destiny of the duchesse and the Bourbon dynasty. In the article, the duchesse’s servants are compared to those of Marie Stuart, underlining the tragic destiny of all those surrounding the duchesse, or new Marie Stuart.142 Later in the same issue, the comparison was repeated more eloquently: She [the duchesse de Berry] is a woman who travels, a woman who, not being able to return to the poor France she loved so much, came at least to its borders to breathe the cherished air of her adoptive fatherland. Marie Stuart cried when she saw the clouds blown towards France by the northern wind; she envied their destiny. However, the juste milieu trembles, the government dies of terror when facing the news of this woman’s travels. Ah! You admit that considerable importance is given to this exiled princess: even if it is only a walk, only a journey of necessity or pleasure...143

The quotation demonstrates that La Mode had a strong political tone in its description of the Bourbon family. The first sentence referred to the duchesse to whom France was an “adoptive fatherland” the same way it had been for Marie Stuart. Juste milieu was a name used to designate Louis-­ Philippe’s government, which, according to La Mode, was terrified of the news of the duchesse travelling. The magazine simultaneously promoted the cause of the duchesse de Berry and her son, and criticized Louis-­ Philippe’s government, like we established in the previous chapter. The duchesse was presented simultaneously as a weak woman and as a force that frightened Louis-Philippe. The intention was to show Louis-Philippe as a weak king who was scared of a mere woman. The duchesse de Berry, similar to Marie Stuart, was forced to leave France, and both women, according to La Mode, would not stop yearning for the country and its people. The magazine did not justify the similarities between the women, nor did it narrate the history of Marie Stuart. It assumed the readers knew the history of the daughter-in-law of Catherine de’ Medici and could make the connection between Marie Stuart and Marie-Caroline, both widows at an early age. As we will see in the following chapters, the alleged similarities between the duchesse de Berry and Marie Stuart were later on transformed to represent parallels between the Bourbon and the Stuart families. In 1831, however, the analogy was primarily between the two royal women.

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The magazine did not invent the analogy, but the famous ball inspired it in 1829. The Stuarts, and particularly Marie Stuart, were a popular reference point to the exiled Bourbons. The duchesse de Berry was fascinated by the history of the sixteenth century and its tragic heroines.144 Therefore, to choose Marie Stuart as an analogy for her was quite an obvious choice. History was not just political, it was also extremely popular, and the politicians and authors knew which events to evoke to produce desired emotions in readers. * * * La Mode did not restrain itself to just one famous historical example. To prove the importance of the duchesse’s cause, the magazine needed multiple historical references and narratives. And those it produced. On the very same page in 1831 where La Mode compared the duchesse de Berry’s servants to those of Marie Stuart, the magazine wrote that she was no longer Jeanne d’Albret, but now she was Blanche of Castile and Marie-­ Thérèse.145 La Mode, however, did not explain which Marie-Thérèse it referred to. There are at least three possibilities: first Marie-Thérèse the duchesse d’Angoulême, secondly the duchesse d’Angoulême’s grandmother the Empress of Austria, and thirdly Marie-Thérèse, Queen of France and spouse of Louis XIV. This was very typical of La Mode—it did not explain the references, and some of them were left vague. In the comparison, the duchesse de Berry was a key figure in the dynasty’s survival and she was made to have more importance than what she held in reality. Moreover, this was the same comparison used in the early 1820s as we have seen. The continuation of the analogy between the duchesse de Berry and Jeanne d’Albret, Blanche of Castile, and Marie-Thérèse revealed the aim of the passage and to which Marie-Thérèse the magazine was referring to: “[…] heaven help her in the middle of all the ingratitude, betrayals, defamation, and sorrows.”146 The magazine implied that Marie-Caroline was no longer only the mother of the legitimate Bourbon heir “Henri V”. She was equally a tragic heroine like Blanche of Castile, who had lost her husband and had to act as a regent for her son, Saint Louis. La Mode wrote not a word of the politicized opposition Blanche had to face during her lifetime.147 Moreover, Marie-Caroline’s life shared similar features with the ultimate tragedy of Marie-Thérèse, the duchesse d’Angoulême, who was forced to exile from France in 1795, 1815, and again in 1830.

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Ingratitude and betrayals mentioned in the citation most likely referred to the Orléans family because La Mode accused Louis-Philippe and Adélaïde of being no different than their father, who voted for the death of Louis XVI. La Mode accused them of deceiving Marie-Thérèse and the duchesse de Berry, even after all the favours the Bourbons had shown for them. It is, therefore, safe to assume that the Marie-Thérèse used as a third comparison to the duchesse de Berry was no other than her sister-in-law. The passage also highlighted Blanche of Castile and, very likely, her regency. Following the abdication of Charles X and the duc d’Angoulême, it was not self-evident that the duchesse should be her son’s regent should the Bourbons be able to return to France. On the contrary, Charles X wished himself to be the regent. Only in January 1831, Charles X consented that the duchesse could act as a regent if she was able to establish a government in France.148 The comparison to Blanche of Castile offered multiple readings. The ambiguity was most likely a deliberate choice since the legitimists were not a coherent group, and not all embraced the regency of the duchesse or a woman as a regent. The regency might not even have been a very popular choice in Paris less than a year after the Revolution. Therefore, Blanche of Castile could constitute a comparison to a mother of a heroic and saintly king as it did in 1820, or to a female regency, or both of them. Most noteworthy was the reference to Jeanne d’Albret. The duchesse de Berry’s son, titled comte de Chambord after 1830, was styled as “Henri V” during the crucial days of the July Revolution when Charles X and the Dauphin abdicated in his favour. The king’s abdication in early August of 1830 was conditional. According to the legitimists, it was only valid should his grandson become the king under the name of Henri V. Louis-Philippe famously ignored this condition of the abdication.149 The conditioned abdication resulted that for the legitimists, the abdication was not conclusive until “Henri V” was the King of France. The legitimacy of “Henri V” was emphasized by comparing him to Henri IV, and the duchesse de Berry to Jeanne d’Albret, whose Protestantism was yet again ignored. During the first half of the 1830s, the duchesse de Berry was referred to more frequently as Jeanne d’Albret than as Marie Stuart. The reason lies most likely in her son’s position as the legitimist claimant to the French throne and in La Mode’s will to emphasize his right to rule France. All contemporary learned readers knew that Henri IV’s mother had not been Catholic even though he had converted to Catholicism. Nevertheless, her

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Protestant faith was left entirely unmentioned in the legitimist press. This selective reading of history became even more interesting after 1837 when the Orléans’ family’s popular heir, Ferdinand-Philippe, the duc d’Orléans, married a Protestant princess, and the legitimist press accused Queen Marie-Amélie of permitting the Protestant influence to penetrate the French royal family.150 In the early 1830s, Jeanne d’Albret’s Protestantism did not prevent La Mode styling the duchesse de Berry as the “nouvelle Jeanne d’Albret”.151 As La Mode did not justify the reference, it should be read as the new mother of a Bourbon king. In another reference from 1832, the duchesse de Berry was compared to Jeanne d’Albret in her courage to startle her enemies.152 In 1832, the magazine wrote an article dedicated and addressed to the comte de Chambord: “You too, you have as a mother one Jeanne-­ d’Albret whom the dangers, even death, did not frighten, when the inheritance of her son was at stake!”153 This quotation came from an article published to celebrate the birthday of “Henri V”, on September 29. A description of the events in France followed the comparison between the duchesse and Jeanne d’Albret. At the end of April 1832, the duchesse had come ashore in France in preparation for the coup d’état that aimed to restore her son as the King of France. At the end of May, it became apparent that she did not have the popularity she believed would help her overthrow the July Monarchy, and by June 8, she was on the run. She was not captured until the beginning of November 1832.154 In addition to publishing the comparison between the two courageous women to celebrate “Henri V’s” birthday, La Mode published a full article to mark the courage of the duchesse who was still at that point hiding from the French authorities. The magazine criticized Louis-Philippe for wanting to send the “granddaughter of Henri IV” to the scaffold.155 The four-page article’s continuing theme was to draw parallels between the fates of Marie-Caroline, Louis XVI, and Marie-Antoinette by presenting Louis-Philippe, similar to his father, voting for the death of the legitimate Bourbon ruler. The reference to Henri IV reminded the readers of his legitimacy in comparison to that of LouisPhilippe. In this article, Marie-Caroline was not a Jeanne d’Albret for now she too was a Bourbon and at risk of losing her head. In the next issue of La Mode (October 1832–January 1833), there was further information about the duchesse de Berry, who had by now been

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captured. An article entitled Arrestation de Madame la duchesse de Berry contained very little actual information of what had happened and focused more on portraying the duchesse’s heroic nature, the situation’s parallels with the execution of the royal family in the 1790s, and the tragic events of her earlier life. The article left no doubt as to whom they blamed: “[W]ho would have said that one day Jeanne d’Albret surrendered her sword to M.  Thiers!”156 It was Adolphe Thiers, then Minister of the Interior, who was held responsible for capturing the duchesse. Thiers was a liberal politician, one of the driving forces of the July Revolution before which he had acted as a journalist often criticizing the politics of Charles X. Marie-Caroline, instead of being the granddaughter of Henri IV, was his mother again. Only less than thirty pages later, the discussion continued in exceedingly similar terms.157 La Mode declared sarcastically in an article entitled Marie-Caroline, duchesse de Berry, prisonnière de son oncle, Louis-Philippe, roi des Français about the captivity of the duchesse that: [T]his horridness did not happen in some barbarous times, on the first centuries of the monarchy, during the reigns of Chilperics, Chlothars, and Dagoberts, of Fredegunds and Brunhildas; these events took place in the Lord’s year 1832, on the third year of the glorious July Revolution […].158

The magazine drew parallels between the actions of Louis-Philippe and his ministers and the “barbaric” events of the Merovingian period. The underlying assumption in the citation was that the 1830s should be more civilized than the early Middle Ages. Louis-Philippe, whom La Mode saw as a usurper, had brought France back to the “childhood” of the civilization.159 The journalists of La Mode employed the popular view of French civilization that the civilization would evolve towards its peak in the nineteenth century. The most famous historian to have written about the “French civilization” was no other than the liberal Protestant politician François Guizot, who held multifold roles in the Louis-Philippe’s government.160 One should recall that the period of “Dagoberts and Brunhildas” was equally that of Clovis and Saint Clotilde. The period celebrated in the 1820s as the cradle of Catholicism in France and the birth of monarchy, was now the symbol of horridness and barbarity. The representations of the duchesse de Berry as Jeanne d’Albret continued to be present during her captivity and especially before her pregnancy was revealed in February 1833. La Mode’s use of history of Jeanne d’Albret, and almost uniquely her motherhood, for she was reduced to

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nothing but a mother of a Bourbon king, was an argument used to justify the duchesse’s actions and guard her against any allegations of her seeking power for herself. All her actions were presented as selfless deeds of a loving mother. During a period of women’s quasi-total exclusion from political power and of new domestic ideals, the duchesse’s deeds could only be presented positively if they were done out of love for her family. La Mode highlighted this ideal when it celebrated other women, especially a cook called Marie Boissy, for helping the duchesse during her hiding. Not only was Marie Boissy “like Joan of Arc”,161 but the other women helping the duchesse were also mothers, according to the magazine, which created “an intimate community of feelings and emotions” that made the women proud of the duchesse “like they are proud of Jeanne d’Albret and MarieThérèse”.162 This quotation combined two most significant historical references the magazine used to win sympathy for the imprisoned duchesse, Henri IV and the revolution of 1789, especially the execution of Louis XIV and Marie-Antoinette. Similar pathos continued in the magazine during the end of 1832 and early 1833.163 * * * The duchesse de Berry and the failed coup naturally attracted much attention. One notable and representative author to support the duchesse was the famous François-René Chateaubriand. The historian was active in politics and served as a minister during the Restoration. He was a fervent royalist who never accepted the July Monarchy and disliked Louis-­ Philippe. Chateaubriand had not esteemed Charles X the same way he had esteemed Louis XVIII, and he even saw that the legitimacy had ended in 1824. According to Chateaubriand, the last King of France, Charles X, was only a shadow of the glory the kings had had.164 For Chateaubriand, however, Louis-Philippe was a worse choice than Charles X could have ever been, and the historian fiercely defended the duchesse de Berry when she was captive. In December 1832, he penned a defence for her, Mémoire sur la captivité de Madame la duchesse de Berry (published in 1833), in which he aspired to prove her innocence and advance her release by using a wide range of arguments drawing from debates on legitimacy, historical examples, human nature, and from a corpus of various laws. Chateaubriand, a Peer of France, being one of the best-known historians and authors of early nineteenth-century France, drew extensively from

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history when writing the defence. He discussed the potential similarities that the supporters of the July Monarchy and Louis-­Philippe found between the failed coup d’état of the duchesse de Berry and Napoléon’s Hundred Days in 1815. He sought to prove the two incidents to be dissimilar.165 He  examined also  closely the events related to the decade of 1789–1799 to substantiate the duchesse could not have committed any crime since Louis-Philippe was the usurper and the duchesse only protected the rights of “Henri V”. To strengthen his arguments, Chateaubriand employed a wide range of historical examples from the Middle Ages and early modern period. The author of Génie de Christianisme, Les Martyrs, and Les Quatre Stuarts compared the imprisonment of the duchesse to that of Marie Stuart, and warned the supporters of the July Monarchy that not even a prison could prevent the duchesse from gaining popularity in France.166 In this passage, Chateaubriand validated the parallels between the Stuarts and the Bourbons, and between the Orléans regime and that of Elisabeth I.  For a royalist such as Chateaubriand, Elisabeth I was a monstrous usurper who had the legitimate ruler executed. Similarly, the Orléans were but usurpers of the throne that belonged to the Bourbons. In the opposite reading of the early modern English history by the supporters of the Orléans dynasty such as Édouard Laboulaye in the early 1840s, Elisabeth I was one of the rare examples of successful ruling women.167 The Peer of France used strong arguments on behalf of the duchesse that justified her actions as motherly love for her son, the “rightful heir”. Chateaubriand portrayed her reluctantly carrying the crown and thus sacrificing her desires and needs for those of her son. The duchesse was compared to Marie-Antoinette pleading for mothers to help her.  Similarly, Chateaubriand invited French mothers to understand the duchesse because she only tried to save France for her son, the “légataire de saint Louis et de Henri IV” upon whom the future of France depended.168 He named Charles VII (1403–1461) and Henri IV as the duchesse’s heroes and bellwethers, and argued that similarly to these two great kings, the duchesse’s actions should not be seen as illegal but as the actions of a rightful ruler. Should the legitimacy of Henri V and the duchesse be reversed, so should Charles VII and Henri IV be seen as “fauteurs de guerre”, warmongers.169 Indeed, according to Chateaubriand, she had all the same rights to claim the French throne for her son as the great historical kings had had. She was “la noble Fille de Henri IV”.170

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In the booklet of more than 70 pages, the duchesse was portrayed as a martyr ready to sacrifice her life for France and her son.171 Executed kings and queens were frequently brought up to remind of the horrible destiny she might face in prison: Marie Stuart, Charles I, Louis XVI, and Marie-­ Antoinette.172 Even though Chateaubriand and La Mode pictured her already as a martyr, it is highly unlikely the government of Louis-Philippe at any point discussed her execution. The last thing it needed was another royal martyr, when in 1832–1833 France was still struggling with economic crisis, government crisis, and social unrest especially in Lyon. Louis-Philippe’s police knew about the duchesse de Berry’s intentions already at a very early point during the spring of 1832 and, according to Pamela Pilbeam, the whole coup d’état soon became something of a farce.173 However, it was in the legitimists’ interest to present the duchesse as a significant political player and the event gravely undermining the authority of the July Monarchy. Chateaubriand equalled the “daughter of Henri IV” to Alexander the Great and Napoléon.174 As a historian, he also employed lesser-known characters to emphasize the duchesse’s heroism and motherly love. According to Chateaubriand, the same way as Jeanne de Montfort had protected the rights of her orphan son, the duchesse protected her son’s rights.175 Similarly to La Mode, Chateaubriand did not give any background on the historical characters he used to defend the duchesse, but he assumed the reader knew their histories. Jeanne de Montfort is better known today as Jeanne de Flandre (or as Joanna of Flanders), who died in 1374. She was the comtesse de Montfort-L’Amaury through her marriage with Jean de Montfort. Jeanne fought almost twenty years for her husband’s inheritance, the duchy of Brétagne, after the duc Jean III had died without an heir and had named his niece Jeanne de Penthièvre as his heir. Jean de Montfort claimed the duchy as his inheritance as he was the duc’s half-brother. Furthermore, he claimed that the inheritance of the duchy should follow the same rules as the kingdom of France—male succession. Jeanne de Flandre eventually won the dispute (her husband had died years earlier), and her son became the duc under the name of Jean IV de Brétagne.176 In Chateaubriand’s reading of the history of Jeanne de Flandre, or Jeanne de Montfort, Jeanne protected the inheritance of her son, and the legitimate rule of male succession in France, and the duchesse de Berry was now following her footsteps.

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Jeanne de Montfort was not the only heroic mother evoked by Chateaubriand. Right at the end of his defence of the duchesse, he evoked two royal mother–son duos that could be paralleled with Marie-Caroline and “Henri V”: Blanche of Castile and Saint Louis, and Jeanne d’Albret and Henri IV. Chateaubriand implicitly prophesied that the same way as Saint Louis was given the crown by his enemies, Henri V would receive it for “Marie-Caroline de Naples is the granddaughter of Blanche of Castile.”177 No matter how eloquently Chateaubriand re-interpreted the history of the Middle Ages, the political realities in France never permitted another Restoration of the Bourbon dynasty. Marie-Caroline storming into France was also problematic due to her gender. Chateaubriand evoked the infamous Salic Law, which we discussed relating to women’s right to inherit the French throne in 1820, in the defence of the duchesse. Some early nineteenth-century historians even considered the women’s exclusion from the throne to date to the Merovingian period.178 Not all these historians saw the exclusion as a result of the early medieval Salic Law even though many of them knew the law well. Women’s exclusion from the throne did not become official until the late Middle Ages, the Hundred Year’s War, and the famous yet false interpretation of the early medieval Salic Law.179 According to the vicomte, “[…] woman-king during the absence of the Orphan, Caroline would accede to the vacant throne due to her male courage without violating the Salic Law.”180 The passage indicated that Chateaubriand saw Marie-Caroline ruling on behalf of her son while he was absent. The passage contained several notions that referred to the period’s perception of women using power. The notion of “woman-king” (“femme-Roi”) could have been replaced with “queen” or “queen regnant” (“reine régnante”), latter, which was already in use in France.181 Except that in France, with its long history of women’s exclusion from the throne, the notion of queen had connotations of inferiority in relation to the notion of king. A queen was but a spouse, according to the bourgeois ideal, and a king was the one to rule the same way as men ruled over women in the 1830s domestic ideal. Chateaubriand, therefore, seemed to wish to emphasize Marie-Caroline not only as a queen, as a spouse, but as a ruler and as a female king. Yet, to do so, she needed more than average female qualities. She needed “male courage”, to rise above her gender and assume male qualities. Interestingly, Marie-Caroline could be praised for assuming “male courage”, but Adélaïde could not assume such qualities since she was not a Bourbon (enough). Chateaubriand did not fail to

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remind the reader that the duchesse did not want to question the current male domination in politics or refute women’s exclusion from the inheritance of the throne. In order not to alienate conservative supporters, it was essential to remind the reader that the duchesse had no political passions besides protecting the inheritance of her son. The Journal des débats acknowledged Chateaubriand’s long pamphlet and published a response to its accusations against the government. The Journal des débats did not use many historical references in its arguments except when it cited Chateaubriand referring to Marie-Caroline as the mother of Henri IV. The Journal des débats focused mostly, like in all of its reporting on the coup, on the actualities without using many historical references. The legitimists used excessively historical examples to highlight the legitimacy of the Bourbons. However, the government and its supporters drew their arguments from another period—from Napoléon’s reign. The article discussing Chateaubriand’s pamphlet compared the duchesse to Napoléon, a comparison Chateaubriand firmly refuted.182 Earlier in November, the Journal des débats had published an article where the duchesse was (allegedly) quoted comparing herself to Marie-Louise and how she would not give up her son’s right to the French throne as Marie-Louise had done.183 After arresting the duchesse, the question that seemed to intrigue the pro-government magazine was how the duchesse should be judged. Was she an ordinary accused, or did she have a sacred position? Or something else? Should she be put on trial, or should she be released? The Journal des débats evoked the trials of Marie-Antoinette and her sister-in-law Élisabeth more than once, but otherwise historical references were sporadic.184 There were also references to Empress Maria Theresa in the discussions about the duchesse. The Journal des débats reported in January 1833 about a court session in Rennes where legitimist pamphlets supporting the duchesse were examined. The pamphlets included, among other things, references to Marie-Caroline as the “nouvelle Marie-Thérèse” who would, like the grandmother of the duchesse d’Angoulême, inspire the “Hungarians” (i.e., the French) to rise up.185 In the same legitimist writings, Marie-Caroline was compared to Napoléon. The pamphlet explained that she, unlike him, had eight centuries of legitimation on her side. The Journal des débats frequently portrayed Marie-Caroline’s actions as trying to initiate a civil war. This language underlined the dangerous and unlawful nature of her actions.186

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Chateaubriand was only one of many authors to write about the failed coup d’état of the duchesse de Berry. However, his words of defence represented well the legitimist reading of the duchesse as a heroic, if foolhardy, mother, willing to fight for her son’s rights. One has to keep in mind that the legitimists were not a homogeneous group, and not all the members of the Bourbon family saw eye to eye how to react to the July Revolution.187 The discussion about the duchesse’s right to act as regent on behalf of her son ended in February 1833 when her pregnancy was revealed and her marriage to the comte Hector Lucchesi-Palli was made public. The new comtesse Lucchesi-Palli was formally excluded from the regency. On the level of representations, Marie-Caroline transformed from a suffering spouse and a mother first to a consumer of theatre and balls, and secondly to a new Napoléon threatening France with a civil war. The representations overlapped, and not all political sides shared them. Nevertheless, they prove the power of public opinion and media in shaping the representations and image of the monarchy. The journalists and magazines raced to publish their arguments and interpretations of the events and about her. Following the 1832 failed coup La Mode gradually started to make fewer comparisons between the duchesse de Berry and Marie Stuart, and moved on to make comparisons between the Bourbon family and the Stuarts. Further reasons for the decreasing number of comparisons were that Henri, the comte de Chambord, came of age in 1833, so there was no more need for a regent. * * * After Marie-Caroline departed from France in 1833, she did not disappear overnight from the French public discussion. For example, the Journal de débats reported in December 1833 that her infant daughter had deceased.188 The following year, in January, the magazine reported that the authorities had confiscated lithographs, lockets, and other objects supporting the duchesse de Berry and her son. Some of the objects had the duchesse and her children’s images, some had texts such as “Madame, votre fils est mon Roi”. There were even images of Archangel Michael combatting the devil, where the former had Henri’s features and the latter had Louis-Philippe’s features.189 In November the same year, the Journal des débats reported on a court case against a person allegedly distributing (among other things) publications defaming Louis-Philippe and the government. According to

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the magazine, the publications claimed, for example, that the duchesse de Berry deliberately had herself imprisoned and that Louis-Philippe would have agreed to give the throne to the Bourbon family against a pension of two million francs.190 In 1834, Alfred Nettement, a loyal supporter of the Bourbon family and the duchesse de Berry, re-published a collection of articles that had previously appeared in the royalist magazine La Quotidienne. The collection, Histoire fantastique de la révolution de juillet, included an article entitled D’une nouvelle edition de la regence de la reine Blanche initially published on October 31, 1831. The article did not mention Marie-­ Caroline explicitly, but it alluded to her on several occasions. It argued that one should publish a second edition of the chapter on Blanche of Castile’s regency in Jean-François Dreux du Radier’s (1714–1780) Mémoires historiques, critiques et anecdotes des reines et régentes de France. The article’s point had nearly nothing to do with Dreux de Radier’s collective biography on queens of France, but it highlighted the importance of women protecting France in a moment of crisis, as Blanche or Joan of Arc had done. Furthermore, the article argued that women should not be excluded from regency since there might come a time when a woman and a young son could save France, like Blanche of Castile and Saint Louis had done.191Clearly, Nettement alluded to Marie-Caroline and Henri when he argued that a woman and a child could save France in a moment of crisis. To publish a new edition of Blanche’s regency could be to write about the duchesse de Berry. Even after the coup failed, Nettement continued to support the duchesse and to keep her memory alive in France by re-­ publishing this 1831 article. The Journal des débats evoked the duchesse de Berry and the failed coup several times in 1836 when Charles-Louis Napoléon Bonaparte, the nephew of Napoléon, had been exiled from France after a failed coup in Strasbourg. Louis-Philippe exiled him discreetly in October 1836, but the press compared his release to that of Marie-Caroline a couple of years earlier. The magazine argued the government was right to treat him the same way as they had handled the duchesse.192 This year was eventful for the legitimists, who had an internal crisis in the mid-1830s due to ideological and generational conflicts. Charles X died in 1836, and the legitimists were divided into those supporting “Louis XIX”, the duc d’Angoulême, and those supporting “Henri V”.193 Alfred Nettement kept publishing biographies and memoirs of the Bourbon family even when the family’s political

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significance diminished in France. In 1837, he published the memoirs of the duchesse de Berry. Memoirs authored by Nettement and his contemporary writers were not necessarily autobiographies despite their somewhat misleading name. Mémoires historiques de S. A. R. Madame, duchesse de Berry had three volumes and more than 1000 pages. Even though the work emphasized that the duchesse de Berry was not politically active before the July Revolution, the memoirs were a political statement to the core. Concerning the uses of historical narratives, the memoirs were fascinating since the first volume (covering the  period until the assassination of the duc de Berry) included an excessive number of historical references to Henri IV, Louis XIV, Saint Louis, and to Antigone, for example.194 Yet, the number of historical references declined towards the third volume, which covered the period after the July Revolution. In the third volume, there was only one direct comparison. According to Nettement, the duchesse de Berry inspired her troops the same way Anne of Austria had inspired hers during the Fronde.195 One should recall that at the same time, the history of Fronde was used in the legitimist narrative to prove the historical untrustworthiness of the Orléans family. Not once, however, Nettement compared Marie-Caroline to Blanche of Castile or Marie Stuart. Overall, the Stuarts were absent from the Mémoires historiques nearly entirely. Jeanne d’Albret was only mentioned briefly in the second volume in the context of the birth of Henri.196 With more than 1000 pages, the historical references were then rare. The scarcity correlated with the situation in La Mode, where the duchesse’s political significance diminished predictably after her new marriage and settling down in Italy. Even the memoirs were not so much about the duchesse than about the legitimist politics where MarieCaroline no longer had a role as Henri’s mother. The memoirs concluded the decade that started with the physical exile and ended with a figurative exile from the Bourbon family to Italy. The historical references associated with Marie-Caroline intensified during the attempted coup in 1832–1833 but nearly disappeared from the legitimist sphere after the new marriage. She was no longer Blanche of Castile, Marie Stuart, or Jeanne d’Albret since she was no longer a potential regent. The legitimists, however, did not abandon her completely, as we will see in the 1840s.

