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Anne Marie Louise d'Orléans, Duchess of Montpensier

 
French Literature Companion: Anne-Marie-Louise d'Orléans Montpensier
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Montpensier, Anne-Marie-Louise d'Orléans, duchesse de, known as Mademoiselle or la Grande Mademoiselle (1627-93). First cousin to Louis XIV and most important heiress of her century. Her exploits during the Fronde were legendary. Because of them, her cousin exiled her to her château, Saint-Fargeau. There she began her memoirs, so controversial that their posthumous first edition was suppressed by royal decree. From her collaboration with Segrais resulted the Nouvelles françaises published under his name (1656-7), two collective volumes that made verbal portraiture fashionable, and the novellas Relation de l'île imaginaire and Histoire de la princesse de Paphlagonie (all 1659). Her long-desired marriage to the adventurer Lauzun was ill-fated.

[Joan Dejean]

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Columbia Encyclopedia: Anne Marie Louise d'Orléans duchesse de Montpensier
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Montpensier, Anne Marie Louise d'Orléans, duchesse de (än märē' lwēz dôrlāäN' düshĕs' də mŏpäsyā'), 1627-93, French princess, called Mademoiselle and La Grande Mademoiselle; daughter of Gaston d'Orléans, the brother of Louis XIII. She took an active part on the rebel side in the Fronde of the Princes; in 1652 she relieved the city of Orléans at the head of her troops and opened the gates of Paris to Louis II de Bourbon, prince de Condé, and his army. Exiled with her father (1652), she returned to court in 1657. She fell in love with the duc de Lauzun; the king's permission for their marriage was granted only to be revoked (1670). Shortly thereafter, Lauzun was imprisoned (1671). Mademoiselle bought his release in 1681 and apparently married him, but they soon separated. Mademoiselle spent the rest of her life in pious works and the composition of her memoirs.

Bibliography

See biographies by F. Steegmuller (1955) and V. Sackville-West (1959, repr. 1969).

Wikipedia: Anne Marie Louise d'Orléans, Duchess of Montpensier
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Princess Anne Marie Louise d'Orléans
Duchess of Montpensier
Portrait by the school of Pierre Mignard (Musée de Versailles)
Predecessor Marie de Bourbon
Successor Philippe de France
Spouse Antoine Nompar de Caumont, Duke of Lauzun
House House of Orléans
Father Gaston de France, Duke of Orléans
Mother Marie de Bourbon, Duchess of Montpensier
Born 29 May 1627(1627-05-29)
Palais du Louvre, Paris, France
Died 5 April 1693 (aged 65)
Palais du Luxembourg, Paris, France

Anne Marie Louise d'Orléans, Duchess of Montpensier (Paris, 29 May 1627 - Paris, 5 April[1] 1693) was a French princess of royal blood by birth. As a granddaughter of king Henry IV of France, she was a Petite-fille de France.

She was styled as Mademoiselle before the birth of Mademoiselle d'Orléans, the daughter of Louis XIV's brother Philippe; at which time she became known as La Grande Mademoiselle. She is well remembered for her voluminous memoirs of the reign of her younger cousin, King Louis XIV of France.

Contents

Life

Childhood

Anne Marie Louise d'Orléans was born at the Palais du Louvre in Paris, on 29 May 1627. Her parents were Gaston, Duke of Orléans called Monsieur at court, the younger brother of Louis XIII, and Marie de Bourbon, Duchess of Montpensier, who was the daughter and sole heiress of Henri de Bourbon, Duke of Montpensier, and who died shortly after the birth of her daughter. While still a child, Anne Marie Louise was moved to the Palais des Tuileries by her uncle Louis XIII of France. From the time of her birth and the death of her mother, she had very little contact with her father as he was often temporarily exiled from her uncle's court because of his infamous and numerous schemes to get the crown of France.

Despite that, her father did try to see his only child as often as possible. As was common at the time, she was given over to a retinue of staff and was looked after by governesses until her adolescence.

Being of the blood-royal of France on both paternal and maternal sides, and heiress to immense property,[2] she appeared to be very early destined to a splendid marriage. It was perhaps the greatest misfortune of her life that La Grande Mademoiselle was encouraged to look forward to the throne of France as the result of a marriage with Louis XIV, who was, however, eleven years her junior. Ill luck, or her own willfulness, frustrated numerous plans for marrying her to persons of exalted station, including even Charles II of England, during his exile from England.

