Anne Marie Louise d'Orléans, Duchess of Montpensier

French princess and writer

• Born: May 29, 1627
• Birthplace: Paris, France
• Died: April 5, 1693
• Place of death: Paris, France

The duchesse de Montpensier, refused succession to the throne because she was female, would successfully lead troops during the Wars of the Fronde. She wrote about court personalities, produced a satire, insisted on gender equity in relationships of intimacy as well as power, and developed an aversion to marriage, believing it was, in part, a form of slavery. Her memoirs—historical, introspective, and autobiographical—led to the further development of the novel.

Early Life

Rarely has a child been born with so much and yet so little. Granddaughter of Henry IV and Marie de Médicis, Anne-Marie-Louise d’Orléans (ohr-lay-ahn), duchesse de Montpensier (deh moh-pahn-syay) was born to Gaston d’Orléans (the despicable brother of King Louis XIII ) and Marie de Bourbon, duchesse de Montpensier. Had Anne-Marie-Louise been male, she would have been next in line of succession after her father, but female succession was prohibited by Salic law.

As an infant, she became the richest woman in France, but only as a result of her mother’s early death. She loved her father unconditionally but was shamefully neglected by him, preoccupied as he was with faction fighting and plotting against the king, his brother. Because of Gaston’s irresponsible behavior, Cardinal de Richelieu , the king’s first minister, took the duchess from him and established her in the Tuileries, where she felt terribly alone, even though she was living in one of the most elaborate royal households. Her education consisted of learning court ceremonial and etiquette, while her schooling was generally neglected.

The duchess’s governess, who died when the duchess was fifteen, was replaced by a heavy-handed supervisor who earned the duchess’s adolescent rebellions. When Louis XIII died the following year (1643), the queen, Anne of Austria , who was regent to the four-year-old Louis XIV, appointed Cardinal Jules Mazarin rather than Gaston (the duchess’s father) as the duchess’s confidential adviser. She would come to feel the loss of Anne’s affection.

Her youthful political perceptions were determined by her love for her father; only gradually and painfully did she begin to see through him. She also began to realize that her rank made her a political commodity in a very restricted marriage pool: She could marry an emperor, a king, or an archduke.

Life’s Work

During the Wars of the Fronde, the civil wars fought between 1648 and 1653, the duchesse de Montpensier acquired the reputation of an “amazon-duchess.” She had led her own troops and captured Orléans in 1651 to the enthusiastic approbation of its citizens. In 1652, she turned the cannon of the Bastille on the royal troops, delivering a victory to the rebellious Frondeurs. Subsequently, Mazarin remarked that Montpensier had “killed” her husband with that Bastille cannon shot; that is, she destroyed any chance of marrying Louis XIV.

Marriage prospects were discussed, however, but nothing materialized. Ferdinand, brother of Anne of Austria and Spanish commander in Flanders, had died. After Montpensier’s aunt, the queen of Spain, died in 1643, there had been discussion of marriage with Spanish king Philip IV (his wife, Elizabeth, died in 1644). When the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand III was widowed, the duchess was mentioned as a possible empress (a prospect that excited her ambitions), but he married elsewhere, as did his brother, Archduke Leopold. Henrietta Maria , the daughter of King Henry IV and the queen of England, who was in exile in France, tried to arrange a marriage between Montpensier and her son, the future King Charles II, but the duchess was not impressed with Charles.

When Ferdinand III was again widowed, Montpensier’s dreams of the imperial title reawakened, but they soon were dashed by news that he had remarried. She was considered a possible wife for Philippe, the duke of Anjou and the king’s younger brother, but even though the cousins had great mutual affection all their lives, they were not suited to each other. Philippe would later marry the sister of Charles II. Negotiations on behalf of the duchess by the court seemed halfhearted at best, and she sensed that neither the queen nor Mazarin had her interests at heart.

From 1652 to 1657, Montpensier was exiled from court for her participation in the Fronde, and between 1662 and 1664, she was exiled again, this time for refusing to marry King Afonso VI of Portugal. In exile at her estate of Saint Fargeau, where she held her own court, she was prodigiously active. She renovated the château; began writing her memoirs, the Mémoires de mademoiselle de Montpensier (pb. 1729); acquired her own printing press and printer; and corresponded with the Great Condé. She also established a theater and engaged in hoydenish games, dancing, hunting, and fêtes champêtres(outdoor entertainments). She surrounded herself with distinguished company, including Pierre-Daniel Huet, bishop of Avranches; poet Jean Regnault de Segrais, her secretary and, possibly, her literary collaborator; Madame de Lafayette; and Madame de Sévigné. While at Fontainebleau, she socialized with the colorful Christina, formerly queen of Sweden.

Gaston continued, however, to cause her great unhappiness. When she had come of age and assumed control of her own wealth, she discovered that her father had been siphoning her money for years to cover his gambling debts and to support his new family. This resulted in legal disputes and much heartbreak, with Gaston mercilessly deceiving and threatening her until she acquiesced in his financial demands. Even the third woman of France, without a husband to protect her, was powerless against her unscrupulous father. When she finally agreed to give him the sum he demanded, his response, as Montpensier acidly remarked, would be most affectionate. She was proved correct. By acquiescing, she was reconciled with the court (1657).

