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Abstract
The court aristocracy of Versailles has been seen as open to relative mésalliances with daughters of the noblesse de robe or nouveau riche financiers. At the same time, status consciousness and court politics guaranteed that many marriages were still concluded within the narrowest élite of dukes and major courtiers. What resulted was a pattern of connubium where status-equal marriages regularly alternated with mésalliances. This article first discusses well-known cases of the intra-familial antipathies allegedly caused by these differences in status and establishes the impossibility of assessing them based on unreliable anecdotal evidence. Instead, it quantifies the likelihood of these status differences based on a prosopographical sample (174 marriages of high-ranking courtiers) and proposes a matrix of status categories. Based on this, we can not only gain a clearer understanding of how frequent (and how extreme) mésalliances really were, but also establish separate patterns of inequality between husbands, wives and their respective mothers-in-law, as well as gender-specific statistics both for the likelihood of encountering a living mother-in-law at all, and for the average length of co-existence between the two generations.
Notes
1 Louis de Rouvroy, duc de Saint-Simon, Mémoires, Arthur de Boislisle and Léon Lecestre, eds, 41 vols (Paris, 1879–1930), vol. XII, p. 289, translation by the author. For the difficulty of establishing the statement’s exact wording see below, note 6. For the Saint-Amans family, see Ibid., p. 288, note 2, and Daniel Dessert, Argent, pouvoir et société au Grand Siècle (Paris, 1984), p. 544.
2 Saint-Simon, Mémoires, vol. XII, p. 289, note (a) to note 3. For the Bonnier family, see Louis Grasset-Morel, Les Bonnier, ou une famille de financiers au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1886), and for the date of their automatic ennoblement (1710) by purchase of an office of secrétaire du Roi, Christine Favre-Lejeune, Les secrétaires du roi de la Grande Chancellerie de France. Dictionnaire biographique et généalogique (1672–1789), 2 vols (Paris, 1986), vol. I, p. 246.
3 Saint-Simon, Mémoires, vol. XIV, p. 364, where the editor also quotes a number of additional sources dealing with this marriage. On the Crozat family, see Dessert, Argent, pouvoir et société, p. 565-6, and its genealogies in Bibliothèque Nationale de France [hereafter BNF], Ms. fr. 30995 (Cabinet de d’Hozier, 114), and BNF, Ms. fr. 29771 (Dossiers bleus du Cabinet des titres, 226) [no consecutive foliation].
4 Mathieu Marais, Journal et mémoires … sur la régence et le règne de Louis XV (1715–1737), Mathurin-François-Adolphe de Lescure, ed., 4 vols (Paris, 1863–64), vol. II, p. 345; Charles-Philippe d’Albert, duc de Luynes, Mémoires … sur la cour de Louis XV (1735–1758), Louis Dussieux and Eudore Soulié, eds, 17 vols (Paris, 1860–65), vol. VIII, p. 147.
5 German: ‘Maußdreck’. The first of innumerable instances of this can be found in a letter written six months after her son’s marriage: Aus den Briefen der Herzogin Elisabeth Charlotte von Orléans an die Kurfürstin Sophie von Hannover. Ein Beitrag zur Kulturgeschichte des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts, ed. Eduard Bodemann, 2 vols (Hanover, 1891), vol. I, p. 160 (7 August 1692).
6 For details, see Hélène Himelfarb, ‘Madame de Sévigné chez Saint-Simon: témoignage, ou vision du XVIIIe siècle?’, Cahiers Saint Simon 32 (2004), pp. 79-87, pp. 83-4.
7 See for the exploration of his worldview, heavily influenced by growing up as the child of an embittered ducal father sixty-eight years his senior, in Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie and Jean-François Fitou, Saint-Simon ou le système de la cour (Paris, 1997), the great number of enlightening case studies in the Cahiers Saint-Simon, the factual corrections regularly added to the canonical edition of the Mémoires by his meticulous editors Boislisle and Lecestre, and some examples of pure fabrication exposed more than 150 years ago by Adolphe Chéruel, Saint-Simon considéré comme historien de Louis XIV (Paris, 1865).
8 Saint-Simon, Mémoires, vol. XII, p. 289.
9 See on all of this Dirk Van der Cruysse, Madame Palatine, princesse européenne (Paris, 1988), passim.
10 Aus den Briefen der Herzogin Elisabeth Charlotte von Orléans an die Kurfürstin Sophie von Hannover, vol. I, p. 38 (29 September 1681), and note 1 with material on the German proverb ‘mouseshit always wants to mix in with pepper-corns’. It should be noted that as a result of both the German princes’ much stricter standards for status-appropriate marriage and the German practice of classifying nobility by ‘quartiers’ rather than ‘degrés’ (i.e. by including all ancestry in the maternal lines), mésalliances had severe practical and legal consequences in Germany that simply did not exist in France.
11 It is important to phrase this with great precision, as there are a few cases of French princes (the last of them in 1692) and lower-echelon court officials marrying illegitimate royal children after this date. It should also be noted that aristocratic families were less reluctant to let their daughters marry men of illegitimate birth, provided the son-in-law’s status had been partly redeemed by legitimation and the grant of a rank. Finally, illegitimacy has to be understood as a legal status, and distinguished from the discrepancy between legal and biological paternity that is often mixed up with it. Biologically, the marquis du Luc (1741-1814) was a son of Louis XV and the comtesse de Vintimille, but as his mother’s husband did not disavow him, he was a legitimate child before the law.
