Aristocratic Women on Love, Learning,
and the Feminine, 1782–1827
Carolina Armenteros
T
he period 1750–1850 saw the rise and consolidation of an ideal of marriage based on passionate love. Its history, like the history of all winners, has been well
researched and documented.1 The story of those whom it could not convert remains yet
to be told. The literary sources suggest that the unpersuaded engaged closely and creatively with
the question, discarding dominant theories of female nature, developing new models of male
nature, and introducing the battle of the sexes into political debate. In this essay I shall examine the work of three French aristocratic women—Stéphanie-Félicité de Genlis (1746–1830),
Antoinette Legroing de La Maisonneuve (1764–1837), and Constance de Maistre (1793–1882)—
who vigorously criticized the enshrinement of passionate love within marriage in the process of
devising what was at first an aristocratic, and later a monarchist, feminist ideal. The texts they
wrote on the subject are almost completely unknown. Although Genlis is the subject of continuously expanding scholarship,2 the passages and some of the works by her that I examine here
I would like to thank Carla Hesse for the conversation during which I conceived the idea for this essay; Laura
Downs, Miranda Gill, and most particularly Alicia Montoya for sharing their erudition with me; Adrian Daub,
Dan Edelstein, Karen Offen, and especially the anonymous reviewer for Republics of Letters for their helpful
comments and suggestions; and the audiences of Stanford’s French Culture Workshop and of the Triangle
Intellectual History Seminar for stimulating discussions of previous drafts of this piece.
1 n the rise of amour-passion in the last half of the eighteenth century, see Allan Pasco, Revolutionary Love in
O
Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century France (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009).
2 See Machteld De Poortere’s The Philosophical and Literary Ideas of Mme de Staël and Mme de Genlis, trans. J.
Lavash, Currents in Comparative Romance Languages and Literatures, vol. 160 (New York: Peter Lang, 2007);
B. A. Robb’s Félicité de Genlis: Motherhood on the Margins (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2008); and
François Bessire and Martine Reid, eds., Madame de Genlis: Littérature et éducation (Mont-Saint-Aignan:
Publications des Universités de Rouen et du Havre, 2009). On her life, see also Violet Wyndham, Madame de
Armenteros, Carolina. “Aristocratic Women on Love, Learning, and the Feminine, 1782–1827.”
­R epublics of Letters: A Journal for the Study of Knowledge, Politics, and the Arts 3, no. 2 (November 15,
2013): http://arcade.stanford.edu/rofl/aristocratic-women-love-learning-and-feminine-1782-1827.
2 republics of letters
have, to my knowledge, remained unstudied. Legroing’s works have never been analyzed, and
one of her manuscripts has been lost.3 As for Maistre, she has so far been the subject of only one,
biographical article, which is based mostly on her unarchived correspondence and does not even
mention the fact that she published a book.4 Yet although little known, these women were innovative. In their novels, as well as in their moral, literary, and pedagogical treatises, they drew inspiration from the golden age of French feminism and women’s writing to rework the aristocratic
ethic in response to the rise of bourgeois and republican notions of intimacy.5
That the fortunes of passionate love should rise with those of republicanism and the bourgeoisie during roughly the same period—Reinhart Koselleck’s Sattelzeit—should come as no
surprise. Passionate love has long been at the heart of democratic consciousness, with the experience of erotic passion being deemed central to the constitution of individual self-sovereignty.6
The French revolutionaries recognized this and refurbished marriage with liberty, reconceiving it
as a voluntary contract of love that underpinned citizenship and stimulated patriotic allegiance.7
Intuitively, one might think that democracy’s institutionalization in marriage should have been
accompanied by women’s emancipation. However, historians have long noted, perplexed, that
although the Revolution furthered freedom in other areas—and although recent studies have
emphasized that it created unexpected opportunities for women8—revolutionaries and republicans generally sought to limit female self-empowerment.9 To explain this, Geneviève Fraisse
has ventured that relegating women to the private sphere was crucial to building a strong notion
of the public sphere (as well as to enforcing sexual domination).10
I argue, however, that republican and revolutionary attitudes to women were formed in the
struggle against a now-forgotten aristocratic feminism that sought to liberate women from the
accusation of adultery. In the eighteenth century, women were believed to be more likely than
Genlis: A Biography (London: Andre Deutsch, 1958); and Georges de Broglie, Madame de Genlis (Paris: Perrin,
1985). The book by Alice Laborde, L’œuvre de Madame de Genlis (Paris: Nizet, 1966), remains a reference.
3 The Contes moraux that she composed for her students. See François Cattois, Notice historique sur Mme Legroing
de La Maisonneuve, in Extrait de la biographie universelle, vol. 71 ([Paris]: Impr. de Bruneau, 1842), 5.
4 Jacques Lovie, “Constance de Maistre: Éléments pour une biographie,” Revue des études maistriennes 4 (1978):
141–73.
5 On the rise of love-based marriage, see Patricia Mainardi, Husbands, Wives, and Lovers: Marriage and Its
Discontents in Nineteenth-Century France (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003); Pasco, Revolutionary
Love in Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century France; and Anne Verjus, Le bon mari: Une histoire politique des
hommes et des femmes à l’époque révolutionnaire (Paris: Fayard, 2010).
6 I n the eighteenth century, the great exponent of this theory was Rousseau, the prophet of “true love” (to use his
own vocabulary). On his sexual politics, see Joel Schwartz, The Sexual Politics of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1985); Penny Weiss, Gendered Community: Rousseau, Sex, and Politics (New York:
New York University Press, 1993); and Elizabeth Wingrove, Rousseau’s Republican Romance (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2000). Cogently, Genlis found Julie insufferable: “Rousseau made fashionable the
exaltation of sentiments and disordered love,” she grumbled. See Stéphanie-Félicité de Genlis, De l’influence des
femmes sur la littérature française, comme protectrices des lettres et comme auteurs, ou Précis de l’histoire des femmes
françaises les plus célèbres (Paris: Maradan, 1811), 322.
7 Suzanne Desan, “The Politics of Intimacy: Marriage and Citizenship in the French Revolution,” in Women,
Gender and the Enlightenment, ed. Sarah Knott and Barbara Taylor (London: Palgrave, 2005), 635, 637.
8 Suzanne Desan, The Family on Trial in Revolutionary France (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 2004).
9 See Jean-Clément Martin, La révolte brisée: Femmes dans la Révolution française et l’Empire (Paris: Armand
Colin, 2008).
10 See Geneviève Fraisse, Reason’s Muse: Sexual Difference and the Birth of Democracy, trans. Jane Marie Todd
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).
armenteros | aristocratic women on love, learning, and the feminine, 1782–1827 3
men to initiate sexual and social disorder.11 Rousseau suggested as much in the preface to Julie, ou
La nouvelle Héloïse (1761), a major precursor of the romantic novel: “It seems that the sex always
needs a time for libertinism, either in one state, or in the other. It is a bad leaven that ferments
sooner or later.” 12 This belief in the “bad leaven” animated republican demands for love-based
marriage as an antidote to adultery.13 In reality, however, marital instability increased during
the period of passionate love’s establishment,14 and indeed not all were persuaded by republican
explanations of adultery or the means proposed to allay it. Searching for alternatives, some aristocratic women writers—the same ones who after the Revolution would end up on the Right—
rewound the clock. They went back to a century when “mind [had] no sex,” to borrow the famous
phrase of the Cartesian feminist François Poullain de la Barre (1647–1725)—or more accurately
when it had less sex than it would have in the eighteenth century—when women’s literature was at
its apex, and when the précieuses refused to marry, denouncing marriage as slavery and dreaming
up utopias of nonmarital love. Not that Genlis, Legroing, and Maistre were simply rehashing. Far
from it: discrediting amour-passion required new attitudes—especially to female learning—and
new explanations of adultery that no longer put the burden of the blame on women. In this essay
I shall explore how this trio renewed the old to represent the losing, now elapsed, and ultimately
monarchist case in the struggle over love, learning, and femininity that raged from Revolution
to Restoration.
critiquing amour-passion
Monarchists looked on erotic love with disquiet. In addition to engendering social disorder by
manufacturing a mass of sovereigns who could challenge the one sovereign authority they venerated, this passion undermined the practice of liberty by distracting people from their various social
duties. Indeed, royalists’ critique of passionate love and engagement with bourgeois republicanism
were both driven by the desire to bolster individual freedom and the ideal of liberty as independence. This is true of even Legroing de La Maisonneuve, the most sympathetic of our authors to
bourgeois ideals. She wrote two novels: Zénobie, ou L’héroïne d’Arménie (1794), a best seller during
the Terror that went through at least three editions and was hailed as a new Télémaque (1699), and
Clémence: Roman moral, dans lequel les jeunes personnes dont le cœur seroit engagé, trouveront des
principes et des exemples utiles (1802). Though these tales ended, bourgeois style, with marriages of
love, their most prominent theme is women’s freedom from passionate love.
