The Creation of the French Royal Mistress: From Agnès Sorel to Madame Du Barry by Tracy Adams and Christine Adams

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Creation of the French Royal Mistress: From Agnès Sorel to Madame Du Barry by Tracy Adams and Christine Adams Patrick Ball Adams, Tracy, and Christine Adams, The Creation of the French Royal Mistress: From Agnès Sorel to Madame Du Barry, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania State University Press, 2020; hardback; pp. xii, 236; R.R.P. US$89.95; ISBN 9780271085975. Notwithstanding its somewhat unpromising opening words—'Semiformalized extraconjugal relationships' (p. ix)—this work is written in a highly readable style, rendering it accessible, as well as of potential interest, to non-scholarly individuals, not only academics. That said, its aims are squarely academic. France's 'official' royal mistresses have received attention to date mostly from popular historians, whose aim has been titillation, not serious scrutiny. Tracy Adams and Christine Adams set out, by examining nine of the most prominent, to determine how the phenomenon of the French royal mistress came about. As they stress, though rulers' concubines were nothing new, in France they developed into something unique: not just the king's lover, they had a recognized position at court, and might be influential political advisors. How did this happen? The analytical framework adopted is that of Fernand Braudel's time cycles. While this approach has explanatory power regarding the mistresses themselves, it stresses the connections their history has with things evolving concurrently. The authors argue that the French royal mistress took on her peculiar character when longstanding medieval attitudes to women (that they were as capable as [End Page 145] men, though legally inferior) aligned with the fifteenth-century rise of male royal favourites, who had no claim to power through birth but wielded influence via the king's favour, plus the growing theatricalization of the court in the sixteenth century. With these key criteria satisfied, the stage was set for female favourites who, without formal status, were nonetheless thought competent to offer the monarch advice. To come into being, the role still awaited the right woman and the right king. As can be seen, this book inserts itself into existing scholarship on a range of topics. While the nature of the subject would always have made it relevant to fields such as court history, women's history, and so on, the approach highlights such interconnections. Having foreshadowed their line of attack in a valuable introduction, the authors' development of the role of mistress is then pursued by means of a series of chapters devoted to individuals, beginning with Agnès Sorel, who, they contend, pre-dated the coalescence of factors that brought into being the 'official' royal mistress. The lives and fates of the individuals treated in these chapters, Sorel not least, present their own interest. However, the broader argument commences in the sixteenth century, when court behaviour became more artificial and theatrical in the wake of Castiglione's Book of the Courtier. The authors trace the 'official' mistress's history, from its inception with Anne de Pisseleu d'Heilly and Diane de Poitiers, mistresses of François I and Henri II, through the ill-fated Gabrielle d'Estrées (Henri IV), then the mistresses of Louis XIV and Louis XV, to the Revolution. Essential to the position of mistress, the authors argue—and this will be the volume's main contribution to scholarly debate—was the fact she represented an 'open secret', whereby everybody knew of her presence, and drew on her patronage or influence as needed, but nobody formally acknowledged she existed. That could happen because of the dissimulation now characteristic of the court; it meant that alongside the foreign-born queens, whose loyalties were always suspect, might live another woman, capable of giving the king political advice since her primary devotion was always to him and to France. The mistress therefore became the centre of cultural and political activity at court, with the queen the centre of virtue and propriety. This open secret, however, depended on the mistress having some pre-existing reason for attendance at court: she might herself be an aristocrat or belong to a family of royal officials. Nobody then needed to explain why she was there. Part of the authors' case is that if this 'open secret' came...