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4.4   Exiled Madame Royale When Marie-Thérèse left France in 1795, it was not self-evident that the Bourbons would return to the throne one day. When the Bourbon family left France in August 1830, it was not self-evident they would never return to the throne of France. The future was open, and the legitimists would not lose their hope overnight. The duc d’Angoulême became “Louis XIX”, when his father died in 1836, but he was never acknowledged by the French government. This chapter will focus on the way Marie-Thérèse was portrayed in France after her third exile in 1830. She did not vanish from the French people’s conscience when she left France, as legitimist publications such as La Mode reminded the readers of the exiled royal family. There were entire books published on the Bourbon family; some works glorified the family, whereas some vilified them. The analysis includes examining side-by-side representative examples from the supporters and opponents of the Bourbon family. The examples will demonstrate that Marie-Thérèse continued to represent not only herself but the whole Bourbon family and dynasty, and by vilifying or glorifying her, the authors defamed or promoted the entire family. What kind of historical examples were used after the July Revolution? Was there continuity in the narratives drawn from the medieval or early modern era, or did the authors employ a new set of examples after the Revolution? The chapter’s temporal focus will be the beginning of the 1830s since most of the publication focusing on Marie-Thérèse appeared within a few years of the 1830 Revolution. The publications were biased, either supporting the Bourbon family or opposing it. Neutrality, as the modern reader would understand it, did not prevail. In Marie-Thérèse’s case, there seemed to be three options: to idolize her, to defame her, or to ignore her. As we have seen, the relative lack of censorship in the beginning of the 1830s enabled critical voices to address the royal families, both the Bourbons and the Orléans. The moments, and even years, after the three glorious days in July 1830 were highly volatile politically, socially, and economically. The recently appointed Orléans regime needed to consolidate its power, and one way was to defame the Bourbon family. In 1830, the anonymous Lettre de la duchesse d’Angoulême au couvent de Montrouge was published.197 The letter from the “duchesse d’Angoulême” to the abbey of Montrouge, a well-­ known Jesuit house near Paris, was published by J.  L. Bellemain, a publishing house known for its sympathies for the Orléans regime.198

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Taking into consideration the publisher it is highly unlikely that the letter is real. Regarding the letter’s content, it becomes even more probable the letter was a fabrication of the publisher who wished to consolidate the negative image of the Bourbon family. The letter, or more of a pamphlet with 22 pages, presented the duchesse planning a revolution with the Jesuits, Jules de Polignac, comte de Peyronnet, and others. Polignac and Peyronnet were Charles X’s unpopular ministers sentenced to prison and civil degradation after the July Revolution. Already on the first page of the letter, the “duchesse” called Charles X a bull-headed person, and throughout the letter, the “duchesse” bashed the charter for “tying their hands”. The letter urged Montrouge to prepare for physical confrontation against the liberals and wished to suppress the “lumière” that had hurt them so much since the Revolution (of 1789).199 The “duchesse” urged Montrouge to expand its authority as much as possible and to “train, if it is possible, young Ravaillacs, one might need a coup de main [a swift attack] […]”200 Ravaillac refers to the Catholic assassin of King Henri IV in 1610, François Ravaillac. Thus, the “duchesse” urged the Jesuits to train regicides. The letter lets one assume she would be ready to murder her uncle should he stand in the way of the revolution. There was no mention of the young Henri, son of the duchesse de Berry. Only the duc d’Angoulême was mentioned briefly. The “duchesse” assured that the Dauphin would be fully obedient to her once he was a king. She would make sure he would get to enjoy hunting like his father and would sign any document brought to him. The current king, Charles X, would donate, the “duchesse” promised, large amounts of money to the Jesuits (the Jesuits had been re-established in 1814).201 The letter put together the wicked rumours about the Jesuits and the Bourbon family that had been circulating in the 1820s: that Jesuits and the Bourbons were plotting to overthrow the charter and return France to the age of absolutism. Furthermore, the letter presented the king and his son as weak men and that the Jesuits would not even refrain from regicide to reach their sinister goals. Marie-Thérèse’s role is noteworthy in the letter—she was pictured as the Bourbon family’s evil mastermind. The reference to Ravaillac was gripping since, as we have seen on multiple occasions, Henri IV was one of the most popular royal references during the Restoration, and to picture the duchesse wishing to train new “Ravaillacs” was insulting on every level. The letter implicitly associated her with notorious women such as Fredegund, Brunhilda, Catherine de’ Medici, and Marie-Antoinette whom the political propaganda portrayed at stopping at

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nothing, even regicide, to reach power. These women’s nefarious reputations were products of the imagination and political desires of contemporary or later historians and political adversaries, who used the time-­old imagery of dangerous female ambition to defame their opponents. This is the same treatment the legitimists would give to Adélaïde d’Orléans when they wished to defame her brother’s reign in the 1830s. As Karen Offen has argued, “[…]both men and women deliberately elaborated and manipulated the notions of women’s power and influence to achieve particular political effects.”202 The letter of the “duchesse d’Angoulême” was by no means unique in its content. As we have seen in the case of the duchesse de Berry, the members of the Bourbon family were fair game to political opponents and revolutionaries after August 1830. The anonymous Histoire scandaleuse, politique, anecdotique et bigote des duchesses d’Angoulême et de Berry (1830) described Marie-Thérèse as a revengeful woman who regarded all French people as her enemy (6). She was also depicted as mean and making people tremble in fear (8). She was the fruit of an illicit union between the comte d’Artois, later Charles X, and Marie-Antoinette, and therefore she was married to her half-brother. She had multiple lovers (90), and she killed French babies (135). She was a spitfire, the only man in the family, as Napoléon had allegedly announced (120–121).203 When she became the Dauphine, she was “old, ugly, mean, and churchy” (134). Histoire scandaleuse employed very few explicit historical narratives to create a negative image of Marie-­Thérèse. There was only one reference to Antigone, as the anonymous author claimed that Marie-Thérèse “loved to resemble her” (124–125). The author even ridiculed the Bourbons for wanting to reminisce the past (125).204 Clearly, the underlying narrative created of Marie-Thérèse followed the same path as any other similar narrative written to defame royal women. Equally noteworthy is that the political opponents of Adélaïde would also imply she had incestuous relations with her brother. Marie-Thérèse was described as a very masculine figure both in the Histoire scandaleuse and in the letter of the “duchesse d’Angoulême”. She was “the masculine half of the poor duc d’Angoulême”.205 Regarding the events of July 1830, the duchesse, according to the Histoire scandaleuse, wanted violent and extreme measures to solve the situation. Then, “[a]t ten o’clock in the evening, the only man in the family became a woman again.”206 These remarks highlighted that using public power made a woman less feminine and more masculine—a woman by definition should

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not use such power reserved for men. Simultaneously, the remarks emasculated the duc d’Angoulême and Charles X as they were presented incapable of ruling and using power. Weak men enabled strong, masculine women such as the duchesse in the Histoire scandaleuse. Interestingly though, Marie-Thérèse could switch from woman to man and back if she chose to. Her behaviour determined her gender, and by deciding to act in a feminine way, she could become a woman again. Following this line of deduction, the society was constructed of people who had decided to be men or women, not because they were born and destined as such.207 Many of these allegations were drawn from Amours secrètes des Bourbons (1830), which was one of the sources of the Histoire scandaleuse. Amours secrètes, which we already examined in the previous chapter, focused on the entire Bourbon family. Regarding Marie-Thérèse, the work alleged that she was married to her brother and that she was the only man in the family. The fictional letters the author (or “la Comtesse du C***”) claimed to have found received the most attention. According to the work, these letters revealed the affair the duchesse, under the pseudonym of Athénaïs, had had with the archbishop of Paris. The fragments of the letters, claimed to have been found, all from the archbishop to the duchesse, started with the words “…. passion funeste”.208 The idea of a fatal passion, or any passion other than religious, was associated with notorious women—it always led to destruction. The idea of morally and sexually corrupted Catholic leaders only highlighted the author’s revolutionary message. Certain works attached Marie-Thérèse to a longer chain of French monarchs. Les crimes, les forfaits et les turpitudes des rois de France published in 1831 included two volumes, one for the crimes of the kings and one for the crimes of the queens. Marie-Thérèse was only mentioned in the first volume, when Charles X and the royal Bourbon family’s flight was discussed. Already the name of the volume indicated that the anonymous author had nothing good to say about any ruler who had ever lived in France. One does not need to look for historical narratives since the entire work was a narrative of the way monarchs had abused and tyrannized French people. According to the work, Charles X was quietly taking the people (“nous”) back to the Middles Ages, demonstrated by the way clergy seconded the king in his desires to weaken the charter.209 The close union between the church and the altar thus signified the Middle Ages to the author. The volume did not present the  Middle Ages as oppressive because all periods ruled by French kings and queens were equally horrible

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to French people. Contrary to the general Bourbon interpretation of the Middle Ages, populated by saintly royal heroes and princesses, in this vision, the Middle Ages was a cradle of royal and ecclesiastic tyranny. Multiple visions of the Middle Ages existed simultaneously in the 1830s the same way as they exist today.210 As an exception, the anonymous author glorified Joan of Arc as heroic and saving France for Charles VII, who rewarded her by letting the English burn her to death.211 It is difficult to say, though, if the anonymous author truly valued Joan of Arc or if she was just another convenient example of the French kings’ monstrosity. Marie-Thèrese was not exempt from the alledged evil and corrupted nature of the French royals. According to Les crimes, “[h]er violent character erupted: she swore, cursed, slandered her good uncle […]”.212 The message was clear as day; she was no different from all the other French royals before her, regardless of gender. The passage implied that the violence had always been there, just hidden beneath a calm surface. Her true nature was violent and abusive. The author did not detail how Louis-­ Philippe and Marie-Amélie would differ from their “oppressive” cousins. It is remarkable how rapidly authors produced these defamatory works of the Bourbons after years of strict censorship. It is difficult to estimate how influential such works were. Yet, especially the two volumes on the French kings and queens’ crimes seem to have been popular right after the Revolution of 1830. The influential liberal magazine Le Courrier français advertised the books in September 1831 and mentioned that already a second edition had been issued about them due to their popularity. The advertisement emphasized that the two volumes, particularly one on the popes’s crimes, had been forbidden during the Restoration.213 The legitimist magazine La Mode seized the advertisement. It took the opportunity to criticize the liberal magazine and the entire July Revolution for their fake morality for advertising such disgraceful and wretched works. La Mode continued to attack the July Monarchy by asking if permitting the publication of such books was useful for the progress and movement.214 Indeed, the legitimist magazine justified the past censorship of the works by their low quality and immoral content, and used the negative attributes of the works to equal the qualities of the July Monarchy. La Mode’s strategy to minimize the influence of the publications defaming the royal Bourbon family was counterattack. Histoire scandaleuse, the long propaganda work on the duchesse d’Angoulême and duchesse de Berry, received criticism by the legitimist press in 1832. According to the

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magazine, there was an advertisement poster of the book215 in a window of a bookstore in Paris (in la Galerie-Neuve-d’Orléans), and the magazine found this infuriating, “une monstrueuse affiche”. The short column attacking  the advertisement ended with the magazine making fun of Adélaïde d’Orléans as if the magazine wanted to demonstrate that should not the Orléans government be willing to constrain the defamation against the exiled Bourbon family members, the legitimists would continue to attack the Orléans family.216 * * * The  aforementioned defamatory works of the exiled Bourbon family helped to justify the new government and new king. The insulting texts, caricatures, and pamphlets were popular among the people as the advertisements in Le Courrier français attested. As Robert Darnton has described in his study The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France, the agitating gossip about the royal family members interested large audiences.217 A royalist supporter of the Bourbon family, Hector de Jailly, strongly disapproved of the publishing of such insulting texts but acknowledged that publishers would continue to peddle such works in the streets of Paris as long as there were readers.218 La Mode supported the Bourbon cause visibly, but it was not the only one. Jailly published a work about the events between July 27, 1830 and July 27, 1831 together with long biographical chapters about members of the royal family, including Marie-Thérèse. Before examining the way Jailly employed history to draw empathy for the duchesse, it is worth noting that Jailly approached the events of July 1830 remarkably calmly, describing them as glorious to the winners, fatal to the defeated, and memorable to all.219 Jailly did not attack the supporters of the Orléans regime directly but described almost neutrally the events and the ordonnances. The authors writing defamatory texts had accused Marie-Thérèse of wickedness, violence, incest, immorality, and vindictiveness, among other things. Jailly acknowledged especially the accusation of vindictiveness but refuted it by claiming that vengeance had not entered either her heart or her words.220 He stated that “[T]his vindictive princess if we are to believe her and our enemies […]”.221 The author, however, referred in the chapter about Marie-Thérèse to another famous and allegedly vindictive queen. Jailly compared the men guilty of violence during the 1789 Revolution to

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Macbeth’s Fredegund.222 It is fascinating to discover that in the French adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Lady Macbeth was named Fredegund after the Merovingian queen, and she was made to resemble the early medieval queen’s notoriety both in vindictiveness and in motherly love for which Gregory of Tours made her famous.223 Jailly’s chapter about Marie-Thérèse emphasized well the difference in the way history was employed by the supporters and the critics of the Bourbon family. Whereas the latter ones, and especially liberals, focused on the present-day events, the supporters drew extensively from history, as did Jailly.224 He opened the chapter with reference to the infortunes of Marie Stuart (Mary, Queen of Scots), Henrietta of England (1644–1670), and Henrietta Maria of France (1609–1669).225 Both Henriettas were seventeenth-century royal women, Henrietta Maria being the mother of Henrietta of England. Henrietta of England was the spouse of the duc d’Orléans, brother of King Louis XIV. Her mother was the spouse of King Charles I, executed in 1649. Henrietta Maria, the daughter of the assassinated King Henri IV, had already fled to France in 1644. The reference to Henrietta Maria is interesting but problematic. She could be represented in France as the tragic daughter of France primarily associated with her assassinated father.226 She was significant because her fate had similarities with Marie-Antoinette, which the author undoubtedly grasped. Marie-Antoinette herself had perceived the similarities between the times she lived in and those of Charles I in seventeenth-century England.227 Similar to Jailly, who constructed a sympathetic narrative of suffering Marie-Thérèse forced to exile from her beloved France, Henrietta Maria had presented herself in the seventeenth century as a suffering wife and a mother. Equally, Marie-Antoinette had portrayed herself as a reluctant political figure during the Revolution.228 Yet, such comparisons between Marie-Thérèse and Henrietta Maria of France were problematic because Marie-Thérèse was exiled to England, the kingdom that had caused the daughter of Henri IV to flee back to France. Furthermore, Henrietta Maria was often portrayed, especially in England, in a negative way—dominating over her husband and even causing his death and the downfall of the monarchy.229 Historian Susan Dunn-Hensley has written that the conflict between Henrietta Maria’s duty and faith evoked the character Antigone.230 No doubt, she could have evoked the same similarity among the nineteenth-century French readers who associated her with Marie-­ Thérèse, another Antigone.

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These three tragic royal women, Marie Stuart and the two seventeenth-­ century Henriettas were associated with Marie-Thérèse in 1831 in a passage that underlined the cruel fates of the men close to these women. As we have seen many times, the Bourbons were associated with the Stuart family especially in the 1830s due to their exile and stay in Holyrood, Scotland, in a palace strongly associated with Mary, Queen of Scots. Jailly pictured Marie-Thérèse among the tragic royal women who had lost family members to regicide. The two Henriettas have not been used frequently in the context of Marie-Thérèse, and perhaps the exile in Scotland vivified their memory. The author, however, did not mention that Henrietta of England was the spouse of the duc d’Orléans, even though most readers likely were aware of this connection. Henrietta of England was instrumental in Jailly’s narrative of tragic Marie-Thérèse as the daughter of an executed king, and not as the spouse of an Orléans, a family associated with usurpation and regicide. Une année recycled many narratives associated with Marie-Thérèse such as Antigone française, her being mother of all French, and her being a descendant of Henri IV.231 Jailly emphasized the heroism of Joan of Arc when he described the events that took place in Bordeaux in 1815: “Like Joan of Arc, she grabbed the flag of lilies and showed it to the irresolute solders: ‘French! They heard her cry out, do you not recognize my voice? it is not that of the Corsican, of a foreigner; me, I am French!”232 In this passage, Joan of Arc’s heroism was employed to parallel that  of Marie-­ Thérèse while facing a foreign enemy, Napoléon. The narrative of the heroism of Joan of Arc incorporated the idea of French people fighting against a foreign army, that of England. As we have seen, it was problematic to use the narrative in the context of the Bourbon struggles since the enemy was not a foreign army but a French army. Therefore, as Jailly pictured, the enemy was made to be foreign in 1815 Bordeaux. Napoléon was a foreigner even though his army was French. Even if the author described the events of the Revolution 1830 rather neutrally, the author deliberately distorted the events of 1814.233 The neutrality Jailly had had in describing the contemporary events of 1830 had entirely faded away. According to the author, the French people wanted a monarchy and a Bourbon king in 1814. He explicitly denied that the Allied forces would have brought back the Bourbons.234 Most of the politicized historical narratives have internal conflicts. For example, in the narrative of Henrietta Maria of France, the daughter of murdered Henri IV, the English were the enemy as they  executed her

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husband for which she had to escape to France. However, in 1830, the Bourbon family found their first exile in Scotland under the protection of the English crown. Prudently, one could only highlight certain aspects of the history of Henrietta Maria the same way as one did not wish to remind too much the French during the Restoration that the executors of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette had been French. Jailly presented the entire French people having desired the return of the Bourbon monarchs in 1814, whereas only a particular group of French people orchestrated the Revolution of 1830.235 Marie-Thérèse also featured in travel literature published by legitimists visiting the Bourbon family. A royalist supporter of Charles X and a former high-ranking official of the state, Adolphe de Sèze, published two works about his travels to visit the Bourbon family in Bath and Holyrood in 1831 and 1832. The duchesse d’Angoulême, still being called the Dauphine since, for the legitimists, Charles X’s abdication had not happened, featured a prominent place in the latter work which omitted almost completely the duchesse de Berry. The earlier work from 1831 still considered the duchesse de Berry as Jeanne d’Albret and Blanche of Castile, but the second one focused uniquely on those Bourbon family members living in Scotland.236 History, even though essential, was manifested in a different form than as narratives about the medieval and early modern monarchs, which had been so precious to other royalist and legitimist authors.237 The focus was now on the current state of the Bourbon family and the inferiority of the Orléans family. The inferiority of the Orléans family culminated in Adélaïde, whom the author did not spare. Sèze declared that she both dressed badly and in tricolor during the Restoration, which signified that she had been disloyal to the Bourbon family all along.238 Marie-Thérèse, on the contrary, had the best interest of France always in her heart and did not stop suffering from bad health and for France. According to the author, she feared France would again have a harsh winter ahead and that she alone could ease the misery.239 The Dauphine never found, according to the author, the French as ungrateful even though she had done so much for them.240 Sèze’s narrative about the exiled Bourbons highlighted Marie-Thérèse as a martyr who suffered for France and selflessly continued to love the French people even though they did not love her back. Like La Mode, Sèze underlined the considerable amount of money the Bourbon family had donated to charity to prove they were not cheap.241

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La Mode continued to uphold the saintly image of Marie-Thérèse and the Bourbon family in France even after the marriage and exile of the duchesse de Berry. La Mode regularly  published articles about Marie-­ Antoinette and Louis XVI, and reminded the readers of the sacredness of Marie-Thérèse. For example, in 1838, the magazine suggested that the spouse of the young duc d’Orléans (or here, the duc de Chartres) would have allegedly desired to have the title of Dauphine, which was not in use during the July Monarchy. La Mode claimed that the name reminded of so great virtues and achievements that to parallel Marie-Thérèse and the young Protestant duchesse d’Orléans would be impossible.242 The magazine did not spare praises for Marie-Thérèse, who was now the spouse of Louis XIX. She would always be the last Dauphine of France. Marie-Thérèse and her husband, Louis-Antoine, were pictured resigned as saints. Like Saint Louis, they carried their misfortune in a Christian manner and imitated the medieval king’s  courage and strength.243 In 1839, the magazine published an article of Marie-Thérèse, which dramatically outlined the most critical events in her life.244 According to the article, the French monarchy, a monument founded by Charlemagne, crumbled down during the 1789 revolution when the son of Saint Louis was killed. Marie-Thérèse was a saint who had experienced nothing but misery, which she endured with dignity. Even Bossuet, the seventeenth-­ century author who had portrayed Henrietta of England to possess inhuman courage, would back down with horror in front of the misfortunes the duchesse d’Angoulême had had to endure. Plutarch himself could not invent such a worthy story. The duchesse’s devout hope and saintly resignation were her secret weapons against the revolutions. According to the article, “[..]she stayed calm under the real and bloodstained ruins of the universe’s greatest monarchy.”245 For the legitimists, she was a relic of the greatest dynasty ever to have ruled in France. The starting point of all her misery was when the monarchy started by Charlemagne came crumbling down.

Notes 1. Such as Auguste Trognon, Vie de Marie-Amélie, reine des Français, 1874; Auguste-Philibert Chaalons d’Argé, Marie-Amélie de Bourbon: Notes historiques et biographiques accompagnées de neuf autographes de LouisPhilippe—Marie-Amélie—la Princesse Hélène d’Orléans—Madame la Duchesse de Nemours—S.  M. Léopold II, Roi des Belges—M. de Duc de

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Nemours—M. le Prince de Joinville, 1868; see also the works of ArthurLéon Imbert de Saint-Amand (1834–1900). 2. C.  C. Dyson, The Life of Marie Amélie Last Queen of the French, 1782–1866, 1910. 3. For the role of charity in the early nineteenth-century Paris and especially during the July Monarchy, see Sarah A Curtis (2002). “Charitable Ladies: Gender, Class and Religion in Mid Nineteenth-Century Paris,” Past & Present (no. 177), 121–156. 4. Susan K.  Foley (2004). Women in France since 1789. The Meanings of Difference, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 16. 5. Hunt (1992). The Family Romance, 113–114, 116 & 121. 6. French historian Hélène Becquet has argued that the princesses of the Restoration monarchy still belonged to the public sphere because of their role in transmitting the royal blood to their children. She considers that the princesses had a legitimate access to power because of their attachment to the Bourbon dynasty. Becquet does concede that the public saw these princesses in a quite negative light, mostly because of their role in power. Becquet (2009). “Une royauté sans reine”, 152. Rebecca Rogers has argued that in the early nineteenth century there was a tendency to blame Marie-­Antoinette and the women of the court for the decadence and downfall of the Old Regime, which reinforced the idea that women should not have public influence. Rebecca Rogers (2007). Les bourgeoises au pensionnat. L’éducation féminine au XIXe siècle, Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 33. 7. Margaret H.  Darrow (1979). “French Noblewomen and the New Domesticity 1750–1850,” Feminist Studies (vol. 5, no. 1), 41 & passim. 8. Foley (2004). Women in France, 45. 9. Denise Z. Davidson (2007). France after Revolution: Urban Life, Gender, and the New Social Order, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 71. 10. Foley (2004). Women in France, 110–111. 11. The booklet was published sometime in 1836 or early 1837 because it is mentioned in La Mode in October 1837. 12. He was a historian and a professor at the Collège de France. 13. Tissot (s.a.). Notice biographique sur S.M. Marie-Amélie, 3. “Avertie par des exemples qui sont des leçons sévères, cette princesse ne se mêle point des affaires du gouvernement, et craindrait d’affecter une influence presque toujours pleine de dangers pour les femmes; toute sa politique consiste à demander des grâces, et, il faut bien l’avouer, elle est heureuse à les obtenir, parce qu’elle prie avec le coeur.” 14. Tissot (s.a.). Notice biographique sur S.M. Marie-Amélie, 2–3. 15. Tissot (s.a.). Notice biographique sur S.M. Marie-Amélie, 4.