Zenobia is a figure that appears in most galleries des femmes of the baroque period, where she
was a staple of the literature and imagery of the femme forte—a triumphant, Amazon-type figure
who discarded voluptuousness for martial glory. Historically, there had been two Zenobias: the
first-century queen of Armenia who convinced her husband, Rhadamistus, to kill her so that she
would not to fall into the hands of the Parthians but who survived the scimitar blow to be welcomed by the Parthian king Tiridates;15 and the third-century queen of Palmyra who extended
her empire through conquest and led a revolt against the Romans. These two figures had a long
literary afterlife in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France as the heroines of tragedies and
11 See Natalie Zemon Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern Europe, chap. 5.
12 e “Seconde préface” to Julie, ou La nouvelle Héloïse, in Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Œuvres complètes, ed. Bernard
Th
Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond, 5 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1959–95), vol. 2 (1961), 24.
13 See Mainardi, Husbands, Wives, and Lovers, viii.
14 Pasco, Revolutionary Love in Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century France, 70.
15 Tacitus tells her story in book 12 of the Annals.
4 republics of letters
novels. Their attributes frequently fused to form a single figure. Thus, Legroing’s Zénobie is the
queen of Armenia, but she is a martial heroine like the historical queen of Palmyra. And she
resembles both of her historic forebears in being a symbol of aristocracy and royalty as well as a
paradigm of femininity.
Psychologically, however, Legroing’s Zénobie descends mostly from her Palmyrene ancestor. She is forte and honnête, qualities that in the baroque period denoted chastity and honor.
Forging alliances and marshaling troops, she reconquers Armenia from neighboring invaders,
professing the love of glory 16 and living among the Amazons. She recalls Pierre Le Moyne’s
Palmyrene Zénobie, engaged in a “chase” where “it is Sovereigns who chase, and Sovereigns
who are chased.” 17 Legroing’s queen is also morally related to the Palmyrene protagonist of
D’Aubignac’s tragedy Zénobie (1647), which showcases the femme honnête: this Zénobie, like
Legroing’s, is a model of chastity and honor. Yet Legroing’s heroine is even older, since her honnêteté, by including learnedness, hails back to early seventeenth-century ideals18 and borrows
from the baroque all the heroic feminine qualities that her creator wished the women of her own
time to attain.
If Legroing’s Zénobie is Palmyrene in her psychology, she is Armenian in her relationships
with her husbands. Zénobie, reyne d’Arménie, a 1653 tragedy by Jacques Pousset de Montauban
(1610?–85), may have inspired Legroing by antithesis. It tells the story of a woman who, consumed
by a desire for revenge against her two brutal husbands, Rhadamiste and Tyridate, spends most
of the play persuading the Roman consul, who is in love with her, to kill them. A corrupt variation on the femme forte, this Zénobie may be a female avatar of Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s
Segismundo,19 another royal with a penchant for cruelty who finally spares his enemy. The theme
of initially bloody and finally forgiving sovereigns goes back to antiquity, of course, but during a
troubled period when royalists defended monarchies as the conciliatory alternatives to inherently
partisan republics, the peacemaking destinies of monarchs probably impressed Legroing, whose
own heroine institutes an armistice when she reascends the throne. This said, the Zénobie who
seems to have moved her most is the protagonist of Crébillon père’s most famous play, Rhadamiste
et Zénobie (1711), which was staged in Paris during the Revolution. Both this Zénobie and hers are
the wives of a violently jealous prince, Rhadamiste; both are in love with virtuous and moderate
princes (in Crébillon’s version, Arsame; in Legroing’s, Tiridates); both initially renounce their
love out of duty but marry the men they love after Rhadamiste dies violently.
If in creating her learned, self-controlled, conquering, and harmonizing heroine Legroing
borrows from baroque characters, in critiquing erotic love she adapts baroque literary themes.
Zénobie is indebted to Honoré d’Urfé’s classic novel L’Astrée (1607–27), which associates the
themes of the hunt and the flight from love and prominently features the pastoral tradition of
the cult of Diana.20 Thus, when running away from her husband and avoiding her lover, Zénobie
goes to live among a simple shepherd people who worship the goddess of the hunt. In a moment
16 A ntoinette Legroing de La Maisonneuve, Zénobie, ou l’héroïne d’Arménie, 3rd ed.[?] (Paris: Pougens, an VIII
[1800–1801]), 28–29.
17 P ierre Le Moyne, La gallerie des femmes fortes, 5th ed., 2 vols. (1647; Paris: Compagnie des marchands libraires
du palais, 1665), 1:194.
18 On the evolution of the idea of honnêteté in the seventeenth century, see Linda Timmermans, L’accès des femmes
à la culture (1598–1715) (Paris: Honoré Champion, 1993), 319–20.
rom Calderón’s La vida es sueño (1635).
F
20 Ian Maclean, Woman Triumphant: Feminism in French Literature, 1610–1652 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1977), 158, 159.
19 armenteros | aristocratic women on love, learning, and the feminine, 1782–1827 5
when Love (who, together with his mother, Venus, is the villain of the story) is tempting her,
Zénobie invokes Diana (who, along with Minerva, is the novel’s good goddess). Hearing her
prayer, the divinity of chastity abducts her and takes her to live among her army, where she
teaches her captive to admire her nymphs, who live without husbands or lovers. 21 Crucially,
though, where Zénobie’s pastoral ancestors depict shepherd society as the sole possible haven of
true love, Legroing’s novel represents it as a refuge from love22—another sign of the story’s late
eighteenth-century composition. The queen’s time among the shepherds is the period of her separation from her husband and her lover. Pastoral retreat also marks the widowhood of Faula, the
royal Amazon who brings poetry, song, and religion to the shepherds after she decides to cease
grieving for her dead husband Hercules and to enjoy “the sweetest of pleasures, that of doing
good.” 23 Thus, where the flight from love in L’Astrée is associated with the figure of the satyr, in
Zénobie it is women who do the fleeing, building community and exonerating their sex symbolically from the imputation of lasciviousness.
