In November 1776, the Baron de Saint-Surin, residing in Celle in Lower Saxony, drew up his will. His chrysoprase ring, his round Dresden china box, and his gold medal of Prince Henry of Prussia he bequeathed to his “dear goddaughter” and niece Henriette de Champagné. To her father, his first cousin, he left, “as a mark of my esteem,” portraits of himself and of his late brother the Prussian General La Motte-Fouqué, along with diverse portraits given to him by his patrons the Prussian princes
These testamentary choices had a certain significance, for by them Saint-Surin was leaving family treasures not to his nearest kin, like him residing in Germany, but to more distant relations in Ireland whom he had never met. As he explained in his will, “Although I have never had the satisfaction, so desired, of seeing my cousin Monsieur de Champagné in Ireland, the ties of blood and epistolary commerce have nonetheless always united us in a sincere friendship.” The Irish heir and the German testator were both second-generation “refugees,” born and bred in their respective homelands well after the father of one and mother of the other—siblings—had escaped from La Rochelle in 1687. Eighty-nine years later, how was it that Saint-Surin was still cognizant of and intent upon honoring his Huguenot family bonds—to the benefit of an unknown cousin 700 miles away with whom he shared neither language nor nationality nor name?
Forthcoming in Memory and Identity: The Huguenots and their Diaspora (University of South Carolina Press, 2002)
The memoirs madame de La Guette published in 1681 were unusual, perhaps unique, among French memoirs of the seventeenth century. Few among the increasing numbers of memoirs were penned by women, fewer still originated from individuals otherwise obscure, and scarcely a handful were published in the author’s own lifetime. But for the memoirs of Hortense Mancini (d. 1699) and Marie Mancini (d. 1715), which appeared in the 1670s, the women’s memoirs now so valued as testimonies to seventeenth-century experience remained unpublished—often for a very long time—until after their author’s death. Those of the duchesse de Nemours (d. 1707) reached publication only in 1709, madame de Motteville (d. 1689) in 1723, mademoiselle de Montpensier (d. 1693) in 1728, madame de Lafayette (d. 1693) in 1731, madame de Caylus (d. 1729) in 1770.
We can ask, then, of madame de La Guette not only what inspired her to write her own life story but also what motivated her to make the public her audience before her life had reached its term. Documentary sources that tell the circumstances of her life independently of the memoirs offer answers she withheld from her readers. Her history, juxtaposed to her self-presentation in the memoirs, allows us not only to free the text from certain fictions with which critics have distorted it but also to identify fictions that madame de La Guette herself placed within the text. From the truths and fictions thus revealed, we can understand how she sought through publishing her memoirs to claim a social identity and personal justice that the vagaries of fortune—and choices made by her husband and son—did not secure for her.
In Elizabeth C. Goldsmith and Dena Goodman, eds., Going Public: Women and Publishing in Early Modern France (Cornell University Press, 1995)
Social distances in Louis XIV’s France should have ensured that Charles Chesneau would not be a key player in the king’s performance on Sunday, 11 May 1687. Brawling with fellow villagers in Saint-Jean-les-Deux-Jumeaux over paltry coins, Chesneau, a laborer from nearby Montceaux, was struck in the temple with a stone and died two hours later. The king may have seen or not: Louis did not record his passage that day from Fresnes, via Meaux, through Saint-Jean to Jouarre, en route to the military front in Alsace and Luxembourg. Still, Chesneau’s act was part of the king’s passage, for the coins came from the king’s purse, and the curé of Saint-Jean-les-Deux-Jumeaux did record the Chesneau incident, indeed allowed it to frame his journal’s narrative of the three visits the king made to this small briard parish in the 1680s.
In preparation
The exodus of protestants from France in the era of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685) was the first of modern Europe's great migrations to generate a body of firsthand literature. The several dozen Huguenot escape memoirs that can be found today suggest that many of the 150,000 or so protestants who left France may have committed to paper some autobiographical account of their escape and resettlement.