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16. Mary Beard (2018). Women & Power. A Manifesto, London: Profile Books, passim. 17. About Maria Carolina, see Cincia Recca (2014). “Maria Carolina and Marie Antoinette: Sisters and Queens in the mirror of Jacobin Public Opinion,” Royal Studies Journal (vol. 1, no. 1), 17–36. 18. Tissot (s.a.). Notice biographique sur S.M. Marie-Amélie, 2. 19. Interestingly the publication supporting the Orléans family contrasted Marie-Amélie with her mother and presented the daughter as the wiser one whereas the legitimist magazine La Mode presented the mother as a wise one for initially opposing the union between Marie-Amélie and the son of the  regicide Philippe Égalité. See La Mode 6.7.1839, 241; 1839, 123. 20. Tissot (s.a.). Notice biographique sur S.M. Marie-Amélie, 4. 21. La Mode 7.10.-37, 18. 22. See also another anonymous work dedicated to the July Monarchy and the glory of the Orléans family: J.-B.  C. (1839). La France en 1839. Notice historique adressée au peuple français, Paris: Imprimerie de P. Baudouin. Especially starting from p.15. 23. Anon (1838). Petite notice historique, dédiée à Marie-Amélie, reine des Français: à l’occasion du baptême du comte de Paris, Paris: Imprimerie de Stahl, 9.“A genoux, le matin, dans son oratoire, elle offre à Dieu ses premières pensées et lui demande la santé de sa famille, le bonheur de la France, le pouvoir de tarir toutes les larmes et de verser du baume sur toutes les plaies; […] elle s’occupe, ainsi qu’une simple bourgeoise, à tailler des layettes et de petits trousseaux que les princesses achèvent ensuite […].” 24. Anon (1838). Petite notice historique, 10. “Un ancien empereur romain se plaignait d’avoir été un jour de sa vie sans accorder un bienfait. Amélie n’aura pas même une seule minute de son existence perdue pour le malheur. Elle a fait plus que Titus, elle s’est ingéniée pour être utile. Bonne, simple dans ses goûts, dans ses habitudes, dans sa parure, elle est devenue élégante, et pour ainsi dire coquette, afin d’animer l’industrie.” 25. See, for example, La Mode 5.1.1833, 207–208. See also Fortescue (2005). France and 1848, 27. 26. Anon (1838). Petite notice historique, 4–5. 27. Margadant (1999). “Gender, Vice, and the Political Imaginary in Postrevolutionary France”, 1473 &1475. 28. La Mode 1840, 15. 29. Joséphine Amory de Langerack (1847). Galerie des femmes célèbres depuis le Ier siècle de l’ère chrétienne jusqu’au XVIe siècle, Paris: Mellier Frères, 202. “Bathilde, modèle des reines et des épouses, voulut que toutes les bouches dussent bénir les choix du monarque qui l’avait placée à ses côtés. Des royales prérogatives attachées à son titre, elle n’ambitionna

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que celle de sécher toutes les larmes, d’alléger toutes les souffrances, de conjurer tous les maux.” 30. Alexandrine Bonaparte (1820). Batilde, Roine des Francs: Poëme en dix chants avec des notes, Paris: Rapet, 8 “Elle obéissait au roi comme à son seigneur; elle honorait les évêques et les prêtres comme ses pères, et les religieux comme ses frères; elle chérissait les princes et les seigneurs du royaume comme si elle eût été leur mère; elle traitait les pauvres comme si elle eût été leur nourrice; enfin elle avait une tendresse et une charité universelles; elle ne se servait de sa puissance que pour faire du bien à tout le monde, pour maintenir les bons, protéger les faibles […]”. Bonaparte was citing Adrien Baillet (1649–1706) author of Les vies des saints. 31. Robert Folz (1975). “Tradition hagiographique et culte de sainte Bathilde, reine des Francs,” Comptes rendus des séances de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres (vol. 119, no. 3), 369–84. 32. The painting was long thought to be lost but a copy of the painting was found in Scotland and verified to be the original “Delaroche,” in Fake or Fortune? (Series 5, no 2, 2016). BBC One. 33. See, for example, in Langerack (1847). Galerie des femmes célèbres. 34. Revue de Paris 1834, 325. “Sainte Amélie, fille de Christian, prince souverain des Ardennes, au temps de Charlemagne (dit la légende), avait construit dans le jardin du château de son père un oratoire, et élevé de ses mains un autel. Elle y allait souvent avec de jeunes filles pour l’orner des fleurs et des fruits de la saison et y faire sa prière.” 35. Revue de Paris 1834, 326. 36. Interesting detail: in the early 1830s, Clovis, who was extremely popular historical reference for the Bourbon dynasty at the 1820s, was removed from list of famous historical persons included in the stained glass windows at the church of castle d’Eu. Clovis and Roman Syagrius, who was also removed from the list, were replaced with a local saint and William the Conqueror. The reason was to please the local people but it can also be a sign of the falling star of Clovis’ popularity after the fall of the Bourbons. See Dominique Morel (1994). “Les vitraux de l’église d’Eu. Une commande de Louis-Philippe à la manufacture de Sèvres (1833–1847),” Revue de l’Art (no. 103), 69. 37. In 1833, there was a mention of Marie-Amélie participating in a Mass in the chapel of castle d’Eu with the stained glass windows already presenting Saint Amelia. Vidal (2010). Marie-Amélie de Bourbon-Sicile, 222. 38. La Mode 1834, 252. “La sainte reine est en prières au pied de l’autel avec ses deux filles; il y a du calme et du bonheur dans la figure pleine de noblesse et de bonté de la sainte, elle prie, mais elle n’a rien à se faire pardonner; elle remercie le ciel de ne l’avoir faite di ingrate, ni hypocrite: c’est une ravissante peinture, un délicieux portrait de fantaisie.”

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39. Grégoire Franconie (2009). “Louis-Philippe et la sacralité royale après 1830,” in Hélène Becquet and Bettina Frederking (eds.), La Dignité du roi, Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 107–108. See also anonymous work from 1839, which emphasized the virtues of Marie-Amélie. J.-B. C. (1839). La France en 1839, 15. 40. Adolphe de Leuven (1833). Le Roi des Français et sa famille / par un patriote de 1789, Paris: Barba, 166–167. 41. Leuven (1833). Le Roi des Français et sa famille, 165, 170. 42. See Aali (2017). Merovingian Queenship, 68–83. 43. Anon (1838). Petite notice historique, 9. 44. Sarah Maza (2007). “Construire et Déconstruire La Bourgeoisie  : Discours Politique et Imaginaire Social Au Début Du Xixe Siècle,” Revue d’histoire du XIXe siècle (no. 34), 21–37. 45. See, for example, Augustin Thierry and his article “Histoire véritable de Jacques Bonhomme, d’après les documens authentiques”. The article, summarizing his interpretation on the subjugation of the Third estate since the Roman times of freedom until the Restoration period, was originally published in 1820. See Augustin Thierry (1851). Oeuvres complètes de Augustin Thierry: Dix ans d’études historiques, Paris: Furne, 243–251. 46. Sylvain Venayre (2013). Les Origines de La France. Quand Les Historiens Racontaient La Nation, Paris: Éditions Du Seuil, 35–49. 47. Margadant (2006). “Representing Queen Marie-Amélie”, 422. 48. See, for example, his Récits des temps mérovingiens first published in the 1830s. Even though bishop Gregory of Tours was the narrator of the work, it was due to his role as a historian and not as a bishop and saint. 49. Margadant (2006). “Representing Queen Marie-Amélie”, 422. 50. Margadant (1999). “Gender, Vice, and the Political Imaginary in Postrevolutionary France”, 1462. 51. Margadant (1999). “Gender, Vice, and the Political Imaginary in Postrevolutionary France”, 1490–1491. 52. For example, in 1838 La Mode inquired why there were no images of Christ or angels in the bedroom of Marie-Amélie, “la sainte de la maison” as they sarcastically called her. Her children had no devotional objects either. She only had pictures of her parents and family. La Mode 6.4.-38, 246. 53. La Mode repeatedly criticized the family for donating less to the charity than the older branch of the family. See, for example, La Mode 5.1.1833, 208; 1.1.-36, 139; 6.7.-39, 85. 54. La Mode 10.1836, 80. La Mode was especially referring to the Journal des débats, which they repeatedly accused of favoring the Orléans monarchy.

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55. La Mode 10.1836, 80. 56. La Mode 1839, 57. 57. La Mode 1839, 106. Also p.32 there is a reference to the sculpture of Joan of Arc by Marie d’Orléans. 58. La Mode 1.4.-37, 29. 59. La Mode ridiculed Marie-Amélie’s Catholic devotion openly because she had chosen a Protestant princess as a wife for the heir to the throne. See also La Mode 1.4.-37, 133–134. 60. The magazine invented full discussions for the Orléans family just to mock them. See, for example, La Mode 5.1.-35, 17–20, where the Orléans family is pictured reading La Mode and being horrified of the magazine’s content. 61. La Mode 6.4.-38, 279–281. 62. Price (2007). The Perilous Crown, 291. 63. Saint-Hilaire (1830). Vie anecdotique de Louis-Philippe duc d’Orléans, 213. 64. Saint-Hilaire’s work’s title is Vie anecdotique de Louis-Philippe duc d’Orléans, lieutenant général de ce royaume ... par un grenadier de la Garde nationale. Extremely curious is the title, which refers to LouisPhilippe’s position during July and August 1830. Was the work a statement on  the role of Louis-Philippe in relation to Charles X, who the author recognized to have been abdicated with his son, duc d’Angoulême? 65. Saint-Hilaire (1830). Vie anecdotique de Louis-Philippe duc d’Orléans, 213. According to Saint-Hilaire, the president of the welcoming committee in Reims made the comparison to Henri IV on the occasion of Charles X’s coronation there in 1825. According to Haskell Dole et  al., SaintHilaire had small success in his days and was mostly known for his positive portrays of Napoléon at the end of the  1830s. Haskell Dole gives the impression that Saint-Hilaire was not completely trustworthy, and therefore, he possibly invented the speeches where Louis-Philippe and Adélaïde were praised, and that the comparisons were, in fact, his own. Nathan Haskell Dole & al. 2003 (1904), The Bibliophile Dictionary: A Biographical Record of the Great Authors. The description of Adélaïde as Henri IV’s granddaughter was in the short speeches given in the occasion of Charles X’s coronation in Reims in 1825 and reproduced by Saint-Hilaire in his work. In addition to Adélaïde, the short speeches compared LouisPhilippe and Marie-Amélie to “Henri le Grand”. The comparisons between Louis-Philippe and Henri IV were repeated throughout the work. Saint-Hilaire (1830). Vie anecdotique de Louis-Philippe duc d’Orléans, 211–213. See also Saint-Hilaire (1830). Vie anecdotique de Louis-Philippe duc d’Orléans, 227. 66. Leuven’s real name was Adolphe de Ribbing (died in 1884).

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67. Leuven (1833). Le Roi des Français et sa famille, 293. “Madame Adélaïde joint à une grande bonté et à toutes les vertus de son sexe un caractère ferme et élevé. Elle a supporté avec courage les longs malheurs dont sa jeunesse a été abreuvée. Sa sensibilité n’en a pas été émoussée; Madame est heureuse quand elle peut maintenant soulager quelque infortune. La bienfaisance est une vertu de famille chez les d’Orléans et les Penthièvre, et elle n’a pas répudié cet héritage.” Adélaïde and Louis-Philippe were members of the Penthièvre family from their mother’s side. 68. Leuven (1833). Le Roi des Français et sa famille, 293. 69. Leuven (1833). Le Roi des Français et sa famille, 293. 70. La Mode 5.1.1835, 232. 71. Marie Le Harivel de Gonneville Mirabeau, (ed. 1890). Le Prince de Talleyrand et la maison d’Orléans, lettres du roi Louis-Philippe, de Madame Adélaïde, et du prince de Talleyrand, Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1. 72. Pillet’s pamphlet could well be the source for Adolphe de Leuven’s portray of Adélaïde in 1833 because they are so similar. 73. Léon Pillet (1832). Notice biographique de Madame Adélaïde, princesse d’Orléans, soeur de S. M. Louis-Philippe […], Paris: imprimerie de Plassan, 16 & passim. The work is only 29 pages long so the missing pages are a lost. It seems that no complete version is available. 74. Pillet (1832). Notice biographique de Madame Adélaïde, 27–29. 75. See, for example, 14.2.1837 (p.2), the Journal des débats announced how Madame Adélaïde’s endless charity work extended to all unfortunate souls. See also, for example, the Journal des débats 13.4.1832 for a similar type of description. 76. Journal des débats 9.11.1838; 18.5.1838; 17.6.1833; 5.7.1832; 6.5.1832; 12.6.1831. 77. Élisabeth Brun (1847). Vie de sainte Bathilde, Reine de France, Lille: L. Lefort. 78. The accusations against Adélaïde’s chastity were brought up in the only full biography written on her. In 1908, one Raoul Arnaud published her biography, which was not at all flattering to her. Arnaud argued that there had been accusations of an incestuous relationship between Adélaïde and her brother. Raoul Arnaud (1908). Adélaïde d’Orléans (1777–1847), d’après des documents inédits: l’égérie de Louis-Philippe, Paris: Perrin, 296. 79. Price (2007). The Perilous Crown, 287–291. Price discusses also other slander and defamation Adélaïde received in the 1830s. The caricature of Daumier, Les Poires, was published in 1834 in the magazine Le Charivari. 80. Journal des débats, 2.3.1832. 81. La Mode 5/1833, 238. “Récompense honnête à qui donnera des nouvelles d’un enfant né à Londres en 1793, de père et mère réputés inconnus; s’adresser aux Tuileries, chez madame Messalin.”

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82. Anon (1789). Antoinette d’Autriche ou Dialogue entre Catherine de Médicis et Frédégonde, reines de France, aux enfers : pour servir de supplément et de suite à tout ce qui a paru sur la vie de cette princesse. London. 83. Hunt (1992). The Family Romance, 107. 84. Viennot (2006). La France, les femmes et le pouvoir, 585–591. See also Crawford (2007). “Constructing Evil Foreign Queens”. 85. See, for example, Heta Aali (2017). “Constructing Queenship in Early Nineteenth-Century French Historiography,” in Milinda Banerjee, Charlotte Backerra and Cathleen Sarti (eds.), Transnational Histories of the ‘Royal Nation’, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 267–286. 86. Recca (2014). “Maria Carolina and Marie Antoinette”, 17–36. Recca compares in her article the two sisters during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Maria Carolina was de facto ruler of the kingdom of Naples. 87. La Mode 5.1.1833 “Madame Messalin est allée voir Lucrèce Borgia. Elle a trouvé ce drame-là bien pâle.” 88. The issue of January 1833 covered the period from January to April 1833. 89. Sylvain Ledda (2006). “La mort dans Lucrèce Borgia,” communication du Groupe Hugo, Université de Paris VII-Denis Diderot, 6. 90. Ledda (2006). “La mort dans Lucrèce Borgia”, 8. 91. La Mode 13.7.1833, 238 “Madame Messalin a remarqué avec peine qu’il n’y a pas de vignes en Normandie: elle aurait préféré de beaucoup un voyage en Bourgogne.” 92. La Mode 13.7.1833, 46 “Mme Messalin ne concoit pas qu’un puisse aller prendre les eaux ailleurs qu’en Bourgogne ou en Champagne.” 93. Price (2007). The Perilous Crown, 289–290. 94. See Bouyer (2007). Les reines de France, 192–193. 95. Ledda (2006). “La mort dans Lucrèce Borgia”, 1. 96. See Gilles Castagnès (2019). “Considérations sur la monarchie et figures du roi dans l’œuvre d’Alfred de Musset,” Nineteenth-Century French Studies (vol. 47, no. 3 & 4), 270–271. See also Sophie Mentzel (2019). “Rois et reines sur la scène romantique, ou la reconfiguration du pouvoir,” Nineteenth-Century French Studies (vol. 47, no. 3 & 4), 246–261. 97. For example in La Mode 6.1.1838, 53. The reference was not to Adélaïde but to her ancestors. 98. Michael R.  Evans (2014). Inventing Eleanor. The Medieval and Post-­ Medieval Image of Eleanor of Aquitaine, London: Bloomsbury, 19, 33–34, 51. See also Aali (2017). Merovingian Queenship, 207–208. 99. Bruno Dumézil (2008). La Reine Brunehaut, Paris: Fayard, 398. 100. La Mode 5.1.1833, 214. “La statue de Messaline a été commandée pour les appartemens particuliers de madame Ath...”

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101. Price (2007). The Perilous Crown, 289. 102. La Mode repeatedly pondered if Adélaïde was Madame or Mademoiselle because to call her Madame could refer both to her position as the king’s sister and to her position as a married woman. See, for example, La Mode 6.4.1838, 21–22. 103. Price (2007). The Perilous Crown, 289. 104. Athalie was performed 457 times between 1691 and 1900 of which 146 performances were before 1774. See Revue des deux mondes 7/1901, 958. Also Daniel R. Dupêcher (1978). “Racine à la Comédie-Française, 1680–1774,” Revue d’Histoire littéraire de la France, (Vol. 78, no. 2), 196. Phèdre was performed 984 times between 1680 and 1900. 105. See chapter 2.1. 106. See, for example, Jeremy D. Popkin (2002). Press, Revolution, and Social Identities in France, 1830–1835, University Park, Pa: Pennsylvania State University Press, 3–4. 107. Joas was the grandson of Athaliah’s husband. 108. Price (2007). The Perilous Crown, 289. La Mode 6.1.1834, 213–216, 273, 295, 296, 297. 109. La Mode 6.10.1832, 155. Place de la Révolution was where the royals were executed during the 1790s. 110. La Mode 6.10.1832, 179. 111. La Mode 1.4.1837, 345. “L’Hôtel-de-Ville où vous êtes, Madame, fut témoin aussi des scènes les plus mémorables de la Fronde, ici vinrent plus d’une fois la grande mademoiselle d’Orléans qui faisait tirer le canon sur l’armée du Roi (je parle à votre Altesse de la fille de Gaston et non de votre tante mademoiselle Adélaïde); […] Il y avait, dans ce temps-là, un oncle de roi, parent dénaturé, sujet factieux, prince infidèle qui conspirait contre la minorité du monarque: c’était le duc d’Orléans. Tout ce mouvement Madame dura plusieurs années; il en résulta des malheurs sans nombre pour les habitans de la bonne ville, la ruine de tout commerce, la guerre civile, et même un massacre dont le signal partit de cette fenêtre que vous voyez en face de vous.” 112. See Pierre Gatulle (2012/3). “L’image de Gaston d’Orléans: entre mémoires, fiction et historiographie,” Revue d’histoire moderne & contemporaine (no. 59–3), 124–142. 113. La Mode 1.4.1837, 345. 114. Monsieur was the brother. 115. La Mode 6.7.1839, 33. “Est-ce que par hasard la révolution de juillet, parce qu’elle a fait Louis-Philippe roi, s’imaginerait qu’elle est assez puissante pour faire passer, du titre de mademoiselle au titre de Madame, mademoiselle Adélaïde d’Orléans? La révolution de juillet serait alors une indiscrète et une présomptueuse. La Fronde, son aîeule, fut plus timide et

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plus réservée; elle conserva le nom de Mademoiselle à cette vieille frondeuse de duchesse de Montpensier, même après qu’elle eut beaucoup fait pour le perdre de concert avec M- de Lauzun.” 116. La Mode 7.10.1837, 271. “qui n’aimait ni les révolutions ni les révolutionnaires.” 117. La Mode 7.10.1837, 271. “un modèle de sobriété”. 118. La Mode 7.10.1837, 272. “qui trouva tant de maris”. 119. La Mode 7.10.1837, 272. “[…] hautaine, ambitieuse, mechant, haineuse, qui se mêla des affaires d’état, qui se jeta dans les fureurs politiques, qui jamais n’obtint de l’estime d’une homme le titre d’épouse.” 120. La Mode 7.10.1837, 272. “[…] soufflant autour d’elle les mauvaises passions dont elle était animée, elle contribua à faire chasser le légitime héritier de son héritage […]”. 121. La Mode even suggested some could mistake Adélaïde for a man. La Mode 1.7.1837, 313. 122. See, for example, La Mode picturing Adélaïde adoring the memory of her revolutionary father, 1.4.1837, 251; Adélaïde being an “Égalité”, 259. 123. See about the legitimist opposition, Fortescue (2005). France and 1848, 22. 124. Christine Adams (2020). “The Gallic Singularity”, 47. 125. Christine Adams (2020). “The Gallic Singularity”, 56. 126. Margadant (1997). “The Duchesse de Berry”, 24. 127. Margadant (1997). “The Duchesse de Berry”, 42–3. See also Jeffrey B.  Hobbs (2017). “‘Napoléon in a Skirt’: The Duchesse de Berry’s Rebellion and the Politics of Emotional Representation in July Monarchy France,” French Historical Studies (vol. 40, no. 4), 589–621. 128. On the current literature, see for example the review in Hobbs (2017). “‘Napoléon in a Skirt’”, 590. 129. Brégeon (2009). La duchesse de Berry, 166–181 passim. 130. See also about the discussion relating to the representations of the death of Charles I in the 1830s, François de Vergnette. (2014) “Paul Delaroche et les enjeux de la représentation de la mort de Charles Ier sous la Monarchie de Juillet,” in Paul Chopelin and Sylvène Edouard (eds.), Le sang des princes, Rennes: Presse Universitaires de Rennes, 227–238. 131. Authored by Louise-Félicité Guinement de Keralio Robert. 132. Horace-Napoléon Raisson (1830). Amours secrètes des Bourbons, depuis le mariage de Marie-Antoinette jusqu’à la chute de Charles X, par la Csse du C***, Paris: J.  Lefebvre, 118–126. The alledged author could be the comtesse du Cayla, Louis XVIII’s confidante. 133. Raisson (1830). Amours secrètes des Bourbons, 126. 134. See Chapter 1.1.

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135. Anon (1830). Souvenirs de 1830. Le faux héritier de la couronne de France, […], Paris: A. Deshayes, 7. The work has no named author except the duc d’Orléans but it was not penned by the Orléans king, only the pamphlet was allegedly signed by him. The work claimed the pamphlet was genuine because “The duc d’Orléans has never denounced the text […]” (p. 6). “Le duc d’Orléans n’a jamais désavoué cette pièce […].” 136. Anon (1830). Histoire scandaleuse, 184, 196, 203, 209. 137. Anon (1831). Les crimes, les forfaits et les turpitudes des rois de France, depuis Pharamond jusques et y compris Charles X, vol. I, Paris: Gauthier, 104. 138. Anon (1831). Les crimes, 126. 139. Anon (1831). Les crimes, 132. “[…] en costume d’amazone, chapeau d’homme, et des pistolets à la ceinture.” 140. Anon (1830). Histoire scandaleuse, 6, 9, 219. 141. Jo Burr Margadant argues that La Mode had been political right from the start and had criticized the king under the patronage of the duchesse. Margadant (1997). “The Duchesse de Berry”, 37–38. Margadant recognized, however, that the tone of the magazine radically changed in 1831. Margadant (1997). “The Duchesse de Berry”, 41. 142. La Mode 2.7.1831, 7. Prior to the duchesse returning to France in 1832, she was referenced only twice in La Mode as Marie Stuart. After 1832, the duchesse was most often associated with the Stuart queen in connection to the masked ball where she had dressed as Marie Stuart. See 7.10.-37, p.209, 1.1.41, p.300–1, 1.1.42, p. 190 & 168. 143. La Mode 2.7.1831, 39. “C’est une femme qui voyage, une femme qui, ne pouvant entrer dans cette pauvre France qu’elle aimait tant, vient du moins respirer autour de ses frontières l’air chéri de la patrie adoptive. Marie Stuart pleurait en voyant les nuages que le vent du nord dirigeait vers la France; elle jalousait leur sort. Mais la juste milieu tremble, mais le gouvernement se meurt de peur à cette nouvelle du voyage d’une femme. Ah! vous convenez donc qu’un grand intérêt se rattache à cette princesse exilée: si ce n’était qu’une promenade, qu’un voyage de nécessité ou de plaisir...” 144. Brégeon (2009). La duchesse de Berry, 125–126. 145. La Mode 2.7.1831, 7. See about Blanche, Prudhomme (ed. 1830). Biographie universelle, vol I, 368 and also Langerack (1847). Galerie des femmes célèbres, 271. 146. La Mode 2.7.1831, 7. “[…] le ciel lui soit en aide au milieu de tant d’ingratitudes, de trahisons, de calomnies et de malheurs.” 147. Bouyer (2007). Les reines de France, 168–174. 148. Brégeon (2009). La duchesse de Berry, 181. 149. Clément (2015). Charles X, 397–409.

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150. This discussion will be analysed in the next chapter about Marie-Amélie. 151. La Mode 1.10.1831, 10. 152. La Mode 7.4.1832, 245. 153. La Mode 9.7.1832, 312. “Vous aussi, vous avez pour mère une Jeanne-­ d’Albret, que les dangers, que la mort même n’ont point effrayée, lorsqu’il s’est agi de l’héritage de son fils!” 154. Brégeon (2009). La duchesse de Berry, 220–242. 155. La Mode 9.7.1832, 277. 156. La Mode 6.10.1832, 134. “Qui eût dit qu’un jour, Jeanne d’Albret rendrait son épée à M. Thiers!” 157. See also La Mode 6.10.1832, 162. Here duchesse de Berry was again Jeanne d’Albret. 158. La Mode 6.10.1832, 157. “Cette monstruosité ne se passait pas dans les temps de barbarie, aux premiers siècle de la monarchie, sous le règne des Chilpéric, des Clotaire et des Dagobert, des Frédégonde et des Brunehaut; ces faits se passaient en l’an de grâce 1832, dans la troisième année de la glorieuse révolution de juillet […].” 159. Merovingian period, and the entire Middle Ages, was sometimes seen as the “childhood” of civilization, See Aali (2017). Merovingian Queenship, 75 & 141. 160. See, for example, his Histoire de la civilisation en France: depuis la chute de l’Empire romain. 4 vol. 1840. 161. La Mode 6.10.1832, 167. 162. La Mode 6.10.1832, 196. 163. La Mode 6.10.1832, 186 & 267. The references to duchesse de Berry as Jeanne d’Albret continued up until February 1833. See La Mode 5.1.1833, 37 & 122. 164. See Sophie Guèrmes. “La représentation des Bourbons dans Mémoires d’Outre-Tombe,” Monarchy & Modernity since 1500, University of Cambridge, January 9, 2019. 165. François-René de Chateaubriand (1833). Mémoire sur la captivité de Madame la duchesse de Berry, Paris: Le Normant, 24–25. 166. Chateaubriand (1833). Mémoire sur la captivité, 22. 167. Édouard Laboulaye (1843). Recherches sur la condition civile et politique des femmes, depuis les Romains jusqu’à nos jours, Paris: A. Durand, 528. 168. Chateaubriand (1833). Mémoire sur la captivité, 36. 169. Chateaubriand (1833). Mémoire sur la captivité, 36–37. 170. Chateaubriand (1833). Mémoire sur la captivité, 53. 171. Margadant also underlines the duchesse’s importance for the legitimists while she was in captivity. She was already made a martyr for the cause. Margadant (1997). “The Duchesse de Berry”, 41. 172. Chateaubriand (1833). Mémoire sur la captivité, 48.

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173. Pilbeam (1991). The 1830 Revolution in France, 114–115. See also Fortescue (2005). France and 1848, 22. 174. Chateaubriand (1833). Mémoire sur la captivité, 65. 175. Chateaubriand (1833). Mémoire sur la captivité, 55. 176. Viennot (2006). La France, les femmes et le pouvoir, 327. 177. Chateaubriand (1833). Mémoire sur la captivité, 70. 178. See, for example, Amable Tastu (1836). Cours d’histoire de France, vol. I, Paris: Lavigne, 24; Laure de Saint-Ouen (1830). Histoire de France, depuis l’établissement de la monarchie jusqu’à nos jours, Paris: L. Colas, 18; Henri Martin (1834). Histoire de France depuis les temps les plus reculés jusqu’en juillet 1830, vol. I, Paris: L. Mame, 171; Chrysanthe Ovide Des Michels (1835). Histoire générale du moyen âge […], vol. I, Paris: L. Colas et L. Hachette, 200; Abel Hugo (1837). France historique et monumentale: Histoire générale de France depuis les temps les plus reculés jusqu’à nos jours, vol. II, Paris: H.-L. Delloye, 18. 179. About the exclusion and Salic Law, see Hanley (2003). “The Salic Law”, 2–16. Also Viennot (2006). La France, les femmes et le pouvoir, 1–36 & passim. 180. Chateaubriand (1833). Mémoire sur la captivité de Madame la duchesse de Berry, 68. “[…] Femme-Roi pendant l’absence de l’Orphelin, Caroline aura par son mâle courage monté au trône vacant sans violer la loi salique.” 181. Philippe-Antoine Merlin (1809). Répertoire universel et raisonné de jurisprudence, vol. 10, Pro-Rel, Paris: Garnery, 761. 182. Journal des débats 4.1.1833. 183. Journal des débats 22.11.1832. Another comparison to Napoléon, see, for example, the Journal des débats 15.5.1832. 184. Journal des débats 13.11.1832, 11.11.1832. See also about the arrest of the duchesse: 2.12.1832, 12.11.1832, 14.11.1832, 30.11.1832, 13.11.1832, 9.11.1832, 20.11.1832, 18.11.1832, 18.10.1832, 28.11.1832, 19.11.1832, 6.11.-1832, 29.11.1832, 1.12.1832. 185. Journal des débats 22.1.1833. 186. About civil war and the duchesse, see, for example, the Journal des débats 29.5.1833, 27.8.1832, 22.1.1833, 4.1.1833, 6.1.1833. 187. Brégeon (2009). La duchesse de Berry, 251–261. 188. Journal des débats 2.12.1833. 189. Journal des débats 25.1.1834. 190. Journal des débats 4.11.1834. 191. Alfred Nettement (1834). Histoire fantastique de la révolution de juillet, en soixante-dix articles, ou Recueil de variétés insérées dans La Quotidienne, Paris: G.-A. Dentu, 337–349.