The Fronde

She was twenty-one years old when the Fronde broke out, and, attributing as she did her disappointments to Jules Cardinal Mazarin, she sympathized with it not a little. In the new or second Fronde she not only took nominal command of one of the armies on the princes' side, but she literally and in her own person took the city of Orléans (capital of her father's appanage) on 27 March 1652[3][4]. She described in her memoirs how, having left her escort of troops behind and having failed entry through other gates of the city, some boatmen on the banks of the Loire outside the walls of Orléans volunteered assistance to break open a gate on the quay. Climbing from a boat to the broken gate (the Porte Brûlée), she was passed through a hole to enter the city.[5]

However, she had to retreat to Paris, where she practically commanded the Bastille and the adjoining part of the walls. On 2 July 1652, the day of the battle of the Faubourg Saint Antoine, between the Frondeurs under the Grand Condé and the royal troops under the vicomte de Turenne. Mademoiselle saved Condé and his beaten troops by giving orders for the gates under her control to be opened and for the cannon of the Bastille to fire on the royalists.[6] In the heat of the émeute which followed, she installed herself in the Hôtel de Ville, and played the part of mediator between the opposed parties.

Exile

Her political importance lasted exactly six months, and did her little good, for it created a lifelong prejudice against her in the mind of her cousin, Louis XIV[7]. From 1652 until 1657, she was exiled from her cousin's court as was her father who lived at the Château de Blois where she had spent part of her youth.

During her disgrace, she resided on her estates, mainly at the château de Saint-Fargeau[8], in Burgundy, which she had inherited from her mother. She hired the architect François Le Vau, brother of Louis Le Vau, to rebuild and decorate the 15th century castle which, uninhabited, had fallen into disrepair. She also rebuilt the Château d'Eu, later the property of an Orléans relative, Louis-Philippe, King of the French[9].

In 1657, she was granted a pardon by Louis XIV and his aging mother Anne of Austria, and returned to Court. But, though projects for marrying her were once more set on foot, she was now past her first youth.

Later life

She was nearly forty, and had already corresponded seriously with Françoise Bertaut de Motteville on the project of establishing a ladies' society "sans manège et sans amour," when a Gascon nobleman, Antoine Nompar de Caumont, marquis de Puyguilhem, better known as the duc de Lauzun, attracted her attention.

It was some years before the affair came to a crisis, but at last, in 1670, Mademoiselle solemnly demanded the king's permission to marry Lauzun.

Louis, who liked Lauzun, and who had been educated by Mazarin in the idea that Mademoiselle ought not to be allowed to carry her vast estates and royal blood to anyone who was himself of the blood royal, or even to any foreign prince, gave his consent, but it was not immediately acted on, and the other members of the royal family prevailed with Louis to rescind his permission.

Not long afterwards Lauzun, for another cause, was imprisoned in Pignerol under duress. It was ten years before La Grande Mademoiselle was able to buy his release from the king by settling no small portion of her estates, notably her Château de Choisy, near Versailles, to Louis's natural and legitimised son, Louis-Auguste de Bourbon, known as the duc du Maine.

By the time Lauzun was released in 1681, he was nearly fifty, and Anne-Marie Louise was fifty-four. It has been hypothesized that they were then secretly married, but recent scholarship suggests the contrary. [10] Indeed, the princess was repelled by the way Lauzun attempted to tyrannize her (it is said that on one occasion he told her: "Louise d'Orléans, tire-moi mes bottes," "Louise d'Orléans, pull my boots off"). She broke with Lauzun definitively in May 1684 and never saw him again. [11] She refused to see Lauzun on her deathbed (Saint-Simon). After the episode with Lauzun, she decided to retreat from court life and stayed at her various residences, mainly in Paris at the Luxembourg Palace, where she died on 5 April 1693. She was buried in the Basilica of Saint-Denis.

Anne Marie Louise in her early years.

Anne Marie Louise, after Jean Nocret, (circa 1657).

Anne Marie Louise by Hyacinthe Rigaud.

Anne Marie Louise holding a painting of her father, by Pierre Mignard.

Titles

Anne Marie Louise inherited many of her titles and vast estates from her mother's family, the House of Bourbon-Montpensier. The line had married into the family before the House of Bourbon were the rulers of France. As a result of her royal blood, she was an automatic recipient of the following rank and style:

Petite-fille de France, "Grand-Daughter of France", a title she received at birth because of her royal blood from her grandfather, King Henry IV of France;

Mademoiselle, as the eldest daughter of Monsieur, she was given the honorary title of Mademoiselle; then La Grande Mademoiselle, when her father became Le Grand Monsieur, and to differentiate her from the daughter of the Duke of Orléans, who was styled Mademoiselle.