Even warier than Zénobie, which presents Love as a deity of “anger, barbarity, and furor,” 24
Legroing’s Clémence censures passionate love as a “poison” and as the “sad necessity” of “sensitive
and tender” souls.25 “I have never believed,” writes Clémence, “in love at first sight, in irresistible
penchants, in sympathies that one cannot vanquish.” More severe than Zénobie, who neglects
her studies when she begins her relationship with Tiridates, Clémence falls in love only as a result
of “negligence”:26 the man who eventually becomes her fiancé, Alphonse, was first introduced to
her as her brother, so that before she discovered his true identity, she grew close to him without
constraint.27 Yet Clémence wishes that she had freed her heart in time.28 To her, passionate love
always announces “crime or unhappiness,” and she advises her friend Zéphirine to avoid it as a
blight on emotional life.29
Such musings echo the opinion of Genlis, another admirer of the grand siècle and a foe of
Romanticism and the Enlightenment who also rejected romantic love as a form of moral and
emotional depletion. When discussing the fiancée of her son Théodore, the baronne d’Almane,
the heroine-pedagogue of Genlis’s magnum opus, Adèle et Théodore, complains that the former’s
“imagination is fixed only on [Théodore], no occupation has attraction for her. That is not the
daughter-in-law that I would have desired!” 30 But Genlis went further than Legroing in condemning romantic love as a form of vanity and as a fictitious sentiment that flowered only fleetingly.31 She traced its origins to immoral novels that exalted narcissism and ridiculous feelings,
like Germaine de Staël’s Corinne (1807), which she parodied in Hortense, or the Victim to Novels
and Travels (1808). The antiheroine of this last novella is a rich and pretentious intellectual with
21 egroing, Zénobie, 278.
L
I bid., 157–58.
23 I bid., 158. Genlis gives the same definition of pleasure in Adèle et Théodore, ou Lettres sur l’éducation, 3 vols.
(Paris: M. Lambert and F. J. Baudoin, 1782), 1:102.
24 L egroing, Zénobie, 26.
25 A ntoinette Legroing de La Maisonneuve, Clémence, roman moral, 3 vols. (Paris: Duprat, an X [1802]), 1:179.
26 I bid., 301–2.
27 L egroing may have borrowed this plot element from Montauban’s Zénobie, where the queen’s daughter, Perside,
becomes betrothed to the man she once thought was her brother.
28 L egroing, Clémence, 1:294, 302; 2:217, 242.
29 I bid., 2:242.
30 Genlis, Adèle et Théodore, 3:332.
31 De Poortere, Philosophical and Literary Ideas of Mme de Staël and Mme de Genlis, 97, 72–73, 101, 151, 153, 154.
22 6 republics of letters
many follies, notably the wish to marry for love.32 An enthusiast of Corinne, she travels to Italy
intending to emulate the novel’s events to the last detail, even taking a melancholy Scottish lover.
With him, she painstakingly mimics Corinne and Oswald’s relationship, with the exception of
the denouement: for unlike Corinne, Hortense lives, and unlike Oswald, her melancholy lover
runs away with all her money. The story is a satirical execution of the baronne d’Almane’s comment that everyone’s life has been newly scripted, and that each is now convinced of a “chimerical
fatality” according to which he or she must experience a great passion.33 Genlis’s opinion is that
the “fatality” usually results in the abandonment of women.
Nor does amour-passion’s enshrinement in marriage in any way forestall women’s eventual
loss of imaginative power. In fact, Genlis thinks it disastrous that a woman should marry a man
whom she loves passionately, and she advises the restraint of passion in men as well.34 The fiancé
of Adèle, the baronne d’Almane’s daughter, is in love with his betrothed, and Adèle might have
encouraged this sentiment, but the baronne advises her expressly against it. Romantic passion
can last at most one, perhaps three, years,35 and if encouraged during its apogee, it later leads to
distancing. Instead, Adèle must only let her husband “see the sentiments that can last always.” 36
In this way, she will inspire in him a “profound, inalterable attachment” and become his “confidante and friend” as well as “the object that he will love the best.” 37 The advice is the precise contrary of that which the tutor gives to Sophie in book 4 of Rousseau’s Emile. For whereas Sophie is
taught stratagems to intensify her husband’s passion for as long as possible, Adèle is instructed to
moderate this passion for the brief time that it will last. On this point, the antithesis between the
republican and monarchist points of view is total. But it shows that although Genlis practiced the
open marriage common among the aristocracy—she was the mistress of the duc d’Orléans and
possibly the mother of his children—she valued the bourgeois ideal of marital companionship.
Indeed, Genlis’s opinions on love and marriage were the exact obverse of those professed
by the seventeenth-century feminists whom she otherwise extolled.38 The latter had denounced
marriage: “It is only the state of Marriage which seems incapable of consolation as well as relief,”
François de Grenaille (1616–80) had lamented.39 Joining in, Le Moyne had compared dressing
brides to “adorning slaves and crowning captives, . . . taking them to prison with pomp and dancing.” 40 Yet the same century that had decried weddings had also celebrated “inclination”—the
word is Madeleine de Scudéry’s invention41—especially after the triumph of absolutism imposed
the differentiation of the sexes. Thus, although the princesse de Clèves—a favorite of Genlis, who
has Adèle read her story at thirteen—had refused to marry for love, the précieuses had asked for
nonmarital love and marriage by “inclination,” conjuring, in their novels, utopian courts of love
32 enlis, Hortense, 113.
G
Genlis, Adèle et Théodore, 1:349–51.
34 De Poortere, Philosophical and Literary Ideas of Mme de Staël and Mme de Genlis, 73.
35 Genlis, Adèle et Théodore, 3:476.
36 I bid., 478.
37 I bid., 477.
38 See below.
39 François de Grenaille, L’honneste marriage, 2 vols. (Paris: Quinet, 1640), 2:105.
40 L e Moyne, Gallerie des femmes fortes, 2:14.
41 Joan E. DeJean, Tender Geographies: Women and the Origins of the Novel in France (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1991), 87.
33 armenteros | aristocratic women on love, learning, and the feminine, 1782–1827 7
governed by queens.42 The distance between these refined feminists and Genlis was carved out by
the phantom of female adultery that eighteenth-century theories of female nature had called up
as the nuclear family and the bourgeoisie’s closed marriage slowly gained literary ground. By the
time the French Revolution arrived, it was no longer marriage that was bemoaned for enslaving
women but women who were held responsible for destroying marriage, and in her novels, Genlis
felt compelled both to acquit her sex and to protect the institution. Thus, when her vicomtesse
de Limours—that innocent exponent of all bad opinions—argues that a woman who is not in
love with her husband will necessarily take a lover, the baronne d’Almane counters: “The heart
is made to love; I agree; it needs a sentiment that agitates and occupies it; but must it be love?” 43
Paradoxically, to save bourgeois-style marriage, Genlis imputed adultery to the very phenomenon that the bourgeoisie prescribed as its cure: passionate love. The contrast with the baroque is
notable: where it had sought to expand love cautiously, the Counter-Enlightenment à la Genlis
strove to strip love of passion. In fact, Counter-Enlightenment à la Legroing did so too: the difference between the two authors lay only in the degree to which their arguments were inspired
by the baroque.
Like the “inclination” of the précieuses, a lack of passion could have utopian consequences.
The community of Lagaraye, where the baronne d’Almane takes her children to learn bienfaisance, is a monarchy-cum-republic where people deposit their sentiments in universal objects. It
is the creation of a single man, monsieur de Lagaraye, an extraordinary Legislator figure who was
once victimized by passionate love but who recovered from the blow to testify to the wonders that
the will of a single man can accomplish. Populated by the former poor, Lagaraye is a flourishing,
laborious, and egalitarian republic where everyone wears plain gray clothes, including monsieur
and madame de Lagaraye. It is an exceptional world, the kind that only outstanding individuals
can create and perpetuate (the community of Lagaraye vanishes with the death of its founder),
and then only in the right circumstances. The once-rich monsieur de Lagaraye is of spotless virtue
and has only ever known one passion, his paternal love for his daughter, who died suddenly in the
midst of her debutante party. Initially devastated but finally recovered from the “stupidity that
derives from violent despair,” this overly emotional father concluded from his experience that
“to attach oneself passionately to one object, to make all of one’s happiness depend upon it, is to
expose oneself to pains, to torments of which the idea alone makes one tremble.” 44 And it was
following this realization that Lagaraye decided to extend his love altruistically to All.