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192. Journal des débats 16.1.1837, 14.12.1836, 21.11.1836, 5.11.1836, 15.11.1836, 18.11.1836. See also Goujon (2012). Monarchies postrévolutionnaires, 299–300. 193. Goujon (2012). Monarchies postrévolutionnaires, 294–299. 194. Alfred Nettement (1837). Mémoires historiques de S.  A. R.  Madame, duchesse de Berry, depuis sa naissance jusqu’à ce jour, vol. I, Paris: Allardin, 9, 39, 123, 158, 181, 184, 187, 210, 234, 289, 322. 195. Nettement (1837). Mémoires historiques de S. A. R. Madame, vol. III, 49. 196. Nettement (1837). Mémoires historiques de S.  A. R.  Madame, vol. II, 51–53, 64. 197. Dijon, le 25 juillet 1830. The duchesse d’Angoulême was indeed in Dijon right after the publication of the three famous ordonnances that triggered the July Revolution on July 25. See Becquet (2012). Marie-Thérèse de France, 253–255. 198. See Dictionnaire des imprimeurs-lithographes du XIXe siècle: Bellemain Jean-Louis. Another anonymous work from the same publisher, Anon (1830). Rira bien qui rira le dernier, ou ce que c’est que la légitimité. Avis aux jésuites, congréganistes, carlistes, royalistes, etc., etc., etc. (Paris: J.-L. Bellemain) strongly justified the Orléans regime against the claims of the Bourbon legitimists. 199. Anon (1830). Lettre de la duchesse d’Angoulême au couvent de Montrouge, Paris: J.-L. Bellemain, 1830, 5–22 and passim. 200. Anon (1830). Lettre de la duchesse d’Angoulême, 10. “formez, s’il se peut, de jeunes Ravaillac, peut-être aura-t-on besoin d’un coup de main, […].” 201. Anon (1830). Lettre de la duchesse d’Angoulême, 9 and passim. 202. Offen (2017). The Woman Question in France, 39. 203. See also, for example, an anonymous print of the duchesse: anon (s.a.). “Le seul homme de la famille,” Paris: chez l’Editeur, which presented the duchesse very fiercely and angry looking. The half-length portrait included a text, “the duchesse d’Angoulême making her significant look” (“La Duchesse d’Angoulême faisant son regard significatif”). The engraving does not have a date but I estimate it was published shortly after the 1830 Revolution. 204. Anon (1830). Histoire scandaleuse, 6, 8, 90, 135, 120–121, 134, 124–125. The work also presented Marie-Thérèse as “le courier féminin des Jésuits”, female courier of the Jesuits (p. 130). 205. Anon (1830). Histoire scandaleuse, 182. “la masculine moitié du pauvre duc d’Angoulême.” 206. Anon (1830). Histoire scandaleuse, 165–166. “A dix heures du soir, le seul homme de la famille redevient femme.” 207. See also Offen (2017). The Woman Question in France, 129–130. 208. Raisson (1830). Amours secrètes des Bourbons, vol. II, 191.

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209. Anon (1831). Les crimes, vol I, 126. 210. See, for example, David Matthews (2017). Medievalism. A Critical History, Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 13–41. 211. Anon (1831). Les crimes, vol I, 51. 212. Anon (1831). Les crimes, vol I, 130. “Son caractère violent se déchaîna; elle jura, sacra, injuria son bon oncle, […]”. 213. Le Courrier français 3.9.1831. All three works on the crimes of the popes, and of Kings and Queens of France, were new and continued editions of the similar works published in the early 1790s. 214. La Mode 3/1831 (7–10.1831), 253–254. 215. La Mode wrote about a book entitled Histoire scandaleuse de la duchesse d’Angoulême but it is no doubt the same book as Anon (1830). Histoire scandaleuse. The magazines did not always use full names of the books. For example, Le Courrier français wrote about a book called Crimes des papes, des rois et reines de France, which was in fact three books. 216. La Mode 3/1832 (7.-10.1832), 272. 217. Robert Darnton (1996). The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France, London: Fontana Press, 77 & 138. 218. Hector de Jailly (1831): Une année: ou La France depuis le 27 juillet 1830 jusqu’au 27 juillet 1831, Paris: Dentu, 43–44. 219. Jailly (1831): Une année, 13. 220. Jailly (1831): Une année, 54. 221. Jailly (1831): Une année, 86. “Cette princesse vindicative, si l’on croit ses ennemies et les nôtres [..]” 222. Jailly (1831): Une année, 57. 223. Jean-François Ducis published his version of Macbeth in 1784. See Liliane Picciola (2004). “Les tragédies de Ducis, entre Corneille et Shakespeare,” Dix-septième siècle (vol. 225, no. 4), 707–723. Picciola does not seem to distinguish between the layers of legends surrounding the person of Fredegund and the real historical woman. There are no proofs that she murdered her husband or that she was behind the murder of Galeswinthe as Picciola claims. See Picciola (2004). “Les tragédies”, note 43. About Fredegund in French historiography, see Aali (2017). Merovingian Queenship and Graceffa (2009). “Le pouvoir déréglé”. 224. Not all literature favouring the Bourbons drew as extensively from history as Jailly’s work did. For example, an anonymous biography of Marie-­ Thérèse published in 1830 did not use as extensively historical references even though, in general, the tone of the work was as praising as in Jailly’s work. The nearly compulsory Saint Louis and Henri IV were mentioned as was also mentioned the long history of the Bourbons that, according to the anonymous author, stretched back to the Merovingian period. The author argued that the great virtues of Marie-Thérèse made her worthy

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of being included in the history books. Therefore, her importance was not drawn from history but from the fact that she was historically significant. The work, even though  it mentioned in the title “ex-dauphine”, ends before the 1830 Revolution. Anon (1830). Vie anecdotique: politique, critique et bigote de l’ex-dauphine, duchesse d’Angoulême chez les marchands de nouveautés, Paris: Imprimerie de Lebel, 215, 316, 321, 325–6. 225. Jailly (1831): Une année, 52. It is not clear if Jailly writes of the two Henriettas or only of Henrietta Maria. The passage is unclear. 226. Sarah Betts (2019). “Henrietta Maria, “Queen of Tears”? Picturing and Performing the Cavalier Queen,” in Estelle Paranque (ed.), Remembering Queens and Kings of Early Modern England and France, New  York: Palgrave Macmillan, 171–173. 227. Carolyn Harris (2016). Queenship and Revolution in Early Modern Europe. Henrietta Maria and Marie Antoinette, New  York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1. 228. Harris (2016). Queenship and Revolution, 180. 229. Betts (2019). “Henrietta Maria”, 155–177. 230. Susan Dunn-Hensley (2019). “Conniving Queen, Frivolous Wife, or Romantic Heroine? The Afterlife of Queen Henrietta Maria,” in Estelle Paranque (ed.), Remembering Queens and Kings of Early Modern England and France, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 293. 231. Jailly (1831): Une année, 63, 65, 71. 232. Jailly (1831): Une année, 83. “Comme Jeanne d’Arc, sa main saisit le drapeau des lis, elle le montra aux soldats indécis: ‘Français! l’entendit-on s’écrier, méconnaîtriez-vous ma voix? ce n’est pas celle d’un Corse, d’un étranger; je suis Française, moi!” 233. See, for example, Goujon (2012). Monarchies postrévolutionnaires, 19–21, on the events of 1814 in France. 234. Jailly (1831): Une année, 72. 235. Jailly did not mention once that the French wanted the 1830 Revolution but named specific groups and men who acted for and during the Revolution. See Jailly (1831): Une année, 1–23. 236. Adolphe de Sèze (1832). Nouveaux souvenirs d’Holy-Rood, Paris: G.-A. Dentu, 29. 237. The author criticized Louis-Philippe by pondering if Dagobert would have been a good constitutional king. Dagobert was a seventh-century Merovingian king, but Sèze was actually referring to a revolutionary period song called Le bon roi Dagobert, which mocked the king and made a complete fool out of him. In the song, the only good advice came from the Saint Eligius (Éloi) but Sèze argued that the king would no longer choose a saint as an adviser referring to the alleged anti-Catholicism of the Orléans king. Sèze (1832). Nouveaux souvenirs, 22.

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238. Sèze (1832). Nouveaux souvenirs, 117–118. 239. Sèze (1832). Nouveaux souvenirs, 177–178. 240. Sèze (1832). Nouveaux souvenirs, 52–3. 241. Sèze (1832). Nouveaux souvenirs, 115. 242. La Mode 6.4.1838, 63. 243. La Mode 6.7.1839, 249. 244. La Mode 6.7.1839, 313–317. 245. La Mode 6.7.1839, 317.

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CHAPTER 5

Dying Royal Power (1840–1848)

5.1   Marie-Amélie and the Catholic Revival Queen Marie-Amélie’s saintly reputation that had evoked both critical and admiring reactions in the 1830s continued to flourish in the 1840s and commenced to transform into a social and political stagnation following the death of the crown prince, young duc d’Orléans, in 1842. In many ways, his death was a decisive moment for the queen and the future of the Orléans dynasty. France in the 1840s went through late industrialization, population growth, and strong social movement together with urbanization. All these factors contributed to the social restlessness that would have needed responses from the government. However, what defined Louis-Philippe’s governments, and especially the governments led by François Guizot, were conservatism and reactivity. The same hands held political and financial powers. This chapter examines the public reaction to the position of Marie-­ Amélie, especially regarding the death of her son, the heir to the throne. The question of gendered power became once again burning when the duc d’Orléans left two young sons, and the question of regency had to be solved. The duchesse d’Orléans was Helene of Mecklembourg-Schwerin, a Protestant princess. Did the debate on regency influence the way the queen was represented and commented on in public? How did the growing conservatism of Louis-Philippe’s politics affect the way Marie-Amélie © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 H. Aali, French Royal Women during the Restoration and July Monarchy, Queenship and Power, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59754-2_5

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was presented by the supporters and critics of the dynasty? Broadly examining, was the queen more discussed in public in the 1840s compared to the previous decade, or did her visibility diminish together with the number of her public appearances?1 The 1840s was the period of the Catholic revival in France. Religion’s visibility increased especially in the public sphere. Re-emerging religiousness can be detected, for example, in the growth of religious literature on saint queens, in the increasing number of Catholic charity organizations, religious orders, pilgrims, and in the Church’s political and social activity within the French society. However,  the revival did not signify overall growth in participation in all sectors of society because simultaneously the number of holy orders decreased and the number of participants in the Easter service remained relatively low.2 During the 1840s, Marie-Amélie, and her religiousness, gained more authority over her husband, whereas Adélaïde’s power diminished. Following the death of the crown prince (who was no longer called Dauphin after 1830), Louis-Philippe and Marie-Amélie became increasingly religious and distrusting of any political or social reforms. The religiousness of Marie-Amélie continued to be emphasized at the beginning of the 1840s very similarly as it had been accentuated in the 1830s. A short anonymous pamphlet published in celebration of the day of Saint Philip (May 1), the namesake saint of the king, presented the queen almost uniquely in a religious context. The anonymous author did not mention anything else about the queen besides her charity work and participation in Mass, aiding the poor and needy, and praying with her daughters. According to the author, following the example of the queen’s “pure piety”, the poor and suffering souls kneeled more eagerly before God in order to “receive the hope and necessary resignation of their state.”3 The queen’s role was reduced to the religious educator of her family, especially her daughters, and the whole nation—particularly the poor. Like the saint queens such as Clotilde, she would protect France with her devotion and prayers. The booklet’s strong emphasis on Marie-Amélie’s devotion and religiousness is at least partly explained by the criticism the royal family faced following the introduction of Protestant spouses, particularly Helene of Mecklembourg-Schwerin, to the Orléans dynasty in the late 1830s.4 The legitimist discourse presented the queen willingly and knowingly jeopardizing France by approving Protestants to marry into the royal

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family. In his discourse, the Orléans were usurpers, and the Protestants were a threat to Catholic France. Bourbons were associated with the Catholic Church and the religion of the majority of the French.5 Catholicism, after 1830, was no longer the state religion but only acknowledged as the religion of the majority of the French. According to the legitimists, however, most  French did not approve of  the French royal princes or princesses marrying Protestants. Frédéric Dollé published a booklet (1841) in association with the legitimist magazine La Mode, which warned Marie-­ Amélie of the dangers of letting Protestants into the royal family. The responsibility for the royal marriages was given to the queen, and the king was hardly mentioned at all. Indeed, the author granted the queen a large amount of power by depicting her alone in charge of arranging their children’s marriages and choosing appropriate spouses. No clear indication is given why the booklet and accusations were directed to the queen rather than to the king. There are, however, two possible reasons. The first reason is that the marriages were perceived as belonging to the “intimate” sphere regarded as feminine even though royal marriages were anything but “intimate” issue. The second reason is the queen’s saintly and devout reputation that the booklet sought to challenge by presenting her as a henchman of the Protestants. Probably both reasons affected the choice of Marie-Amélie as the focus of the booklet. Dollé’s booklet drew extensively from the French medieval and early modern history to prove how Catholicism, and especially the Bourbons supporting and drawing support from the Catholic Church, had always protected and cherished France. It juxtaposed the descendants of Charlemagne and Saint Louis to the followers of Luther and Calvin: [P]rotestants have been called to the ministry of religion and public education, and the family that the catastrophe of July placed on the throne of rois très chrétiens, descendants of Charlemagne and Saint Louis, have only found unions among the followers of Luther and Calvin.6

According to Dollé, not only did the Orléans place the whole of France in danger, but they were also unwanted spouses among the royal European (and Catholic) families. Therefore, they needed to marry into the Protestant families. The Revolution of July, or “catastrophe of July”, was orangiste, styled after the Protestant King William of Orange (King of England 1689–1702) who dethroned James II and VII.7 The

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sixteenth-­century queens, Elisabeth I and Marie Stuart, were also referred to in Dollé’s work. Elisabeth I, whose “Protestant fanaticisms exceeded even that of her father’s” sent Marie Stuart to the same scaffold where her mother Anna Boleyn had ended her days.8 In this legitimist reading, similarly to Chateaubriand’s work in 1833, the Orléans family was the nineteenth-­century Elisabeth I, whereas the Bourbons were the new tragic Stuarts. The Protestant minister was François Guizot. The principal current threat to France, according to the booklet, was Helene, the young duchesse d’Orléans, who in 1841 was the mother of the heir and possibly a future queen, and it was Marie-Amélie who had introduced her into the royal family. According to Dollé: [w]e know that Protestantism was introduced to France due to the special protection given to the sect by one duchesse d’Orléans, sister of François I; God protect us so that the Lutheran condescension of another duchesse d’Orléans would not be fatal to our fatherland!...9

He continued at the very end of the booklet: […] by her special protection Marguerite d’Orléans encouraged the Protestantism, and it is her guilty condescension that we should blame all the disasters of the sixteenth century; I hope that another duchesse d’Orléans will not immortalize our misery by advocating with her powerful influence the sect that would necessary, as Voltaire said it, breed civil wars and rock the foundation of states […]10

Dollé produced as a warning example a sixteenth-century duchesse d’Orléans favouring Protestantism in France, and he predicted that should not the current duchesse d’Orléans be stopped, or her influence constrained, France would again face violent clashes or even new Wars of Religion. Who was this sixteenth-century duchesse d’Orléans who, according to Dollé, caused so much pain and misery with her favourable attitude towards the Protestants? The person Dollé was referring to was Marguerite d’Angoulême (1492–1549), Queen of Navarra. She was also known as Marguerite de Valois after her first husband, Charles de Valois, the duc d’Alençon. Her father was Charles d’Orléans, which was why Dollé styled her as the duchesse d’Orléans even though she did not inherit the title. Dollé did not

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mention Marguerite also being an Angoulême, a name associated with Marie-Thérèse. Marguerite was the sister of François I (1494–1547), King of France. Marguerite’s only surviving child was no other than Jeanne d’Albret, mother of the first Bourbon king Henri IV, to whom the legitimists made frequent references in the 1830s regarding  the duchesse de Berry. Indeed, only less than ten years before Dollé’s booklet’s publication, the legitimists in La Mode had styled the duchesse de Berry as the new Jeanne d’Albret, the heroic mother who would save France for her son. The sixteenth-century Marguerite was not a Protestant like her daughter, Jeanne d’Albret, even though she was very favourable to the Reformation and Protestants.11 This is most likely why Dollé chose her to be the warning example of a “duchesse d’Orléans” endangering France with Protestantism. Marguerite’s grandson Henri IV belonged to the same canon of great men as Saint Louis, Charlemagne, and Louis XVI did. Dollé presented Henri IV saving France by becoming a Catholic before acceding to the throne.12 Interestingly, keeping in mind the veneration of Jeanne d’Albret in La Mode, Dollé argued that the great families in France did not want her marrying the possible (Catholic) heir to the French throne, which consequently made her marry Antoine de Bourbon, the father of Henri IV.13 Dollé’s reasoning was at times confusing. The underlining argument seemed to be that only the Bourbons (earlier Henri IV and now “Henri V”) could save Catholic France from the Orléans family (earlier Marguerite d’Angoulême or d’Orléans, now Marie-Amélie, the previous duchesse d’Orléans, and Helene, the current duchesse d’Orléans), who enabled the Protestants to enter France causing so much pain and misery. Another reading of Dollé’s arguments is that he associated Protestantism with women and Catholicism with men. Marie-Amélie, Helene, Marguerite, and Jeanne promoted, and would continue to promote, according to the booklet, Protestant sects, whereas Henri IV and “Henri V” protected, and would continue to protect, Catholic France. Women’s activity in the field of religion endangered France, whereas men who knew the true religion could save the country. Even though the booklet accused Marie-Amélie of permitting a Protestant into the royal family, it implicitly reproached the king for not constraining his spouse. This indirect accusation implied that Louis-Philippe could not control his spouse and could not protect France against the dangerous Protestant influences. According to the booklet, the

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Bourbons, especially the Bourbon king(s), would never have permitted such a thing to happen. These accusations were all too familiar for French queens since, for example, both Marie-Antoinette and Henrietta Maria, the daughter of Henri IV and spouse of Charles I, were accused of being dominant partners in their marriages and permitting foreign powers to intervene in French and English politics.14 Dollé re-published the booklet in 1842, right before the accidental death of the duc d’Orléans. The content was largely the same as in the previous version and the author mentioned the current duchesse d’Orléans but referred to her repeatedly as the duchesse de Chartres. Louis-Philippe’s and Marie-Amélie’s oldest son was styled the duc de Chartres before Louis-­ Philippe became the king of the French when Ferdinand-Philippe inherited the title of duc d’Orléans. Helene would have been the duchesse de Chartres had Louis-Philippe still been the duc d’Orléans. Perhaps this is what Dollé implied—that for him, Louis-Philippe was not the king but only a duc d’Orléans, and consequently, Helene was the duchesse de Chartres. In addition, Dollé withdrew from writing about another duchesse d’Orléans regarding Marguerite d’Angoulême and only stated that “[…] la Ligue was born of […] the guilty condescendence of certain duchesse d’Orléans, sister of François I.”15 The author now reproached less the young duchesse d’Orléans of endangering France. Without the information on the reactions provoked by the 1841 version, it is impossible to know for sure what led the author to make the changes. Yet, one has to keep in mind that since 1835 France had strict laws of censorship.16 Dollé’s interpretation of Marie-Amélie favouring Protestantism was interesting, considering that according to Florence Vidal, the queen’s biographer, Marie-Amélie did not appreciate her daughter-in-law due to her Protestant religion.17 Vidal argued that Marie-Amélie had accused Helene of having a thirst for power and wishing to become a regent after the duc d’Orléans died.18 These accusations resembled very much the accusations the legitimists threw against Marie-Amélie in the 1830s. According to the accusations, she had always secretly harboured the desire to become a queen despite her opposing reassurances.19 In 1841, La Mode published a short article about Marie-Amélie and Adélaïde. The article discussed if Marie-Amélie was the most esteemed lady in her family.  According to the magazine, another publication had declared her as such. Alfred Nettement, the author of La Mode’s article, claimed that Adélaïde was and should be more esteemed in the Orléans family than the queen. The reason for the fierce legitimist and frequent

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contributor of La Mode to argue for Adélaïde’s esteem was that, according to him, she had always stayed faithful to her education and beliefs whereas Marie-Amélie had oftentimes betrayed them. It is essential to keep in mind that La Mode frequently attacked Adélaïde and her use of power. Interestingly, when put side by side with her sister-­ in-­law, Nettement would prefer the king’s sister. Marie-Amélie’s biggest sin seemed to be that her mother, Marie-Antoinette’s sister, brought her up to loath the Revolution and despise Philippe Égalité. Despite all this, she would marry Philippe Égalité’s son. Similarly, during the Restoration, she had been a friend to the young duchesse de Berry, her niece, and Marie-Thérèse, her cousin, but later she would rise to the throne reserved for the Bourbon branch, and she would show no mercy for the duchesse when she was imprisoned in 1832.20 The article repeated the same arguments against the queen as before: that she had betrayed the Bourbon family and her mother by marrying Louis-Philippe and that she had always secretly harboured the desire to become a queen. Marie-Amélie was not the only one whom the legitimists accused of pretending to be religious. In 1841, La Mode sarcastically argued that Louis-Philippe always became such a devout man in Eu, where the royal family had their summer dwelling. For the church at Eu, Louis-­Philippe had ordered stained glass windows picturing the namesake saints of the royal family including Saint Philip, Saint Amelia, and Saint Adelaide. The chapel of the castle d’Eu already had the stained glass windows with Saint Amelia from the painting of Delaroche that we discussed earlier. La Mode informed the readers that in addition to the royal saints in the stained glass windows at Eu, there were representations of major Norman heroes: “[B]esides the image of all these blessed ones, he [Louis-Philippe] carefully placed there the illustrations of Normandy. Rollon, Guillaume-­ Longue-­Epée and Guillaume-le-Conquérant... men of steel and of battle who would not have wanted M. Guizot as their minister or his peace at any price.”21 Guillaume-Longue-Epée was William Longsword (died in 942), the son of Rollon (died c. 930), anachronically styled in later sources as the duke of Normandy. Interestingly though, William Longsword was not mentioned to be represented in the stained glass windows ordered by Louis-Philippe, according to Dominic Morel, an author of an article about the production of the stained glass windows during the reign of Louis-Philippe.22 La Mode’s principal aim, however, was to juxtapose the medieval heroes to Louis-Philippe’s newly appointed Minister of Foreign Affairs, François

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Guizot, whom the magazine presented as a coward.23 Louis-Philippe’s government was portrayed as less valuable and less heroic than the great Norman warriors whose histories were associated with the castle d’Eu. La Mode wished to imply that Louis-Philippe was not as illustrious as the previous, heroic medieval dukes of Normandy and holders of the comté d’Eu, which the king had inherited from his mother. Not even military victories could make Louis-Philippe or his sons appear heroic in the eyes of the critical French public. The most significant foreign military campaign France participated in the 1830s and 1840s was the conquest of Algeria (1830–1847) that began during the Restoration. Four of Louis-Philippe’s sons served in Algeria during the July Monarchy and received distinctive military merits. The princes’ merits did not significantly affect the falling popularity of the increasingly conservative king. François, the duc de Joinville, one of the royal princes, brought back from St Helena the remains of Napoléon which were re-buried with an elaborate ceremony to the chapel of Invalides in December 1840.24 The quest for military glory from history did not aid the July Monarchy that struggled with social and political issues. * * * In July 1842, the duc d’Orléans died in an accident with carriages. The prince fell from the carriages, hit his head and died shortly afterwards. The crown prince was the royal family’s most popular member, a war hero, and a young father. His passing affected not only his immediate family but also the continuity of the Orléans dynasty and even that of the French monarchy, although Marie- Amélie and Louis-Philippe had several children. The duc’s death affected the royal couple’s position in public in several ways. The grief popularized the king for a moment, and many critical voices quieted down temporarily out of respect for the family. For example, the number of cutting articles on Marie-Amélie was significantly reduced in La Mode following her oldest son’s death. The death of the duc d’Orléans ensued a surge in publications venerating his memory and respecting the grieving family. An anonymous Notice biographique et nécrologique du prince royal duc d’Orléans25 came out right away in 1842 and dramatically portrayed the events that led to the death of the prince. The booklet described how, by the deathbed of her son, Marie-Amélie became a Christian instead of a mother: “[…] then a Christian replaced the mother, and joining her hands together, she said to the priest with a heartbreaking voice: ‘For pity’s sake,

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pray for my son! Tell me that he is in heaven!..’”26 Few pages later, Marie-­ Amélie reminded her spouse, the king, and several significant men that the duc’s death was not only a disaster for the Orléans family but for the entire France.27 Even during her grief, Marie-Amélie was presented as considering the whole country instead of only focusing on her own family. Furthermore, as a true Christian, she concerned herself with her son’s soul in heaven. The booklet pictured the young duc with various esteemed qualities and portrayed him as a young Napoléon, as charitable Emperor Titus, and as the fourteenth-century hero of the battle of Calais, Eustace de Ribeaumont.28 The duc d’Orléans was represented as a hero in every imaginable way: as a benefactor, and heroic military leader ensuring France’s national glory. Marie-Amélie was reduced to grieving and praying mother, securing the religious purity of the nation by sacralizing the royal family. No doubt, presenting the queen considering the future of entire France alluded to the criticism the Orléans family had received of favouring their own family at France’s expense. Another booklet related to the death of Ferdinand-Philippe drew from the visible similarities between this death and the assassination of the duc de Berry in 1820. They were both fathers of young children and on their shoulders lay much of the hope for the dynastic continuity.29 The similarities of the two deaths were also emphasized in engravings. Jean-­ Dominique-­Étienne Canu’s 1820 engraving of the duchesse de Berry with her children entitled La Nouvelle Jeanne d’Albret was re-published in 1842 with the face of the duchesse de Berry replaced with that of the duchesse d’Orléans and the bust of the duc de Berry replaced with that of the duc d’Orléans. In addition, the daughter of the duchesse de Berry was changed to a boy since the oldest child of the duc d’Orléans was a boy. Otherwise, the image was recognizably the same even though all the text, even the title, had been removed.30 The Orléans dynasty recycled the imagery without naming Helene as a new Jeanne d’Albret, who had been a Protestant similarly to Helene. The engraving emphasized her role as a grieving widow and not as a Protestant princess. The duc d’Orléans’ death inevitably resulted in a similar situation as in the 1820s as now the next in line to the throne was extremely young. An anonymous author of a booklet Le duc d’Orléans. Sa vie, sa mort, sa généalogie raised this question and firmly argued that regency led by a woman could not be an option. In England, the monarch was but a puppet of which, according to the author, Queen Victoria was a good example: “An eighteen-year-old queen is an eminent example of such custom. How