12 Particularly so ever since it was taken up (without a source) by Werner Sombart, Luxus und Kapitalismus (Munich and Leipzig, 1922), p. 23.
13 In 1886, Grasset-Morel, Les Bonnier, p. 158, does not give a source at all. In 1896, Saint-Simon’s erudite and careful editor Boislisle (Saint-Simon, Mémoires, vol. XII, p. 289, note (a) to note 3) only introduced it by ‘[l]es historiens des fermiers généraux racontent … ’ Whilst this unusual lack of precision may be due to the fact that Boislisle quoted the phrase only in a footnote to a footnote, it can equally be read as a refusal to commit himself too much to the statement’s authenticity.
14 Journal historique de la révolution opérée dans la constitution de la monarchie françoise par M. de Maupeou, chancelier de France, 7 vols (London, 1774–76), vol. III, p. 212, entry dated 23 July 1772. The BNF catalogue attributes this anonymously published work to Mathieu-François Pidansat de Mairobert and Barthélémy-François-Joseph Mouffle d’Angerville.
15 L’Observateur anglois, ou correspondence secrète entre milord All’Eye et milord All’Ear, 10 vols (London, 1777-85) [title changed to L’espion anglois, etc, from vol. II], vol. I, pp. 225-6. Attributed to Mairobert by BNF catalogue.
16 Mémoires secrets pour servir à l’histoire de la république des lettres en France, depuis MDCCLXII jusqu’à nos jours, 36 vols (London, 1777-89), vol. VII, pp. 83-4, entry dated 27 October 1773. Despite being officially attributed to Louis Petit de Bachaumont, this series of newsletters is understood to have been published, once again, by Mairobert and Mouffle d’Angerville, see e.g. Françoise Weil, ‘Une entreprise éditoriale mystérieuse’, Dix-huitième siècle 40 (2008), pp. 485-501. The newsletters’ editor states that the poem in question had originally been written about a previous duchesse de Chaulnes (née Françoise de Neufville de Villeroy, 1625–1701), whose loss of ducal rank through a scandalous third marriage (in 1667) did in fact strangely mirror the contemporaneous Dowager Duchess’s remarriage described in this entry.
17 Lettres de Madame de Sévigné, de sa famille et de ses amis, Pierre-Marie Gault de Saint-Germain, ed., 12 vols (Paris, 1823), vol. XI, p. 34, note 1. The editor’s reference to Dangeau is actually meant to refer to Saint-Simon’s Additions au Journal de Dangeau.
18 By claiming the 1695 Grignan dung quotation had been ‘mis en vogue par la duchesse de Chaulnes, douairière, qui n’étoit pas en odeur de bonnes moeurs’, and giving no other identifying details, Gault de Saint-Germain managed to simultaneously allude to the 1734 mother-in-law (who was then neither a dowager duchess nor morally compromised), her daughter-in-law (who wouldn’t have propagated the alleged remark against herself), and the Dowager Duchess mentioned in note 16 above (the only bearer of that title who was both a contemporary of Madame de Grignan and considered to be of somewhat dubious morals), as if these three were all the same person.
19 The most recent instance of this can be found, alongside mention of a non-existent son and an equally nonsensical attribution to ‘Mémoires (posthume), Saint-Simon’, at https://www.histoire-en-citations.fr/node/838
20 François Formel-Levavasseur, ‘Saint-Simon révélé: les manuscrits des premières copies des Mémoires’, Cahiers Saint-Simon 39 (2011), pp. 133-9, p. 134. As the marquise du Deffand’s powerful aunt Madame de Luynes had married a second cousin of Choiseul’s wife, and as her step-grandfather had been another duc de Choiseul, the Marquise had close relations with Madame de Choiseul whom she called ‘grand-maman’ despite being forty years her senior. Through their links with the house of Albert de Luynes, both women were also distant in-laws of the house of Chaulnes.
21 On the Choiseul circle’s reading and appreciation of Saint-Simon in 1770–71, see Correspondance complète de Mme du Deffand avec la duchesse de Choiseul, l’abbé Barthélemy et M. Craufurt, Louis-Clair de Beaupoil, marquis de Sainte-Aulaire, ed., third edn, 3 vols (Paris, 1877), vol. I, pp. 339, 405, 408, 423, 429, 442-2; vol. II, pp. 2 and 7; and Correspondance complète de la marquise du Deffand avec ses amis le président Hénault, Montesquieu, d’Alembert, Voltaire, Horace Walpole, Mathurin-François-Adolphe de Lescure, ed., 2 vols (Paris, 1865), vol. II, pp. 100, 107, 122, 158, 171-2, 175, 189.
22 Ibid. vol. I, pp. xlvii-xlix, lxii-lxiv, cxxvi, and the letters quoted there.
23 Political antagonism seems a less likely motive, as the Duchess and her son apparently didn’t take sides in the great controversy between the Choiseul and Maupeou-Aiguillon parties; their family links to more explicit supporters of the latter were shared by Madame de Choiseul herself. On the other hand, a genuine error might well have stemmed from the fact that both Madame de Grignan and Madame de Picquigny-Chaulnes had been born into recently ennobled financier families from Montpellier.
24 Marais, Journal et mémoires, vol. II, p. 345 (6 September 1722), confirms the same nickname before Saint-Simon had even started to write his memoirs, and seems not to have had any meaningful contact with the latter.
