Constructing Queenship in Early Nineteenth-Century French Historiography

Abstract

Women have been excluded from the French throne since the Late Middle Ages and this exclusion was re-enforced in 1814 and in 1830 through law as well as history-writing. Queens were sometimes even blamed for the failure of the ancien régime monarchy. Their perceived crimes, such as immorality and excessive political influence, were used to emphasize their failure. This chapter examines how early nineteenth-century French nationalist historians, like Francois Guizot, Adolphe Thiers, and Francois René de Chateaubriand, argued for women’s exclusion from the French throne by using examples from the history of other, mostly European, dynasties. Paradoxically, the history of French queenship was presented in the early nineteenth-century historiography simultaneously as a progressive narrative and as immutable: progressive in the sense that France had advanced towards a society of ‘natural’ order where men alone could govern, while simultaneously, women’s exclusion from the throne was pictured as having always existed in France in order to justify the ‘natural’ order.