Why this was so is far from obvious, given that their religion—for which they emigrated—was, in Philippe Joutard’s words, “of all Christian theologies the least hospitable to the existence of a profane as opposed to a sacred memory.” For Calvin, the New Testament founding of redemption upon remembrance of Jesus entailed a denial of history, including those Catholic remembrance practices—memorials of the dead, tombs, epitaphs, necrologies, relics—out of which modern memoirs are said to have developed. Calvinists enduring persecution did take solace in Old Testament histories of exodus and deliverance, which were oft retold in their Sunday sermons, and some memorialists used them to frame a spiritual reading for their own exile. Nested within their texts, however, in passages that conventional readings overlook, are secular incentives, rooted in practices of the Huguenot diaspora, for the Calvinist émigrés to cultivate profane memory.
Presented at the AHA Annual Meeting, January 1999
This study began in autobiography—that is, in autobiographical narratives—and moved on to autobiographical notations of a quite different sort. The larger project from which it derives, tentatively entitled “Writing the Diaspora: Escape Memoirs and Huguenot Identity,” endeavors to collect and study all extant firsthand memoirs of escape from France in the era of the Revocation, both those that recount only the emigration and those that do so as part of a larger telling of a life story. Such escape memoirs are scarce, which is, as Robin Gwynn has remarked, somewhat surprising: “One wishes there were more original memoirs to set alongside those by Jacques Fontaine, Dumont de Bostaquet and others that have survived. Some have disappeared from view even over the past century; where are all the sources known and used by [Samuel] Smiles?” To date, I have identified 55 such narratives. They yield many insights into Huguenot lives in exile, including the experience of integration and assimilation, as Ruth Whelan’s and Dianne Ressinger’s articles in this volume have shown. The memoirs’ limitations are also important, however. A minute swath of the social hierarchy finds voice through them: almost exclusively ministers and nobles, from time to time a rare artisan. And female voices are nearly absent: of the 55 memoirs I have found, only 8 were written by women. This narrowness has led me to ask whether there might be some other first-hand source that could be broadly construed as “autobiographical” or self-reflexive in a way that would afford insight into the experiences of women refugees and of a broader segment of the social hierarchy than the highly literate alone.
Many studies of integration have focused on areas of adjustment and measures of assimilation that are less likely to involve women than men. So, for example, measures of social integration based upon workforce participation, civic activity, residence locations, admissions to educational institutions, or association memberships over-represent men. Similarly, analyses of attitudes that use written or pictorial opinion are much more likely to reflect men’s degree of acculturation than women’s, simply because men wrote and illustrated more than women did. Primary-group affiliations (friendships, informal patronage relations) in which women might be more prominent are more difficult for the historian to penetrate. So are the common indicators of cultural assimilation in private life: rituals, codes of behavior, linguistic usages, dress, speech, food, bodily care.
The literary critic of autobiography Paul John Eakin once wrote that autobiography “attempts, as it were, to pronounce the name of the self." Naming and autobiography alike employ language to give identity and continuity to the self. Autobiography names, and naming of a more usual sort is an autobiographical act. Now as it happens, this rapprochement of naming and autobiography—as theoretical as it might sound—may provide the means of entry we seek into Huguenot women’s experience of assimilation in England after the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. It may do so because naming patterns for married women in early modern England and France were sharply opposed; tracing whether immigrant French women in the eighteenth century chose to name themselves in the English manner or in French style may give us some index of the extent to which (and the pace at which) they assimilated: that is, shifted their sense of identity not only from their birth family to their husband’s, but also from their natal community to the host society.