25 BNF, Ms. fr. 12626 (Chansonnier dit de Maurepas, vol. XI), pp. 43-6.
26 A complaint that culminated in stating ‘our duchesses’ stools [tabourets] / carry truly ignoble buttocks’ (Ibid., p. 43). The right to sit on a tabouret in the Queen’s or First Lady’s presence was such a crucial privilege of dukes’ wives that contemporaries regularly used ‘tabouret’ as a synonym either for ducal rank or for its holder.
27 Ibid., p. 45. Though notionally presented as the comte d’Évreux’s justification of his marriage, this song is in fact as disparaging of Bouillons, Mancinis and Crozats as the three other songs. See Saint-Simon, Mémoires, vol. XXIV, pp. 288-301, for Saint-Simon’s appraisal of and relations with the duchesse de Bouillon, as well as his judgement of her ancestry; and Pierre Guibours, dit le Père Anselme de Sainte Marie, Histoire généalogique et chronologique de la maison royale de France, des pairs, des grands officiers de la Couronne, de la Maison du roy et des anciens barons du royaume, second edn, 9 vols (Paris, 1726–1733), vol. V, pp. 462-5, for a genealogy of the Mancini family. Their spectacularly undistinguished existence at the lowest end of the urban nobility of Rome made it nearly impossible to translate their status meaningfully into the completely different French system. Ultimately, though Madame de Bouillon was definitely of better noble birth than Mademoiselle Crozat, her haughty attitude could only have been based on the formally immaterial fact that she had grown up as the niece of Cardinal Mazarin when he was the most powerful man of France, and had seen all her sisters marry into the highest nobility before doing so herself.
28 The density of the subject matter and lack of available space does not allow us to introduce all of the relevant historiographical literature concerned with aristocratic women’s roles and behaviour. Two recent and pertinent titles that can serve as useful introductions to the wider literature are Caroline zum Kolk and Kathleen Wilson-Chevalier (eds), Femmes à la cour de France. Charges et fonctions (XVe–XIXe siècle) (Lille, 2018), and the forthcoming publication of Pauline Ferrier-Viaud’s 2017 doctoral thesis, ‘Pouvoir, présence et action de femmes. Les épouses des ministres au temps de Louis XIV’. Though the ministers’ wives studied by the latter author were socially distinguished from the épée courtiers at the heart of the present study in several important ways, they regularly became mothers-in-law of both sons- and daughters-in-law born into high-ranking épée courtier families, or (in the cases of the wives of second- and subsequent-generation ministers such as Louvois, Seignelay, Barbezieux, and Pontchartrain the younger) were themselves daughters of such families.
29 At most they might have mattered in the case of a wife’s birth being actually much higher than that of the husband, but as we shall see, marriage inequality almost never worked that way.
30 See Leonhard Horowski, Au cœur du palais. Pouvir et carrières à la Cour de France 1661–1789 (Rennes, 2019), pp. 302-56, for an in-depth reconstruction of the structures of the agnatic (i.e. patrilineal) famille-souche and its complicated relations with blood relatives in the female (i.e. cognatic) line.
31 Whilst these daughters obviously continued to be members of their birth family, marriage removed them from the shared household and forced them into new loyalties, especially once they had children of their own who were considered to belong to their paternal family only. Since they were expected to work above all in these children’s interest, and thus in that of their husband’s family, the micro-political role they could play within their potentially competing birth family would normally be limited.
32 This was due to the fact that, apart from holding ducal rank which was transmitted by primogeniture, his family also held the extremely rare rank of prince étranger which was extended to all its agnatic members and the sons’ wives. In contrast to other younger sons (and despite being personally styled comte rather than prince), Évreux therefore could offer any prospective wife a princely court rank that was roughly equivalent to that of a duchess. Property, however, still eluded him due to primogeniture, and so it made sense for Évreux to effectively sell this rank to the highest bidder by marrying a financier’s daughter.
33 Their relations with each other might yet profitably be researched in the Archives Nationales, Paris [hereafter AN], since they hold not only the Bouillon family papers (AN, 273 AP 176 to 617, papiers de la maison de Bouillon; and AN, R2 60. correspondances Bouillon et Turenne, 1682–1707), but also the archives of the families to whom Madame de Turenne belonged by birth and by virtue of her second marriage (AN, 273 AP 1 to 175, papiers de la maison de Rohan, including Lévis-Ventadour papers).
34 There are of course several quantitative studies, all of them status-focussed, of fairly comparable groups looking at husbands and wives alone: Le Roy Ladurie and Fitou, Saint-Simon ou le système de la cour, pp. 263-94, especially p. 271 [persons mentioned in Saint-Simon’s memoirs]; Christophe Levantal, Ducs et pairs et duchés-pairies laïques à l’époque moderne (1519–1790) (Paris, 1996), pp. 1127-32 [dukes who were also peers]; and Mathieu Marraud, La noblesse de Paris au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 2000), pp. 178-224 [qualitative study centred around the nucleus of a quantitative study of the parliamentary robe, see pp. 192-3]. It goes without saying that these have all informed and helped my own reflections, not the least my own previous status statistics of 275 courtier marriages presented in Horowski, Au cœur du palais, pp. 333-8; see Ibid., pp. 333-4, note 66, for why (and the extent to which) my criteria for defining family status do in some ways differ from theirs.