From the death of her mother in 1627, just over a week after her birth, she inherited the titles of:

Dauphine d'Auvergne, princesse souveraine de Dombes, princesse de Luc, princesse de La Roche-sur-Yon, princesse de Joinville, duchesse de Beaupréau, duchesse de Montpensier, duchesse de Saint-Fargeau, duchesse de Châtellerault, marquise de Mézières, comtesse d'Eu, comtesse de Mortain, comtesse de Bar-sur-Seine, vicomtesse d'Auge, vicomtesse de Brosse, baronne de Beaujolais, dame de Champigny-sur-Veude, dame de Beaujeu, dame d'Argenton, dame de Saint-Sever, dame de Cluys, dame d'Agurande, dame du Châtelet, dame d'Ecolle, dame de Combrailles and dame de Choisy-sur-Seine.

Father

Philippe I, Duke of Orléans, her cousin who inherited a lot of her vast wealth.

Antoine Nompar de Caumont, Duke of Lauzun

La Grande Mademoiselle in a family portrait. She is on the far right.

Residences

The Palais du Louvre where she was born.

The Château d'Eu.

The Château de Saint-Fargeau

The Château de Choisy in the 17th century, by Pérelle.

Siblings

On 3 January 1632, at Nancy, her father married as his second wife, Marguerite of Lorraine, the sister of Charles IV, Duke of Lorraine. The couple had five children:

By Marie Porcher he had an illegitimate daughter:

  • Marie bâtarde d'Orléans 1 January 1631 Paris.

By Louise-Roger de La Marbelière he had an illegitimate son:

  • Jean Louis bâtard d'Orléans, comte de Charny, b.1638 Tours, d.1692 in Spain.

Legacy

Inheritance

As she was childless, her inheritance of the Duchy of Montpensier and Dauphine d'Auvergne was to be inherited by her rather distant relatives. If the Calvinist marriage of her great-great-aunt Charlotte de Bourbon-Montpensier, a former nun, to William the Silent, prince of Orange, was canonically valid, then her heiress was Elisabeth Charlotte of the Palatinate, the then wife of her first cousin and Louis XIV's younger brother, Philippe I, Duke of Orléans, whose family in fact inherited all. Otherwise, her heir would have been a yet more distant relative, Henri de Lorraine, Duke of Elboeuf.

Memoirs

For the rest of her life, she gave herself to religious duties, and finished her Mémoires, which extend to within seven years of her death, and which she had begun when she was in disgrace thirty years earlier. These Mémoires (Amsterdam, 1729) are of very considerable merit and interest, though, or perhaps because, they are extremely egotistical and often extremely desultory. They are to be found in the great collection of Joseph François Michaud and Jean Joseph François Poujoulat, and have been frequently edited apart. Her Eight Beatitudes has been edited by E. Rodocanachi as Un Ouvrage de piété inconnu (1908).

Ancestors

Titles and Styles

References

  1. ^ The date given by Saint-Simon -- "Mlle de Montpensier, fille aînée de Gaston, et seule de son premier mariage, mourut en son palais de Luxembourg, le dimanche 5 avril..." from Mémoires de Saint-Simon, tome 1.
  2. ^ "She was the wealthiest single princess of Europe," Saint-Simon remarked on the occasion of her state funeral.
  3. ^ Memoirs of Mademoiselle de Montpensier (English translation in 3 vol., H. Coburn, London, 1848), vol. 1, p. 204. The memoirs state, "The day after my arrival, which was Maunday Thursday..." Easter in 1652 was 31 March.
  4. ^ [1] French Wikipedia, "1652 en France"
  5. ^ Memoirs of Mademoiselle de Montpensier (English translation in 3 vol., H. Coburn, London, 1848), vol. 1, pp. 198-201.
  6. ^ Memoirs of Mademoiselle de Montpensier (English translation in 3 vol., H. Coburn, London, 1848), vol. 1, pp. 273-276.
  7. ^ Saint-Simon: "As for Mademoiselle, the King never quite forgave her the day of Saint Antoine; and I heard him once at supper reproach her in jest, for having fired the cannons of the Bastille upon his troops. She was a little embarrassed, but she got out of the difficulty very well." from Memoirs of Louis XIV and His Court and of the Regency at Project Gutenberg
  8. ^ Wilson, Katharina M., "An Encyclopedia of Continental Women Writers", p. 863, published 1991, Taylor & Francis. ISBN 0824085477
  9. ^ Dana, Charles Anderson. "The American Cyclopaedia", p. 767, published 1874, University of Wisconsin - Madison.
  10. ^ Vincent Pitts, La Grande Mademoiselle at the Court of France, 1627-1693, Baltimore, 2000, pp. 222-29
  11. ^ Pitts, p.229

External links

Titles


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French Literature Companion. The New Oxford Companion to Literature in French. Copyright © 1995, 2005 by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.  Read more
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