She continued her writing projects and, in 1659, began a collection of sketches of court personalities, Divers portraits (The Characters or Pourtaicts of the Present Court of France , 1668). In the same year, she published her Histoire de la princesse de Paphlagonie , a roman à clef seen by some at the time to have been a satire of Madeleine de Scudéry’s Artamène: Ou, Le Grand Cyrus (ten volumes, pb. 1649-1653; Artamenes: Or, The Grand Cyrus), a ten-volume novel about Cyrus the Great (of the 500’s b.c.e.).

When King Louis XIV was to be married to Marie-Thérèse of Spain (1660) following the Peace of the Pyrenees (1659), Montpensier traveled with the court. When they stopped at Blois, Gaston woke her early in the morning, telling her to take care of her stepfamily, because he was likely to die soon. At Aix-en-Provence, Montpensier was overtaken with intense, inexplicable sadness, only to learn that her father had suffered a stroke and died.

Although an important participant in the royal marriage ceremonies, Montpensier had been developing an aversion to the married state. In correspondence with Françoise Bertaut de Motteville, begun around 1660, the two women discussed female-centered pastoral utopias and a “gynocentric” republic, gender equity in love and relationships of power, and marriage as a form of slavery for women. Four of these letters were published as Recueil des pieces nouveles et galantes (1667). At the king’s marriage, the duchess was drawn to Antonin-Nompar de Caumont de Lauzun, a commander of a company of royal guards, captain of the dragoons, and eventually personal bodyguard to the king—certainly no match in rank for La Grande Mademoiselle.

Montpensier remained in the Luxembourg Palace when the king moved to Versailles. Her salon there was frequented by Madame de Sévigné, Madame de La Fayette , and François de La Rochefoucauld, among others. In 1669, as part of an engagement party, Tartuffe: Ou, L’Imposteur (pr. 1664, pb. 1669; Tartuffe, 1732), about a religious hypocrite, was performed there, too, with playwright Molière playing the title role.

Lauzun, however, continued to fascinate the duchess. By 1670, the woman who had once turned the cannon of the Bastille on the king’s own army had become as vulnerably obsessive as a love-struck teenager, importuning the king for permission to marry Lauzun. At first, he agreed to his cousin’s pleas, but when he reneged, claiming rumors dangerous to the state, the duchess became profoundly depressed. In 1671, Lauzun was arrested and taken personally by the captain of the musketeers to the remote fortress of Pignerol.

During Lauzun’s imprisonment, Montpensier worked with her charity school at Eu, established and oversaw a hospital and seminary for the Sisters of Charity who taught at the school and nursed in the hospital, resumed writing her memoirs, built a new summer house at Choisy, and continued to importune the king for Lauzun’s pardon. In return for his release, in 1680, she agreed to hand over properties, including Eu and Dombes, to the young duke of Maine, the son of the king and Madame de Montespan. When Montpensier and Lauzun were finally reunited, he prostrated himself at her feet, claiming to owe her “everything.” His actions, though, did not prove his devotion, and his protestations did not make up for his philandering and lies. It was rumored that they were secretly married, but there is no firm evidence to prove this.

One irony of La Grande Mademoiselle’s life was that her father disavowed her martial activities, often carried out at his request, and estranged himself from her. The other irony is that while in her writings she wrote in support of friendship as a basis for rational love, in her own life she succumbed to an obsessive and semirequited passion.

Significance

In Montpensier’s Divers portraits, innovative character descriptions anticipate psychological explorations. Her memoirs and the Motteville correspondence, exemplary of French seventeenth century equity feminism, illuminate the contrast between assumptions about women’s possibilities and the increasing rigidity that Louis’s system thereafter imposed upon aristocratic French society. In the memoirs, she constructs a matrix of introspection, history, and autobiography with narrative method that contributes to the development of the novel. It has added to understandings of the ancien régime through the reflections of one of its most prominent women, who earned a place in military history as the comrade-in-arms of the Great Condé.

Bibliography

Montpensier, Anne-Marie-Louise d’Orléans. Against Marriage: The Correspondence of La Grande Mademoiselle. Edited and translated by Joan DeJean. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. A translation of the Montpensier-Motteville correspondence with a valuable introduction and a bibliography.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Memoirs of La Grande Mademoiselle, Duchesse de Montpensier. Translated by Grace Hart Seely. New York: Century, 1928. An older translation of Montpensier’s memoirs, but still useful and necessary reading.

Pitts, Vincent. La Grande Mademoiselle at the Court of France, 1627-1693. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. Pitts includes an extensive bibliography of primary and secondary sources, comprehensive notes, information on Montpensier’s writings, and detailed information about her vast fortune.

Sackville-West, Vita. Daughter of France: The Life of La Grande Mademoiselle. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1959. Sackville-West’s sense of the historical moment and her writing style make this an excellent introduction.

Steegmuller, Francis. The Grande Mademoiselle. New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1956. An entertaining account that focuses on Montpensier’s love life.