35 At this point the author has to acknowledge one mistake which only became apparent at the final revision, and could only have been eliminated by re-calculating every single figure in the following statistics, for which unfortunately there wasn’t enough time left. The mistake in question is that one couple, the prince and princesse de Guéméné who married in 1761 (A32, where the husband is listed as grand chambellan), were inadvertently counted twice due to their reappearance in a subsequent section of the prosopographic sample (A179, where the husband is featured as capitaine-lieutenant des gendarmes de la garde). While the double inclusion of a protagonist who did in fact hold two different court offices belonging to the sample, and whose wife happened to hold a third outside of it, would not appear inadmissible in general, it is an inconsistency here, given that all other men who also held two sample offices were only counted once. Fortunately, the resulting inconsistency of our statistical results remains minute, as the second inclusion of this marriage only accounts for 0.6% of all cases studied, and as the marriage in question was not an outlier in any way. It does, however mean, that we effectively studied only 174 marriages involving 144 men and 169 women.
36 Due to its size and the work involved in translating it, this prosopography could not be published within the book itself. It has, however, been made available in a digitised form at archive.org and can be found via a link on the Presses Universitaires de Rennes homepage of Horowski, Au cœur du palais.
37 Articles A1 to A19 deal with celibate clerics in the offices of grand and premier aumônier. The offices included in our study are those of grand maître de la maison, grand chambellan, premier gentilhomme de la chambre, grand maître de la garde-robe, maître de la garde-robe, grand écuyer, premier écuyer, grand veneur, grand louvetier, grand fauconnier, capitaine des gardes du corps, colonel général des suisses et grisons, colonel du régiment des gardes françaises, capitaine-lieutenant des gendarmes de la garde and capitaine-lieutenant des chevau-légers de la garde. Here and subsequently, notes will refer to individual cases by their article number, thus enabling the reader to identify the couples in question both in the list placed at the end of this article, and in the more detailed prosopographic directory.
38 Horowski, Au cœur du palais, passim, and for the following point concerning female office-holders, pp.175-7.
39 These were the wives of protagonists A32 (=A179), A33 (second wife, previously wife of A165), A49, A57, A61, A82, A84, A86, A104, A106, A110, A122, A123, A124, A138, A143, A151 (=A167), A153, A154, A155 (second wife), A158, A172, A175, A177, A180, A182 and A188.
40 Here and elsewhere in this text, ‘younger son’ is always employed in the sense of the contemporary term ‘cadet’, i.e. as denoting not a biological, but a (disadvantaged) legal and social status. The complementary status of ‘eldest son’, or ‘aîné’, was accorded not only to actual firstborn sons but also to those second, or occasionally even third sons who, like the duc d’Albret mentioned above, advanced to the family headship after the original firstborn had died without surviving male-line descendants. Occasionally a cadet could also become the aîné of his mother’s family, if the last male head of this house designated him as his heir. In aristocratic systems dominated by primogeniture, no marriage can be properly interpreted without taking into account the groom’s status as an aîné or cadet at the time of its conclusion.
41 See for the explanation of these choices in Horowski, Au cœur du palais, p. 23-4.
42 For the purpose of this article’s tables, I renamed the status categories employed in the prosopography of Au cœur du palais in order to make their hierarchy more immediately apparent. The column titled ‘ACdP' contains the original abbreviated name of each status group as employed in the prosopography attached to that work.
43 The only imaginable élite members that do not feature here would be foreign nobles of very recent extraction, more distant and rankless agnatic descendants of dukes (i.e. great-grandchildren and so on, barely any of which existed during the relevant time since most dukedoms were relatively new, and due to the aristocracy’s ‘slim’ demography) or, even more hypothetically, French families of old nobility who had neither an established épée nor robe identity. (Anyone coming across such a case should, however, be extremely wary, since this impression will normally only arise from faked genealogies of relative newcomers; these would omit ancestors’ embarrassing actual professions, but also hesitate to replace them, since at least for the more recent past, untrue statements about military or judicial office-holding could easily have been proven wrong.) The fact that our scale does not differentiate between different types of non-nobles would be more of a problem in many other contexts but poses none here, since the court élite would have considered any commoner marriage an extreme mésalliance.
44 The only French exception on level 9 were those ‘new’ princes étrangers whose status was not, as with the older holders of that rank, based on membership in an undisputedly sovereign foreign house, and instead just on a legal fiction of actual or lost sovereignty validated by the monarch’s favour. In practice, however, the birth status of all three families to whom this applied (La Tour d’Auvergne de Bouillon, Rohan and Grimaldi) was at least as good as that of the most distinguished families in the next-lower categories.
45 We have deliberately, and in contrast to most comparable studies, grouped ducs pairs, ducs vérifiés (alias ducs simples or héréditaires) and French Grandees of Spain (who held the same rank as the latter) all into a single status group (D1, level 8), since the difference in rank was limited to a small number of rare occasions and tended to be immaterial when marriages were discussed (see for an example of this Horowski, Au cœur du palais, p. 328, note 58). Instead, our lower-status ducal group (D2, level 7) consists of the usually ignored holders of incomplete, non- or not-yet-hereditary ducal rank (see the more detailed explanation Ibid., p. 97).
46 By the time they received their dukedoms, all nine of these families had reached the status group of E2 (assimilated noblesse d’épée). The Albert de Luynes (including Albert d’Ailly) and Gondy de Retz had previously been Italian urban patricians, while the Neufville de Villeroy, Potier de Gesvres came from R1 (ministerial robe), and the Franquetot-Coigny, La Baume-Le Blanc de La Vallière, La Porte-Mazarin and Rosset de Rocozel de Fleury from R2 (lesser robe), with all but the Franquetot only occupying very low robe functions for a very short time after being ennobled. The Vignerot du Plessis-Richelieu, finally, were already noblesse d’épée when they first appeared in 1461, but only qualified as E2 due to missing the early fifteenth-century cut-off date for E1.