An incarnation of Rousseau’s Legislator, this passionless yet boundlessly charitable and
religious man inspires everyone around him. When he walks through the infirmary he has built,
the patients look at him as if he were “a Divinity who deigns to descend into the Temple where he
is implored, to spread there graces and benefits.” 45 Madame de Lagaraye “admires her husband,
and she loves him with a passion that reaches enthusiasm; she listens with avidity and rapture to
all the praises he receives.” Such feelings, destructive in a normal world, are communally constructive in this one, because they run through the paragon of agape that educes them to reach
humanity at large. Describing madame de Lagaraye, the baron d’Almane writes: “I understood . . .
that loving M. de Lagaraye so much, with a lively head, she had allowed herself to be led easily
42 I bid., 49.
Genlis, Adèle et Théodore, 1:349.
44 I bid., 2:77, 78.
45 I bid., 64.
43 8 republics of letters
to everything he had proposed to her.” 46 Empowered by her husband, madame de Lagaraye has
become a legislator figure in her own right, contributing, for example, to designing the curriculum of the community’s schools. For his part, S. André, whom the Lagarayes saved from the most
desperate poverty, is as moved by his benefactor as is madame de Lagaraye. In fact, S. André is
even more affected, since he quite literally follows Lagaraye to the grave by falling dead upon his
lowered coffin during the latter’s funeral, “a noble and touching victim of gratitude and friendship.” 47 Genlis’s moral is that when a rational and virtuous man who is free of passion becomes
the Legislator-king of a society, emotional transparence is possible, since under these conditions
all passions become communally constructive. In itself, the idea that a sentimentally see-through
society can be formed once a foundational individual has experienced and renounced passion
is very Rousseauian: the whole of Julie (1761) is premised upon it. The difference is that passions
in Lagaraye are not erotic, and that once the leader has given them up, they no longer tempt him
(so that unlike Julie, Lagaraye does not have to die to preserve his world, 48 but on the contrary,
his world dies along with him).
Reflections on the communal consequences of emotion are largely absent from Maistre’s
work, whose own attitude to marriage and passion was more radical and simple. Writing in the
third decade of the nineteenth century, she, like her eighteenth-century forebears, critiqued passionate love and, like her seventeenth-century ones, rejected marriage. She also did so with an
extremity that even the most resolute feminists of the pre-Fronde years, bursting with confidence before taking up arms against their king, would not have dared. Maistre’s book, Du célibat
(1827),49 argued that marriage based on “what is called inclination” was not just morally weakening, as it was for Legroing, or an act of deception, as Genlis maintained, but a “shameful and
criminal engagement” that often ended in indifference, coldness, aversion, and sometimes even
hatred.50 Like Genlis, Maistre suggested that passionate love resulted in a roller-coaster ride of
bliss and misery, and that women were usually queens before marriage and slaves after it.51
Yet the abandonment that Genlis bewailed would be a blessing in Maistre’s worldview,
because for her amour-passion’s true danger lay less in its ability to destroy relationships than in its
power of emotional corruption. In defending this view, she was lending a psychoemotional basis
to ecclesiastical suspicions of lust within marriage as sinful 52—and ignoring the post-Tridentine
acceptance of marital carnal love. Because worldly love, Maistre reasoned, blocks the development of the divine love that should alone command the human heart,53 one should be attached
to no creature.54 “I,” she declared, echoing monsieur de Lagaraye, “love no one to the point that
I fear losing them.” 55 This extreme stoicism may have been this passionate girl’s way of coping
with the death of her parents, and especially of her father, Joseph de Maistre (1753–1821), whose
46 I bid., 69–70.
I bid., 3:401.
48 On Julie’s death as a means of community perpetuation, see my “True Love and Rousseau’s Philosophy of
History,” Journal of the Philosophy of History 6 (2012): 258-282.
49 The full title is Des différents états que les filles peuvent embrasser; et principalement du célibat, des motifs de s’y fixer,
et des moyens d’y vivre saintement même au milieu du monde (Avignon: Seguin Aîné, 1827).
50 I bid., 63.
51 I bid., 149.
52 Pasco, Revolutionary Love in Eighteenth- and Early Nineteenth-Century France, 34.
53 M aistre, Du célibat, 190.
54 I bid., 177.
55 I bid., 144.
47 armenteros | aristocratic women on love, learning, and the feminine, 1782–1827 9
passing, by her own account, had struck her “speechless with pain” 56 —hence the eighteenth
and twenty-second reasons she lists in Du célibat for not getting married: not going through the
pain of losing a husband and children who are sincerely loved 57 and “[finding] oneself, at death
all alive . . . attached, bound to the objects of one’s most tender love.” 58
Dwelling on the displeasures of human company, these were utterly unpolitical and uncommunal views. In the world of the daughter of the famous conservative, feminism was an unrelational matter, and social rapports functioned at best as auxiliary aids to spiritual development.
Maistre’s father, Joseph, had had a different perspective. He had deplored the Revolution for its
dissolution of familial bonds and insisted that the family must found society.59 But in rejecting
both passion and marriage completely, Constance de Maistre had decided to reject the world as
well. Although she believed that marriages would be improved if passions were restrained, she
seemed utterly uninterested in discovering how precisely this might happen and how society
might benefit as a result. Hers was a celibate universe bereft of the earthly will to self-perpetuation. And it was the last cry of a dying culture that foresaw its end only too well.
In all, royalist women seem to have been little agreed on the precise communal regime that
would derive from the elimination of amour-passion. After all, charitable utopias, ancient queenships, and societies without marriage have little in common—although, as we shall see below,
they were all premised on key abstract concepts. What royalist women did agree upon was that
theories of gender nature and relations would have to change for concord to reign inside and
outside the home. Indeed, our authors went so far in this quest as to challenge eighteenth-century theories of female nature and, along with these, the biblical account of the origin of evil that
these theories bolstered or replaced. For in royalist circles at the end of the eighteenth century
and the beginning of the nineteenth, being a passionate woman was becoming as little fashionable as being one that lacked reason.
eden retold
Traditionally, the idea of passionate women bereft of reason served well the initially absolutist,
and later republican, ambition of creating a gulf between the sexes which Fénelon and Rousseau
represented most famously. In the Traité de l’éducation des filles (1687), Fénelon challenged the
Cartesian postulate that “mind has no sex” and wrote that little girls were born with a “violent
desire to please” so destructive that the whole of girls’ education had to be oriented around
containing it.60 In Emile, ou De l’éducation (1762), Fénelon’s “spiritual child” enthusiastically
adopted this view. And in Julie, as we have seen, Rousseau predicted that little girls, harboring
the “bad leaven,” would grow up to be sexually dissolute at some point in their lives, either before
or after marriage. This vision was hardly appealing to our three authors. Although Genlis borrowed her pedagogy partly from Rousseau, she tellingly refused to incorporate his thoughts on
56 Camille Latreille, “Les derniers jours de Joseph de Maistre racontés par sa fille,” Quinzaine, July 16, 1905, 149–61.
aistre, Du célibat, 143.
M
58 I bid., 157.
59 On Maistre’s idea of the family and its German descent, see Adrian Daub, ‘“All Evil Is the Cancellation of
Unity’: Joseph de Maistre and Late German Romanticism,” in Joseph de Maistre and His European Readers:
From Friedrich von Gentz to Isaiah Berlin, ed. Carolina Armenteros and Richard A. Lebrun, Studies in the
History of Political Thought, no. 5 (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 123–50.
60 François Fénelon, Traité de l’éducation des filles, ed. Paul Rousselot (Gallica document, 1997 [Paris: Ch.
Delagrave, 1883]), 108.
