La Duchesse: The Life of Marie de Vignerot, Cardinal Richelieu’s Forgotten Heiress Who Shaped the Fate of France
by Bronwen McShea.
Pegasus, 466 pp., $28.95
In the premodern history of women, few places and times were more remarkable than seventeenth-century France. It is true that the vast majority of women there were peasants who spent most of their lives helping to scratch sustenance out of a recalcitrant soil. But for a small number of wealthy, aristocratic women, the period afforded extraordinary opportunities. They could exercise substantial political influence. They could act as patrons of the arts and charitable institutions. If not subject to a father or a husband, they could control their own fortunes. While they could hardly ever choose their husbands, they might still enjoy a surprising degree of sexual freedom—marital fidelity was generally expected of neither partner in the highest circles of French society. They could become writers and engage in daring philosophical and political speculations. In 1622 the prolific Marie de Gournay published a work entitled The Equality of Men and Women, arguing that if given the same education as men, women could match their achievements.
Yet they were in no sense modern women . Whatever their thoughts on sexual equality, they mostly took for granted the enormous social inequality of the day: their elegant existence depended on the possession of vast tracts of land and the exploitation of thousands of servants, workers, and artisans. Although even aristocratic women rarely received much formal education, they were drilled from an early age to exercise tight control over their physical movements and facial expressions when in public, to master complex rules of etiquette, and generally to live a part