47 Here again, it is important to understand the difference between rank and birth status. If we classified individuals by their actual rank, the ducal group (categories D1 and D2) could only comprise the eldest sons of dukes, and not even them unless they already held ducal rank at the time of marriage; the relatively few younger sons and the very many daughters of dukes would not be considered part of the same group, since they held no ducal rank themselves. Only when we look at birth status groups instead we can actually define a meaningful category that includes all those whom contemporaries would have considered each other’s social equals. Yet rank is not immaterial to that, since it did inform that very judgement: a duke’s daughter, though without rank of her own, was still considered to be of higher birth status than the daughter of a non-ducal nobleman. As a result, our ducal status group includes all individuals who were descended from a duke in the direct male line. Fortunately, no comparable difficulty arises either in the categories above (where all family members shared the family’s princely rank) or beneath (where nobody had any heritable rank to begin with).
48 This conclusion is made even stronger once we realise that even among the small number of second or further marriages, the majority were concluded either by men without surviving sons (and whose remarriage was therefore dictated by dynastic imperatives), or by childless widows who were young enough to remain under parental control, and who could thus be used as pawns in the game of micro-politics for a second time. In an extreme case (marriages of A29 and A30), a foreign heiress whose husband had died eleven days after the wedding was talked into marrying his younger brother immediately afterwards in order to save her the return journey, and to keep her wealth in the family. In contrast to this, a legally emancipated widow of twenty-five or more years was very unlikely to remarry, since only love (see e.g. first marriages of A104 and A175, and second marriages of A143 and A155) or enormous material and status improvement (e.g. first marriage of A104, third marriage of A54) would have motivated her to give up an independence which in this social class tended to be materially unproblematic. In our sample, only seventeen out of 170 women married for a second time, and none more often than that, with a median age at marriage of twenty-six years, and an average of twenty-eight years. Men were only a little keener on remarriage, with twenty-three out of 145 concluding a second marriage when aged anything between nineteen and eighty-two years (the average age being forty-two years, with a the median of thirty-nine years), and chose wives aged anything between twelve and forty-two years (or an average age of twenty-three years, and a median of nineteen years). No more than six men married for a third time (at an average age of forty-five years, with the median at forty-two years), their wives being on average twenty-four years old (median age of twenty years). The only fourth marriage in the entire sample was concluded by the duc d’Albret mentioned in the text, who in 1725 (when he was fifty-seven) wed a seventeen-year old.
49 Figures based on the 141 cases where we actually know the men’s age at marriage.
50 Based on the 143 cases where women whose age we know became the first wives of men in this sample. The total of women’s first marriages is 158, since it also included cases where a women’s first marriage was concluded with a man who had been married before. In 156 of these cases we know the bride’s age at marriage, which ranged from twelve to thirty-six years (average age: eighteen years, median age: seventeen years). No fewer than twelve out of these 156 first-time brides were married aged twelve, i.e. at the earliest legally possible age, whilst 113 out of 156 (72%) were married before their twentieth birthday.
51 That said, Madame de Noailles’s case was not just extreme because few women managed to withstand the rigours of extreme fecundity as well as the apparently indestructible Maréchale. The dominant demographic trends of the Versailles court aristocracy also clearly went towards much smaller nuclear families, constituted by the relatively few children a couple would have in the wife’s late teens or twenties before the couple then tended to lead more or less separate lives.
52 If we have not included this parameter in our regular prosopography of mothers-in-law (and hence, left it out of Appendix I), this is due to the general difficulty of finding reliable dates of birth even for aristocratic women, as these tended to be publicised far less than those of their brothers, and as most of the relevant Parisian parish registers are lost. This difficulty is compounded for mothers-in-law, who due to the patterns of hypergamy, which we are going to observe very often, came from comparatively less prominent families than their daughters and, a fortiori, their sons-in-law; as a result, their birth dates are often even less reliably reconstructable.
53 Based on data for the eighty-seven mothers of married men who were still alive at the time of their sons’ marriages, and whose dates of birth we know; we do not know birth dates for another seven mothers who lived to see their son’s wedding, or for four mothers of sons who may or may not still have been alive at that time.
54 Based on data for the ninety-five mothers of married women who were still alive at the time of their daughters’ marriages, and whose dates of birth we know; the dates of birth are unknown for another thirteen women who were still alive at that time, and for nine who may have been.
55 Based on data for eighty-six cases where men’s mothers still lived at the time of their sons’ weddings, and where the dates of birth are known for both mother- and daughter-in-law.
56 These figures are based on the ninety-five cases where men’s mothers-in-law were still alive at the time of their daughters’ marriages, and where their date of birth was known. The extreme case of a mother-in-law being forty years younger than her son-in-law is that of Élisabeth de Bellefourière de Soyecourt, marquise de La Chesnelaye (1660?–1725), whose nineteen-year-old daughter married the eighty-two-year-old duc de Gesvres in 1703. As omitting this case would have skewed results considerably, we have exceptionally included her in these statistics even though we only dispose of an estimated date of birth based on her parents’ date of marriage, her position in the birth order of siblings, and her date of marriage. All other dates of birth are at the very least based on the age given at a person’s death, and more often on precise dates of birth drawn from genealogical reference works, the Cabinet des Titres or parish registers.
57 In four more cases, we only know that the mother-in-law survived her daughter’s marriage, but not exactly for how long, with the mother-in-law still alive at least half a year, three, five and twenty-one years, respectively, after the marriage.