57 10 republics of letters
women’s education. Sophie and Emile receive quite different instruction, but Adèle and Théodore
are raised in a nearly identical manner. Legroing does not mention Rousseau, but she admires
Fénelon: her character Clémence eulogizes him and declares that, among history’s known souls,
his was the “masterpiece of the Creator.” 61 This enthusiasm is consistent with Legroing’s greater
tolerance for passionate love, as well as with the more domestic education that she gave the girls
she taught at her school in Paris.62 Maistre too mentions Fénelon approvingly in her work, but
either on subjects unrelated to female pedagogy or to quote his opinion that women can learn
Latin as well as men.63 Maistre’s father, Joseph, had been sympathetic to Fénelon’s Traité, even
citing its prescriptions in his letters to Constance’s sister, Adèle,64 but as we have seen, Constance
would have none of it. She would probably have had even less of Rousseau. She never mentions
him—he has no place in her devout baroque universe—and if her views on Émile in any way
resembled her father’s,65 she probably spurned the entirety of his pedagogy.
These nuances aside, our three authors cast off Fénelon’s and Rousseau’s theories of feminine specificity to develop a model of male nature. Adopting an aristocratic stance of female
superiority toward exploitative and irresponsible male behavior, 66 they suggested that it was,
not women, but men who were at the root of libertine and adulterous turmoil. Building on seventeenth-century feminists like Le Moyne, who mentioned women’s subjection to men’s infidelity, 67 they explained unfaithfulness psychologically as a male malady. Germeuil, one of the
protagonists of Genlis’s novel La femme auteur (1804), is passionately in love twice, at first with
madame de Nangis and later with the heroine Natalie. He swears eternal fidelity to both women,
and he leaves both for another. Madame de Nangis—a character who recalls the présidente de
Tourvel from Les liaisons dangereuses (1782)—dies when he abandons her. But Germeuil is no
vicomte de Valmont. He simply represents his sex’s fickleness in love: “it is above all in love that
the heart of men is inexplicable,” observes Genlis when introducing his character.68 In marriage,
this irrationality can have dire consequences, since besides estranging the spouses, it can bring
male “tyranny” into the home—as when the vicomte de Limours forces upon his wife his mistress’s ill choice of husband for their daughter Flore.
Looking on men more kindly, Legroing thinks of them, not as mercurial, but as the original
bearers and transmitters of passionate love. Zénobie’s tutor, Sohême, suggests this when he first
realizes that Zénobie is in love: “A man,” he tells her, “has already slipped into your heart softness
and voluptuousness.” 69 Legroing’s male characters are extremely passionate. Her Rhadamiste,
as we have seen, is violently jealous like Crébillon’s.70 Alphonse, the hero of Clémence, is obses61 L egroing, Clémence, 2:139–41.
62 S ee Legroing’s pedagogical treatise, Essai sur le genre d’instruction le plus analogue à la destination des femmes
(Paris: Impr. de Dufart, an VII [1798]).
63 M aistre, Du célibat, 7, 26, 52.
64 Joseph de Maistre, Œuvres complètes, 14 vols. (Lyons: Vitte et Perrussel, 1884–86; Geneva: Slatkine Reprints,
1979), 9:303.
65 See most notably Maistre, Les soirées de Saint-Pétersbourg, in Joseph de Maistre: Œuvres, ed. Pierre Glaudes
(Paris: Robert Laffont, 2007), 564.
66 See Clarissa Campbell Orr, “Aristocratic Feminism, the Learned Governess, and the Republic of Letters,” in
Knott and Taylor, Women, Gender and the Enlightenment, 249.
67 M aclean, Woman Triumphant, 187.
68 Stéphanie-Félicité de Genlis, La femme auteur, ed. Martine Reid (Paris: Gallimard, 2007), 36.
69 L egroing, Zénobie, 28–29.
70 I bid., 32.
armenteros | aristocratic women on love, learning, and the feminine, 1782–1827 11
sive. “What he wants, he wants strongly” 71—a trait that drives Alphonse to risky and rebellious behavior whenever obstacles to his love are raised, much to Clémence’s displeasure. Even
Zénobie’s “sweet and moderate” 72 Tiridates is led astray by Love: the god himself appears to him
and tells him to cease sacrificing to Minerva.73 Love’s doves then lead him to Zénobie, accompanying his walk with their “plaintive cooing.” 74 “An excess of virtue misleads you,” 75 Tiridates
tells his beloved on meeting her. Together with another male character, Piroüs, he pleads with
her to ignore her marriage vows to Rhadamiste and marry him instead—the episode that triggers Diana’s abduction of Zénobie.
Men are thus the deluded victims of intense yet openly acknowledged feelings. But they can
be worse—elusive seducers who hide their passions in order to serve them better. “It is true that
they care only about cheating us,” says the baronne d’Almane to Adèle in an uncharacteristically
immoderate moment, “about feigning sentiments that they do not feel, in order to seduce us, and
be able to boast afterward.” “That makes one shudder!” replies Adèle.76 Similarly, Maistre cites
male duplicity as another reason that women should not marry. “Most of the time,” she writes,
“one commits oneself without knowing to whom.” 77 Men often do not show their true characters
before marriage: during courtship they are quietly and patiently submissive, but after marriage,
when their true personalities emerge, “horrible storms” await the new bride, including infidelity
and jealousy.78
Passionate love thus laid at men’s door, women’s task becomes to mitigate its consequences.
Zénobie and her goddesses are allied to this end. When Tiridates and Piroüs are crying and begging her amid Love’s doves to marry Tiridates, Zénobie prays to Diana to save her, reminding the
goddess of the aid she once gave to Arethusa.79 “Instantly thunder bursts from all sides: Diana
descends from the skies, surrounds the queen with a cloud impenetrable to the eye, abducts her,
and transports her to the middle of her army, which was waiting already for her in the forest.” 80
The change is total: from a dove-filled world of male voluptuousness to a martial, female one of
adventure and discipline.
In more modern and less military times, letter writing substitutes for the gods. Like Genlis,
Legroing explores the theme of female solidarity in matters of love through epistolary pairs of
female friends who exchange impressions on gender relations. In these pairs, the heroine and
moral pedagogue is a woman of reason, while her friend-disciple is one of the heart. Zéphirine
tells her beloved Clémence: nature “has made you be born to think, and me to feel . . . with you
the mind dominates the heart, and with me the heart dominates the mind.” 81 In La femme auteur,
Dorothée is likewise reasonable and respected, and her sister, Natalie, passionate and disparaged.
71 egroing, Clémence, 1:188.
L
L egroing, Zénobie, 32.
73 I bid., 249.
74 I bid., 251–52.
75 I bid., 253.
76 Genlis, Adèle et Théodore, 3:276–77.
77 M aistre, Du célibat, 125.
78 I bid., 126, 127.
79 A rethusa was a nymph of Diana. Amorously pursued by the river god Alpheus, she prayed to her goddess, who
saved her by enveloping her in a cloud and turning her into a fountain (that of Ortygia in Syracuse).
80 L egroing, Zénobie, 255.
81 L egroing, Clémence, 2:54.
72 12 republics of letters
As for the baronne d’Almane, she is a studious and retiring character who finds her greatest happiness in reflection, while her friend, the vicomtesse de Limours, is emotionally expansive, has
trouble concentrating, and loves her friend dearly, calling her “my heart.” Psychologically, the
pairs Clémence-Zéphirine, Dorothée-Natalie, and baronne d’Almane vicomtesse de Limours
are flawless Cartesian antitheses of the Claire-Julie team of Rousseau’s Julie: in this last novel—
which Genlis despised—the heroine and social builder is not the transparent and rational Claire
but Julie, the emotional volcano who initiates sexual relations with Saint-Preux.