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could one imagine comparing such nation to France, country of Salic Law, a  country whose great periods have all names of kings: Saint Louis, François Ier, Henri IV, Louis XIV, Napoléon!”31 The author argued that since France had never had a great queen, there should not be even discussion about female regency. He left out all the regents from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and presented the Salic Law as protecting the country from the power of the aristocrats.32 Therefore, the text can be read as a firm opposition to the regency of the duchesse d’Orléans even though it did not explicitly mention the duchesse in its political reflections. The author did suggest, however implicitly, that a weak ruler would be at the mercy of the aristocracy like in England and implied that a woman, the duchesse, would no doubt be a weak ruler. The discussion about regency commenced right after the death of the duc. Ferdinand-Philippe’s older son, Philippe, comte de Paris, was now the heir to the throne. By the will of the late duc d’Orléans, the mother, Helene of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, was excluded from the regency. The exclusion did raise vivid debates among the politicians, and eventually, the less popular duc de Nemours, younger brother of the late duc d’Orléans, was declared regent for his nephews. According to Florence Vidal, Marie-­ Amélie was against the regency of Helene, and she never acknowledged her daughter-in-law’s intelligence that might have even saved the throne for the family in 1848.33 According to Vidal, the poet and politician Alphonse de Lamartine wished to see the duchesse as a regent for her son, but François Guizot objected on the grounds of women’s inability to be politicians. Marie-Amélie objected to the duchesse’s regency based on her Protestant religion and because the queen wished to see her other son as the regent.34 Guizot’s opposition to female regency cohered well with the general tendency to perceive women incapable of participating in political life.35 The tendency was tangible in Édouard Laboulaye’s prize-winning study Recherches sur la condition civile et politique des femmes, depuis les Romains jusqu’à nos jours (1843) that won a competition launched by the Académie des sciences morales et politiques in 1842, two months before the duc’s accidental death.36 The conclusion of the work declared that “[R]oyal power in their [women’s] hands is a fatal weapon that often turns against its holder; power does not suit them; their weakness, their spirit, their education, their grace even should keep them apart from these stormy positions.”37 In addition, Laboulaye argued that women’s kingdom was at

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home where they were the true rulers, a home that had: “soft monarchy that does not trouble the peacefulness of their hearts […].”38 As we have observed throughout this study, the only roles considered suitable for even the most powerful royal women were those that held “soft power”. * * * Since the late 1830s, Napoléon and his reign were increasingly glorified in France, and Louis-Philippe willingly embraced this in his attempts to respond to his falling popularity. We saw references to young Napoléon in the booklet dedicated to the late duc d’Orléans in 1842 and that the duc de Joinville brought back to France Napoléon’s ashes in 1840.39 The increasing popularity of Napoléon’s legend did not signify the eclipse of other national histories. On the contrary, the 1840s saw the construction and restoration of multiple historical sites that embraced the medieval and early modern history and made references to the ruling family.40 Critics did not forget  Queen Marie-Amélie’s saintly reputation, although La Mode became less thorny as it had been in the 1830s. However, the magazine did sarcastically present, for example, the Virgin Mary being a usurper against Marie-Amélie, and they warned her to watch out for prosecution.41 Louis-Philippe’s many historical restoration and construction projects were frequently commented on in La Mode. The church of Saint-Vincent-­ de-Paul that had its construction commenced already during the 1820s received, according to La Mode, several sculptures during the July Monarchy drawing from the Catholic history such as Saint Louis, Saint Gregory of Tours, Saint Elisabeth, and Saint Charles. There were also  sculptures there of Saint Henri, Saint Philip, and Saint Amelia. According to the magazine, Saint Philip’s face was sculpted to resemble the face of Louis-Philippe, and Saint Amelia was “grasse et fraîche”.42 The magazine did not criticize the sculptures of the royal couple as such but the lack of remembrance of Charles X and “l’auguste fille de Louis XVI” who initiated the construction of the church.43 The criticism was noteworthy since the magazine wrote only a  couple of lines earlier that Saint Charles and Saint Teresa  were included among the sculptures. Those sculptures could be seen as references to Charles X and Marie-Thérèse, but apparently, the magazine did not (want to) interpret the sculptures this way.

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Saint Philip and Saint Amelia with the facial features of Louis-Philippe and Marie-Amélie were equally memorialized in the stained glass windows of the transept of Dreux finalized in 1844. They were immortalized together with a number of medieval saints such as Saint Denis, Saint Genevieve, Saint Radegund, Saint Clotilde, Saint Balthild, and Saint Isabelle.44 The construction of Dreux as the new dynastical resting place for the Orléans family, and not burying the Orléans in Saint-Denis as the Bourbons had been buried, was a significant step away from the monarchical traditions of the Old Regime and the Restoration period. However, the separation was moderated by selecting the same national saints to the stained glass windows as had been utilized by the Bourbon family during the Restoration. The duc d’Orléans was buried in Dreux. The 1840s saw the achievement of sixteen sculptures of famous French women in the Jardin de Luxembourg in Paris. Louis-Philippe himself initiated the order for the sculptures. The sculptures included many of the women discussed in this study: Genevieve, Clotilde, Balthild, Blanche of Castile, Marie Stuart, Jeanne d’Albret, and Marguerite d’Angoulême.45 Saint Clotilde was represented both in Dreux and in the Jardin de Luxembourg, but she did not have a church dedicated to her in Paris until 1846 when the construction of such a church was initiated. During the Restoration, the church was elected to be dedicated to Saint Charles when the plan for the church had been first laid. Sometime during the reign of Louis-Philippe, the church was decided to be dedicated to Saint Amelia, in honour of the queen. It seems, however, that Marie-Amélie herself wished to dedicate the church to Saint Clotilde.46 In all accounts, Saint Clotilde seems to have been a popular saint in Paris during the 1840s because, in addition to previously mentioned places of veneration, a street was named after her. The church of Saint-Germain-­ l’Auxerrois received several sculptures of the saint Merovingian queens, including Clotilde.47 Saint Clotilde’s popularity in the 1840s was an interesting phenomenon taking into consideration that the 1820s was the heyday for the popularity of her spouse, Clovis. Clotilde’s later popularity, together with the popularity of other saint queens, illustrates the Catholic revival in France and the reuse of national saints from one decade to another. From the perspective of gender, the popularity can be read as an indication of a desire to create simplistic ideals for women and mothers and as a continuing closure of the political sphere for women despite the attempts of several prominent French feminists.48

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Clotilde could also signify the queen’s religious influence over the king. In 1845, La Mode urged the Catholic priests to whisper into Marie-­ Amélie’s ears the words she should repeat in Tuileries. According to La Mode: […] since a long time, since Clotilde, […], we have known in France what kind of influence women can obtain and what kind of power they can ­exercise in the palace. Therefore, the preachers should, with the authority they have received from God, say the words that Marie-Amélie could repeat in Tuileries.49

The passage contains many interesting features. Firstly, it recognized the influence Marie-Amélie had over her husband. Secondly, it pictured all queens having had this influence in the royal palace since the early Middle Ages. Thirdly, Marie-Amélie was imagined, perhaps similar to Saint Clotilde, absorbing the priests’  words without her own reflection and passing them to the men ruling in the palace. Therefore, the priests could use the women as vehicles of ideas when they wished to influence the king. Women did not only hold illicit power in the palace, but men of God, according to La Mode, easily influenced them. Since Catholic history was essential to the legitimists, together with the support of the Church, the aim of the criticism was twofold—to criticize Marie-Amélie as being easily influenced by priests and to criticize King Louis-Philippe as being equally easily influenced by a woman. The passage corresponded well with the general perception of the influence Marie-Amélie had over her husband from 1842 to 1848: increasingly conservative and religious influence. However, one should bear in mind that in the 1820s, the political opponents criticized Charles X for being excessively influenced by the Jesuits. Twenty years later, the roles had changed, but criticism was the same. In 1847, France was consumed by economic, foreign, and social crises. Depression and unemployment had hit France in 1845 and Louis-­ Philippe’s government did not undertake reforms to improve the situation for lower classes or increase electoral rights. Fairly good relations with Britain, the so-called entente cordiale, had ended by 1846 with multiple crises, including the Spanish marriage of the duc de Montpensier. In July 1847, started a series of reform banquets where politicians, mostly of opposition, protested the unpopular government’s lack of will to push through any reforms.50 Despite, or perhaps because of, the royal couple’s increasing unpopularity and blindness for any need of reforms, a short yet

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flattering biography was published on Marie-Amélie in 1847. Biographer E. Pascallet portrayed the queen in many ways very similarly as she had been portrayed in the 1830s: dedicated to her family and France, without any ambition to become a queen. The biography did not entirely ignore the political situation of the late 1840s. Unlike the previous biographies, Pascallet began with Marie-Amélie’s early education and paralleled her teacher Madame d’Ambrosio’s virtue and genie to those of Anne de Gonzague de Clèves (1616–1684) and François Fénélon (1651–1715).51 Anne de Gonzague de Clèves was the aunt of the spouse of Philippe I, duc d’Orléans, younger brother of Louis XIV. Madame d’Ambrosio inspired especially the love of religion in Marie-­ Amélie, according to Pascallet. Marie-Amélie’s relations to the executed royal couple were left out. The biographer only described Marie-Amélie’s mother’s joy of Louis-Philippe, a war hero, becoming her son-in-law. Pascallet omitted the politics of Marie-Amélie’s mother, a controversial issue in earlier biographies, only stating that she was patriotic.52 The author emphasized how meritocracy had prevailed in Louis-Philippe’s court in the 1810s.53 Meritocracy was associated with the reign of Napoléon and contrasted with the Restoration period when birthright determined much of people’s future. Concerning the events of July 1830, the biography emphasized that there was no conspiracy to get the duc d’Orléans to the throne of France. On the contrary, the author suggested that the duc’s popularity and Marie-Amélie’s “qualités vraiment royales” might have furthered the rise to power.54 The common thread was to promote the queen’s charity work, religiosity, modesty, and virtues. According to Pascallet, heaven had foreseen her to become the model of all French mothers and an example of all virtues.55 The author emphasized strongly her resignation and all the sorrow she had had to face throughout her life. Religion was her strength amid all the deaths in her family. Although no member of the Bourbon family was named in the biography, the portrayal of Marie-Amélie had started to resemble that of Marie-Thérèse. Both were portrayed as martyrs who had lost their loved ones and now lived a life of resignation, charity, and religious purity. Both devoted themselves to the happiness of the French. The biography delved several pages on the deaths of the princess Marie (1839) and duc d’Orléans (1842). Princess Marie’s sculpture of Joan of Arc was praised for over a page for its modest heroism, as an image of a firm resignation, uniting in the sculpture “pensée religieuse et guerrière”.56

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Historian William Fortescue named Louis-Philippe’s loss of moral authority as one reason for the fall of the July Monarchy in 1848.57 The continuity of portraying Marie-Amélie as a religious authority was visible in royal imagery until the end of Louis-Philippe’s reign and perhaps was used to reclaim the moral authority. The year  1842 signified Marie-­ Amélie’s quasi-disappearance from the public sphere, after which religion became the most central reference associated with her. The representations of Marie-Amélie became apolitical and religious, which defied any social reforms but simultaneously responded to versatile criticism from the adversaries of the Orléans dynasty. Nevertheless, she was made to replace the exiled daughter of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette as a royal martyr. The slow transformation of her portrayal cohered with other aspects of Louis-Philippe’s reign that increasingly commenced to resemble the end of the Restoration rather than producing any practical solutions to social and economic issues tormenting France.

5.2   No More Revolutions for Adélaïde d’Orléans Adélaïde d’Orléans was a firm supporter of Louis-Philippe until her death in 1847. It appears, however, that her influence on her brother diminished gradually during the last decade. The primary sources of Adélaïde in the 1840s are the magazines that carefully reported about the royal family. There are very few works dedicated to her during the 1840s, and therefore, I shall consult related works to discover how she was represented during the final years of her life. An excellent example of Adélaïde’s power in her brother’s politics, as reflected by La Mode, comes from 1840 in the form of a picture. France had a severe crisis in foreign policy due to the support that the government had given to the Pasha of Egypt, Mohammed Ali, and his ambitious politics of expansion in the Middle East. However, the support, unbeknown to the government and the king, had positioned France against the projects of four major European powers, Britain, Russia, Prussia, and Austria. Eventually, the Pasha of Egypt had to back down from his ambitious plans. France, together with Louis-Philippe and his government, suffered a blow both in terms of foreign policy and in terms of authority in domestic policy.58 La Mode commented on the events in the form of popular physionomies, description of customs and manners, or “episodic narratives focusing on contemporary mores”.59 The article Physionomie du chateau contained a

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sarcastic list of the people in France to whom the Pasha could rely on for  support in a political crisis. One of them was Adélaïde of whom the magazine wrote “Of the rest, Mlle Adélaïde, who is perhaps the most intelligent of the place, would carry perfectly well alone the burden of the affair of the Middle East.”60 In the picture, Adélaïde is visualized in an oriental style clothing, standing, and holding hands on her hips. She is leaning slightly backwards due to the heavy weights attached to her hair. The weights make her head turn back and her nose upwards, making her look proud and self-confident. The article undoubtedly aimed to mock the government by picturing its wisest head belonging to a woman, but it simultaneously recognized Adélaïde’s influence in Louis-Philippe’s politics. According to French historian Bertrand Goujon, the legitimists did not threaten the July Monarchy at the end of the 1830s, but they continued to put pressure on the government on a large scale.61 The physionomie of La Mode did not draw from history to criticize Louis-Philippe’s government and the royal family it considered usurpers. Nevertheless, history was as much an essential ingredient to criticize the government as it was to reinforce any government’s legitimacy. As we have seen in the previous chapter about Marie-Amélie, La Mode published in 1841 an article comparing the queen to her sister-in-law. The inspiration for the article came, according to La Mode, from a “dynastical magazine” that praised the queen for being the most distinguished lady of her family.62 I have analysed the article from Marie-Amélie’s point of view, so I shall focus here on how it represented Adélaïde. The article aimed to prove Adélaïde more worthy than her sister-in-law because Adélaïde had always been faithful to her political views, even if the legitimist magazine did not approve the views. According to the article, Adélaïde’s father and her famous governess, Madame de Genlis, were to blame for her distorted political views. According to the magazine, on one occasion, for example, Madame de Genlis had taken young Adélaïde and her brother to a castle, where they had seen the statue of Diane de Poitiers (1500–1566), Henri II’s mistress. Madame de Genlis had allegedly looked at Louis-Philippe and said of Diane de Poitiers: “Ah, she was fortunate to be the mistress of both the father and the son”.63 La Mode implied that Madame de Genlis would have wished to be Louis-Philippe’s mistress as well as his father’s and that if Adélaïde was immoral and supported the Revolution, as the magazine had repeatedly implicated in the 1830s, it was because of the upbringing she had had. History was simplified in order to evoke a narrative known to all readers. Here, it was the narrative of the immoral women:

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Adélaïde had learned her habits from the examples of Madame de Genlis and Diane de Poitiers. In an opposition magazine, such as La Mode, the uses of history as a way to criticize the July Monarchy took inventive forms. They drew extensively from contemporary issues such as conservation of historically significant buildings.64 Louis-Philippe was known for his love for national history, which was visible in transforming the château de Versailles into a museum in 1837. Versailles, château “louis-quatorzien”, was an excellent example of Louis-Philippe’s admiration for the Sun King and for his desire to prove the legitimacy of his rule by demonstrating his kinship with the Bourbon king.65 Another restored building was the château d’Amboise, a royal residence in the Loire Valley. The site has a long history going back to the Merovingian period. Louis-Philippe inherited the château from his mother, who had passed away in 1821. In 1840, the king had the château protected as a Monument historique. The following year La Mode published a seemingly innocent travel description, a letter from one Roger de Beauvoir to the editor-in-chief of La Mode, vicomte de Walsh. The letter described Roger de Beauvoir’s travels in the Loire Valley, where the author had visited various historical sites, including the château d’Amboise. The letter was not without a political aspect. The author wrote that he had briefly laid his eyes on Chambord, known for its magnificent château. Beauvoir stressed the importance of the area since it belonged to “Henri de France” and to which the “liste civile” (Louis-Philippe and his government) could not get their hands on. The château de Chambord had “un style vraiment royal” that even the later restorations could not contradict.66 Chambord, associated with the son of the duchesse de Berry, was highly praised by the author and implicitly compared to the château d’Amboise. The latter château belonged to Louis-Philippe, and according to the author, it was in possession of “sa très honorée soeur”, Adélaïde. The magazine did not consider Adélaïde any more honourable than her brother but used the adjective sarcastically. According to the author of the travel description, the restoration of the château d’Amboise was done with a poor taste. The author even pondered if one could find any royal example of worse taste.67 The author did not like what Adélaïde had renovated in the château and was happy the visitors only saw certain parts of the château such as  the tower and the chapel. He continued to explain that Adélaïde slept in the château in a bed that “represented” the bed of Catherine de’ Medici.68 The message was obvious: even the Bourbon

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family’s castles had more dignity and better taste than the Orléans family and their châteaus. The Orléans family did not have, according to the article, the royal taste that the historically valuable properties needed. Whereas the Bourbons had continued the elegance of the earlier French royal families, the Orléans did not know how to make these magnificent places royal. The author juxtaposed the Orléans with the Bourbons, and with all the kings and queens that had existed before them and who were all pictured collectively more worthy. The Journal des débats had quite another reaction to the châteaus renovated by Adélaïde. In 1845, the magazine quoted with length the magazine L’Echo de la Haute-Marne, which praised the work Adélaïde had done with the château d’Arc (Château d’Arc-en-Barrois), which was fully renovated that year. The château, according to the Journal des débats, had two parts, an older part dating to the twelfth century and a younger part dating to 1675. The magazine referred to the older part of the château as “mutilated remains of the Middle Ages”.69 No one was allowed to touch the old castle without Adélaïde’s permission. She wished to conserve its medieval past. The renovation of the castle was possibly insinuated already in 1841 when the Journal des débats quoted the Journal de la HauteMarne saying the rural district of Châteauvillain had conserved the pious memory of Adélaïde’s illustrious ancestor and anticipated construction of a royal castle.70 Châteauvillain is located right next to the château d’Arc, and the duchy belonged to the mother of Adélaïde and Louis-­Philippe. Renovating historical sites and buildings had a political aspect, as examples of the regime’s glory and legitimacy, and the opposition knew this all too well. In 1841, La Mode piqued Adélaïde in various ways, which were quite extensively repetitions from earlier years. For example, the magazine published an invented letter from Baron Atthalin assuring that Adélaïde was unmarried.71 The letter aimed to ridicule Adélaïde and imply she might have illicit or hidden relation with the Baron as the magazine had hinted repeatedly in the 1830s. It did not matter that Adélaïde was well over sixty-years-old at this time. In the same issue was an épingle: “A short work entitled Military Biography of H. M. Louis-Philippe Ier was largely spread in all barracks of Paris. All that needs to be done now is to distribute in the convents a Saint Biography of Mademoiselle Adélaïde.”72 The legitimist magazine equalled Louis-Philippe’s, allegedly, inexistent military accomplishments to Adélaïde’s, again allegedly, inexistent saintly features and

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deeds. In fact, Louis-Philippe had participated in the battle of Jemmapes in 1792 and fought in the French revolutionary army, but this was hardly an advantage in the eyes of the legitimists. Louis-Philippe sought primarily peace during his reign, but he was repeatedly compared to Napoléon and his “glorious” victories making him seem less of a military leader. Many of Louis-Philippe’s sons also took part in military expeditions in Algeria in the 1830s. Both the popular duc d’Orléans and his younger brother, the duc de Nemours, fought there. Even though many of these expeditions were victorious, their expenses were publicly criticized.73 The military expeditions did not bring the Orléans dynasty the military glory it had perhaps desired. Mocking Adélaïde’s religiousness was to ridicule the July Monarchy and Orléans family, as we have seen. La Mode brought up Saint Adelaide and her feast day in different contexts. Firstly, it was to mock Adélaïde’s religiousness, secondly to argue that all Orléans family members looked too bored in festivities, and finally to say that Louis-Philippe’s men, including Baron Atthalin, guarded Tuileries too heavily when the royal family was enjoying the festivities.74 Adélaïde, or Saint Adelaide, was not in focus but her political affiliation was. Adélaïde and her religiousness, or lack of it, and, for example, her alleged relationship to the Baron Atthalin were highlighted due to her influence on the king. In 1843, La Mode once again mocked the king but this time for not being able to work without Adélaïde. According to the magazine, Adélaïde had fallen ill, and according to another source, had stopped working. La Mode sarcastically interpreted that from now on, she could no longer intervene in her brother’s politics. La Mode described her as the nymph Egeria without whom the Roman emperor Numa Pompilius was unable to work.75 This comparison could imply an  even more close connection between the brother and sister than just counselling. Often, in the representations of women using power such as this one, the women were coupled with sexual features deemed unnatural or immoral. In the legitimist imagery, only the Bourbon women presented supreme feminine qualities. * * * Adélaïde was not present uniquely in the legitimist press. The Journal des débats regularly reported on Adélaïde’s charity work and travels with the royal family. She and the rest of the royal family were often reported

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ordering books and gift shopping for Christmas.76 Most news related to her were very brief, and only a few of them included references to history. The Journal des débats advertised in January 1841 that Adélaïde, MarieAmélie, and the duchesse d’Orléans had subscribed author Eugénie Foa’s new work on Saint Genevieve. The magazine highlighted that the life of the saint was now in the hands of all young readers.77 In the Journal des débats, the historical references associated with Adélaïde were all related to saints—an association La Mode so dearly derided. Yet, the magazine wrote less about her in the 1840s than it had written about the duchesse d’Angoulême or the duchesse de Berry in the 1820s. Her role in the royal family differed significantly from the roles Marie-Thérèse and Marie-­ Caroline had had in the Bourbon family twenty years before.78 In 1843, a year after the death of the young and popular duc d’Orléans, the Journal des débats reported on the construction of the chapel of Saint Ferdinand. The magazine described the chapel and especially the stained glass windows in detail. Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres had designed the windows that portrayed, in addition to Saint Adelaide, saints such as Saint Philip, Saint Louis, Saint Amelia, Saint Ferdinand, Saint Helena, and Saint Henri.79 The chapel of Saint Ferdinand bore resemblance with the chapel of Dreux, which was the last resting place of the young duc and had stained glass windows designed by Ingres. The royal chapel of Dreux had two smaller chapels, one dedicated to Saint Arnulf of Metz and the other one to Saint Adelaide at the request of the late dowager duchesse d’Orléans, mother of Adélaïde and Louis-­ Philippe. Saint Adelaide was not represented in the stained glass windows, according to the description of the Journal des débats, but her image was left to a large medallion representing Jesus Christ.80 As we have seen before, the stained glass windows in the transept of Dreux included portraits of the namesakes of the royal family members (Louis-Philippe, Marie-Amélie, and Ferdinand-Philippe) with their facial features. In addition to the royal namesakes, the stained glass windows included, for example, Saint Clotilde, Saint Balthild, Saint Radegund, and Saint Isabelle of France. The Journal des débats did not tell if the medallion representing Saint Adelaide had any resemblance with the king’s sister. Louis-Philippe and Adélaïde’s mother was also named Louise Marie-Adélaïde. Adélaïde was included in the saintly imagery created to promote the Orléans family as a ruling dynasty, but she did not stand out on the Orléanist side of the public discussion. This was, no doubt, a well-planned strategy.

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Nevertheless, there were other ways to represent Adélaïde as well. A well-­ known socialist politician and historian, Louis Blanc (1811–1882), took one way  in his Histoire de dix ans: 1830–1840, which had five volumes published between 1842 and 1844. The work examined critically the first ten years of the July Monarchy. Blanc mentioned Adélaïde only few times in his monumental work, but the brief references sufficed to portray her primarily as a political person. In the first volume, Blanc narrated the way Adélaïde accepted the throne for Louis-Philippe in 1830: Mme Adélaïde had too much virility in her spirit and too little religious softness in her soul to submit to consider the family. However, aware of the dangers that enveloped her brother, she rushed to say: ‘They can make my brother the president, a member of the national garde, whatever they wish, as long as they do not make him an outlaw.’ These words expressed naively and loyally the emotions of the prince at that moment. However, M. Thiers offered the throne, and Mme Adélaïde did not have the willpower to decline such a tempting offer. Devoted entirely to her brother the duc with whom she shared opinions and over whom she had some authority, she had hoped great things for him as she deemed him worthy of such greatness. She seemed to have only one fear. What would Europe think? Would it not set the alarm bells to ring in all the royal houses and undermine the world peace if he was to sit on the throne from which Louis XVI had descended to the scaffold? M. Thiers answered that the fears were not reasonable. England, who still remembered well the defeated Stuarts, would clap its hands for this conclusion supported by the example and model of its history […].81

Blanc portrayed Adélaïde as ambitious and devoted to her brother and more determined than him. Blanc also considered Adélaïde had a certain influence over her brother but did not portray her as selfless. The author stated elsewhere that Adélaïde had strength in her character, “fermeté de son caractère”.82 Adélaïde, according to Blanc, might not have considered the family, but she did consider other European royal houses and their reactions. The history of the Stuarts was essential in 1830 due to the perceived similarities between the Scottish family and the Bourbons. Blanc described Adolphe Thiers using the history of the Stuarts to persuade Adélaïde to accept the throne for her brother. Blanc depicted history as a means for politics and used it the same way himself. In the fourth volume, where he discussed the reactions to a short political treaty published by a Peer of France, Pierre-Louis Roederer (Adresse d’un constitutionnel aux

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constitutionnels, 1835), he particularly mentioned Adélaïde reading the pamphlet. According to Blanc, the pamphlet discussed the king’s power vis-à-vis to his ministers, and Blanc compared the situation to the late Merovingian era: the king did not want be a new roi fainéant letting his ministers to be modern-day maires du palais. In other words, Blanc argued that the king did not want to be a weak king at the mercy of his powerful ministers.83 The representation of Adélaïde enthusiastically reading the pamphlet that supported a powerful king underlined her loyalty to her brother but also her interest in politics—an aspect that the Journal des débats and all the biographical notices deliberately omitted. Blanc brought up Adélaïde’s political influence regarding the marriage of the young duc d’Orléans. According to Blanc, the duc dreamt of a magnificent union with a foreign princess, but Adolphe Thiers was more hesitant with the plan as was also the king. The king’s hesitation brought friction between father and son, and Adélaïde was needed to convince Thiers to support the duc’s marriage plan. Blanc criticized the plan primarily because the duc insisted on having a foreign princess as a wife, instead of a French noblewoman, borrowing the habit from “de gothique majestés”.84 The author criticized the prince for wanting to continue the custom of marrying foreign princesses, as France has never had a “French” queen, which he deemed as gothique, outdated. Adélaïde, again, helped the family and her “indecisive” brother. * * * Adélaïde d’Orléans did not live to see the defeat of her dear brother and the final exile of the Orléans family in February 1848. Adélaïde passed away in  the early hours of December 31, surrounded by her family. Newspapers reported widely on her death at the beginning of January. According to the Journal des débats, Adélaïde had been ill for some time before her death at the age of seventy. The glowing obituary the magazine published stressed Adélaïde’s loyalty and love for her brother and his family. Her political influence was not mentioned, as it had not been mentioned before.85 Her funeral service was held on January 5 in Dreux. The magazine described Adélaïde as “his [Louis-Philippe’s] oldest object of affection, his approved confidante, a friend in what ever came to his way […]”.86 The magazine praised Adélaïde in many ways but did not draw from history when describing the funerals or the king’s sorrow. Another magazine, Le Constitutionnel, announced Adélaïde’s death on January 1.