58 This was the case of the prince de Rohan (1669–1749), who in 1694 became the son-in-law of the duchesse de Ventadour (née Charlotte-Madeleine-Éléonore de La Mothe-Houdancourt, 1652–1744), and only survived her by five years. It is worth noting that his second mother-in-law was twenty-five years younger than he, and forty-two years younger than the first mother-in-law. The duc de Piennes (then duc d’Aumont, 1762–1831) married a daughter of the comtesse de Rochechouart (née Madeleine-Mélanie-Henriette Barberie de Courteilles, 1747–1831) in 1781, lost his wife after a mere nine years, but co-existed with her mother for fifty years, at the end of which she outlived him by five months. Here and elsewhere co-existences and deaths after 1789 have been included in our calculations, as (barring the very few cases of revolutionary executions) their incidence was not materially altered by the post-1789 environment the way that marriage patterns were.
59 Again the duchesse de Ventadour (see preceding note), whose first son-in-law the prince de Turenne (1665–1692) had been killed in the battle of Steenkerke. Eight out of the thirty-three surviving mothers-in-law survived a son-in-law for more than a quarter of a century.
60 In three cases it is unknown whether the wife’s mother-in-law was still alive at the time of marriage. In a fourth case, she is known to have survived the marriage by eight years at least, but her exact date of death is uncertain.
61 The case of the two last duchesses de La Vallière (nées Marie-Thérèse de Noailles, 1684–1784, and Anne-Julie-Françoise de Crussol d’Uzès, 1713–1797) is all the more remarkable, as the elder of them had already been forty-seven years old when her son married the younger in 1732. For a total of twenty-three women, co-existence with their mother-in-law lasted for at least a quarter of a century.
62 Adding to the general definitions of birth status groups given above, it has to be pointed out that what we measure and call an individual’s ‘birth status’ here and everywhere else in this article is always their birth-based status at the moment of marriage, and thus not necessarily the status they had at birth. This is due to the fact that only the highest status groups were completely defined by unchangeable birth. A second type of status groups (P3, D1 and D2) are defined by birth into a family possessing a certain rank; since it was possibly to acquire these ranks anew, a person born, e.g., as the child of an ordinary gentleman of old épée nobility (E1) could therefore become the child of a duke (D1 or D2) if the father was promoted to that rank at a later stage. Analogously, a child born as a non-noble (B) would participate in the father’s ennoblement and thus reach status A some time before marriage. Status groups of a third type were either partly (E2) or entirely (R1, R2) defined by the possession of certain types of offices. As a man might move from A or B into R1 by acquiring a robe (i.e. judicial) office, and even into R2 by becoming a minister, his children’s status would therefore change accordingly, whilst the acquisition of military positions combined with renunciation of all robe offices regularly turned families into E2. Finally, and in accordance with criteria employed by contemporaries, women’s birth status has always been defined as that of their fathers, rather than their brothers’.
63 Le Roy Ladurie and Fitou, Saint-Simon ou le système de la cour, pp. 237-94. We do not compare our figures to the ones given by these authors partly because of the different nature of their sample and slight differences in categorisation, but also due to certain problems with the reliability of their assessment of individuals (see Horowski, Au cœur du palais, pp. 333-4, note 66; see also Ibid., pp. 48-9, for a different view of the consequences of marriages across status lines, and more generally pp. 46-62 for reasons why noblesse d’épée and noblesse de robe should be understood to have been sharply distinct groups of unequal status up to the very end of the Ancien Régime. The grand marriages of robe ministers’ daughters to dukes which figure prominently and plausibly in Le Roy Ladurie’s and Fitou’s argument were a phenomenon of the reign of Louis XIV and disappeared together with the great ministerial dynasties soon after his death).
64 Whilst technically speaking, positive inequality ranged between one and five levels, in practice only a single mother-in-law actually had a superiority more than three levels. This was the 1607 marriage (A127) of the comte de Tresmes, son of an active robe minister, to a duke’s daughter whose mother Diane de Lorraine-Aumale (1558–1586) had been a princesse étrangère. As this case, the earliest marriage of the sample, is both chronologically and socially extreme, it seems fair to discount it for the purpose of establishing the range of inequality, whilst it remains included in all other statistics. Except for the Barbezieux-Uzès marriage of 1691, no son of the active ministerial robe ever married a duke’s daughter again, let alone the daughter of a princesse étrangère, whilst only very few sons of robe ministers made it into the kind of high court office by which our sample is defined.
65 A phenomenon first noted by Le Roy Ladurie and Fitou, Saint-Simon ou le système de la cour, p. 284.
66 In systems such as the German one where aristocratic status depended not only on patrilineal but also on matrilineal ancestry, and where therefore a single mésalliance would have ruined a family’s eligibility (e.g. for rich ecclesiastical office or participation in political estates) and attractiveness as marriage partners for several generations, members of the old nobility were so dependent on finding a wife with the right kind of paternal and maternal ancestry that this valuable quality could replace the high dowries which French aristocrats had to pay in order to marry their daughters off.
67 The willingness of French royal princes to marry royal bastards ruined their chances of ever marrying their daughters into European royalty. This predicament mirrored dukes’ or equivalent aristocrats’ virtually complete inability to marry their daughters into high nobility of neighbouring Germany, with the only such marriage being that of the hereditary prince of Nassau-Saarbrücken to Mademoiselle de Montbarey in 1779 (the bride’s father being not only French minister of war, but also a newly created prince of the Empire and a descendant of the house of Nassau in the female line). Whilst this was arguably less of a problem for the notoriously inward-oriented aristocracy of Europe’s richest and most powerful monarchy, it did undoubtedly harm its international standing. Louis XIV’s attempts to take control of the prince-bishopric of Strasbourg were considerably hindered by the near-impossibility of finding French nobles who could have become canons — and thus eventually, prince-bishop — by fulfilling the traditional German requirement of proving sixteen quarterings (i.e. sixteen great-great-grandparents all born into the chevaleresque nobility).
