Literary Feminism in Seventeenth‐Century Southern France: The Case of Antoinette de Salvan de Saliez

Abstract

“Among honest people, the equality of the sexes is no longer a contested principle.” This confident utterance is found in an open letter to an “unknown, spirited gentleman” published in the issue for January 1682 of the influential French literary magazine Le Mercure Galant and signed by “Madame de Saliez, Viguiere d’Alby.” Seven years later, she expressed the same opinion in even stronger terms: “Several of our best writers have thoroughly discussed the equality of the sexes, a principle that is no longer contested in France.” The full name of the author of these lines was Antoinette de Salvan de Saliez, a widowed lady of aristocratic standing and a lifelong resident of the small town of Albi in southern France. Her confident language is surely striking for a provincial lady in the heyday of French Classicism, an age that has often been depicted as deeply hostile to all manifestations of female intellectual autonomy. In his study of seventeenth-century feminist literature, Ian MacLean has even claimed that feminist writing “almost ceased” after the beginning of the personal reign of Louis XIV in 1661. Now it can easily be shown that the last statement is untenable and that feminist publishing continued in the 1660s, 1670s, and 1680s. Admittedly, in these decades the French literary scene came to be dominated by figures like Moliere, La Rochefoucauld, and La Bruyere, who, while critical of old-style, boorish misogyny, spoke in extremely sarcastic and dismissive terms about women’s aspirations to participate in intellectual