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The magazine, which admitted that they were not “courtesans” of the July Monarchy but, nevertheless, desired its survival, described Adélaïde as “éclairée”, courageous, and always on a lookout for pitfalls that might endanger the kingship of her brother. The obituary stressed the benefits of the education she had had by the famous Madame de Genlis. Le Constitutionnel concluded that history would honour Adélaïde’s memory for all the positive qualities she had had and especially for the vigilant affection she had had for Louis-Philippe.87 La Mode acknowledged the death of Adélaïde and wrote an obituary for her as well. Unlike Le Constitutionnel that praised the education Adélaïde had had as a young girl, the legitimists openly despised Madame de Genlis. Both magazines, however, emphasized the influence Madame de Genlis had had on Adélaïde. Yet, this time Alfred Nettement, the author of the obituary for La Mode, did not use historical references to insult Adélaïde. The only history the author referred to was that of the Revolutions, both 1789 and 1830. A central feature in the obituary was Adélaïde’s political influence on her brother and the seriousness of the current situation as now Louis-Philippe was without his most important confidante. According to Nettement, if they were to believe the general rumours, Adélaïde held an exceptional place by her brother’s side, and their discussions preceded any of his decisions. She had “caractère viril” and her death would have political consequences. La Mode referred to Louis Blanc’s Histoire de dix ans when describing Adélaïde taking an “initiative hardie”, a bold initiative, during the decisive moments in 1830 when Louis-Philippe became a king.88 Whereas the Journal des débats only alluded to her political influence, La Mode stated it without hesitation. Other publications on Adélaïde were published after her death, but due to the 1848 Revolution that started in February, other more pressing issues quickly overshadowed the death. For example, Bureau de Pas-de-Calais published a short pamphlet announcing her death, including a short biography. The tone was very neutral, only saying that the king often consulted Adélaïde.89 The king had now lost his most loyal advisor. The legitimists had attacked Adélaïde since 1830 due to her political authority in the Orléans regime. Even though the number of historical references diminished in the 1840s, the magazine criticized, for example, the restorations of historical châteaus Adélaïde funded and supervised. The supporters of the July Monarchy and Orléans family did not want to portray Adélaïde as a person with political authority—let alone as “virile” or anything un-feminine. As we have seen repeatedly, women using power,

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real or imagined power, could easily be turned against the regime like the histories of Marie-Antoinette, Henrietta Maria, Fredegund, and Catherine de’ Medici illustrate. History can be a powerful political weapon, and it was used in 1847 to undermine the moral authority of the Orléans regime. Several histories of the Napoleonic period and revolutionary era were published that year, and they suggested that the July Monarchy lacked patriotism and glory. They contributed to the negative image of the July Monarchy.90 Louis-Philippe faced the same problem as Charles X and Louis XVIII had faced, which contributed to their downfall: they reigned and governed when they should have only reigned. The crown was not politically neutral, and the king was actively involved in politics. Opposing the government signified opposing the crown, which led the opposition to a challenging situation.91 In addition to the social and economic problems tormenting France in the 1840s, the opposition’s reform banquet campaign started in July 1847 and brought together various opposition’s political forces. The new parliamentary session opened on December 28, 1847, and Louis-Philippe’s speech evoked strong emotions, especially among the opposition. The king expressed his satisfaction with the existing constitution. He accused the reform banquet campaign of causing “des passions enemies ou aveugles”.92 Consequently, one of the opposition’s magazines, Odilon Barrot’s Le Siècle, compared the 1847 parliamentary opening session to the sessions at the end of the Restoration. The magazine implied that the situation was similar in 1847 as it had been eighteen years before. The only changes were the colour of the flag, and that the duchesse d’Angoulême was replaced with the Queen Marie-Amélie or Adélaïde d’Orléans. The duc de Bordeaux was replaced with the son of the late duc d’Orléans.93 As the duchesse d’Angoulême failed to save the Restoration, Adélaïde failed to save the July Monarchy.

5.3   Remembering the Exiled Bourbon Women The 1840s opened for the Bourbon family in exile. The previous decade had been disastrous for them, starting with the July Revolution, followed by the failed coup in 1832, and the death of Charles X in 1836. Henri had come of age, but it had resulted in nothing if not for the internal disintegration of the legitimists. Marie-Thérèse, formerly the Dauphine, had moved from Holyrood to Austria in 1832, where she would spend the rest of her days. She would lose her husband, the older son of Charles X, in

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1844. Louis-Antoine had been styled after his father’s death as “Louis XIX”, and after Louis-Antoine’s death, the only Bourbon heir to the French throne was the comte de Chambord, “Henri V”, son of the duchesse de Berry. The duchesse, or the comtesse Lucchesi-Palli, continued her life with her new husband and their four children born between 1835 and 1840. She spent the 1840s in Italy, Sicily, and Venice but frequented her oldest children, Henri and Louise, in Austria. Even though neither she nor Marie-Thérèse set foot in France in the 1840s, they were not absent from the legitimist minds or writings. One significant event was the comte de Chambord’s marriage with the Archduchess Maria Theresa of AustriaEste in 1846, which brought hope of continuity for the legitimists. This chapter will analyse how the two famed Bourbon women were remembered in France ten years after their exile. Who kept their memory alive in France, and how? What kind of role history had in keeping the Bourbon name alive during the final decade of the July Monarchy? I shall examine the two women side by side in order to see how their legacies differed during this decade. During the 1840s, both the duchesse d’Angoulême and the duchesse de Berry, as the legitimists continued to call her, were less visible in France than they had been during the previous decades. They were no longer relevant to the current politics the same way they had been before. Nevertheless, the legitimists and particularly La Mode and Alfred Nettement, continued to promote the Bourbon cause in France as Nettement published books on the exiled royal family. I shall start with the legitimist representations. They were more active in discussing the two women than their opponents, who had other political troubles to consider. The legitimist magazine, La Mode, whose patron the duchesse de Berry had been since 1829 and who had supported the duchesse during her adventures in France in 1832–1833, no longer reserved her a special place in the Bourbon family or the pages of the magazine. For example, in September 1840, the magazine published a short article about the Bourbon family, Nouvelles d’Allemagne (News from Germany), which first described the celebration of Saint-Louis in Kirchberg, and then moved on to give news of the Bourbon family members. According to the magazine, S.A.R. Mademoiselle, the oldest daughter of the duchesse de Berry, had been ill but now recovering, whereas the “praiseworthy daughter of Marie-Antoinette” continued to enjoy good health as her great spirit made her strong. “Henri of France”, the oldest son of the

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duchesse de Berry, continued his history lessons and undertook new travels. The duchesse herself would soon return to Gratz from Tœplitz (Teplice), and, according to La Mode, all the poor of the city would rejoice of her return.94 Interestingly, “Louis XIX” was not mentioned even though he was now the head of the family. Furthermore, the duchesse de Berry’s news was presented the last even though earlier she had been the publication’s key figure. La Mode regularly published similar news from the exiled family. Approximately a year after the above-mentioned news, the magazine published articles about the feast of Saint-Henri, July 15, to honour the son of the duchesse. The first article did not mention the mother but drew extensively from the history of previous kings: Henri IV, Saint Louis, and all the kings since Hugh Capet (died in 996).95 The second article brought news of the celebration of the feast day from the family in Kirchberg, where the whole Bourbon family had gathered together. According to the article, Henri was the pride of the duchesse de Berry. Louis-Antoine and Marie-Thérèse were this time both acknowledged and, according to La Mode, there were so many French voices around them that they could have believed to be in France.96 La Mode published similar short references of the duchesse de Berry all through the 1840s, which was not much considering that the magazine had hundreds of pages annually.97 French readers could get regular updates on the Bourbon family members around Europe from La Mode. Marie-Thérèse was regularly pictured as a saint, and the magazine reminded the readers of the fate of Marie-­ Antoinette and Louis XVI, as if the royalist readers could forget who her parents were.98 It seems that by the 1840s, Marie-Thérèse had become the most prominent royal woman in the magazine since no one could question her holiness and suffering. In 1844, Marie-Thérèse lost her husband. Before the feast of Saint-Louis, the magazine reminisced two persons, Louis-­Antoine who had “gone to rest in the Franciscan sepulcher” next to his father, and Louise de France (oldest daughter of the duchesse de Berry), who had not died but was to get married and travel to her new home. She was, according to the magazine, a pupil of the “l’orpheline de Temple”.99 Such news together with the well-chosen words would only emphasize Marie-Thérèse’s halo of sanctity and sacred suffering. Alfred Nettement, who had published the biography of the duchesse de Berry a few years earlier, propagated a similar image of the daughter of

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Marie-Antoinette in the biography he published in 1843.100 History played an essential role in the biography since Nettement drew the importance of the duchesse nearly completely from historical events, especially from the Revolution. Out of nearly 500 pages, almost 400 pages focused on the  period prior to 1815. The biography emphasized the image of Marie-Thérèse as an eternally suffering yet loving princess who dedicated her time to worship and charity. Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette were more than saints and martyrs. The executed king had become a second Christ who sacrificed himself for France, just like he had been in the 1820s.101 According to Nettement, the Judas of the narrative was the late duc d’Orléans, father of the King of the French.102 The political statement was clear.103 The author emphasized the references to the execution of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette with the use of historical comparisons. Nettement used, as Hector de Jailly had done in 1831, references to Henrietta Maria, or Henrietta of France. The references associated Marie-­ Thérèse with the tragic destiny of the Stuarts who had become such a popular reference point for the exiled Bourbons. In a similar manner, King Charles I’s (executed in January 1649) martyrdom had also been associated with the death of Jesus in the seventeenth century.104 Henrietta Maria, as we have seen, was the daughter of the assassinated Henri IV and the wife of the executed Charles I. Nettement was especially touched by the funeral oration of the queen written by Bossuet in 1669, which highlighted the suffering she had had to endure during her life. Nettement concluded in the introduction of the biography that Bossuet must have seen the future, for he had written about the life of Marie-­ Thérèse.105 The Stuarts had a visible role in the biography of Marie-­ Thérèse both because of the execution of Charles Stuart, grandson of Marie Stuart, in 1649, and because the Bourbons had been staying in Scotland in the beginning of their final exile. Indeed, the duchesse de Berry had been many times compared to Marie Stuart, Queen of Scots, but towards the end of the 1830s, after the failed coup and new marriage, these specific comparisons became rarer whereas general comparisons between the tragic destinies of the Bourbons and the Stuarts became more popular. No doubt, the legitimists also hoped that as Henrietta had had two sons who became kings of England, Marie-Thérèse would also see the nephew she raised, Henri, to become a king. According to Nettement, the “fatality of the Stuarts” seemed to weigh on the Bourbons.106 Moreover, Holyrood was “still full of memories of the Stuarts”, and England, when seeing the return of the Bourbons there

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during their first exile, thought of the melancholic destiny of the Stuarts and saluted Louis XVIII as it would have saluted the Stuarts had the descendants of Charles I “returned to the kingdom of their ancestors”.107 Furthermore, Nettement made Marie-Thérèse rejoice her return to France in 1814 with the words of Marie Stuart.108 The author presented all events happening as destined therefore denying the chances of an open future for any of the Bourbon family members. Everything Marie-Thérèse did was defined by the events of the Revolution and the executions of Louis XVI and Marie-­Antoinette. They defined the entire Restoration period and all the Bourbon family members who lived in the past that they simultaneously wished to undo. Marie-Thérèse’s biography drew much attention to her religious piety, charity, and suffering but disregarded significant events and roles the duchesse had had. A theme such as motherhood was mentioned only briefly within the nearly 500 pages. For example, right at the end of the biography, Nettement described that Marie-Thérèse would have still had hopes for a child in 1824, at the age of 46.109 Another issue that the author denied and dismissed was Marie-Thérèse’s political influence. Nettement did not perceive charity and religious activity having any political dimension even though the biography multiple times presented Marie-Thérèse disposing at her will large sums of money to anyone she deemed worthy.110 It is noteworthy that the charity was given such a large role in the representations of both the Bourbon and Orléans royal women rather than the acts that would have reduced the poor’s need for charity. This was, no doubt, a political choice from the part of the authors and the royal women themselves. Charity, even if indispensable for the significant number of poor in Paris due to insufficient welfare services, was a way to exercise power for the rich women.111 According to Nettement, Marie-Thérèse had no “political life” during the Restoration, and did not get involved in “affairs”. She only participated in the good times and in bad times of the family. Furthermore, she was a “foreigner” to all political intrigues, government and parliamentary crisis, and everything that led to the Revolution of 1830. She led a “simple, charitable, and generous” life during the Restauration.112 It is undeniable that she had political influence over her uncles, husband, and the rest of the family, but to present her as politically influential would have been dangerous for it could have damaged the saintly image created of her. Queen Marie-Amélie was regularly presented as leading a simple life, as a mother and a spouse, and Marie-Thérèse was presented in a similar

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manner to avoid criticism from political adversaries. This image of MarieThérèse did not please herself as Hélène Becquet has argued that MarieThérèse did not consider the biography truthful. At the same time Marie-Caroline, the duchesse de Berry, praised the book.113 Not until 1845, La Mode drew attention to the duchesse de Berry with historical comparisons. According to an article written by the vicomte de Walsh, the editor and frequent contributor of La Mode, “Marie-Caroline de Berri” was another Margaret of Anjou and Jeanne de Montfort.114 Jeanne de Montfort, the fourteenth-century noblewoman, whom we already met in the previous chapter about the duchesse de Berry, was associated with her because she fiercely defended the inheritance of her son. Similarly, Margaret of Anjou, a fifteenth-century Queen of England and a relative of the King of France, was profiled as the protector of her only son. Like always, the magazine did not explain who the historical persons were or the connection the reader was supposed to draw. The author, vicomte de Walsh, undoubtedly expected the readers to recognize the medieval noblewomen’s names. Equally interesting to the appearance of the noble and medieval comparisons was the context of the comparison. Vicomte de Walsh wrote about Margaret of Anjou, Jeanne de Montfort, and the duchesse de Berry in an article entitled De l’influence des femmes (On the influence of women). The article was an eulogy for women’s religious influence and for the religion’s influence on the heroic women since biblical times. The article started by tracking all the names of famous biblical women, whom “our mothers” had taught us, and who functioned as virtuous role models. Advancing somewhat chronologically after the biblical women, the article praised the faith of Saint Genevieve, the early medieval protector of Paris, and Saint Clotilde, who converted her husband Clovis to Christianity. After the two women came Balthild, who, according to the author, joined the crown of a queen to the aureole of a saint, and Radegund who preferred the convent to a castle, according to the author.115 Next noteworthy women, according to the article, were Blanche of Castile and Joan of Arc.116 Especially the latter inspired the author to sing praises to the strong faith of women and the importance of such women for the history of France. According to Walsh, the voice of heaven inspired Joan, and had she not listened to the voice, the destiny of France could have been entirely different. After praising the faith, courage, and virtues of biblical and medieval women, the author finally revealed the article’s purpose: to refute Jules

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Michelet’s recent work, Du Prêtre, de la femme, de la famille. Michelet was famous for his anticlerical tendencies and this work, which had two prints taken during the first year, accused the church and clergy of destroying the French families. According to Michelet, a highly prolific and influential historian, Catholic clergy, which he pictured as uneducated and ignorant, could negatively affect the contemporary women who were weak and ductile. Michelet attacked especially the Jesuits, who were known supporters of the Bourbon family. The famous historian did not mention the royal Bourbon women. His interpretation of the clergy and women in nineteenth-century France was not flattering to either women or clergy. Only (non-clergy) men, in his vision, were strong and wise enough to resist the words of the Catholic Church. On several occasions, Michelet compared his contemporary situation to the Middle Ages. He argued, for example, that whereas the clergy had been more educated than most laymen in the Middle Ages, now the tables had turned, and laymen were more educated than most clergymen. Furthermore, in the Middle Ages, the clergy had had a different role, and that is why the Catholic Church had been able to dominate the Western world. Michelet continued to argue that in the Middle Ages, women loved their husbands for their severity, even violence. However,  this role had now been given to the clergy—when earlier the husband would physically beat his wife, now the clergy spiritually abused the women. Moreover, according to Michelet, this was love for women. Did Michelet consider that women should be free from the “yoke” of the Church? No, but men should regain their control of their wives so that they could mould them into perfect spouses.117 For Michelet, clergy, and especially the Jesuits, were straightforward enemies. He, then, did not just oppose the Catholic Church but all those who supported the Jesuits and opposed the Revolution. Walsh and other legitimists, no doubt, saw this as an attack against them. The biblical and royal women were again part of the political dispute, but the women in question did not have a voice. Walsh argued that religion and faith made women achieve great things and made even otherwise unmemorable women memorable. He did not forget Marie-Thérèse, whom he described as courageously suffering and carrying the heaviest burden. According to Walsh, she could match any man. He even cited Chateaubriand, according to whom, Marie-Thérèse was one of the greatest of France.118 After all these religious and saint women, it was a bit surprising to encounter the duchesse de Berry since she had never been known for a particular religious

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devotion. Walsh avoided this issue and emphasized her courage and abstinence instead. Walsh constructed a (political) narrative of the pious women who had acted for their faith and who had been inspired by their faith since biblical times. Marie-Thérèse and Marie-Caroline both belonged to this narrative as only they could continue the list of biblical, saintly, and heroic Bourbon women. Unlike Michelet’s passive and weak women, Walsh presented the women in his narrative as strong and fierce, who were even ready to die for their beliefs like Joan of Arc. Both authors agreed that eventually, women should be subordinate to men. Walsh saw that God had made women to moderate the caprices of men, whereas Michelet saw that men should mould their wives to become ideal spouses. Equally, both saw motherhood as a woman’s central mission together with keeping the family content. Neither of them pondered the role women themselves would like to have, nor did they give voice to the women. However,  Walsh encouraged his female readers to ignore Michelet’s words and to continue supporting the royalist cause and faith. Except, of course, Queen Marie-­ Amélie, whose reliance on the priests, as we saw in the previous chapter, was a sign of weakness rather than a sign of strong faith, according to the legitimists. Marie-Thérèse’s and Marie-Caroline’s significance and royal roles were related to Henri de France, comte de Chambord, after the July Revolution. Especially after 1836 and 1844, after the deaths of Charles X and Louis-­ Antoine (comte de Marnes after his father’s death), Henri became an even more important person for the legitimists. Alfred Nettement emphasized the situation by publishing in 1845 a two-volume work entitled Henri de France, ou Histoire des Bourbons de la branche aînée pendant quinze ans d’exil, 1830–1845. According to the editor, this even longer (more than 750 pages) work on the last male heir of the Bourbon branch and about the fifteen years of exile was published to show gratitude for the royalists of the positive reception of Marie-Thérèse’s biography. And because Louis Blanc, the well-known socialist, had just published his influential Histoire de dix ans: 1830–1840, which did not support the royalist narrative.119 Blanc, for example, presented the Bourbon family, and especially Charles X, abandoning and denying the duchesse de Berry after the failed coup d’état and remarriage. Blanc analysed the duchesse de Berry’s failed coup and presented the duchesse as a sympathetic and courageous woman even if not as a very wise one. He stated about the planning of the coup  that “[O]therwise, the role of Jeanne d’Albret pleased her Neapolitan

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imagination.”120 The statement was full of sarcasm towards the vivid historical imagination of the duchesse, her desire for adventure, and the legitimists’ claims that the duc de Bordeaux was the new Henri IV. Blanc had no sympathy for any contemporary French king, Charles X, “Henri V”, or Louis-­Philippe. Again, the royalists responded to these  interpretations that they perceived untruthful by offering a counter-narrative with different points of view and main characters. Nettement’s work had two volumes, of which the first one focused more on the royal women since it covered the time up until circa 1833. The first volume used more than half of the more than 350 pages to describe the failed coup-d’état of the duchesse de Berry. The author discussed only briefly the reasons for the 1830 Revolution, and in his view, the reasons were that France was too divided, and the waves of the Revolution had not yet calmed down: there was too much passion in France. Nettement, like all legitimists, implied that the Bourbons always thought the best for France. The king and Bourbon family were not to blame for anything.121 Marie-Caroline was in the centre of the first volume, and the history of the Stuarts was still the primary source of references used by the author. The author continued to validate the representation of the Bourbons sharing the same tragic destiny of the Stuarts as he had done in the biography of Marie-Thérèse. Nettement described how James V started the construction of the Holyrood palace, where the Bourbons had stayed in Scotland, and how the rooms of Marie Stuart continued to exist and were covered with portraits of the Kings of Scotland. These kings were “silent witnesses of a glorious past”.122 Nettement described in detail one of the travels of young Henri. The travel took place in summer 1832: The first historical souvenir the young prince encountered was related to Marie Stuart. The impressive ruins of the castle of Loch Leven reminded him of the long and cruel captivity of the anguished queen and sorrowful denouement of the captivity. This ominous souvenir must have woken in his heart a filial fear because during this time there were strongholds outside Scotland that could any time close their doors behind an arrested princess (1).123 (1) Already at this point, the events of 1832 had taken place, and the call for arms had failed.124

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Nettement implied in the passage that in July 1832, Henri feared that his mother Marie-Caroline, who was then hiding in France after the failed coup, might face the same tragic destiny as Marie Stuart had faced—captivity and even execution. These comparisons between Marie-Caroline and Marie Stuart were an inherent part of the legitimist narrative of the events related to the coup, and Nettement recycled them in 1845. Most likely, the loyal readers were familiar with them. There was also another comparison between the duchesse de Berry and Marie Stuart in the narrative about the coup. This comparison was related to the duchesse’s second marriage and pregnancy that significantly altered her position within the Bourbon family. Nettement did not mention the pregnancy or any of the duchesse’s other children. Marie-Caroline’s second husband was not mentioned either. The reason for the omission of the new family of the duchesse was clear. Nettement saw that the marriage had no bearing with her political situation or role: The government had learned from the informers that Madame la duchesse de Berry had wished to change dramatically not her political position, but her private position during her flight. The morganatic marriages in no way influence the official position of the princes. However, the government had decided to abuse this piece of news and forced the duchesse de Berry to declare the secret marriage publicly.125

The author saw that the government had used “des obsessions et des persecutions” to force the duchesse to sign the public declaration of her marriage, which the author saw as her private matter. He continued: “Was it not Marie Stuart who said in the castle of Loch Leven when an iron fist weighted on her hand ‘Mylord, I will sign these statutes with the liberty I am given here’”.126 Nettement most likely referred to the abdication Marie had signed in the castle.127 Again, the author pictured the duchesse, and Marie, as heroic women whom the opponents mistreated. Nettement only mentioned Marie-Caroline’s marriage, not her pregnancy, which was the reason for her marriage. Interestingly, Nettement wrote nothing about the reactions of Charles X and Marie-Thérèse to the events of 1832–1833. Marie-Caroline did not only prove that a Bourbon could have as much bravery as the Stuarts, but she was also more daring than the “effeminate” (male) politicians were, according to Nettement.128 She had virile fearlessness and temperate willpower (fermeté tempérée) that were, again according to the author, “especially rare among persons of her sex”.129

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Marie-Caroline surpassed her gender and masculine virtues. In contrast,  her opponents were weak and “effeminate”. Since many features deemed masculine, such as bravery and willpower, were generally perceived more positively than qualities deemed feminine, it was more acceptable, in certain cases, for women to present features deemed masculine—that is, to become better—than men to assume feminine features. However, there was a line between what was acceptable and what was not. Marie-­ Caroline could assume masculine features to protect the realm of her son, but Adélaïde d’Orléans, an unmarried woman, could not meddle in politics. Of course, this was also a political debate. In the case of Marie-­ Caroline and Adélaïde, the critics and supporters had opposing views on acceptable behaviour for royal women. One only has to keep in mind how the Bourbon family’s opponents kept repeating that Marie-Thérèse was the only man in the family. It did not only associate Marie-Thérèse with certain features deemed masculine but made the Bourbon men seem effeminate, which was the real insult. * * * The legitimists were not the only ones to remember the exiled Bourbon family members in the 1840s. For example, in October 1842, the Journal des débats published a review of a new theatre play entitled Le Portrait Vivant, which was a remake of Marivaux’s 1737 comedy Les Fausses Confidences. In the remake, the female lead was called the duchesse de Berry as the early eighteenth-century duchesse, the daughter of the duc d’Orléans, regent of France (1674–1723).130 No doubt, however, the multiple love triangles and the duchesse’s desire for amusements reminded the readers and spectators of the exiled duchesse de Berry, who had only ten years earlier remarried after an unexpected pregnancy during her captivity. The eighteenth-century duchesse de Berry had died following a difficult childbirth, five years after the death of her husband. In November 1842, the Journal des débats focused on the passions of great queens when the magazine reviewed firstly a theatre play Fredegund et Brunehaut by Lemercier (1821) and secondly Les Deux Impératrices, ou Une petite guerre by Virginie Ancelot (1842). The two empresses were Catherine the Great and Maria Theresa. The first play, the tragedy, incorporated many popular characteristics of the Merovingian period: barbarity, blood and heroism, brutal passions, poison, assassinations, and vengeance. Many of these

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features related to the Merovingians were made famous by the best-seller Récits des temps merovingiens by Augustin Thierry, published in the 1830s. Both Lemercier’s play and Thierry’s work focused on the lives of Fredegund and Brunhilda, two notorious early medieval queens. In the Journal des débats, the passions continued in the form of comedy. According to the magazine, Maria Theresa, empress of Austria, was very passionate with a young Hungarian count, which resembled the duchesse de Berry in Le Portrait Vivant. The Journal des débats questioned how it is possible to picture the greatest empress of Europe in a similar manner and the reason, according to the magazine, was that the comedy, which was by nature bourgeois and popular, had been dislocated to the palace of kings and queens. The Queen of Sweden, Queen of England, and Lady Marlborough had been equally submitted to such treatment, not to mention the duchesse de Berry, who was made to “prostitute for her pleasure”.131 According to literary historian Sophie Mentzel, the theatre plays representing historical kings and queens became increasingly mocking and demeaning towards the end of the French monarchy, which reflected the monarchy’s gradual loss of power.132 The royal sphere was no longer separate from the popular and bourgeoisie sphere, but they had been unified, resulting representations of magnificent queens experiencing tormenting passions in popular comedy. The failed coup d’état of the duchesse de Berry was still in the memory of the French people, and unexplained political unrest could be pointed to the duchesse. In 1846, there had been political unrest and several disastrous fires in the department of Yonne without anyone knowing who was behind the disasters. According to the Journal des débats, there had been rumours of political uprising orchestrated by the republicans, the supporters of Napoléon, or the legitimists. There were even rumours of the return of the duchesse de Berry.133 The Angoulêmes were equally featured in the press. In June 1844, the Journal des débats wrote about the death of the duc. The magazine acknowledged him as a good Christian prince but made clear he had no importance in contemporary France and that it was only good for France that he had never ruled. The article was as much a message to the legitimists as it was a death notice or a necrology when it stated that the duc’s death was hardly even noticed in France.134 The magazine delivered the message that the Bourbon family was no longer

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significant in France. Yet, they were important enough to be exiled and never to have the right to return to France.135 The tragic histories of the French and Scottish royals and aristocracy had been intertwined for centuries. At crucial moments, they shared the same options as presented in the Journal des débats in 1847. In a lengthy book review of the history of the Earls of Lindsay, the Journal des débats presented the family’s connection to France: they originated from an Anglo-Norman family and united in Scotland with kings of Celtic background that had only one remaining descendant, the duchesse d’Angoulême.136 The importance of the book, according to the author of the review, Philarète Chasles, a curator of the Bibliotheque Mazarine, was that it united two spirits: one being popular and looking forward to the future and the second one being exclusive and looking to the past. Chasles concluded that the exclusive one was doomed to lose if it could not turn its eyes to the future, and the history of the Lindsays was a homage to a new world.137 Bourbons seemed to be doomed to be exclusive and to look into the past to protect the future, which was why they could not survive in a changing Europe and France despite the best efforts of the legitimists.