Forthcoming in Randolph Vigne and Charles Littleton, eds., From Strangers to Citizens (2001)
Perhaps the most familiar, vivid, and affecting characterization of an early European school for girls is Charlotte Brontë’s description of Lowood Institution in Jane Eyre (1847). In Brontë’s novel, this charitable school in the English countryside was, for the orphan Jane who spent eight uninterrupted years there, both a godsend and a torment. It was a godsend because, over time, acceptance and support from the community of girls and women encouraged the frightened ten-year-old entrant to grow into the accomplished, self-directed young woman who would confidently set forth into the world “to seek real knowledge of life amidst its perils.” It was a torment because in order to leave at all, Jane had to survive an environment whose deliberately imposed physical hardships conduced not only to the girls’ spiritual annihilation but to loss of their lives. Poor quality food (burnt porridge for breakfast, dinner of rancid fat and strange sheets of rusty meat), inadequate portions that left the girls always hungry, insufficient clothing, severe corporal punishment: these privations, designed as means “to render [the girls] hardy, patient, self-denying,” implemented the desire of the founder, Mr. Brockelhurst, to dehumanize and martyr the girls by frustrating their physical needs. Physical hardship was, then, integral to the school’s purpose, and death at school was the result: “disease had thus become an inhabitant of Lowood, and death its frequent visitor.” As Jane would later reminisce: “semi-starvation and neglected colds had predisposed most of the pupils to receive infection: forty-five out of the eighty girls lay ill at one time....a few girls were fortunate enough to have friends and relations able and willing to remove them from the seat of contagion. Many, already smitten, went home only to die; some died at the school, and were buried quietly and quickly."
In Jane Eyre, the ordeal of Lowood is one in a succession of trials that symbolize stages of spiritual growth in an allegorical pilgrimage. Brontë’s characterization of Lowood is, however, more than a literary device in her novel: it is, as Brontë herself maintained, historical and autobiographical: “the Lowood part…is true.” It set in fictionalized context the psychological and physical abuse that Charlotte and her three sisters had actually experienced in The Clergy Daughters’ School at Cowan Bridge in the North of England. In that school, to which they had been sent in 1824 after their mother’s death, two of Charlotte’s sisters contracted fatal illnesses, and Charlotte herself developed health problems from which she would suffer her whole life long. Brontë’s friend and biographer Elizabeth Gaskell reported that “Miss Brontë more than once said to me, that…there was not a word in her account of the institution but what was true at the time when she knew it.”
When, thirty years later, Gaskell herself looked into the situation at Cowan Bridge, she found it rather puzzling: “I can hardly understand how the school there came to be so unhealthy, the air all around about was so sweet and thyme-scented, when I visited it last summer.” In the end Gaskell tempered the novelist’s harsh judgment, sympathetically exonerating the founder and blaming the cook. But Brontë’s own presentation left no doubt that in her mind the problem ran to the founder’s door: the sadistic Mr. Brockelhurst subjects the girls to a regimen of deprivation out of masculinist and elitist prejudices masquerading as religious faith and social propriety. For the novelist, the survivor, the “unconsciously avenging sister,” it is because Lowood is an instrument of his self-defined “mission” to “mortify” the girls that it becomes a venue of death. Once Mr. Brockelhurst is repudiated by an indignant public and relieved of his authority, the health of the pupils ceases being an issue and the school becomes “a truly useful and noble institution.”
The grim boarding school episode in Charlotte Brontë’s life and fiction brings to mind a set of questions that, curiously, have been overlooked in all the recent attention to the history of education. Was the death of pupils a significant problem at early modern schools for girls? Was it significant at boarding schools generically or merely at poorly-run schools such as Lowood/Cowan Bridge? Did any contemporaries observe that girls were dying at boarding school and call attention to deaths at school as a cause for concern? How might the answer to these questions change our understanding of what it meant—not merely in intellectual and social terms, which have preoccupied historians, but also in terms of physical well-being—for girls to go away to school?
Appeared in Barbara Whitehead, ed., Women’s Education in Early Modern Europe: A History, 1500-1800 (1999), 193-224.
This essay examines a defining feature of the Old Regime that Alexis de Tocqueville declined to mention in his L’Ancien régime et la révolution, in a geographical area that had no role in his story, using his preferred type of source in a way he did not imagine, in pursuit of issues that lay at the very heart of his picture of pre-Revolutionary governmental practice. The defining feature is crown enforcement of religious uniformity, originating in the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes—a problematic omission from Tocqueville’s classic history, given both the prominence of the issue of religious pluralism in his earlier discussions of America and the centrality of the protestant question in writings by such of his contemporaries as Michelet and Quinet. The region is the Aunis, which lay in the shadows between Tocqueville’s Touraine and his Languedoc. The source is the correspondence between provincial intendant and crown, in this case the letters Pierre Arnoul, intendant at La Rochelle from 1683 to 1688, exchanged with three secrétaires d’Etat: Seignelay (whose portfolio included the marine and the Aunis), Louvois (who had oversight of the army), and Châteauneuf (who, at least formally, had responsibility for protestant policy).