Regardless of women’s particular character, though, all must find ways of bringing amorous
men back to reason. Clémence reminds Alphonse that his duty to family and society must take
precedence over his passion;82 the baronne d’Almane wins back her husband, who had developed
a “violent passion” for another woman, through firmness and affection.83 The duty of wives, she
tells the vicomtesse, is to inspire in their husbands reasonable and useful feelings. Only so will
men cease tyrannizing and abandoning them84 and be distracted from the passionate love that is
native to their sex. As for Maistre, less concerned to improve marriage than to prevent it, she has
fewer thoughts on rational female solidarity. Yet she, too, upholds it in her own way: her book,
written by a woman for women, fulfills the role of the baronne’s letters to the vicomtesse and of
the goddesses’ training of Zénobie. As she remarks: “in writing I have not sought to make my
intelligence shine but to make the truth be known to many persons of my sex.” 85
Yet this is by no means a world of pure transparency, for while women pursue rational truth
together, men must, on the contrary, be deliberately deluded about the opposite sex. In Adèle et
Théodore, the parents of Théodore and of his fiancée, Constance, pretend that they have fallen out
and that the marriage is off so as to inflame the young man’s feelings for his bride-to-be. Similarly,
Adèle’s parents raise her up into an almost unobtainable object in order to make her prospective
husband fall in love with her. As we have seen, these feelings will not last forever, and the wives
should not encourage them; but given men’s fickle nature, they must be stirred at first so as to
attach the young men to their wives. From the republican point of view—and Genlis has republican sympathies—passion also has the advantage of developing political personas. Significantly,
Théodore goes to war to defend his fatherland only after he is in love.
Developing young girls’ passion, on the contrary, is highly undesirable: the baronne regards
Constance’s passionate love for her fiancé as evidence of the bad education she has received; while
Adèle writes to her own betrothed that she will sacrifice him at once if he ever requires her to be
separated from her family and to live anywhere except in her mother’s house.86 Her world, like
Legroing’s, is both monarchical and matriarchal: the women in it are reasonable and dispassionate; they share with men the patriotic glory of writing and the civic responsibility of educating;
and in extraordinary places—like Lagaraye or madame d’Almane’s household—they can even
legislate.
82 I bid., 1:270–71.
enlis, Adèle et Théodore, 1:222–23.
G
84 I bid., 335.
85 M aistre, Du célibat, 5.
86 Genlis, Adèle et Théodore, 3:470–73.
83 armenteros | aristocratic women on love, learning, and the feminine, 1782–1827 13
cultivating the “celestial vegetation”
Laying love’s blame on men, however, was not enough. To render women reasonable, one had to
further their learning, and to do so, one had to combat theories of female nature yet again, this
time those holding that women’s greater sensibility and imagination deprived them of genius and
rational powers.87 Although “men of letters,” wrote Genlis in her own, literary-critical version of
a baroque gallerie des femmes,
have over women authors a de facto superiority that it is impossible to . . . contest . . . one should
not conclude that the organization of women is inferior to that of men. Genius is composed of
all the qualities that one does not deny to [women], and that they can possess to the highest
degree; imagination, sensibility, elevation of soul.88
Agreeing with Genlis, Maistre contradicted her father, who in 1808 had written to her in the
very vein that Genlis regretted, arguing that women’s historically lesser intellectual production
confirmed their lack of genius.89 Constance refuted him by appealing to Fénelon’s and Rollin’s
opinion that girls were as capable of learning Latin and the other sciences as boys90 —and by
expediently omitting to mention that Fénelon wanted girls to learn Latin not in order to study
ancient poetry and the church fathers, as she did (he thought such reading dangerous for women)
but in order to follow the divine service.91
Study, our feminists argued, was also good for women because it enabled ecstasy: “When
one writes with truth,” says Genlis of Natalie’s writing moments, “when one looks only in the
heart for the moving feelings that one wants to express, there is in this occupation such charm
that it can easily take the place of happiness.” 92 More enthusiastic, Legroing spiritualized learning. “The contemplation of this celestial vegetation,” she wrote of the arts and sciences, “is
certainly the most perfect of all enjoyments,” and the happiest humans are those who deliver
themselves to it “not by cupidity or pride but by inclination, [to live] in the midst of an ideal
world.” 93 Girls, too, can have “inclination,” and those who do should pursue it: “not to cultivate
the gifts that a child has received . . . is it not to make oneself guilty toward her?” 94 The use of the
word “inclination” is meaningful here: it was Madeleine de Scudéry’s neologism for romantic
love, and by using it to refer to studying, Legroing posited the arts and sciences as love’s replacements and spiritual superiors.
Maistre concurred: “I have made of the high sciences my most chaste delight.” 95 She had
had to strive to achieve this. At seventeen, she had written to her father that she wished to remain
single in order to devote herself to studying. Voltaire was right, she said, that women were capable
87 S ee Jean Bloch, “Rousseau, Women and the French Revolution,” in Rousseau and the Eighteenth Century: Essays
in Memory of R. A. Leigh, ed. Marian Hobson, J. T. A. Leigh, and Robert Wokler (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation,
1992), 387–90; Jenny Mander, “No Woman Is an Island: The Female Figure in French Enlightenment
Anthropology,” in Knott and Taylor, Women, Gender and the Enlightenment, 99, 113.
88 Genlis, De l’influence des femmes sur la littérature française, iii–iv.
89 Joseph de Maistre, Œuvres complètes, 11:143.
90 M aistre, Du célibat, 7.
91 Fénelon, Traité de l’éducation des filles, 135.
92 Genlis, La femme auteur, 66.
93 L egroing, Essai sur le genre d’instruction le plus analogue à la destination des femmes, 45, 44.
94 I bid., 67.
95 M aistre, Du célibat, 7.
14 republics of letters
of the same intellectual attainments as men.96 Worried that without a husband she would end up
poor, that her choice of celibacy might be motivated by vanity and the “love of glory,” that she
would have to endure jealousy and ridicule as did Genlis’s heroine Natalie, and hating Voltaire
deeply in any case, Joseph had objected strongly, calling her aversion to marriage a “vice.” 97
Constance had chafed loudly but submitted to this opinion. When she finally met her father
at the age of twenty-one, she became his personal secretary, staunchest supporter, and “little
Chamber of Commons,” as he lovingly called her.98 She felt his death deeply, composed a devoted
account of his last days,99 and wrote: “no one in the family has lost as much as I.” 100 Yet so much
filial piety could never convince Maistre that her father was right about women’s celibate learning. The proof is that, six years after his death, she published what was probably the only work in
nineteenth-century France recommending it to women.
The thorny question was how far learning should go. As far as Maistre was concerned, single
women who had renounced worldly love could give themselves entirely to the studious “delight.”
She joined seventeenth-century religious feminists in believing that learning was an aid to salvation,101 that it encouraged piety, devoutness, chastity—the elements of honnêteté that governed
her life. On this point she disagreed with Legroing, who again conformed to bourgeois convention by insisting on studious moderation. The heroine of Clémence consistently uses the language
of “désennuyer”—literally, “unboring”—as well as of amusement or distraction to describe her
composition of stories and plays,102 and she is downright annoyed when she is sent to Paris to
perfect her music.103 Her creator practiced in life what she preached in her novels. At the school
she ran, Legroing refused to institute prize competitions among her pupils for fear of “[destroying] the friendly intimacy that [reigned] between them” and of seeing them become “ambitious,
jealous, and delivered already to all the evils that desolate humanity.” 104
Once again, Genlis struck a middle position between Maistre and Legroing. She resembled Legroing in her worldly perspective and Maistre in her desire to place no bounds on women’s cultivation of the arts and sciences. “Why should it be forbidden [to women] to write and
become authors?” she asked in De l’influence des femmes sur la littérature française (1811). “I know
all the arguments that can be opposed to this kind of ambition. I have made them myself in the
past with that sentiment of justice that often pushes impartiality all the way to exaggeration.
Now, at the end of my career, I can speak more freely in regard to this, because I feel completely
disinterested in a cause that I no longer regard as my own.” 105 Genlis was distancing herself
from La femme auteur, whose story of a woman writer abandoned by her fiancé, libeled by the
public, and persecuted during the Revolution contained multiple autobiographical references.
With hindsight, she suggested that her novel was less a warning to women to mute their literary
96 J oseph de Maistre, Œuvres complètes, 11:143.
On Maistre’s objection to Voltaire’s dictum, see Maistre to Constance, October 24, 1808, in Joseph de Maistre,
Œuvres complètes, 11:141–46; and on Maistre’s criticism of Constance’s ambition to study and remain single, see
Jacques Lovie’s citation of Maistre’s letter to Constance of November 19, 1810, in “Constance de Maistre,” 144.