68 See Horowski, Au cœur du palais, p. 175-7, for the way in which relatively high birth continued to be a de facto requirement for appointment to high female court office at Versailles.
69 Out of the 145 male court officials accounting for the sample’s 175 marriages, only a single one (A92) belonged to the lowest noble status group (A). There were no representatives of the ordinary noblesse de robe (R2), only three of the ministerial robe (R1), and fifteen of the recently assimilated noblesse d’épée (E2). Of the remaining 126 men who all belonged to the old nobility, thirty-one were non-ducal old noblesse d’épée, whilst ninety-five held ducal or princely rank — a spectacularly high quota considering how even after the last massive ducal promotions of 1663, there were never more than at most fifty ducal and six princely families in a France of 20 million inhabitants.
70 The duchesse de Saint-Aignan (née Françoise Géré, 1643–1726), whose everyday title before marriage, ‘Mademoiselle de Lucé’ (or Lussey) appears to have been no more than the pseudo-noble nom de guerre adopted by many commoners in upwardly mobile situations. Whilst her exact birth status was obscure enough for some tactful contemporaries to suggest noble birth (see the passages quoted in Saint-Simon, Mémoires, vol. XI, pp. 3-4, notes 3 and 5), her pre-marriage position seems to have been that of a duchess’s femme de chambre rather than a demoiselle de compagnie, which would have been incompatible with noble birth. Secretly concluded in 1680, the marriage only became public when the crypto-duchess’s first pregnancy made this inevitable in the following year.
71 Marriage of the comte d’Ayen, future duc d’Ayen and then duc de Noailles (1739–1824, A126) to Henriette-Anne-Louise d’Aguesseau de Fresnes (1737–1794). For the purposes of this statement, the term ‘office-holder’ includes only those who obtained such office after their marriage. In 1778, an ex-holder of a third-tier court office (Bourbon-Busset, A540) married the daughter of an ex-minister (Boynes, B100) belonging to the robe. The last daughter of a robe minister to be appointed, in 1771, to significant court office was the duchesse de Luxembourg (née Madeleine-Renée-Suzanne-Adélaïde de Voyer de Paulmy d’Argenson, 1752–1813), though it should to be pointed out that she was fairly untypical of the ministerial robe which was, by then, in decline anyway: her father had ceased to be a (third-generation) minister when she was only six years old and belonged to the only family of the ministerial robe that was of bona fide épée origin.
72 See Saint-Simon, Mémoires, vol. IV, pp. 296-301 and notes, on her birth status and involuntary withdrawal from society, and vol. V, p. 129 on the fact that she was allowed to participate in their daughter’s marriage. It is true that this withdrawal was the consequence of a previous decision to sequester the Countess’s wildly eccentric husband in a comparable way. At the same time, the decision to force the mother-in-law into informal seclusion because she could no longer live with her husband was hardly inevitable, and served as a perfect pretext for saving the ducal house of Noailles any close contact with a commoner mother-in-law who would, otherwise, almost certainly have moved in with them. For her limited contact with them before and after her being set free in 1715, see Françoise d’Aubigné, marquise de Maintenon, Marthe-Marguerite-Hippolyte Le Valois de Villette de Mursay, comtesse de Caylus, and Sophia Maria Wilhelmina de Löwenstein, marquise de Dangeau, L’estime et la tendresse. Correspondances intimes, Pierre-E. Leroy and Marcel Loyau, eds (Paris, 1998), pp. 217, 283, 304, 329.
73 This replacement had already been complete by 1692, when Françoise-Amable d’Aubigné was eight years old: Lettres de Madame de Maintenon, Hans Bots and Eugénie Bots-Estourgie, eds, 11 vols (Paris, 2009–2018), vol. II, p. 184 and note 2.
74 Marquise de Maintenon to comtesse de Caylus, 19 December 1715 (Maintenon, Caylus and Dangeau, L’estime et la tendresse, p. 329). The Duke de Noailles had been propelled to greater power by the same death of Louis XIV that had cost Madame de Maintenon hers, and had apparently granted Madame d’Aubigné legal or financial favours.
75 See the astonishing details in Œuvres de Mr. Duplessis, ancien avocat au parlement, 2 vols (Paris, 1726–28), vol. I (separately entitled: Traitez … sur la Coutume de Paris), pp. 907-11, and for the context, Saint-Simon, Mémoires, vol. V, p. 253 and note 4. Born as the daughter of an ordinary robe family (R2), Madame de Lyonne (née Marie de Grieux or Grieu, 1609–post 1662) was of a slightly higher status than her anobli husband and daughter, whose family should not be confused with the far more important ministerial robe clan of Lionne. Her genealogy can be found in BNF, Ms. fr. 29877 (Dossiers bleus du Cabinet des titres, 332), dossier 8459, fols. 2 and 25.