As for the pursuit, the essay attempts to understand the dynamics through which the decision made at the center to revoke the Edict was implemented by the crown’s agent, the intendant, in one of the realm’s most densely Huguenot places. For Tocqueville, of course, the crown’s ability to enforce its will in the provinces was an essential characteristic of the ancien régime, and the tie between the crown and the intendant was the linchpin of monarchical centralization. Tocqueville took for granted (rather than examining) the identity of crown and intendant, as if the royal will and the intendants’ were ipso facto alike—indeed, as if the intendants varied as little among themselves as their homogenized provinces did, as if their personal or ideological particularities were so slight that he could extract from their records piecemeal and compress the extracts into a general picture of the Old Regime, always without giving the intendants’ names and usually without designating their provinces. This paper, by contrast, follows one little-known intendant in his interactions with the crown through one brief but critical moment, in order to add to our understanding of regional variations in the implementation of the Revocation and to reveal something of the matrix of presuppositions, interests, and competing priorities through which, in the Old Regime, administrative directives could be refracted en route to becoming political practice.
Forthcoming in Rob Schneider and Robert Schwartz, eds., Tocqueville and Beyond
Before dawn on an April day in 1687, six children of the Protestant noble family Robillard de Champagné slipped among the wine casks below decks of an English 18-tonner and made their escape from La Rochelle to Devon. Their mother and eldest brother traced the same route to exile in June. Eleven months later the father fled overland to Holland. The baby sister was left behind.
The pattern of the Champagné family’s escape was, for all its drama and complexity, unexceptional. Protestant fugitives in the era of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes commonly emigrated in family fragments, children preceding parents, women acting independently of their fathers and husbands, over multiple routes, creating permanent separation because some family members fled while some did not. Perhaps 150,000 Huguenots left France during the 1680s in every imaginable configuration of kin and non-kin, grouped and solitary. The escape permutations were sketched, in microcosm, on board the ships that carried as contraband Jacques Fontaine, a ministry student from the Saintonge, and Jean Migault, a schoolmaster from Poitou. Fontaine crossed from La Tremblade to Appledore in November 1685 with his own party of four (himself, his niece, his fiancée, and her sister), 2 boys from Bordeaux, and 6 young girls from Marennes. The 25 fugitives sailing with Migault from La Rochelle to Brielle in 1688 were 2 married couples, 1 with a child in tow; 3 fathers bringing 7 children among them; a widow and a lone mother, each with a daughter; 1 woman alone, 5 men alone.
What was exceptional—indeed unique—about the Champagné escape was its recording: two of the escapees, both women, wrote memoirs of their family’s emigration. Marie de La Rochefoucauld, dame de Champagné (died 1730) recorded her experience soon after settling in Holland, where she would stay until the infirmities of age forced her to make one last migration, in 1722, into the care of her eldest son in Ireland. Her daughter Suzanne de Robillard de Champagné, later madame de La Motte Fouqué (1668-1740), recorded her version of the escape either while still in Holland or after her definitive move around 1702 to Celle in Lower Saxony. Their two escape accounts were passed down in different branches of the family—the Irish and the German—that lost touch with each other. And so they have never been brought together and analyzed in one another’s light. Separately, they are only partially understandable, for each alone seems somewhat routine, emotionally flat, and unreflective. But reading the two accounts comparatively, and in conjunction with documentary sources that tell the circumstances of the authors’ lives independently of the memoirs, restores to the texts their masked emotional charge and discloses meanings that the authors did not explicitly tell, especially insights into what the emigration meant to families and, more particularly, how women experienced expatriation or exile.