98 L ovie, “Constance de Maistre,” 147.
99 L atreille, “Les derniers jours de Joseph de Maistre racontés par sa fille.”
100 L ovie, “Constance de Maistre,” 147.
101 M aistre, Du célibat, 93.
102 L egroing, Clémence, 2:38, 113.
103 I bid., 1:237.
104 L egroing, Essai sur le genre d’instruction le plus analogue à la destination des femmes, 97–98.
105 Genlis, De l’influence des femmes sur la littérature française, xxi.
97 armenteros | aristocratic women on love, learning, and the feminine, 1782–1827 15
ambitions than a complaint about the treatment women writers received in her time. Things had
been different during the grand siècle. “In that century when mores were infinitely more serious
than ours,” she wrote,
there was a multitude of women authors of all kinds and in all the classes; and not only did
people of letters [les gens de lettres] not get wild on them [ne se déchaînèrent point], did not
declaim against women authors, but they took pleasure in giving them their worth and in
rendering to them all the homage of esteem and gallantry. This conduct, this procedure, has
nothing that should be surprising.106
Furthermore, the difficulties that women writers have since faced are not only to their detriment but to France’s as well, since “all [women writers] have shown in their works the love of the
fatherland.” 107 If in matters of love and marriage, then, Genlis was a woman of her century, when
it came to literary feminism, she was a true heir of the baroque.
Women’s literary patriotism, however, did not mean that they could become involved in
les grandes affaires. Retaining eighteenth-century theories of female nature only in this respect,
Adèle et Théodore observes that women are imprudent beings who should not get involved in politics.108 In this particular respect, Genlis was the most republican, the least royalist, and the least
pious of our trio. Legroing and Maistre were more providentialist: women, they suggested, were
politically inactive because that was how Providence had made society. Should society change,
however, there were, at least potentially—and as Legroing’s legends of queenship suggest—no
bounds on just how political women could become. It was a royalist point of view.
improving marriage, founding society
Yet though they might enter politics, women should never become agents of the absolutist erot-ics
defended by Rousseau. The ethic of the citizen of Geneva was anathema to our authors be-cause
it politicized individuals unto the stifling of civil liberty, which was itself a gift of God. What was
needed instead was a libertarian authoritarianism, a regime akin to Montesquieu’s monarchy
where civic liberty flourished thanks to the multiplication of intermediary powers.
Establishing this regime required a new emotional administration to diminish the erotic
distance that had widened progressively between men and women since the late seventeenth
century. In particular, a cult of sincerity would have to replace the encouragement of manipulation that had flourished in eighteenth-century novels. Rousseau was again the perfect antithesis to our monarchists. A woman, he wrote in Emile, that master text of manipulation, “must
learn to discern [men’s] feelings through her words, her actions, her looks, through her gestures.
It is necessary that, through her words, her actions, her looks, her gestures, she know how to
give them the feelings that she likes, without even seeming to think about it.” 109 Contemporary
novels illustrated this advice. The Lettres de madame du Montier (1767) by the extremely popular
Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont (1711–80), for example, depicts a woman, who is adored by
106 I bid., xxxiv–xxxv. Genlis’s argument here prefigures DeJean’s in Tender Geographies.
enlis, De l’influence des femmes sur la littérature française, 369.
G
108 Genlis, Adèle et Théodore, 2:226.
109 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Émile, ou De l’éducation, in Œuvres complètes, ed. Gagnebin and Raymond, vol. 4
(1969), 737.
107 16 republics of letters
her husband, manipulating him into ceasing his fits of rage by agreeing with him on everything
until he admits how unjust he really is.
That manipulation should be associated with amour-passion is hardly surprising: honesty
destroys erotic distance. And that Genlis and Legroing should replace it with affection for one’s
husband likewise has its logic in a monarchist universe bent on avoiding political absolutism.
Genlis’s vicomtesse de Limours writes to the baronne d’Almane that, although she has long been
married, it was only after her husband rekindled his affair with another woman that it occurred
to her that she might love him:
I have spent fourteen years without thinking for a moment about the advantage that could
result from finding one’s friend in one’s husband; it is only during the last eighteen months
that I have advised myself to think of it; all of a sudden I have seen M. de Limours with new
eyes, or, to say it better, I have looked at him, I have listened to him, and I have known, with
inexpressible surprise, that if I had not loved him until then, it was solely out of distraction, and
because I had occupied myself with completely different things. When one has passed the age
of thirty, when one has renounced coquetry, when one is tired of dissipation, one has nothing
better to do than to love one’s husband if one can.110
The vicomtesse draws a caricature of what aristocratic marriage was according to its bourgeois
critics: an arrangement between two near strangers who commit adultery (the vicomtesse has
no lovers but she used to be coquettish and have admirers). The alternative that the baronne recommends incorporates some features of the bourgeois critique of aristocratic ménages.111 Above
all, husband and wife must not be idle or lead wholly separate lives: instead, they should collaborate in cultivating the arts and sciences, both for their own benefit and to educate their children.
Contrary to the republican argument that reading leads to adultery, and Latin to debauchery,112
Genlis believes that these things, when well employed, prevent it. In fact, she agrees with mademoiselle d’Espinassy113 that only properly educated women can be good guides for their husbands—one reason that the baronne’s marriage is happy, and the vicomtesse’s is not.114
A proper education, in turn, includes training in beneficence. Much of Adèle’s upbringing
consists in the practice of charity. As a small child, she makes clothing for the poor; when she is
twelve, she gives half of her pocket money to the needy; as an adolescent, she gives all of it; and as
a married woman, she sets up a school for poor girls, which she co-runs with friends and family
and where she is herself a teacher. It is the literary, poverty-oriented equivalent of the school that
Genlis herself created at Bellechasse for the Orléans children. It also represents female royalists’
desire that women should become communal founders and educators. Legroing too has this
wish: her Clémence writes morally inspiring fiction for her grandfather, her friend, and her grandfather’s village—fiction that itself contains tales about queens who form and found societies.
Zénobie brings wisdom and peace to Armenia; Faula imparts poetry, song, and the cult of Diana
to a pastoral people; and the fabulous female sovereigns who govern the islands of Clémence’s
tale Le petit Serpolet are patrons of the arts and sciences.
110 Genlis, Adèle et Théodore, 1:221.
111 See Verjus, Le bon mari.
112 Fraisse, Reason’s Muse, 19–20.
113 Stéphanie-Félicité de Genlis, Essai sur l’éducation des demoiselles (Paris: B. Hochereau, 1764).
114 Jean Bloch, “Discourses of Female Education in the Writings of Eighteenth-Century France,” in Knott and
Taylor, Women, Gender and the Enlightenment, 251.
armenteros | aristocratic women on love, learning, and the feminine, 1782–1827 17
Interestingly, Legroing’s resort to myth and antiquity enabled her to convey messages
unavailable to Genlis. Through Zénobie, she could celebrate hereditary queenship in a country that had known only the Salic law, and at a time when royalism was proscribed and royalists
were put to death. She could praise female civilizing figures in years when women were explicitly excluded from the public sphere,115 and when their social, political, and legal fortunes were
beginning to decline.116 Most uniquely, she could present, in her queens, the rational, self-mastered, and politically dominant negatives of the sentimentally explosive Julie, mistress of Clarens,
eighteenth-century francophone literature’s most famous female social founder.