Notes 1. Following the multiple assassination attempts on the king in the 1830s, the royal couple decreased their public appearances. 2. Driskel (1992). Representing Belief, 34–35. 3. Anon (1841). Le premier mai 1841. Bouquet au roi, Paris: Imprimerie de Ducessois, 10. “[…] obtenir l’espérance et la résignation nécessaire à leur état.” 4. Leopold I of Belgium was also a Protestant. He was the spouse of Louise-­ Marie, the eldest daughter of Marie-Amélie and Louis-Philippe. 5. Frédéric Dollé (1841). Lettres historiques. À Marie-Amélie, Paris: Bureau de “La Mode”, 7. 6. Dollé (1841). Lettres historiques, introduction. “Des protestants ont été appelés au ministère des cultes et de l’instruction publique, et la famille que la catastrophe de juillet a placée sur le trône des rois très chrétiens, des descendans de Charlemagne et de Saint-Louis, n’a trouvé des alliances que parmi les sectateurs de Luther et de Calvin.” 7. Dollé (1841). Lettres historiques, introduction. 8. Dollé (1841). Lettres historiques, 10. “le fanatisme protestant a dépassé celui de son père”.

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9. Dollé (1841). Lettres historiques, 6. “On sait que le protestantisme fut introduit en France par la protection toute spéciale qui fut accordée à la nouvelle secte par une duchesse d’Orléans, soeur de François Ier; Dieu veuille que la condescendance luthérienne d’une autre duchesse d’Orléans ne soit point fatale à notre patrie!...” 10. Dollé (1841). Lettres historiques, 34. “[…] par sa protection spéciale Marguerite d’Orléans a encouragé le protestantisme, et c’est à sa coupable condescendance qu’on doit reprocher tous les désastres du seizième siècle; j’espère qu’une autre duchesse d’Orléans n’éternisera pas nos misères en soutenant de ses puissans efforts la secte qui doit nécessairement, comme l’a dit Voltaire, enfanter des guerres civiles et ébranler les fondemens des états […].” 11. See Prudhomme (ed. 1830). Biographie universelle, vol. III, 320; Viennot (2006). La France, les femmes et le pouvoir, 507. 12. Dollé (1841). Lettres historiques, 7–8. 13. Dollé (1841). Lettres historiques, 19–20. 14. Harris (2016). Queenship and Revolution, 194. 15. Frédéric Dollé (1842). Lettre historique à Marie-Amélie sur le protestantisme, Paris: Parent-Desbarres, 3. “[…] la Ligue naquit […] de la coupable condescendance d’une duchesse d’Orléans, soeur de François Ier.” 16. La Mode frequently referred to the duc and duchesse d’Orléans as the duc and duchesse de Chartres in 1841. See, for example, La Mode 1.1.1841, 243. 17. Vidal (2010). Marie-Amélie de Bourbon-Sicile, 235–236, 285. 18. Vidal (2010). Marie-Amélie de Bourbon-Sicile, 314–315. 19. See, for example, La Mode 7.1.1837, 139, 247. 20. La Mode 3.7.1841, 239–243. 21. La Mode 3.7.1841, 331. “Auprès des images de tous ces bienheureux, il a eu soin de placer des illustrations de la Normandie. Rollon, Guillaume-­ Longue-­ Epée et Guillaume-le-Conquérant... hommes de fer et de batailles qui n’auraient pas voulu de M. Guizot pour ministre, ne de sa paix à tout prix.” 22. Morel (1994). “Les vitraux de l’église d’Eu”, passim. 23. La Mode’s criticism was related to a peace contract Guizot signed with other European governments to end Egypt and Turkey’s dispute over Syria. The previous Minister of Foreign Affairs, Adolphe Thiers, had sided with Egypt in the dispute. However, the position had led France to oppose virtually all European powers such as Austria, Britain, and Russia, who sided with Turkey. When Thiers refused to side with Turkey risking an open conflict with other European powers, Louis-Philippe discharged him and replaced him with Guizot who, by siding Turkey, prevented the crisis from escalating into a conflict. Fortescue (2005). France and 1848, 52–53.

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24. Fortescue (2005). France and 1848, 28–29. 25. Notice biographique et nécrologique du prince royal duc d’Orléans précédée de la relation scrupuleusement exacte de la catastrophe de Sablonville, puisée aux sources les plus authentiques 26. Anon (1842). Notice biographique et nécrologique du prince royal duc d’Orléans, […], Paris: A.  Appert, 19. “[…] alors la mère fit place à la chrétienne, et, joignant les mains, elle dit au prêtre d’une voix déchirante: ‘Par pitié, priez encore pour mon fils!.. Dites-moi qu’il est au ciel!...’” 27. Anon (1842). Notice biographique et nécrologique, 22. This same discussion was repeated by another anonymous publication from the same year, 1842. See Anon (1842). Le duc d’Orléans. Sa vie, sa mort, sa généalogie. Réflexions morales et politiques sur l’événement du 13 juillet 1842, Paris: au bureau du Feuilleton mensuel, 42. 28. Anon (1842). Notice biographique et nécrologique, 64, 71, and 63. 29. See, for example, Anon (1842). Le duc d’Orléans, 27. 30. Jean-Dominique-Étienne Canu (1842). “La nouvelle Jeanne d’Albret,” In Œuvre de Jean-Dominique Etienne Canu, vol. II. This second engraving is only to be found in the Richelieu library of the French national library. 31. Anon (1842). Le duc d’Orléans, 46–47. “Une reine de dix-huit ans n’en est que plus éminemment propre à cet emploi. Comment peut-on songer à comparer à une telle nation la France, la terre de la loi salique, le pays dont les grandes époques portent toutes le nom d’un roi: Saint Louis, François Ier, Henri IV, Louis XIV, Napoléon!”. 32. Anon (1842). Le duc d’Orléans, 46. The author implied that England was in reality run by the aristocrats and not by the monarch. 33. Vidal (2010). Marie-Amélie de Bourbon-Sicile, 281–285. 34. Vidal (2010). Marie-Amélie de Bourbon-Sicile, 289. 35. Riot-Sarcey (2015). Histoire du féminisme, 20–34. 36. The Académie had a competition for the best research on the following topic: Tracer l’histoire du droit de succession des femmes dans l’ordre civil et dans l’ordre politique, chez les différents peuples de l’Europe au moyen âge. Laboulaye (1843). Recherches sur la condition, vii. 37. Laboulaye (1843). Recherches sur la condition, 528. “La royauté dans leurs mains est une arme funeste, et qui s’est souvent retournée contre elles-­mêmes; le pouvoir ne leur va pas: leur faiblesse, leur esprit, leur éducation, leur grâce même doivent les tenir à l’écart de ces fonctions orageuses.” 38. Laboulaye (1843). Recherches sur la condition, 528. “[…] douce souveraineté qui ne trouble point la tranquillité de leur coeur […].”About Lauboulaye, see also Aali (2017). “Constructing Queenship”, 267–286. 39. Fortescue (2005). France and 1848, 28.

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40. Louis-Philippe and the importance of national history, see Venayre (2013). Les Origines de La France, 85–88. 41. La Mode 5.7.1844, 551. 42. La Mode 3.10.1844, 318. La Mode returned to this theme in 1848 and affirmed that the royal couple had been the models for the sculptures. See La Mode 6.1.1848, 381. 43. La Mode 3.10.1844, 318. 44. See Franconie (2009). “Louis-Philippe et la sacralité”, 107. 45. See Le Jardin du Luxembourg. Les statues du Jardin du Luxembourg: Reines, saintes et dames illustres. 46. Heta Aali (2019). “Pyhimyskuningattaret ja vallan legitimointi heinäkuun monarkian Ranskassa,” Ennen ja nyt (vol. 1), 11–12. 47. Aali (2019). “Pyhimyskuningattaret”, 12–13. 48. See Vidal (2010). Marie-Amélie de Bourbon-Sicile, 274–277; Offen (2017). The Woman Question in France, 35 & passim. 49. La Mode 1.1845, 360. “[…] et depuis long-temps, depuis Clotilde, […], nous avons appris en France quelle influence les femmes peuvent prendre et exercer dans les palais. Il est donc bien aux prédicateurs de dire, avec l’autorité qu’ils tiennent de Dieu, des paroles, que Marie-Amélie puisse répéter aux Tuileries.” 50. Fortescue (2005). France and 1848, 56–58. 51. E. Pascallet (1847). Notice biographique sur sa majesté la reine des français, Paris: Bureau central de la “Revue générale biographique”, 3. A quite similar type of complimentary poem was published of Marie-Amélie in 1846 by one Louis-Marie Decoulange, entitled Hommage à la reine des français. It did not contain any historical references except to Antiquity, but it highlighted the queen’s holiness, charity, and virtues, like so many other publications. 52. Pascallet (1847). Notice biographique, 5. 53. Pascallet (1847). Notice biographique, 11. 54. Pascallet (1847). Notice biographique, 12. 55. Pascallet (1847). Notice biographique, 9. 56. Pascallet (1847). Notice biographique, 18. 57. Fortescue (2005). France and 1848, 50–52. 58. François Furet (1996). Revolutionary France 1770–1880, Oxford: Blackwell, 358–359. 59. Bettina Lerner (2018). “Review on Anne O’Neil-Henry. Mastering the Marketplace Popular Literature in Nineteenth-Century France. […],” H-France Review (vol. 18, no. 149), 2.

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60. La Mode 1840, 53. “Au reste, Mlle Adélaïde, qui est peut-être la plus forte tête du lieu, supporterait fort bien à elle seule tout le poids des affaires d’Orient” 61. Goujon (2012). Monarchies postrévolutionnaires, 298–299. 62. La Mode 7/1841, 239 “La reine des Francais est peut-être la seule des dames de sa famille qui soit universellement estimée.” 63. La Mode 7/1841, 239 “Ah! qu’elle fut heureuse d’avoir été la maitresse du père et du fils”. 64. The July Monarchy was known for restoring multiple historical sites such as Château de Versailles, basilique de Saint-Denis, and the cathedrale of Rouen, among other prestigious sites. See Goujon (2012). Monarchies postrévolutionnaires, 307–308. 65. See, for example, Cordier (2014). “Louis XIV et le décor louis-­quatorzien à la cour de Louis-Philippe”, 275–286; Constans (2014). “Portraits peints de Louis XIV et de Louis-Philippe”, 287–294. 66. La Mode 7/1841, 328. 67. La Mode 7/1841, 329. 68. La Mode 7/1841, 329. 69. Journal des débats 20.1.1845. 70. Journal des débats 4.11.1842. 71. La Mode 10/1841, 304. 72. La Mode 10/1841, 34. “On vient de répandre à profusion dans toutes les casernes de Paris une petite brochure intitutilée: Biographie militaire de S.M. Louis-Philippe Ier. Il ne reste plus qu’à distribuer dans les couvens une Biographie sainte de Mademoiselle Adélaïde.” 73. Goujon (2012). Monarchies postrévolutionnaires, 286–287. 74. La Mode 15.10.1845, 572.; 5.10.1847, 488. 75. La Mode 5.4.1843, 41. 76. See for charity, for example, the Journal des débats 9.1.1840; 14.7.1840; 22.11.1840; 26.3.1842; 10.12.1844; 23.3.1847. About her shopping, see the Journal des débats 29.12.1840; 9.1.1840; 21.3.1842; her travelling with the family, see for example 26.7.1843; 11.10.1844; 22.10.1844; 21.5.1846; 13.7.1844; 30.5.1845; 29.7.1845. 77. Journal des débats 15.1.1841. 78. For example, in 1825, the Dauphine had 284 hits in the Journal des débats and Berry had 172 hits. In the 1840s, the most hits Adélaïde had in 1845, 85 hits. Obviously, the numbers are only indicative and approximate. 79. Journal des débats 9.7.1843. 80. Journal des débats 15.7.1844. 81. Louis Blanc (1842–1844). Histoire de dix ans: 1830–1840, vol. I, Paris: Pagnerre, 334. “Mme Adélaïde avait trop de virilité dans l’esprit, et au fond de l’âme trop peu de tedresse religieuse, pour se plier à des consi-

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dérations de famille. Cependant, pénéntrée qu’elle était des dangers dont sont frère était entouré, elle se hâta de dire: ‘qu’on fasse de mon frère un président, un garde national, tout ce qu’on voudra; pourvu qu’on n’en fasse pas un proscrit.’ Ces paroles étaient l’expression naïve et fidèle des sentiments du prince en co moment. Mais ce que M. Thiers venait d’offrir, c’était une couronne, et Mme Adélaïde n’avait garde de repousse rune offer aussi séduisante. Dévouée éntièrement au duc son frère, dont elle partageait les vues et sur qui elle exercait quelque empire, elle avait rêvé pour lui des grandeurs dont elle le jugeait digne. Une seule crainte parut la préoccuper. Qu’allait penser l’Europe? S’asseoir sur ce trône d’où Louis XVI n’était descend que pour aller à l’échafaud, n’était-ce pas jeter l’alarme dans toutes les maisons royales, et remettre en question la paix du monde? M. Thiers répondit que ces craintes n’étaient pas fondées; que l’Angleterre, toute pleine encore du souvenir des Stuarts vancus, battrait des mains à un dénouement don’t son histoire fournissait l’exemple et le modèle […]”. 82. Blanc (1842–1844). Histoire de dix ans, vol III, 314. 83. Blanc (1842–1844). Histoire de dix ans, vol IV, 364. 84. Blanc (1842–1844). Histoire de dix ans, vol V, 37–38. 85. Journal des débats 1.1.1848. 86. Journal des débats 7.1.1848. “sa plus ancienne affection, sa confidente éprouvée, l’amie de toutes ses fortunes si diverses […]”. 87. Le Constitutionnel 1.1.1848. Also, for example, Le Courrier français announced the death but only very shortly. See Le Courrier français 1.1.1848. 88. La Mode 6.1.1848, 1–7. 89. Anon (1847). Bureau du “Courrier du Pas-de-Calais”. Mort de S. A. R. la princesse Adélaïde. Décembre 1847, Arras: Imprimerie de A.  Thierny, 1; Louise Fusil (1848). Notice sur S. A. R. Mme la princesse Adélaïde, Paris: Imprimerie de Mme de Lacombe, 1–12. Actress Louise Fusil published a short praising pamphlet on Adélaïde where she traced the first time she had heard of her during the 1810s in Paris and England. The work, however, was more about Louise than Adélaïde. 90. Fortescue (2005). France and 1848, 51. 91. Fortescue (2005). France and 1848, 29. 92. Fortescue (2005). France and 1848, 61. 93. Le Siècle 29.12.1847. The magazine acknowledged the death of Adélaïde with only few lines on January 1. On December 30, the Journal des débats responded by declaring that Le Siècle’s comparison only had proved the king right. 94. La Mode 1840, 270. 95. La Mode 3.7.1841, 69–70.

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96. La Mode 3.7.1841, 74. 97. For example, in 1844, La Mode published a letter from the duchesse de Berry to vicomte de Walsh thanking him for a book he sent her. 5.7.1844, 32. Later in 1845, La Mode published a long genealogical article about the oldest daughter of the duchesse de Berry who was about to get married with the Hereditary Prince Ferdinand Charles of Lucca. The article detailed both of the parties’ genealogies and showed that they descented from Henri IV. La Mode 15.10.1845, 309–312. 98. For example, La Mode 3.4.1841, 50 & 126; 2.10.1841, 71, 73, 361–367; 5.4.1843, 39; 5.7.1843, 342; 15.10.1845, 87, 286; 5.10.1846; 26.3.1847, 185. 99. La Mode 5.7.1844, 356. 100. Nettement recycled many of the old references used for decades: Antigone française, petite-fille de Louis XIV, fille de Saint Louis, petite-fille d’Henri IV. See Alfred Nettement (1843). Vie de Marie-Thérèse de France, fille de Louis XVI, Paris: De Signy et Dubey, 279, 283, 275, 429, 472, 477, 479, 222, 382. 101. Nettement (1843). Vie de Marie-Thérèse de France, 54, 67, 71, 115, 190–191. Delille (1822). Journal, 205. 102. Nettement (1843). Vie de Marie-Thérèse de France, 113. 103. The author, however, did not judge the King Louis-Philippe as strongly as he judged the king’s late father. This was most likely due to the timing of the biography, since the royal family had lost the heir to the throne the previous year. 104. Imogen Peck (2019). “Remembering—and Forgetting—Regicide: The Commemoration of the 30th of January, 1649–1660,” in Estelle Paranque (ed.), Remembering Queens and Kings of Early Modern England and France, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 137. 105. Nettement (1843). Vie de Marie-Thérèse de France, xiii–xvi. 106. Nettement (1843). Vie de Marie-Thérèse de France, 228. Not only legitimists brought up the connection between the Bourbons and the Stuarts. For example, one Rousse, an unknown author, wrote in 1843 that Holyrood was “illustré par les souvenirs de Marie-Stuart”. Rousse (1843). Histoire de treize ans, 1830–1843, Paris: imprimerie de Ducessois, 19. This passage was from a work that summarized chronologically the major French political events from 1830 to 1843. Based on the work, Rousse was a supporter of the Orléans regime. 107. Nettement (1843). Vie de Marie-Thérèse de France, 312 & 354. See also p. 483, “the melancholic shadows of the Stuarts” in Holyrood. 108. Nettement (1843). Vie de Marie-Thérèse de France, 358. 109. Nettement (1843). Vie de Marie-Thérèse de France, 495, also 327. 110. Nettement (1843). Vie de Marie-Thérèse de France, 50–54.

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111. On charity and improvement in the social welfare in the early nineteenth-­ century France, see especially Curtis (2002). “Charitable Ladies”, 133, 139 & 153–154. 112. Nettement (1843). Vie de Marie-Thérèse de France, 426–427, 442–443. 113. Becquet (2012). Marie-Thérèse de France, 285–286. See also La Mode 5.4.1843, 388. La Mode published the letter of the duchesse de Berry, where she praised the book. Becquet did not detail why Marie-Thérèse did not like the biography. 114. La Mode 26.9.1845, 23. 115. La Mode 26.9.1845, 21. The author was not very exact with the chronology as he wrote that Balthild would have lived before Radegund, though in reality Balthild died nearly hundred years after Radegund. 116. Nettement also mentioned Joan of Arc in the biography of Marie-­ Thérèse. Joan of Arc was “cited” in the context of the return of the Bourbons in France in 1814. See Nettement (1843). Vie de Marie-Thérèse de France, 359. Interestingly, even though the events of Bordeaux and Marie-Thérèse’s actions were described in detail in the biography, Joan of Arc was not mentioned in those passages. Nettement (1843). Vie de Marie-Thérèse de France, 375–388. 117. Jules Michelet (1845). Du Prêtre, de la femme, de la famille, Paris: Hachette, 300–301, 285, 282–283, 270, 199, 14, 8 & passim. 118. La Mode 26.9.1845, 22–23. 119. Le chevalier de Signy, & P.-N.  Dubey (1845). “Avis des éditeurs,” In Alfred Nettement. Henri de France, ou Histoire des Bourbons de la branche aînée pendant quinze ans d’exil, 1830–1845, vol. I, Paris: De Signy et Dubey, v. 120. Blanc (1842–1844). Histoire de dix ans, vol. III, 15. “D’ailleurs, le role de Jeanne d’Albret souriat à son imagination napolitaine.” See about the duchesse de Berry, especially volume III and the beginning of volume IV. 121. Alfred Nettement (1845). Henri de France, ou Histoire des Bourbons de la branche aînée pendant quinze ans d’exil, 1830–1845, vol I, Paris: De Signy et Dubey, 28–29, 31, 35, 37, 39–40. 122. Nettement (1845). Henri de France, vol I, 72. “muets témoins d’un Glorieux passé”. Also about the Stuarts and Bourbons pp. 71–74, 77, and 119 and passim, 202, 210–211, 353. According to Nettement, Marie-­ Caroline also compared herself to Robert Bruce, p. 258. It is interesting how often Nettement kept calling the Bourbons a “race de Louis XIV” or descendants of Louis XIV. Since the Orléans family was descendants of Louis XIV’s younger brother, it might be that he wished to highlight the Bourbons’ legitimacy as the descendants of a king. See, for example, pp. 18, 27, 31, 33, 85. On the other hand, references to Louis XIV, Saint Louis, and Henri IV were self-evident in such works, and their absence

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would have seemed out of place since the legitimacy of the Bourbons was in the centre of all legitimist arguments. 123. Nettement (1845). Henri de France, vol I, 117. “Le premier souvenir historique que le jeune prince rencontra sur son passage, fur celui de Marie Stuart. Les ruines imposantes du château de Lochwen lui rappelèrent la longue et cruelle captivité de cette reine douloureuse, et le lamentable dénouement par lequel cette captivité se termina; et ce souvenir sinister dut éveiller dans son coeur une crainte filiale, car il y avait, à cette époque, ailleurs qu’en Écosse, des châteaux forts dont les portes pouvaient, d’un moment à l’autre, se refermer sur une princesse prisonnière (1).” 124. Nettement (1845). Henri de France, vol I, 117. “Déjà, à cette époque, les évènements de 1832 avaient eu lieu, et la prise d’armes avait échoué.” 125. Nettement (1845). Henri de France, vol I, 299. “C’est que le Gouvernment, qui avait appris par ces derniers qu’il avait plu à Madame la duchesse de Berry, pendant qu’elle était au-dehors, de modifier gravement, non sa position politique, mais sa situation privée, car les mariages morganatiques n’ont aucune influence sur la position officielle des princes, le Gouvernement avait résolu d’abuser de cette découverte et de contraindre la duchesse de Berry à declarer publiquement un marriage secret.” 126. Nettement (1845). Henri de France, vol I, 299. “N’est-ce pas Marie-­ Stuart disant dans le château de Lochleven, pendant qu’une main de fer s’appuyait sur son bras: ‘Mylord, je signerai ces actes avec la liberté qu’on me laisse ici.’” 127. Charles Beem (2018). “The Tragic Queen: Dynastic Loyalty and the Queenships of Mary Queen of Scots,” in Caroline Dunn and Elizabeth Carney (eds.), Royal Women and Dynastic Loyalty, New  York: Palgrave Macmillan, 111–121. 128. Nettement (1845). Henri de France, vol I, 213 (Stuarts) & 190 (effeminate politicians). 129. Nettement (1845). Henri de France, vol I, 180.”… rares surtout chez les personnes de son sexe”. 130. Journal des débats 24.10.1842. 131. Journal des débats 7.11.1842. 132. Mentzel (2019). “Rois et reines sur la scène romantique”, 245–261. 133. Journal des débats 19.8.1846. 134. Journal des débats 15.6.1844. 135. See, for example, the Journal des débats 27.4.1845. In Mai 1845, the Journal des débats reported that the law preventing the return of the members of the Bourbon family, notably the duchesse d’Angoulême, duchesse de Berry, and her son (and Napoléon’s family) had been discussed

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in the Chambre due to a petition with “countless” signatures advocating for their right to return. Indeed, there were many people who wished to see the Bourbons have a right to return to France. 136. Journal des débats 30.11.1847. 137. Journal des débats 30.11.1847.