Previous studies of Huguenot memoirs have understood them as more or less straightforward descriptions of the events they recount. This article, by contrast, is a first attempt to read Huguenot memoirs from the perspective of how they tell their story and thereby to add to their explicitly articulated contents the meanings that their authors left latent within the texts. It responds, in a sense, to Pierre Bourdieu’s call for rhetorical analysis of memoirs and to Myriam Yardeni’s exhortation that in order to reap full advantage from the records Huguenots have left behind “il faut inventer une méthode originale pour interroger chaque type de document.”
The interrogation of both memoirs treated here proceeds from rhetorical clues to experiential revelations. Within the memoir of the mother, the émigrée Marie, the clues are the silences in her narrative—the known aspects of her situation that she declines to mention—as well as the structure and language through which she tells what she tells. By establishing that the memoir’s audience is not the one it at first appears to be addressing, the analysis comes to new insights on the tenor of life in the Huguenot expatriate community and the relation of memoirs to it. It teases out, in addition, an unspoken self-conception that expresses Marie’s way of understanding her experience in terms of her gender, her religion, and her class. Within the memoir of the daughter, the exile Suzanne, the clues lie in the way she revises her mother’s tale and in the generic form she gives to her narrative. These point to the surreptitious expression, by the younger woman, of the pain of exile, to the familial crisis engendered with that pain, and to the reasons why the two generations of women experienced in very different ways the flight and resettlement that they both endured.
Appeared in French Historical Studies ( winter 1999), 5-67.
Literary and historical studies of autobiography, flourishing since the 1970s, have understood the genre as a peculiarly modern form of first-person narrative. Its early exempla are usually situated in the later eighteenth century—only after Rousseau’s Confessions did autobiography become “a full-blown literary genre.” Lines of inheritance have been drawn back from autobiography to medieval spiritual meditations or to Augustinian modes of memory or to Montaigne’s introspective Essais, but autobiography is nonetheless seen as having diverged sharply from earlier egodocuments. Earlier memoirs recorded actions and relationships; modern autobiographies self-indulgently disclose the author’s inner life. And the novelty of the new autobiography’s form and content is customarily said to reflect the emergence of modern personalities: morally autonomous, secular, sui generis, self-defining and self-promoting.
That one can describe a transformation in life writing occurring in the course of the eighteenth century is scarcely in doubt. Yet, explaining the change in narrative expression, accounting for the process through which a new subjectivity and a new genre took shape, is more difficult, for it must extend beyond the bounds of the literary or philosophical canon. Michael Mascuch, looking at the English case, has addressed the need for explanation by broadening autobiography’s literary lineage and reconceptualizing early autobiographers’ cognitive experience. The origins of autobiography, Mascuch suggests, lay with the miscellaneous, non-canonical forms of first-person narrative that proliferated in the eighteenth century: moralists’ tracts, nonconformists’ witnessing, popular biographies, criminals’ confessions. In reading—or, better, misreading—these texts, future autobiographers “experienced personality as a creation of discourse” and “the potential contingency of his own self-identity.” They glimpsed the possibilities of self-definition and derived from them an incentive to intimate self-expression. In this way, discourse itself fashioned a new kind of personality (rather than vice versa), and modern autobiography was born.
The present article suggests moving into an even broader spectrum of texts and, beyond discourse entirely, into more concrete dimensions of autobiographical practice: that is, into the circumstances in which early modern people wrote their own lives and the purposes they meant their writings to serve. Its argument is that autobiography assumed its modern form and content as part of a much larger shift in the production of documents generally, occasioned by the state’s appropriation of the power to set identity. State documentation came, by the end of the eighteenth century, to relieve memoirs of the need to meet public uses that had previously constrained them to masking private selves, to putting on “an additional layer of gravity and modesty on my face,” so as not to undercut public purposes by exposure of personal sentiments. By so relieving them, it permitted an unprecedented privatization of self-definition and efflorescence of subjectivity: autobiography thereafter could unleash the “private self, one that aspires to the immortal glory of a god, a self that will brook no limits whatsoever, not even death.” A shift in material culture, then, by reshaping autobiographical practice—quite apart from any deep mutation in authorial personality that may have occurred—gave birth to the new genre.
Forthcoming