The political women of which our monarchists dreamed, however, were superior to men (as
queens), not on a par with them. In the public sphere, gender equality could be very destructive,
as La femme auteur illustrates. When the first book by the heroine Natalie appears, the journals
rave, and her fiancé Germeuil gets jealous. “Everyone now knows you like me!” he complains to
Natalie. “Isn’t it a sort of infidelity of which your lover has the right to complain?” 117 The situation worsens when Natalie publishes her second book. Envious of her continued success, the
journalists now hurl “extravagant slander” at her. Courageously, Natalie’s sister, Dorothée, takes
up her defense, but Germeuil remains passive and his love turns sour: “all those poisoned darts,
thrown against her, almost entirely annihilated love in the heart of Germeuil. Natalie was not
blackened in his eyes, but her name was profaned by nastiness; and love is a sentiment so bizarre
and so delicate that it can be altered by a lot less.” 118 Eventually, Germeuil leaves Natalie and
marries a fameless pedant.
Gender relations are thus ruined by public passions; but they can be strengthened by the
friendship that blossoms within the semipublic realm of community building and education.
Genlis speaks of “finding one’s friend in one’s husband,” and of a husband being “a protector,
a friend.” 119 Legroing assents. The love of Clémence for Alphonse resembles friendship more
than any other sentiment. “When I see Alphonse’s passion,” writes Zéphirine to Clémence, “I
understand nothing about yours. It resembles friendship much more than it does love.” 120 In
addition to diverting passion, friendship has the merit of enabling sincerity and with it a lasting
bond between spouses. “Admit your mistake with honesty,” the baronne tells the vicomtesse
when advising her on how to win back her husband.121 Sincerity likewise unites Clémence and
Alphonse: he is fully aware of how she influences his taste, his opinions, and “the entire system
of [his] conduct.” 122 This emphasis on marital closeness through friendship was once again an
effect of the baroque. As Le Moyne had observed: “of all the kinds of Friendship, there is none
so close, or better joined than that of Marriage.” 123 It was a view that stood out in the midst of
115 See J. B. Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1998).
116 Carla Hesse, The Other Enlightenment: How French Women Became Modern (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2003), 31.
117 Genlis, La femme auteur, 78.
118 I bid., 85.
119 Genlis, Adèle et Théodore, 1:335. On Genlis’s preference for interspousal respect and affection in her novel
Madame de Maintenon (1806), see De Poortere, Philosophical and Literary Ideas of Mme de Staël and Mme de
Genlis, 59.
120 L egroing, Clémence, 2:51.
121 Genlis, Adèle et Théodore, 1:230.
122 L egroing, Clémence, 3:52–53.
123 L e Moyne, Gallerie des femmes fortes, 2:18.
18 republics of letters
a modern period philosophically indifferent to friendship.124 And it represented a return to the
ancients, those experts on friendship who had declared that it was “the happiest and most fully
human of all loves.” 125
Predictably, however, Maistre disagreed. Eschewing friendship with her customary radicality, she did not deem it passionate love’s antithesis and superior but listed it among the sentiments—including tenderness, love, and passion—that together formed the “shameful and
criminal engagement” that she termed “inclination” 126 and that, like all worldly loves, she viewed
as a potential obstruction in the ascent to God. Her extremity is suggestive: compared with her,
Legroing and Genlis emerge as the moderate proponents of a middle way between emotional
excess and rigorous asceticism that aspired to establish genuine companionship between the
sexes, polities where women founded community and could be queens, and a hierarchical, maternalist civic order where a hardworking aristocracy educated and succored the poor.
conclusion
The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries saw the rise of an aristocratic, feminist, and
ultimately monarchist ethic that opposed bourgeois and republican ideals of marital love. In the
beginning, this ethic was above all a class defense against bourgeois accusations—intellectually
drawn from Fénelon and Rousseau—that aristocratic marriage was ridden with adultery, which
was in turn produced by women’s inborn tendency to dissolution. Adultery, aristocratic feminists implied, arose not out of female nature but out of passionate love and the men to whom it
was native. Unable to find reinforcement for these ideas in the thought of their own time, aristo-cratic women writers sought inspiration in the seventeenth century, the golden age of French
feminism and women’s writing. There, they found a mentality that valorized women as political,
military, and literary leaders and that did not insist on the specificity of their sex. They discovered models of femmes fortes and femmes honnêtes to emulate. And they encountered a critique of
marriage that they replaced or supplemented with a critique of passionate love.
Attitudes to love could be strongly politicized, to the point that they functioned as good
predictors of personal politics. Of our three authors, Legroing made the greatest allowances
for amour-passion, and accordingly, Napoleon offered her the position of superintendent of the
academy that he founded at Écouen for the education of the daughters and sisters of the members of the Legion of Honor.127 He probably reasoned that her bourgeois-friendly yet aristocratic views on love and marriage harmonized well with his project to reconcile Old Regime and
Revolution.128 A lesser compromise was wrought by Genlis, who critiqued passionate love more
ferociously but with the bourgeois aim of reforming marriage and turning women into educators and community builders. Aptly, Genlis was the governess of Louis-Philippe, the “bourgeois
monarch,” and accepted a pension from Napoleon on returning to France. Maistre alone did not
compromise: in rejecting marriages of love completely, she confirmed her legitimist and counterrevolutionary inheritance in a revolutionary move that evoked baroque marital pessimism to
the point of questioning marriage itself as a state desirable for women.
124 See Mark Vernon, The Philosophy of Friendship (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).
. S. Lewis, The Four Loves (London: Fontana, 1974), 69.
C
126 M aistre, Du célibat, 63.
127 Cattois, Notice historique sur Mme Legroing de La Maisonneuve, 5.
128 On Bonaparte’s view of women, see J. K. Burton, Napoleon and the Woman Question: Discourses of the Other Sex
in French Education, Medicine, and Medical Law (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2007).
125 armenteros | aristocratic women on love, learning, and the feminine, 1782–1827 19
The French Revolution’s institutionalization of bourgeois marital ideals and in particular
its rehabilitation of passion threw the aristocratic feminism represented by our authors to the
Right. That should make sense. Monarchist politics had no use for eroticism: there was no need
to create and strengthen wills through the emotions in a polity where the sovereign will belonged
to an individual who reigned de facto. Passionate love for worldly objects, though tolerated after
Trent, was also still suspect in the Catholic tradition that supported monarchism at the time—
especially when such love became all-consuming, as it did in contemporary republican novels
like those of Sophie Cottin (1773–1807), another nemesis of Genlis’s.
It is not that monarchist feminism was purely critical. A political reading of our authors’
family ideology discloses the outlines of two kinds of monarchist polities, one ordinary and the
other extraordinary. When conjuring the latter, Genlis depicts a utopian monarchy-cum-republic led by an utterly altruistic king-Legislator whose perfectly dispassionate benevolence enables
legislative opportunities for women and genuine passionate transparency for both sexes. When
describing normal times, she envisions a flourishing civic culture founded on submission to male
monarchs, military glory and political distinction for impassioned men, and literary glory and
communal leadership for rational women. Legroing too has her normal “monarchy”: the one
presided over by Clémence’s quiet grandfather, a semipublic realm where rational women can
cultivate the arts and forge lasting marital friendships with loving men. The difference between
ordinary and extraordinary polities is thus similar for Legroing and Genlis: in the extraordinary ones, women play greater political roles, whether as queens or as Legislators, respectively.
Maistre, as usual, is the odd woman out: the kingdom she dreams of is not of this world, and the
endless spiritual and intellectual possibilities it holds for women are premised on an utter indifference to politics.
In all, in drafting their monarchical worlds, French aristocratic feminists of the revolutionary age addressed the republicanism they combated and built on a terrain that the bourgeoisie
had selected. When they attacked amour-passion, they dug up the secreted keystone of the edifice
of democracy. When they promoted learning and recommended marital friendship, they tried to
construct a free polity no longer negligent of spousal relations like the Old Regime, yet much less
dependent on erotics and sexual difference than contemporary republicanism. Their thoughts
bring a fresh perspective to an age of “marriage crisis,” marriage reform, and democratic transformation—as well as a heartening view of the eternal question of friendship between the sexes. 20 republics of letters
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