CHAPTER 6

Conclusion

A young and beautiful mother of an heir, the only surviving daughter of a guillotined king and queen, a religious bourgeois queen, and a king’s politically influential unmarried sister. The key commonality in the representations of these early nineteenth-century royal women is the tension between the roles assigned to them and their real or imagined use of power. Their supporters and opponents assigned the women different roles, whereby the supporters diminished the women’s power, and the opponents exaggerated it. With these representations of the royal women, critics could attack the entire regime, and supporters could idealize it. In the case of the duchesse de Berry, her image was romanticized through the references to Marie Stuart and Jeanne d’Albret. The duchess was portrayed as a romantic heroine trying to save her son’s kingdom and dynasty. In these idealized nineteenth-century representations, these royal women were cast in the roles of mother, spouse, and religious benefactor. They were regarded as vitally importance, as they were responsible for protecting, nurturing, and education future great men. Marie-Caroline and Marie-Amélie tangibly fulfilled their roles as mothers, and the queen’s maternal (second) body was fecund. The third body, public opinion fuelled with historical imagery, emphasized the maternal body and defined the two women’s roles accordingly through imagery relating to mothering and nurturing. While both childless, the representations of Marie-Thérèse and Adélaïde shared some similarities, particularly concerning their charitable work and © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 H. Aali, French Royal Women during the Restoration and July Monarchy, Queenship and Power, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59754-2_6

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efforts related to educating the royal children. However,  the duchesse d’Angoulême was much more strongly associated with symbolical motherhood than Adélaïde because she could have had legitimate children. Her dysfunctional maternal body was replaced with a symbolical motherhood. Yet, Marie-Caroline was more than just the mother of “Henri V” and Jeanne d’Albret was more than just the mother of Henri IV. An important aim of this volume was to bring forth the royal women during the Restoration and July Monarchy. This is because much of the research that has been done to this point has focused only on the men of this period: kings, heirs, politicians, and historians. The contemporary pro-­government political literature, propaganda one might call it, romanticized the royal women and diminished their political influence. The literature and press both romanticized and vilified the historical women they referred to simplifying them to narrow feminine roles. The way the contemporary progovernment literature, be it Bourbon or Orléans, presented the royal women in very narrow roles has influenced later representations and concealed their real political authority. This highlights a key aspect of the early nineteenth century, in that women were, above all, defined by their gender. Neutrality, as we understand it, was not an option in media, historiography, or literature at that time, and the narratives employing historical imagery were always one-sided. Authors wrote them for specific purposes, which contemporary readers could recognize from the context and textual references. For a twenty-­first-­century researcher, however, the narratives are often encoded messages that need to be decrypted. The historical references were rarely, if ever, justified. Much of the cultural memory of the Restoration and July Monarchy period has been forgotten, or has become insignificant in popular memory. However, there is much to be learned from this research. For example, the use of Jeanne d’Albret’s history in connection to Marie-Caroline is genuinely fascinating because pro-Bourbon royalists placed great importance on her role as Henri IV’s mother and largely overlooked the fact that she was a Protestant. Unsurprisingly, Jeanne d’Albret’s religious and political activity was omitted from these references as she was reduced to being merely the mother of a king. The historical imagery related to the four royal women was, in a way, narrow and repetitive in addition to being simplistic and remarkably contradictory. This is understandable since readers had to understand the meaning of the references, and cultural memory could only include a limited number of historical events and figures at a time. The clusters of

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references often  revolved around the “Great Men”: Clovis and the Merovingian period, Saint Louis and the women in his life, and Henri IV and the women related to him. In addition, we find imagery related to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Scotland and England, and to Joan of Arc and her life. These references were encoded in the French cultural monarchical memory. The 1830 Revolution and transition from the Bourbon dynasty to the Orléans dynasty did not bring about drastic changes in the historical imagery used, even if the Revolution brought, for the first time, Adélaïde into popular and political discourse. On the contrary, the same references continued to be used, but there was novelty in the (lack of) visibility. The royal Bourbon women, Marie-Thérèse and Marie-Caroline, were much more in the public eye in the 1810s and 1820s than Marie-Amélie and Adélaïde were in the 1830s and 1840s. It is clear that the royalists and legitimists used much more historical references to promote the duchesse d’Angoulême and the duchesse de Berry than the Orléans supporters did with Marie-Amélie and Adélaïde. All the references were biased and blackand-white. They were primarily designed to support or vilify the royal women, but they also revealed the importance of national history and its instrumental value in its fluid nature. It is interesting and telling that even though liberal historiography started to develop in the 1820s and many historians reached political power following the July Revolution, history’s gradual professionalization and academicization was not significantly visible in the historical imagery related to the royal women. The reasons are multiple and varied: liberal historiography did not particularly highlight women as historical actors, multiple historiographical traditions existed simultaneously in France. Moreover, the political, historical imagery drew from other sources than uniquely from the nascent academic historiography, and royal women became reduced to “mere” women close to the ruler as the monarchy was stripped from the sacral position. Examining the historical imagery related to the royal women has revealed several ways in which history and gender were interwoven. The historical references were often full of paradoxes, but history, and the men and women who had lived before, had primarily didactic and instrumental value. The value of both the nineteenth-century women and the historical women were defined by their association with the “Great Men”. Moreover, the historical imagery was employed to downplay the women’s political power when the women were presented in a positive light, whereas the negative imagery sought to underline the women’s perceived illegal use of

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power. In the latter category, authors and politicians ridiculed the royal women’s influence over men, and more generally, the idea of women using direct power. A recurrent theme in many representations was to comment on the royal women’s gender—and how they surpassed it. On the other hand, royal men were portrayed as effeminate in opposing propaganda by highlighting the power the women had. It would have been unheard of to depict, for example, Adélaïde openly counselling her brother during the 1830s and 1840s. In the representations supporting the government, she focused only on duties, which were categorized as feminine. The four royal women were exceptional in terms of their status, wealth, position, and networks, but their displays of power were constrained by narrow social roles. Due to the narrow roles assigned to these women in public representations, their political influence continues to be downplayed in twenty-first-century historiography. This volume has concentrated on the political uses of historical imagery. Fundamentally, these two, politics and uses of history, can never be fully separated. Historical references employed in connection to Marie-­ Thérèse, Marie-Caroline, Marie-Amélie, and Adélaïde illustrate the royal women’s and the historical imagery’s importance to the monarchy and politics. However, the contradiction lies in the historical imagery that ideally highlighted the royal women’s maternal and religious role, but the direct political influence, like in Adélaïde’s case was kept hidden from the official representations due to the persistent negative imagery related to women using power. The historical imagery, be it related to Blanche of Castile or to Antigone, upheld and replicated the narrow roles assigned to women in the French monarchical system. Even if the women held considerable political power within their close circles, the power was, for the most part, indirect influence over the men close to them. The financial power the women held was only rarely touched upon apart from, for example, the restoration of historical sites. Donations and charity played a significant part in the news and narratives about the four royal women and the historical imagery related to saints. There were questions about which family, the Bourbons or the Orléans, donated more funds to charity and which family was more devoted and morally superior. The charity was a way to use, and to indicate, power as the donor could choose where they wished to donate—and what causes were considered charitable enough. This problematic nature of charity was not, however, visible in the historical imagery related to the four women.

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The exceptional period in French history, beginning with the first Restoration, following through with the return of Napoléon, a second Restoration, another Revolution, a change of dynasties, and ending with the Spring of the Nations, gave rise to exceptional royal destinies. Yet, as this volume illustrates, contemporary and historical women have largely disappeared from the narratives of French history due to the mostly male interpretation of history and the role of women in the French monarchy. These four royal women did, however, wield influence, and this volume reveals the value in de-constructing historical representations to uncover the destinies that defined their narrow roles. While the roles bestowed upon them in public representations have continued to live on long after the women themselves have perished, they must not be allowed to define these women entirely.



Annex 1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 H. Aali, French Royal Women during the Restoration and July Monarchy, Queenship and Power, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59754-2

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ANNEX 1

Bibliography

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Index1

A Adélaïde d’Orléans, 2, 3, 7, 9, 12, 17n42, 36, 86–92, 94, 105n181, 106n194, 107n200, 111, 112, 124–139, 147, 153, 160, 163, 166, 172n65, 173n67, 173n72, 173n75, 173n78, 173n79, 175n102, 176n121, 176n122, 186, 190, 191, 199–208, 218, 224n78, 225n89, 225n93, 231–234 Adelaide of Paris, 138 Adelaide of Savoy, 138 Adelaide of Susa, 138 Adelaide, Saint, 89, 117, 137, 138, 191, 203, 204 Alexander I of Russia, 86 Alexander the Great, 152 Amelia, Saint, 116, 121, 170n37, 191, 195, 196, 204 Ancelot, Virginie, 218

Angoulême, duc d’, see Louis-Antoine Angoulême, duchesse d’, see Marie-Thérèse Anna Boleyn, 188 Anne de Gonzague de Clèves, 198 Anne Marie Louise d’Orléans, La Grande Mademoiselle, duchesse (mademoiselle) de Montpensier, 84, 92, 135, 137 Anne of Austria, 2, 53, 57, 113, 157 Anquetil, Louis-Pierre, 26, 31, 45n38, 142 Antigone, 21–23, 27, 28, 30, 36, 43–44n15, 46n48, 82, 104n144, 121, 157, 160, 164, 165, 226n100, 234 Antoine de Bourbon, 189 Armida, fictional character, 38 Arnulf of Metz, Saint, 28, 82, 89, 204 Artois, comte d’, see Charles X

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 H. Aali, French Royal Women during the Restoration and July Monarchy, Queenship and Power, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59754-2

255

256 

INDEX

Atthalin, Baron, 133, 134, 137, 202, 203 Athaliah, biblical character, 36, 63, 133–135 Augustin, Jean-Baptiste Jacques, 66 B Balthild, Saint, 114, 115, 123, 128, 143, 196, 204, 213, 227n115 Barrot, Odilon, 208 Bathilde d’Orléans, duchesse de Bourbon, 88, 115, 169n29 Beauchamp, Alphonse de, 23, 44n19, 44n21 Bellemare, Jean François, 73–75, 102n116 Berry, duc de, see Charles-Ferdinand Berry, duchesse de, see Marie-Caroline Blanc, Louis, 205–207, 215, 216, 224n81, 227n120 Blanche of Castile, 1, 30–33, 54, 57, 59, 97n18, 115, 146, 147, 153, 156, 157, 166, 196, 213, 234 Bocous, Joseph, 30–32, 46n53, 46n54 Bonald, Louis de, 74, 102n123 Bonaparte, Alexandrine, 115, 170n30 Bonaparte, Charles-Louis Napoléon, 156 Bordeaux, duc de, see Henri d’Artois Bossuet, Jacques-Bénigne, 167, 211 Broughton, Baron, 25 Brown, Amy, 39 Brun, Élisabeth, 128 Brunhilda, 26, 27, 45n36, 72, 130, 133, 149, 159, 219 C Canu, Jean-Dominique-Étienne, 56, 97n29, 193, 222n30 Catherine de Clèves, 84, 85 Catherine de’ Medici, 2, 26, 45n35, 58, 64, 113, 130, 133, 145, 159, 174n82, 201, 208

Catherine the Great, 218 Charlemagne, 27, 28, 43n6, 55, 60, 81, 83, 98n52, 116, 167, 170n34, 187, 189, 220n6 Charles I of England, 6, 62, 152, 164, 176n130, 190, 211, 212 Charles VI, 63 Charles VII, 72, 83, 144, 151, 162 Charles VIII, 59 Charles X, comte d’Artois, 7, 8, 12, 19, 28, 44n27, 52, 58, 69, 73, 79, 81–86, 90, 92–95, 107n202, 107n205, 125, 126, 140–143, 147, 149, 150, 156, 159–161, 166, 172n64, 172n65, 176n132, 177n137, 195, 197, 208, 215–217 Charles-Ferdinand, duc de Berry, 8, 12, 19, 36–40, 52, 54–56, 58, 61, 66, 68, 70, 86, 89, 96n5, 100n78, 142, 143, 193 Charles Martel, 82 Chateaubriand, François-René de, 33, 55, 62, 79, 99n58, 141, 144, 150–155, 179n180, 188, 214 Chevalier Bonnemaison, 66 Chilperic, 149, 178n158 Chlothar, 76, 149 Clodion, 74 Clotilde de France, Queen of Sardinia, 46n54 Clotilde, Saint, 4, 15n21, 16n27, 30, 31, 33, 34, 46n54, 52, 59, 69, 76, 115, 117, 123, 149, 186, 196, 197, 204, 213, 223n49 Clovis I, 2, 6, 13n4, 15n25, 16n27, 27, 28, 30, 34, 52, 55, 57–61, 63, 69, 71, 76, 79, 81, 84, 87, 117, 118, 143, 149, 170n36, 196, 213, 233 D Dagobert, 149, 178n158, 182n237 Dauphine of France, see Marie-Thérèse

 INDEX 

Delaroche, Paul, 67, 115, 117, 122, 170n32, 176n130, 191 Delille, E., 89, 106n189, 106n191 Diane de Poitiers, 200, 201 Dido, ancient queen, character of Virgil’s Aeneid, 38 Dollé, Frédéric, 187–190, 220n6, 221n9, 221n10, 221n15 Dreux du Radier, Jean-François, 156 Ducis, Jean-François, 21, 181n223 Dumas, Alexandre, 132 E Eleanor of Aquitaine, 31, 54, 133 Eligius (Éloi), Saint, 182n237 Elisabeth I of England, 63, 99n64, 151, 188 Élisabeth, Madame (sister of Louis XVI), 7, 28, 34, 47n66 F Fénélon, François, 198 Ferdinand I, King of the Two Sicilies, 8 Ferdinand VII of Spain, 77 Ferdinand-Philippe, last duc d’Orléans, duc de Chartres, 64, 91, 135, 148, 167, 185, 190, 192–194, 196, 198, 203, 204 François I, 60, 80, 188–190, 193 François, duc de Joinville, 192, 195 François (Francesco) I of Naples and Two Sicilies, 92 Fredegund, 1, 2, 13n5, 16n27, 25–27, 45n36, 72, 130, 131, 142, 149, 159, 164, 181n223, 208, 218, 219 G Gabrielle d’Estrées, 58 Gaston, duc d’Orléans, 135–137, 175n111

257

Genevieve and Lancelot, 66 Genevieve, Saint, 33, 34, 79, 83, 117, 196, 204, 213 Genlis, Madame de, 9, 200, 201, 207 Gérard, Étienne Maurice, Marshal of France, 128 Gregory of Tours, 13n5, 16n27, 76, 103n134, 164, 171n48, 195 Guillard, Nicolas, 21 Guise, duc de, Henri I, 84, 85 Guizot, François, 5, 6, 16n27, 62, 71, 86, 118, 149, 185, 188, 191–192, 194, 221n21, 221n23 H Hector Lucchesi-Palli, comte, 139, 155 Helena of Troy, 38 Helene of Mecklembourg-Schwerin, duchesse d’Orléans, 135, 185, 186, 188–190, 193, 194 Henri II, 80, 200 Henri IV, 2, 5, 6, 20, 21, 28, 35, 37–41, 43n8, 49n102, 49n106, 52, 55–58, 60, 65, 66, 70, 77, 78, 80, 82, 84, 86, 90–92, 96n1, 97n24, 100n78, 103n136, 104n161, 107n200, 109, 117, 125, 147–151, 153, 154, 157, 159, 164, 165, 172n65, 181n224, 189, 190, 193, 210, 211, 216, 222n31, 226n97, 227n122, 232, 233 Henri d’Artois, duc de Bordeaux, “Henri V”, comte de Chambord, 52, 53, 57, 60, 70, 75, 87, 98n52, 133, 134, 139, 142, 143, 146–148, 151, 153, 155, 156, 189, 208, 209, 215, 216, 232 Henrietta Maria of France, 164–166, 182n225, 182n226, 182n227, 190, 208, 211 Henrietta of England, 164, 165, 167 Henry VIII of England, 60 Hugo, Victor, 41, 131, 132

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INDEX

I Ingres, Jean-Auguste-­ Dominique, 53, 204 Isabeau of Bavaria, 5 Isabelle of France, Saint, 33, 196, 204 Ivanhoe, 62, 63, 65, 99n64 J Jailly, Hector de, 163–166, 181n218, 181n224, 182n225, 182n232, 182n235, 211 James II and VII, 187 James V, 216 Jeanne d’Albret, Queen of Navarre, Jeanne III, 2, 13n3, 37, 41, 47n82, 52, 56, 57, 59–61, 64, 74, 90–92, 98n52, 106n195, 122, 125, 146–150, 153, 157, 166, 178n153, 178n163, 189, 193, 196, 216, 227n120, 231, 232 Jeanne de Montfort, de Flandre, 152, 153, 213 Jezebel, biblical character, 133, 134 Joan of Arc, 1, 23–25, 30, 32, 35, 44n18, 44n27, 44n30, 61, 63, 66, 72, 74, 78, 82, 83, 99n64, 122, 156, 162, 165, 172n57, 198, 213, 215, 227n116, 233 Joséphine, Empress of the French, 29, 103n128 L Laboulaye, Édouard, 151, 194, 222n36, 222n37, 222n38 Lacépède, comte de, 87 Lamartine, Alphonse de, 194 Landon, Charles-Paul, 48n82, 66, 100n77, 100n78

Langerack, Josephine Amory de, 114–115, 169n29 Lapierre de Châteauneuf, Agricol-­ Hippolyte de, 91, 107n200 Lavicomterie, Louis, 143 Le Brun de Charmettes, Philippe-­ Alexandre, 24, 44n26 Lebrun, Pierre-Antoine, 63 Lemercier, Népomucène, 218, 219 Leopold I of Belgium, 220n4 Leuven, Adolphe de, 117, 125, 126, 172n66, 173n67, 173n72 Longsword, William, 191 Louis I, duc de Bourbon, 28 Louis VI Henri de Bourbon-­Condé, 84 Louis XIII, 53, 57, 80, 96n10 Louis IX, Saint Louis of France, 4–6, 21, 23, 24, 27, 28, 30–35, 37, 42, 43n15, 46n60, 54–57, 60, 66, 78, 81, 86, 89, 97n17, 104n154, 104n161, 123, 143, 146, 153, 156, 157, 167, 181n224, 187, 189, 193, 195, 204, 209, 210, 220n6, 222n31, 226n100, 227n122, 233 Louis XIV, 6, 8, 13n3, 15n24, 15n26, 37, 38, 52, 53, 55, 57, 61, 64, 80, 84, 92, 96n9, 96n10, 98n52, 105n185, 125, 135, 136, 146, 150, 157, 164, 193, 198, 222n31, 226n100, 227n122 Louis XVI, 4, 6–9, 11, 19, 21, 22, 32, 34, 37, 47n66, 47n70, 70, 74, 79, 81, 86, 88, 106n189, 123, 143, 147, 148, 152, 166, 167, 189, 195, 199, 205, 210–212, 225n81, 226n100 Louis XVII, 7, 78 Louis XVIII, 7, 8, 17n47, 19–22, 27, 28, 31, 34, 37, 39, 41, 43n8, 45n41, 46n60, 66, 68, 73, 74, 78–80, 82, 83, 86, 88, 90,

 INDEX 

106n188, 123, 141, 142, 150, 176n132, 208, 212 Louis-Antoine, duc d’Angoulême, Dauphin of France, 8, 19, 21, 27, 29, 31, 38, 73, 77, 91, 94, 107n200, 140, 142, 147, 156, 158–161, 167, 172n64, 209, 210, 215 Louis, duc de Nemours, 106n194, 194, 203 Louis-Philippe I, King of the French, duc d’Orléans, 3, 8, 9, 12, 14n16, 15n24, 20, 36, 84, 87–89, 91, 92, 94, 95, 105n181, 106n194, 112, 115, 117, 124, 125, 127, 133–136, 138, 140, 142, 143, 145, 147–152, 155, 156, 162, 169n19, 172n65, 182n237, 185, 186, 189–192, 195–201, 203–208, 216, 220n1, 221n23, 226n103 Louis-Philippe, duc d’Orléans, dit Philippe Égalité, 9, 88, 89, 137, 138, 143, 169n19, 191 Louise (de France), daughter of the duchesse de Berry, 41, 55, 209, 210 Louise de la Vallière, 66 Louise-Marie-Adélaïde de Bourbon-­ Penthièvre, dowager duchesse d’Orléans, 88–90, 106n194, 138, 204 Louise-Marie d’Orléans, Queen of the Belgians, 220n4 Lucrezia Borgia, 1, 131 M Mably, Gabriel Bonnot de, 118 Malherbe, François de, 39, 52 Marchangy, Louis-Antoine-François, 72, 102n107

259

Marcus Aurelius, 39 Margaret of Anjou, 213 Marguerite d’Angoulême, 188–190, 196 Marguerite de Bourgogne, 132 Marguerite de Valois, 58, 188 Maria Carolina, Queen of Naples, 112, 131, 169n17, 174n86 Maria Theresa of Austria-Este (Marie-Thérèse de Modène), Archduchess, 209 Maria Theresa, Holy Roman Empress, 31, 32, 61, 71, 74, 77, 82, 86, 103n136, 154, 209, 218, 219 Marie de’ Medici, 2, 58, 80 Marie d’Orléans, duchesse de Wurtemberg, 122 Marie-Amélie, Queen of the French, duchesse d’Orléans, 2, 7–10, 36, 43n5, 86–88, 90, 109–124, 135, 167, 185–200, 204, 221n9, 221n10, 221n15, 221n16, 231 Marie-Antoinette, Queen of France, 2, 4, 5, 7, 9, 19, 20, 25, 26, 29, 31–34, 46n60, 47n67, 61, 64, 85, 86, 109, 110, 112, 113, 123, 130, 131, 141, 143, 148, 150–152, 154, 159, 160, 164, 166, 167, 168n6, 190, 191, 199, 208, 210–212 Marie-Caroline, duchesse de Berry, 1, 2, 7–9, 12, 13, 13n3, 16n30, 16n37, 35–42, 48n83, 51–68, 73, 75, 78, 79, 82, 83, 87, 89–92, 94, 96n1, 96n9, 97n28, 113, 122, 124, 129, 132–134, 136, 137, 139–157, 159, 160, 162, 166, 167, 176n127, 189, 191, 193, 201, 204, 209–211, 213–219, 226n97, 227n113, 227n120, 227n122, 228n125, 228n135, 231–234

260 

INDEX

Marie-Louise, Empress of the French, 29, 42, 154 Marie Stuart, 2, 37, 62–64, 66, 100n78, 141, 145–147, 151, 152, 155, 157, 164, 165, 177n142, 177n143, 188, 196, 211, 212, 216, 217, 228n123, 228n127, 231 Marie-Thérèse, de Savoie, 96n4 Marie-Thérèse, duchesse d’Angoulême, Dauphine of France, 1, 6–8, 11–13, 19–38, 42n1, 44n26, 46n54, 52, 56, 58, 59, 63, 64, 68–87, 96n4, 98n52, 101n102, 103n136, 103n144, 104n161, 113, 120, 121, 124, 130, 136, 137, 143, 144, 146, 147, 150, 154, 158–167, 180n197, 180n203, 181n215, 181–182n224, 189, 191, 195, 198, 204, 208–218, 220, 227n113, 227n116, 228n135, 231–234 Marie-Thérèse, Queen of France, spouse of Louis XIV, 52 Mary of Lorraine, Marie de Guise, 63 Mary, Queen of Scots, see Marie Stuart Messalina, 36, 129–133 Michelet, Jules, 71, 133, 214, 215 Miel, François, 81, 83, 104n158, 104n159, 107n202 Mirabeau, Comtesse de, 127 Mohammed Ali, Pasha of Egypt, 199 Molière, 83 Montjoie, Galart de, 28, 45n45 N Napoléon, 19, 20, 22, 23, 25, 26, 29, 32, 38, 42, 43n6, 52, 61, 87, 93, 95, 101n100, 103n128, 115, 118, 142, 151, 152, 154–156, 160, 165, 172n65, 179n183,

192–195, 198, 203, 219, 228n135, 235 Nettement, Alfred, 11, 156, 157, 179n191, 180n194, 190, 191, 207, 209–212, 215–217, 226n100, 226n107, 227n112, 227n116, 227n119, 227n121, 227n122, 228n123, 228n124, 228n125, 228n126 Ney, Marshal (Michel), 20 O Oedipus, 21 Orléans, dowager duchesse d’, see Louise-Marie-Adélaïde de Bourbon-Penthièvre Orléans, duc d, see Louis-Philippe I Orléans, duc d’, (Philippe Égalité), see Louis-Philippe, duc d’Orléans Orléans, duchesse d’, see Marie-Amélie Orléans, (last) duc d, see Ferdinand-Philippe Orléans, (last) duchesse d, see Helene of Mecklembourg-Schwerin Orléans, mademoiselle d’, see Adélaïde d’Orléans Otto I, Holy Roman Emperor, 89 P Pascallet, É., 11, 198, 223n51 Peyronnet, comte de, 159 Pharamond, 71, 74, 84, 177n137 Philip V of Spain, 38 Philip, Saint, 117, 121, 143, 186, 191, 195, 196, 204 Philippe I, duc d’Orléans, 198 Philippe Égalité, see Louis-Philippe, duc d’Orléans Pillet, Léon, 11, 127, 173n72, 173n73 Polignac, Jules de, 85, 93, 107n205, 159

 INDEX 

Q Quatremère de Roissy, Jean Nicolas, 82 R Rachel, biblical character, 59 Racine, Jean, 54, 134 Radegund, Saint, 76, 77, 79, 103n130, 115, 123, 196, 204, 213, 227n115 Raisson, Horace-Napoléon, 141–143, 176n132 Ravaillac, François, 159 René d’Anjou, 78 Robert Bruce, 227n122 Robert, Louis-Joseph-Marie, 77–79, 103n136 Robert the Strong, 79 Robin Hood, 63, 87, 99n64 Rosamund, mistress of Henry II of England, 63 S Saint-Hilaire, Émile Marco de, 60, 61, 82, 83, 98n52, 99n54, 104n161, 107n201, 107n202, 125, 172n64, 172n65 Saint Louis, see Louis IX Sartory, Madame de, 52, 96n4 Schiller, Friedrich, 63 Scott, Walter, 62–64, 67 Sèze, Adolphe de, 166, 182n237 Shakespeare, William, 65, 164, 181n223 Simien Despréaux, Claude-Philbert, 11, 27, 28, 45n44

261

Sismondi, Simonde de, 31, 71, 118 Sophocles, Greek tragedian, 21 Sophronia, a Roman matron, 38 Sorel, Agnès, 5, 59, 72, 144 Sully, duc de, 58 T Talleyrand, Charles-Maurice de, 127, 128 Tell, William, 63, 99n64 Teresa of Avila, Saint, 35 Thierry, Augustin, 16n27, 26, 62, 69, 101n91, 118, 119, 171n45, 219 Thiers, Adolphe, 5, 86, 94, 118, 127, 149, 205, 206, 221n23, 225n81 Thomassy, 70–75, 101n98, 101n100, 101n102 Tissot, Pierre-François, 18n51, 111–114, 168n13 Titus, Roman emperor, 39, 43n15, 113, 114, 169n24, 193 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 14n16, 15n16 Torquato Tasso, 38 V Victoria, Queen of England, 193 Vincent de Paul, Saint, 67, 195 Virgil, Roman poet, 38 W Walsh, Edouard, 122, 123, 213–215 William of Orange, 187 William the Conqueror, 170n36