76 Robert Muchembled, Mystérieuse Madame de Pompadour (Paris, 2014), p. 276.
77 I have not been able to locate an original source for it. It is true that the principle of asking for a marriage’s authorisation from the head of one’s house was relatively well-established, especially when the head of the house was significantly more high-ranking or powerful than the asking party; in a case like that, the easily publicised demand presented the latter with an occasion to both remind the former of his existence, and to gain prestige in the eyes of his own milieu. That said, I am not aware of comparable practices between two parties who, as Richelieu and the Emperor, were only linked in the female line. Additionally, the well-known lack of old nobility in the house of Vignerot-du Plessis-Richelieu (see above, note 46) could easily have turned such a gesture into an affront, since the Emperor would not necessarily have appreciated the reminder that his agnatic seventh cousin had married a relative parvenu. On the other hand, the authenticity of the alleged Richelieu-Pompadour dialogue does of course not depend on this ever being a real practice, since the famously malicious Richelieu might well have invented it to snub the Marquise in a way she couldn’t easily question.
78 At least when the mother-in-law’s ancestry was better than that of her husband, and could thus be used to add to their children’s perceived status. An embarrassing mother-in-law would have been much harder to bring up in direct communication with equals where insults were risky, and was therefore only mentionable in anonymous satires or when discussing third parties.
79 Lauzun’s complicated coexistence with his parents-in-law Lorges is detailed by Saint-Simon, Mémoires, vol. II, p. 278; vol. III, pp. 114–17; and vol. X, p. 403. Saint-Simon is more reliable on these matters than usual, as he was married to a sister of Lauzun’s teenage wife.
80 Levantal, Ducs et pairs et duchés-pairies, p. 863 and notes 21-22; p. 866 and notes 28-29; Journal du marquis de Dangeau, avec les additions du duc de Saint-Simon, Eudore Soulié, Louis Dussieux, Charles-Philippe de Chennevières-Pointel et al., eds, 19 vols (Paris, 1854–1860), vol. VIII, p. 349 (where a separate formal contract between the children is suggested); vol. IX, pp. 243-4; Mémoires du marquis de Sourches sur le règne de Louis XIV, Gabriel-Juste, comte de Cosnac, Arthur Bertrand and Édouard Pontal, eds, 13 vols (Paris, 1882–93), vol. VII, pp. 233-4 ; vol. VIII, p. 128; Saint-Simon, Mémoires, vol. X, pp. 113-14, note 2; vol. XX, pp. 303-04.
81 Richelieu concluded his third and last marriage at age eighty-three in 1780, seventy-eight years after his arguably informal, and sixty-nine years after his definite, first wedding contract (see Levantal, Ducs et pairs et duchés-pairies, p. 866 and notes 28-9, 34-5).
82 See the exemplary case of Anne-Geneviève de Lévis-Ventadour (1673–1727), of whose marriage to the prince de Turenne we have already spoken, and whose second husband was the prince de Rohan (see above, note 58); or of Louise-Jeanne de Durfort-Duras, duchesse Mazarin (1735–1781); both as described in Horowski, Au cœur du palais, pp. 329-30, note 61.
83 It is true that, on the one hand, marriage was legally permitted from the age of twelve, and that these provisions reflected regular practice, at least for girls (see above, note 50), whilst on the other hand, the relatively few old men who remarried or married for the first time tended to choose far younger wives. The combination of these two scenarios, was, however, highly unusual, even among Ancien Régime court aristocrats. Elder husbands usually married women well beyond puberty, with the average age of the sample’s fourteen women married to men over fifty being twenty-four years, and the median, 19.5 years. The choice of a girl who would only just have entered puberty seems even more ruthless if one considers that the duc de Bouillon’s official motive of trying to beget another son, combined with his age which did not leave him much time to do so, should have been one more reason for marrying an adult woman.
84 Marc-Marie-Henri, marquis de Bombelles, Journal, Jean Grassion, Frans Durif and Jeannine Charon-Bordas, eds, 8 vols (Geneva, 1978–2013), vol. II, p. 231 and note 18; Levantal, Ducs et pairs et duchés-pairies, p. 472 and notes 14-16.
85 This was Marie-Anne-Catherine de Lombellon des Essarts, Dame d’Irville (1731–1790); the year of her birth is given by BNF, Ms. fr. 31684 (Chérin, 122), dossier 2522, fol. 18vo. For the status of the Banastre family see BNF, Ms. fr. 30284 (Carrés de d’Hozier, 55), dossier 170, and for the Le Tellier d’Irville, BNF, Ms. fr. 31536 (Nouveau d’Hozier, 311), dossier 7220 (includes preuves de noblesse for Madame de Banastre’s sister, fols 14–15vo).
86 His only surviving son died in 1802, ending the ducal branch of the house of La Tour d’Auvergne.
87 Mémoires du président Hénault, François Rousseau, ed. (Paris, 1911), p. 146.
88 See the detailed account in André Maurois, Adrienne ou la vie de Mme de La Fayette (Paris, 1960), pp. 296-303.
89 Ibid., p. 301. The daughter-in-law was the duchesse d’Ayen (see above, note 71).
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Leonhard Horowski
Leonhard Horowski
Leonhard Horowski is a historian attached to Humboldt University, Berlin, where he will hand in his habilitation thesis on Prussian ministers of state (ca.1640–1822) next year. His PhD thesis on the social history of the court aristocracy of Versailles was published as Die Belagerung des Thrones in 2013, and translated into French as Au cœur du palais (Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2019) with the support of the Centre de recherche du château de Versailles. He is also the author of a narrative history of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century dynastic Europe (Das Europa der Könige, 2017) which was shortlisted for the non-fiction prize of the Leipzig Book Fair, and is currently working on a comparative history of the Richelieu, Liechtenstein and Bentinck families.